candlin, fiona - the dubious inheritance of touch (art history and museum access)

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DOI: 10.1177/1470412906066906

2006 5: 137Journal of Visual CultureFiona Candlin

The Dubious Inheritance of Touch: Art History and Museum Access

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journal of visual culture

The Dubious Inheritance of Touch: Art History and Museum Access

Fiona Candlin

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]

Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

Vol 5(2): 137–154 [1470-4129(200608)5:2]10.1177/1470412906066906

AbstractNumerous museums and galleries now offer tactile opportunities as

part of their access provision. This article asks why touch is deemed to

be more accessible than vision as a way of learning about art and what

repercussions that has for blind and visually impaired audiences.

While touch has been discussed in many different contexts, touch also

has a specifically art historical lineage where it is characterized in

predominantly pejorative terms. This then raises serious questions

concerning the use of touch within contemporary access provision: is

touch used in access provision because it is considered to be more

basic, easier than seeing? Does touch remain an adjunct to vision, a

lesser, substitutive form of seeing? Alternatively, are art historical

stereotypes so outdated that they are irrelevant for current museum

practice? In which case does access provision show touch to be a

qualitatively different route to knowledge? And, if this is not the case,

how can we start to construct a model of touch that interlinks with

vision without being subsumed by it, where touch concerns thought as

well as feeling?

Keywordsaccess provision ● Alois Riegl ● Bernard Berenson ● blindness ● Erwin

Panofsky ● museums ● objects ● touch

Museums are no longer places where touch is entirely forbidden. Instead

there are numerous opportunities for visitors to hold and examine original

artefacts or artists’ tools. When objects are very rare the museum may

provide replicas, but otherwise displays of clothing, textiles, ceramics, coins

and metal-ware regularly have selected examples for the audience to handle.

at UVI - Biblioteca Central on May 1, 2014vcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from


These tactile opportunities are all offered to the general public but they are

also intended for use by disabled audiences and specifically by blind and

visually impaired visitors. Accordingly, the objects which are available to

touch will often be accompanied by Braille labels, specialist audio-guides or

large print text leaflets. Alongside these more general events there is also

provision which is explicitly designed for blind audiences, namely, touch

tours, handling classes and description sessions accompanied by raised line

diagrams. In short, touch-based provision is provided in the name of access.

This article asks why museums position touch as an accessible form of

learning and what repercussions that has, specifically on blind and visually

impaired audiences.

In the first instance, touch is an extremely effective way of making access

visible. Museum funding is increasingly predicated on access programmes

and on a demonstrable commitment to widening participation. Accordingly,

museums count the number of visitors who are designated social class C2DE

and calculate how many school visits take place each year. Statistics aside,

these new priorities are demonstrated in museums’ publicity and fund-

raising material. While it is difficult to depict a lack of attitudinal or proce-

dural obstacles, touch is a way of illustrating an absence of physical barriers.

Not only can the visitors actually get in but nothing stands in the way of them

making physical contact with objects. Pictures of children touching objects

thus denote an inclusive, welcoming environment and similarly images of

blind people function as a short-hand for access. The tactile experience is

actually less important than the image of contact and what that implies about

the character of the museum.

Secondly, the use of touch in access provision is due, in part, to educational

approaches, such as those championed by Howard Gardner (1993), that

posit different kinds of intelligence. Touch enables visitors whose

intelligence is ‘bodily-kinaesthetic’ to explore and understand objects that

are usually presented in ways which appeal to ‘logical–mathematical’

intelligence. Thus touch potentially opens up previously prohibited ways of

understanding museum collections and includes visitors who have

traditionally been marginalized by an emphasis on visual learning. As such, it

could represent a new and positive step towards recognizing different forms

of knowledge and in correlation acknowledges the rights of blind people,

among others, to access their collective cultural heritage.

Touch, however, also has a specifically art historical lineage, some of which I

outline in the first part of this article. Here I concentrate on three writers;

Alois Riegl, Erwin Panofsky and Bernard Berenson. Riegl’s work was notable

not least because he moved away from the prevailing 19th-century pre-

occupation with individual artists to investigate the deep structural

principles of artistic style. Crucially these principles included the division

between touch and vision. His account was subsequently challenged and

developed by Erwin Panofsky and together the two authors rigorously staked

out some of the central methodological approaches of the early and mid 20th

century.1 Writing over the same period the American connoisseur Bernard

journal of visual culture 5(2)138



Berenson also investigated the role of touch in visual art but, whereas Riegl

and Panofsky were enormously influential in art history, Berenson was

known as an art expert and arbiter of taste primarily within the museum

sector. He selected paintings for art collectors and museums, working

particularly closely with Lord Duveen whose bequests have shaped many

major museums in Europe and America. While his writing never attained the

sophistication of his German contemporaries, his lack of subtlety serves to

highlight assumptions which the other authors leave implicit.

