When Tate Modern opened, it shouted inclusivity. Now it makes my disabled daughter enter through the back door
There's a major cultural institution my family can only enter through the back door. We pass buckets of cleaning materials, staff health and safety notices and piles of cardboard boxes. We're checked in to the building at the same desk at which a stationary package arrives, and are handled as if we were one. This place is Tate Modern. And my family have been relegated to accessing this high-minded cultural institution through the tradesmen's entrance because my daughter is disabled.
We used to be able to enter by the same door as every other visitor. But when work on the Tate's �215m extension began last year, overnight all the disabled parking bays were removed. Instead, if there's room, disabled visitors and their families can park at the rear and use the staff entrance. If, like my family and many other disabled people, you can't use public transport, this is your only option.
When Tate Modern opened 10 years ago, the disabled community cheered. Here was a building of national and international significance whose entry was a whopping great ramp. No other building of such importance shouted inclusion quite as loudly.
It's particularly disappointing when that same building lets us know families like mine don't matter. In another place, when one section of society was condemned to a different, less attractive, unseen entrance it was called apartheid.
Tate Modern isn't the only cultural powerhouse to treat its disabled visitors differently. The National Gallery boasted that it was lowering some of its collection, "enabling visitors in wheelchairs to examine the paintings at close distance". Just three of the gallery's 2,300 works were lowered ? Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Constable's The Hay Wain and Monet's The Gare St-Lazare ? and for one night only, just two and a half hours, which had to be booked in advance. By the next morning, these iconic paintings were at full height again ? inaccessible, along with 2,997 others.
Tate Modern also defends removing the disabled parking bays by pointing to all its special events for disabled visitors. It brags of workshops for the learning disabled and tours for the visually impaired. But these acts of largesse for the needy ("We like to help the needy," the Tate guard told us as he chaperoned us through our special entrance) is not access; it's the opposite. It's compensating for the lack of any real access and hoping we won't notice. I don't want special or different for my family; I want what every other visitor takes for granted ? everyday access to art.
The view of disabled people as separate from all other users runs across the whole cultural sector. The Old Vic theatre failed to imagine that any of its regular audience might be wheelchair users. When it first introduced a scheme of special cheap rates for local residents, none of the theatre's wheelchair spaces were included in the deal. If you lived in the area and happened to be a wheelchair user, you had to pay four times as much as any non-disabled person living in your street. The very scheme that was designed to broaden access excluded disabled theatregoers.
When these cultural powerhouses talk about their audiences, they implicitly define them as non-disabled. The art world can't believe families like mine might be independent visitors, admiring the post-impressionists or Ai Weiwei's sunflower seeds. They can only envisage us siphoned off in a separate room.
This is cultural apartheid. One night with a lower Hay Wain won't make any difference. A few dozen people being able to see a few works of art for a couple of hours is not access. The cultural sector needs to use its creative powers to see us as part of their audience and let us in through the front door.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/21/disability-galleries-theatres-access-tate
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