Friday, October 11 to Sunday, October 13, 2019, from 10am-6pm
Carolyn Lazard’s A Recipe for Disaster
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
[Image: Yellow text overlays an image of Julia Child cooking. It reads “Then no one gets any. Image and sound that cannot be disentangled. A suffusion. A cacophony. No legibility for some. Illegibility for all. A sensory failure. A redistribution of violence.” White caption reads, “So how’s that for last-minute supper party.”]
A Recipe for Disaster, Carolyn Lazard, 2018, digital projection, 27 mins (looped)
In 1972, Boston’s PBS affiliate WGBH became the first television outlet in the world to include captions for deaf and hard of hearing audiences as part of its programming, doing so initially with Julia Childs’s popular cooking series The French Chef. Closed-captioning, which can be turned off and on, had yet to be invented, so Childs’s show was broadcast with its monologue in open captions, visible to anyone sighted who tuned in. For some, the event offered a new level of access to mass media, yet for others, it also signaled the barriers, theretofore unacknowledged, that many of their fellow viewers had faced.
For their video A Recipe for Disaster, Carolyn Lazard created a continuous loop made from one of the earliest captioned episodes of The French Chef—a half-hour lesson on how to prepare an omelet, presented in its entirety. Augmenting this source material, Lazard has included their own voice as audio captioning, providing verbal descriptions of on-screen actions for blind and low-vision audiences. They have further added a kind of manifesto, rendered in crawling, yellow, all-caps lettering, that is simultaneously read by a second voice. Like Child and her omelets, Lazard combines three simple ingredients—image, sound, text—yielding a work that is variously legible, or illegible, depending on who encounters it.
And like Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema, whose ribald puns and spiraling designs so thoroughly toyed with the intertitles of the silent era, A Recipe for Disaster expands the graphic possibilities for language on screen by repurposing its conventional functions. Allowing the familiar form of the caption—often understood as supplementary, tucked neatly below the picture or between bits of dialogue—to completely dominate the field of perception, Lazard doesn't simply call attention to this vital tool of accessibility, but instead hints at an entirely new paradigm, one in which access is not an accommodating afterthought but rather a fundamental principle of social organization.
A REDUNDANCY FOR SOME,
A CLARITY FOR OTHERS.
A MEDIA OF MEDIAS.
A NEW MATERIALISM.
A WAY OF MAKING AND CONSUMING
THAT REFUSES TRANSLATION,
THAT WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND,
THAT WE CANNOT IMAGINE,
BECAUSE WE HAVE NOT CREATED
THE CONDITIONS FOR ITS PRODUCTION.
A Recipe for Disaster will be on continuous view, 10am-6pm, from Friday, October 11 to Sunday, October 13, and by appointment. The show will conclude with a conversation between Lazard and Emily Watlington at 6:15pm on Sunday, October 13.
Carolyn Lazard is a Philadelphia-based artist and writer working in video, sculpture, sound, and installation. Lazard has exhibited work at various institutions, including the Walker Art Center, the New Museum, The Kitchen, Kunsthal Aarhus, Camden Arts Centre, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lazard has published writing in the Brooklyn Rail, Mousse, and Triple Canopy.
FREE
Accessibility Information
Our venue is on the ground floor and is wheelchair accessible. The bathroom has grab bars, room for a powerchair, and is non-gender-segregated. The conversation with Lazard will be CART captioned and livestreamed via Instagram (@lightindustry). Please contact information@lightindustry.org for more information.