Yet, despite its importance in the work of Riegl, Panofsky and Berenson,

touch is characterized in almost entirely pejorative terms. For them, touch is

prior to and segregated from vision, detached from rationality and from any

established structures of learning. This then raises serious questions con-

cerning the use of touch within contemporary access provision; is touch used

in access provision precisely because it is considered to be more basic, easier

than seeing? If so, doesn’t the use of touch actually consolidate and not

alleviate the exclusion of disabled visitors and other access audiences? Or,

alternatively, are Riegl et al.’s ideas on touch so outdated as to be virtually

irrelevant to current museum and gallery practice? In order to consider these

issues in more detail the second section of the article will go on to examine

three examples of contemporary touch-based provision, all of which are

explicitly aimed at blind and visually impaired audiences. Although there

have been many examples of access provision which adopt the limited

characterizations of touch apparent in the work of Riegl, Panofsky and

Berenson, here I consider recent events and exhibitions that have actively

tried to negotiate those negative associations. Finally, finding that even these

more sophisticated ventures can be stymied by a lack of understanding about

touch as something other than an impoverished prelude to seeing, the third

section offers some suggestions for re-thinking touch as a route to art

historical knowledge.

The Inheritance: Touch as a way of seeing . . .

In Late Roman Art Industry (1985[1901]), Alois Riegl describes the shift

from antique styles of architecture, sculpture, painting and decorative arts to

those of the classical and then Late Roman periods. Crucially these stylistic

changes evince a different historical and cultural perceptual mode. Riegl

posits that in the antique period, sense perception ‘found objects to be

confusing and mixed’ so their ultimate goal was to represent external objects

as clearly defined, individual, material entities. Although Riegl never explains

why antique peoples, specifically the ancient Egyptians, were anxious about

materiality he implies, in passing, that it concerned the separation of self and

object, for the ‘unity of objects [was] . . . a precondition that external objects

were in fact objects independent from us’ (p. 22).

Touch provided the ancient Egyptians with the assurance that objects were

impenetrable and separate from one another (p. 22). There is no suggestion

that touch could facilitate any kind of symbiosis or juncture between subject

Candlin The Dubious Inheritance of Touch 139



and object, instead it only marks difference and monadic unity. Once this

separation had been established a combination of perceptions became

possible. Whenever the eye recognized a coherent coloured plane, prior

tactile experience would convince the viewer that he or she was looking at a

unified external object. Touch was no longer required to establish certainty

and ‘at an early time’, optical perception became sufficient. Nevertheless, this

mode of looking was analogous to touch since it was still concerned with

establishing material presence and, as with touch, the form of an object was

established through the amalgamation of numerous, successive perceptions.

There are undoubted problems with Riegl’s conception of tactile and optic

vision. As Walter Benjamin pointed out, Riegl locates perception historically

but he offers no account of what motivates perceptual change. More recently,

Margaret Iversen has noted that Riegl had a tendency to omit styles and

periods that do not conform to his model wherein the tactile is the precursor

to the optic, or else his desire to attribute artworks, objects and buildings to

a specific period results in some strained interpretation. The Pantheon, for

example, was built at a period when depth was supposedly alien to the

contemporary mindset, so Riegl contends that this large, multiform building

was actually conceived of on the flat plane and understood as pattern against

ground; a conclusion that Iversen understandably finds distinctly uncon-

vincing (Iversen, 1993: 88).2

A more significant issue within the terms of this article is that Riegl’s

conception of tactility risks turning touch into a subset of vision. Riegl’s

account of antique art starts with a conception of actual touch. Touch alone

can assure us of impenetrability and, commenting on the Egyptian statues that

are lifeless from a distance, he writes that ‘the fine modelling [of Egyptian

sculpture] can be felt entirely, when one lets the tip of the fingers glide over

them’, thereby implying that touch has pleasures that are not equally

amenable to vision. Yet the special ability of touch to comprehend impene-

trability is quickly turned into a kind of looking (Iversen, 1993: 170, n 8).3

Riegl’s formulation of tactile looking could be read as an expansion of touch;

an extension of touch into vision but other aspects of Riegl’s argument

suggest that touch is not colonizing vision but being co-opted by sight. Riegl

never explicitly privileges either the tactile or the optic; indeed rather than

assuming a historically unconditional ideal, Riegl seeks to recognize that

there is no absolute basis for judgement:

In spite of its seemingly independent objectivity, scholarship takes its

direction in the last analysis from the contemporary intellectual

atmosphere and the art historian cannot significantly exceed the

kunstbegehren [artistic taste] of his contemporaries. (Riegl,

1985[1901]: 6)4

Even so, Egyptian art is, by implication, the result of a primitive sensory

apparatus that could not easily distinguish individual objects. The Egyptians

were like small children learning to focus.




