Author: Eliza Chandler
Georgina Kleege’s latest book, More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018, Oxford University Press), offers a timely and informed account of the significance of blindness to arts and culture. Throughout this book, she moves between analyses of how blindness is represented in philosophy, phenomenological accounts of the cultural practices and technologies that make arts and culture accessible to blind people, and self-representations by blind artists. Using a disability studies and cultural studies framework, Kleege skillfully blends a sophisticated knowledge of European art history, a robust understanding of the disabled people’s movement and its politics, and her own experiences as a blind person, a daughter of artists, and a frequent patron of art galleries. The uniqueness of this book lies in how Kleege animates, chapter by chapter, cultural appearances of and encounters with blindness, unfurling a multifaceted account of blindness as offering sensorial and generative experiences of the world.