THERE’S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY!, video, 8 minutes.
In Carolyn Lazard’s A Recipe for Disaster, the artist uses Julia Child’s The French Chef—one of the first broadcast television programs to feature closed captions—as source material. Lazard’s voice is heard, describing the video, and intermittently, another voice joins in—reading a manifesto as the text scrolls across the screen: “A work made from the conditions of debility or difference. Not translated for debility or difference [...] A media slow enough for everyone to follow. A media quick enough for everyone to get lost...together.” Informed by the work of Lazard, among others, THERE’S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY! incorporates layers of image, text and sound—captions, descriptions, and dialogue—using infomercials as source material. The featured products are advertised as offering a benefit to all users: a claim that ultimately obscures their potential function as access tools for disabled individuals. The narrator’s assertion of universal appeal and the actors’ exaggerated performances of failure render the products as solutions to seemingly non-existent problems, or as unnecessary over complications: disruptions to the expected flow of daily life. THERE’S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY! uses overlapping text, image and sound to call attention to needs that are typically considered excessive or peripheral—and to disrupt the expected conditions of how a film is viewed and by whom.