Moreover, Riegl’s entire book is an argument for progress and against the

characterization of late Roman art as a decayed or corrupted form of the

Greek. From a contemporary perspective we might not necessarily see

Roman art as a development or improvement, but this is because we don’t

appreciate the cultural and historical needs those art forms articulated.

Whatever our own preferences, these forms ‘constitute progress and nothing

else but progress’ (Riegl, 1985: 11). Crucially, the progress is towards the

modern use of linear perspective, to naturalistic representation and to vision

within which touch is spatially represented by objects appearing to be three

dimensional.

In Riegl’s account, touch is a precursor to modernity and a necessary stage

in a history of perception. At the same time, once the antique peoples have

conceptualized their separation from the world and once they can read

depth in a two-dimensional image, then there is no place for touch in arts

practices. Although a faint trace of touch may remain in the activity of looking

and in the understanding of depth, the pleasures of stroking the subtle

curves of Egyptian sculptures has been entirely repressed or forgotten.

. . . as cannibal . . .

Like Riegl, the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson’s early discussions

of art initially incorporate touch and then shift the emphasis towards touch

as a way of seeing. Yet, unlike Riegl, for whom touch does have a place and

despite Berenson’s apparent advocacy of touch, he actually sees touch as

being entirely alien to a proper experience of art.

In Florentine Painters, written in 1897, Berenson notes that as infants we

understand depth and three dimensions through touch and touch is again

posited as the test of reality, although in this case, it belongs to an

individual’s infancy rather than that of mankind. Berenson also credits these

early tactile experiences with being essential to vision, for although we might

forget the connection, actual touch enables us to attribute tactile values to

retinal impressions.

For Berenson, the task of the artist is to produce an image that is so

convincingly three-dimensional that it will stimulate our tactile senses,

indeed our reaction should be so strong that the viewer ‘must have the

illusion of being able to touch a figure . . . the illusion of varying muscular

sensations inside my palm and fingers’ (Berenson, 1938: 63). Giotto’s

paintings excelled in this respect, having

Not only as much power of appealing to the tactile imagination as is

possessed by the objects represented – human figures in particular –

but actually more; with the necessary result that to his contemporaries

they conveyed a keener sense of reality, of life-likeness than the objects

themselves. (p. 64)




Yet the touch that Berenson extols is not concerned with the material world.

Giotto provokes an illusion of touch and his paintings appeal to the tactile

imagination. We are taken beyond the real by Giotto’s paintings, not into an

engagement with it. This is supposedly a purified experience removed from

the grimy realities of the physical world.

Despite Berenson’s insistence that tactile values are imaginative or idealized,

his own descriptions are rich and highly sensuous. Throughout FlorentinePainters Berenson vividly describes physical pleasure and response – the

aching of muscles after a wrestling bout, the swell of Hercules’ calves, the

flanks of a Centaur, the caressing hand. Indeed, the pleasure evident in

Berenson’s writing frequently threatens to undermine his rigorously ideal

stance when it comes to tactility. A similar tension between description and

conceptual stance is also evident in his later book of 1948, Aesthetics andHistory, where he is far more adamant in his renunciation of tactile

pleasures. Here Berenson emphasizes physical response when he writes

in order to be life-enhancing an object must appeal to the whole of

one’s being, to one’s senses, nerves, muscles, viscera, and to one’s

feeling for direction, for support and weight, for balance, for stresses

and counter stresses. (p. 58)

This notion of touch extends far beyond a muscular sensation in palm and

fingers to include the whole body, its movement and balance, but Berenson

nonetheless insists that tactile values are ideated sensations which only exist

in the imagination:

In art, the object must not arouse any of those wakeful cannibal

appetites that can never be satisfied. . . It should not arouse us to

action, although it cannot help influencing conduct; it should not affect

any of our productive, reproductive or transitive energies but tune us

like instruments – instruments for ecstasy. (p. 59)5

Just in case we missed the point, Berenson goes on to explain that there are

two types of senses, two which are for signalling and reporting and three

more cannibal ones, namely, touch, taste and smell. Objects such as cocktails

or pastries which are made to appeal to the latter senses can be skilful,

delicate and delicious but they cannot be art, for they belong to the world of

immediately present and not purely imagined sensations. Conversely, if those

senses are used to appreciate something which might, in other contexts, be

acknowledged as an art object, it will not be an artistic experience:

The princes of Ormuz and of Ind who pass their fingers through

sackfuls of precious stones, not only for the pride of power which great

possessions give, but also for the touch, and perhaps chiefly for the

gaiety and sparkle of colour, will scarcely be credited with enjoying

them as works of art. (p. 75)




Berenson is clearly working within a western philosophical tradition which

separates mind from body and allies art with bodily transcendence.6 Here

physical contact is not merely outside the realm of art but actively negates it.

