From Inflexions 5, “Simondon: Milieu, Techniques, Aesthetics” (March 2012). 184-223.
In his short commentary [2] on a “papal red” painting entitled “Birds would violate airline dapper standards for appearance but the skies sport vivider dayglo colors when it can fly freely and uncensored by mankind” (Biklen 2005: 179), autistic painter Larry Bissonnette imagines a realm of unencumbered artistic activity. “Not allowing people with disabilities their patterns of inspiring art through total freedom of expression,” he reiterates, “is like limiting creativity with censorship” (Biklen 2005: 179). As he notes in another commentary, [3] part of which serves as the essay’s first epigraph, verisimilitude doesn’t interest him; rather, he paints to his senses, and the senses in autism are often especially charged. With tremendous wit he links the “vivider dayglo colors” of the painting’s skies with the birds’ freedom to soar as they wish. There would be a violation of airliner decorum, he contends, if winged restrictions—what he figures as censorship-were in place.
Read more of “Gobs and Gobs of Metaphor: Dynamic Relation and a Classical Autist’s Typed Massage” (PDF).