Touch turns an aesthetic experience into an un-aesthetic, cannibal

experience.7

. . . and as antithetical to knowledge

While Riegl consigns touch to the past and Berenson to primitivism and they

both turn touch into a species of vision, they still spend considerable time on

an analysis of touch. By contrast in Perspective as Symbolic Form, Erwin

Panofsky situates tangibility as a point of departure and not of enquiry.

Nonetheless, Panofsky remains important for this discussion in that he

elucidates the connection between thought and vision, non-thought and

touch.

In Perspective as Symbolic Form Panofsky (1991[1927]) comments that ‘the

art of classical antiquity was purely a corporeal art; it recognized as artistic

reality only what was tangible as well as visible’ (p. 41). This began to change

in the classical era. Hellenistic artists started to paint objects in their

surrounding space and used overlapping forms to indicate depth. These

suggestions of space and depth are significant for Panofsky because they

represent a shift away from the tangible surface of the picture towards the

picture surface as a window on the world. Yet other aspects of Hellenistic art

represented ‘a fundamentally unmodern view of space’ (p. 43). There was no

single horizon or centre nor any unified light source, and the relationships

between height, depth and width remained undefined.

As such, this antique perspective was ‘the expression of an equally unmodern

conception of the world’ (p. 43). The classical world understood the

universe to be a closed and finite sphere and not an infinite space. Whereas

visual and tactile perception both suggest that objects and space change

according to the position of the perceiver or the direction of measurement,

infinite space relies on a notion of homogeneity: that space will continue to

unfold in a measured and regular manner from any given point. Without a

notion of homogeneous, unified space the ancients literally couldn’t

conceive of systematized perspective. Paintings that have figures of different

sizes, numerous light sources and no horizon line are all indicative of a world

that is tangibly experienced through the body rather than through abstract

concepts.

The acquisition of ‘true’ perspective thus demanded a fundamentally

different world view, both artistically and philosophically. Panofsky traces the

transition from Hellenic art to that of the Middle Ages, which in his view

represented the universe as a homogeneous but immeasurable space, to

Byzantine and finally Renaissance art. Notably, these shifts are conceived of

as an inevitable progression towards a rational, systematized world view. If

the art and philosophy of the Middle Ages conceived of the world as a




continuum, albeit robbed of solidity and, because it was not measured,

lacking in rationality, then ‘the very next step on the path toward modern

“systematic space” had to be the refashioning of the world . . . into a

substantial and measurable world’ (p. 49, emphasis added). Accordingly the

Renaissance invention and the correlative notion of a pictorial ground plane

enable us to read the sizes of figures and the distances between the

individual bodies arrayed on them. The patterns of floor tiles in Renaissance

painting are literally the first example of a co-ordinate system; it is a

calculable modern space that extends out of the picture frame and into

infinity. These developments culminate in Brunelleschi’s procedures for

correct perspective; whereas the space had been aesthetically unified now it

is accomplished mathematically. Single point perspective and the vanishing

point are developed with a ‘full mathematical consciousness’ and function as

nothing less than the visible symbol of the infinite (p. 57). This, writes

Panofsky, is a great evolution, a concrete expression of an epistemological

advance. Just as philosophers were demolishing an idea of the earth as centre

of the cosmos and the celestial sphere at its limit, artists conceptualize

infinity. Whereas infinite space had been inconceivable for Aristotle and for

the medieval Scholastics it could only exist in the shape of divine

omnipotence, it is now a ‘detheologized’, empirical, rule-bound reality. With

perspective, scientific and objective representation became possible.

Importantly, Panofsky does not posit perspective as a true representation of

sensory perception. Indeed, perspective makes

two tacit but essential assumptions; first we see with a single and

immobile eye, and second, that the planar cross section of the visual

pyramid can pass for an adequate reproduction of our optical image. In

fact these two premises are rather bodily abstractions from reality. (p.

28)

Perspective is a move away from ‘psychophysical’ perception towards the

abstract conceptualization of space.

Thus, modern empirical knowledge, Enlightenment philosophy and the

future of science are all predicated on the shift away from tangible sensory

experience towards an abstracted system of visual representation. By

implication, then, touch remains subjective and limited, fastened to a world

where space is not continuous and measured but variable depending upon

one’s own position. Just as Berenson conceives of art and touch as utterly

mutually exclusive, Panofsky posits touch as antithetical to modern know-

ledge. Whereas Riegl also considered touch pre-modern but nonetheless

thought that it was a vital moment in human sensory development, Panofsky

maintains that modern knowledge is predicated upon the eradication of

touch from artistic, scientific and philosophical practice. From the

Renaissance onwards ‘the compasses – namely sound judgement – [were] in

one’s eyes and not in one’s hands’ (p. 146).




Negotiating the Legacy

One answer, then, to the question of why touch is considered to be suitable

for access initiatives is that touch is deemed an earlier and more primitive

sensory mode. Just as the ancients grasped their world because they hadn’t

developed either the sensory or cognitive sophistication to see and represent

it in an ordered, conceptualized manner, then those blind and visually

impaired visitors will be able to form some basic understanding through

touch. This comprehension will not equate to the scientific analysis of

Panofsky’s account but will be more akin to that of Riegl’s child-like

Egyptians and Berenson’s nomads. Alternatively, it is possible to argue that

most of Riegl, Berenson and Panofsky’s views have been discredited for some

time and that it is extremely unlikely that today’s museum professionals

would ever advocate their work as offering an unproblematic model for art

education. While touch does have this dubious inheritance it is arguably no

longer relevant to contemporary practice wherein touch has been recast as a

positive tool for learning.

Undoubtedly some museums and galleries have implemented touch in

unimaginative and unconsidered ways. For instance, basic raised line

drawings are often used to describe images that can’t be seen and thus posit

touch as nothing more than a substitute for looking. Likewise, touch tours

often function as a way of filling in the visual gaps rather than as an

opportunity to explore temperature, weight, solidity and fine texture, none

of which are accessible to vision. More recently, however, some galleries have

attempted to counter this limited and pejorative characterization with more

sophisticated opportunities for touch. This section explores three

institutions that actively promote tactile provision and asks how they

position touch, whether it is characterized as easy or primitive, and if the

legacy of Riegl, Berenson and Panofsky is still an issue.

The Tate Modern in London has an excellent track record in the area of art

education for blind and visually impaired audiences. Nevertheless, when the

artist and Tate trustee Bill Woodrow heard a talk about their provision and

the specific needs of that audience, he noted its limitations and was

prompted to comment: ‘Why . . . can’t blind people have access to complete

and new works of art rather than just being given embossed sheets showing

details of existing works?’8 Woodrow’s solution was to ask a number of artists

to make new drawings that would be transformed into complete tactile

images. Ostensibly, then, these drawings were commissioned against Riegl’s

assumption that touch was secondary to vision and Berenson’s suggestions

that touch was antithetical to art since, instead of tactility substituting for

vision, these works would be made to be touched.

Originally, the drawings were intended for use in schools and other

educational contexts but a later decision resulted in them being collectively

displayed as Raised Awareness during the summer of 2005. On first seeingthe exhibition the appearance of equivalence is striking. The original

drawings were shown with the tactile versions placed beneath on a




projecting shelf. All the originals were A4 or A3 in size and with only two

exceptions were black on white paper. The tactile drawings are identical in

size and are similarly monochrome, giving the impression that art is now as

accessible to blind as to sighted visitors. This image of accessibility was

reinforced by the exhibition’s situation. Instead of being pushed into a

separate education suite or the corridors, Raised Awareness was located

within Tate Modern’s main complex of galleries, thus giving tactile and visual

experience an apparently equal status. This move towards parity is

undoubtedly welcome but to some degree it is misleading. Artworks do not

invariably come in black and white. Colour does not translate into touch and

so the vast majority of artworks do not make convincing tactile drawings.

Here the impression of a visually impaired audience having full access to art

is predicated on an extremely tight selection of drawings.

Moreover, the attempt at equivalence was itself problematic, for the faithful

reproduction of visual images assumes that touch operates in the same way

as sight; that once the visible lines and tones are rendered tactile they will be

equally comprehensible to the hand. This is not the case for, while the

experiences of looking and of touching can overlap, they can never be

identical. For instance, Richard Wilson’s intricate and playful Butterfly(Figure 1) uses a technical style of drawing to depict an aeroplane that has

been deconstructed or is about to be folded together but, because touch can

rarely discriminate between receding planes, decipher perspective or make

out multiple fine lines, its highly complex visual structure remains

incomprehensible to touch.

The disparity between seeing and touching is even more vividly illustrated in

Damien Hirst’s drawing, Untitled, which is a pair of circles made up from a

pattern of black spots. In one circle the spots radiate out in straight lines

from a central point and, in the other, they spiral outwards. The tactile and

visual images look identical, but one of the effects of these circles is that they


Figure 1 ‘Butterfly’ – 2003. © RICHARD WILSON @ The Wapping Project

Space, London.



shimmer and appear to move. Obviously, this is a visual effect and the tactile

dots do not similarly vibrate meaning so, while the literal pattern is

translated, the optical effects cannot transfer in any direct way.

Raised Awareness forgets that touch functions differently from vision and has

its own perceptual specificities and limits. If these drawings were going to be

understood through touch then many of them would have to be converted

into different sizes or broken down into sections. These works are concep-

tually and aesthetically engaging to the sighted viewer but Richard Wilson’s

Butterfly would need to be magnified while the different overlapping

household objects depicted in Martin Craig Martin’s Hearing Things would

have to be separated out before the layered, composite version would make

any sense to a blind visitor.

Here touch is not necessarily considered to be easier than vision but it is

certainly lacking in complexity. The exhibition assumes that touch can accom-

plish the same perceptual tasks as vision, but only so long as the image is pared

down to its monochromatic small-scale basics. Touch becomes equivalent to

vision but only in a poor, restricted context. In effect, the exhibition has similar

problems to those evident within Alois Riegl’s account of touch. Riegl thought

that tactile looking could comprehend all the aspects of an object previously

perceived by touch; that vision could accomplish what touch does and more.

Touch is not credited as having any additional worth for, when the transition

from touch to tactile looking takes place, nothing significant is lost and touch

simply becomes a variety of looking. Whereas Alois Riegl’s model moved

from touch to vision Raised Awareness reverses the transition, but similarly

nothing is lost or gained in the process. Yet since the visual image is so

restricted, Raised Awareness, like Riegl, posits touch as being less than

vision, as more limited and without any range or specificity of its own.

Like Raised Awareness, Sensing Sculpture at Wolverhampton Art Gallery was

aimed at visually impaired visitors; however, unlike Raised Awareness, this

exhibition deliberately eschews tactile drawings and the correlative process

of translating visual images into a tactile experience largely stripped of

colour, expanse and effect. Instead they created a permanent exhibition

where visitors are allowed to touch all the artworks on display. Nevertheless,

this more direct approach also has its problems. When the curators selected

the exhibition they rightly paid attention to texture and surface and, at the

same time, they acknowledged that understanding artwork through touch is

not a primitive, unlearnt or easy process. Unfortunately, the gallery offers

little guidance on how the relationship between touch and meaning can be

developed. On touching the sculptures visitors might register warmth or

cold, roughness and smoothness, size and weight, but there is no way of

knowing how these properties are connected to the meanings of the art

works. For instance, how does the smoothness of Man and Woman by Nancy

Havers impact upon their place within late 20th-century feminism and

debates on sexuality? Does it matter that one of Sophie Zadeh’s Pod Serieshas tiny metal spikes that grate against your fingers or that the bronze head,

Flight, by Robert Jackson Emerson is cold to the touch?




Despite the best efforts of the curators, Sensing Sculpture remains within the

paradigms set by Riegl, Berenson and Panofsky. While the three authors all

imply that physical contact has no place in a modern appreciation of art,

Wolverhampton Art Gallery has given visitors permission to use touch. That

licence is, however, undermined by the absence of any guidance on how to

touch the exhibits. Without instruction, neither blind nor sighted visitors

necessarily know how to touch art objects or how their bodily experience can

contribute to interpretation. In short, the curators have discarded canonical

art historical approaches that dismiss touch as easy and immediate but there

is no new model to take their place. Thus, while the audience is allowed to

touch, both curators and visitors are left in a position where touch remains

antithetical to art and lacks complexity simply because there is no clear

alternative.

In contrast to Wolverhampton Art Gallery where the curators wanted touch

to contribute to a discussion of meaning, staff at The British Museum

developed handling opportunities precisely because they were not equated

with intellectual learning. Here, handling tables contain a number of original

artefacts from which six are selected by the volunteer for the day, thereby

ensuring that repeat visitors will be able to pick up and hold different

objects. From one initial table in the Coins and Medals department the idea

has spread through the Museum, becoming a regular component in any new

gallery provision. There is even a working group on handling that, in an

internal memo on the scheme, stated that the aim of the tables was:

To provide visitors to The British Museum with a more direct, personaland welcoming experience of the Museum by offering them the

opportunity to handle objects related to those on display and to talk to

people about the objects handled and on display, and thereby give

them a sense of intimate engagement with the collections and of

sharing the curatorial expertise of the museum. (British Museum

working group memo, 2003:1, emphases added)

While the document does mention shared curatorial expertise, in practice

that expertise is shared verbally. The curators brief the Museum volunteers

who then tell the visitors about the history and function of the objects. As in

Riegl, Berenson and Panofsky, there is little or no suggestion that touch could

provide any information which is inaccessible to vision or that touch is a skill

which an audience may need to be taught.

Indeed, object handling is considered to be so far removed from scholarship

that it was introduced into The Enlightenment gallery at The British Museum

as a deliberate attempt to forestall criticism. The gallery, which opened in

2003, is a recreation of 17th- and 18th-century patterns of display and

collecting and, during preparation, there were anxieties that the exhibition

concept and format was too complex for a general audience (although this

has not proved to be the case). The handling table was set up to offset this

potentially intimidating environment since the small number of pre-selected

‘star’ objects could counteract the overwhelming numbers of unfamiliar




exhibits. In addition, the volunteer staffing the table would be a point of

contact, someone who could answer questions or engage in discussion.

The emphasis on personal and intimate engagement is undoubtedly a radical

step forward for The British Museum. Unlike art museums where emotion is

often privileged, feeling has not been considered an appropriate response

within the scholarly environments that prize objectivity. Actively encouraging

personal and intimate engagement with the objects thus suggests that the

Museum’s definitions of learning and of who is allowed to know might be

changing. Instead of being populated by academics who have supposedly

learned to distance their feelings, the Museum is using handling objects to

welcome new visitors.

At the same time, this characterization of touch is remarkably close to that

expounded by Erwin Panofsky. Touching objects is assumed to be an easier

way of engaging with them than looking, reading or thinking. Although the

public might learn from touching objects this is in spite of, not because of,

the structure of handling provision and instead knowledge is presented

either visually or verbally. Whereas vision remains firmly allied to rationality,

touch is a way of soothing the visitors’ anxiety when faced with extensive

displays and established scholarship. These visitors are allowed to begin with

the most apparently basic form of sensory perception and, having touched

and been made welcome in the galleries, may be able to progress onto

looking at exhibitions. The handling table is the equivalent of medieval art

and remains a stage to pass through.

Riegl, Berenson and Panofsky’s attitudes towards touch are not simply

mirrored or replicated wholesale in contemporary access initiatives. Indeed

the advocacy of touch at Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the high profile

position of touch at The British Museum and in Raised Awareness actively

refute their conclusions. Nevertheless, while these three institutions do not

maintain that art and touch are antithetical, the dubious inheritance of touch

is still evident in the lack of tactile opportunities that are not reducible to

looking and in the equation of touch with more basic, immediate and non-

intellectual approaches to art. Ironically, this means that the very terms upon

which access initiatives are based undermine the possibility of inclusion for,

if touch is even inadvertently characterized as a lesser form of vision, as an

easy, primitive process that requires no particular skill or as something that

inspires feeling but is unconnected to thought, then it will continue to

occupy a lowly position in the hierarchy of knowledge. Moreover, without

new approaches to touch, tactile provision potentially reinforces the link

between touch and a lack of conceptual sophistication. Thus, blind and other

audiences are being offered a deeply marginalized form of knowledge in the

name of access. Instead of alleviating exclusion touch-based initiatives can

consolidate it.

This has serious repercussions for access audiences, not least because they

have historically been linked to ignorance in various forms. This is

particularly true of blind and visually impaired people. For example, in the

New Testament, blindness denotes an unwillingness or an incapacity to




recognize a Christian God while the miraculous restoration of sight indicates

revelation and literally seeing the truth. This elision between not being able

to see and refusing to see is still replicated today, for example in Elaine

Showalter’s comment that ‘We have so long lamented the blindness, the

deafness, and indifference of the male critical establishment towards our

work’ (quoted in Grigely, 2000: 37). Equally it is evident in the protestations

of access curators who prefix lectures with ‘blind people aren’t stupid they’re

just blind’.9 Thus, touch-based initiatives can perpetuate stereotypes of blind

people as debarred from knowledge and as inherently incapable of seeing

the truth.

Re-thinking Touch

I am not advocating that museums abandon touch-based access initiatives.

Indeed, I do think that touch-based provision can live up to its promise and

offer new ways of understanding collections that are more inclusive than

those predominantly visual and scholarly approaches. Yet in order for this to

happen, it is vital we understand the capacities and the limits of touch as

touch and not just as an adjunct to seeing. Only then will touch be credited

with being a legitimate route to knowledge and not just a substitute for vision.

This is clearly an enormous undertaking but, rather than simply calling for

change, this article concludes with some starting points. We need to:

1. Re-assess the separation of touch and vision. We do not pass through

touch to reach vision. Our visual comprehension of objects and their

representations is dependent upon prior tactile experience. Chardin’s

still lives only make sense because we have experienced silkiness and

sharpness. Equally, our tactile investigations can be stimulated by what

an object looks like. The appearance of smoothness or shininess can

motivate touch, as can a lack of clarity which impels us to check the

surface with our hands. Once we start thinking about vision and touch

as being intimately related then correlative equations of touch with body

and not mind, nature and not culture, the past and not present, become

equally untenable. While we’re at it we should also consider their over-

laps with taste, smell and sound.

2. Stop trying to work out which sense developed first: it’s not a competition.

3. Recognize that Condillac’s model of a statue which acquired each sense

in turn is not really applicable to humans.

4. Avoid jumping to the opposite conclusion, namely, the senses all

function in perfect holistic harmony. Instead we need to know more

about how the senses overlap, over-ride and contradict each other.

5. Consider the specificities of touch; include rhythm, balance, cadence,

stretch, pace and pause. Touch is not limited to a static contact between

our fingertips and a surface. It involves our muscles and bones and

complex somatosensory systems. Waltzing, walking, swimming, leaning,

jumping, climbing, lying down and sitting can all fall within the category

of touch.




6. Take time into account, as well as speed. Touch doesn’t take place in

the blink of an eye; it is usually a slow, cumulative experience. Touch

can also flip and twist time. Museum visitors say that holding a

Palaeolithic hand axe puts them in touch with the person who used it.

These responses should not be dismissed as irrational; imaginative

leaps give us a sense of our place in the world, of history stretching

back and springing towards us.

7. Differentiate between touches. It makes a great deal of political, sexual,

social, scientific and philosophical difference whether visitors gaze,

stare, glance, glimpse, blink, observe, scrutinize, scan, survey, behold or

contemplate the art and each other. Unless we have similar levels of

tactile distinction then the subtlety, nuance and range of touch will

remain unrecognized. What then are the differences between brushing,

stroking, patting, rubbing, scratching, tapping, tracing, picking,

knocking, hitting, punching, handling, holding, pinching or slapping?

8. Be attentive to the history of touch. A pinch in 21st-century New York

is not the same as that which Dickens describes in 19th-century

London, nor can we assume that Riegl’s experience of stroking an

Egyptian sculpture is comparable to that of a blind visitor taking a

touch tour in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

9. Stop equating nicely coloured brain scans with an explanation of how

touch functions or why it matters.

10. Stop using ‘embodiment’ as a sufficient explanation of all the different

kinds of touch, its practices and processes.

11. Begin a cross-cultural comparison of touch.

12. Deconstruct accounts that link touch to particular races, nations, ethnic

groups or genders.

13. Give up the equation between blindness, lack and touch.

14. Remember that we are all always touching, albeit not in the same way.

15. Grasp that who touches matters. Touch didn’t disappear with the

Greeks, the invention of perspective or with the Enlightenment.

Connoisseurs, collectors, curators, artists and all those people whose

touch is judged to be clean, free of damage and legitimate are still

picking things up and holding them.

16. Acknowledge that the curious, inquiring, playful public also carried on

touching but that their touch was deemed damaging and dirty.

17. Be sceptical of claims that objects lose their aura once they’ve been

touched. Sometimes the wear and damage leaves the power of an

object unaffected or even adds to it.

18. Bear in mind that the border between the toucher and touched is not

fixed. In touching something we erode and create it and we are also

moulded by the experience. This contact, however, is rarely

symmetrical; even touching oneself one body part tends towards

activity and the other passivity, an imbalance that certainly doesn’t

make the passive recipient of touch any less aware or responsive than

the active toucher. Indeed, the opposite is often true.

19. Examine the effects of temperature. The borderline between self and

other can shift depending on whether a surface is hot or cold. Laying




your cheek against a warm bronze on a summer’s day is not the same

as touching it on an icy day.

20. Stress that surfaces matter. Even the quality of a piece of paper has

meaning and affects.

21. Re-think the politics of surface. If the image of late capitalism is shiny is

its texture slippery and smooth?

22. Stop thinking of things as if they were only images. The world is not a

slide-library.

23. Read Rodin’s diaries (1912: 63–5).

Instead of imagining the different parts of a body as surfaces more

or less flat, I represented them as projections of interior volumes.

I forced myself to express in each swelling of the torso or of the

limbs the efforescence of a muscle or of a bone which lay deep

beneath the skin.

24. Remain undaunted by the prospect of inventing a tactile art history. The

history of art is already tactile. Joseph Beuy’s fat is not just a visual

image, it smells, we know how it feels, we can imagine it smeared over

his or our body. Ditto Franz West’s Adaptives, Giuseppe Penone’s

paintings with acacia thorns, walking on Carl Andre’s Copper Square,

the grain and texture of stone, the caked ridges of impasto, the fragility

of Eva Hesse’s latex sculptures, the curves of a Barbara Hepworth and

virtually everything Lygia Clark ever produced. We just need to take it

into account.

25. Be wary of art historical precedents for touch.

26. Applaud Lazló Moholy-Nagy. He made tactile training a compulsory part

of the Bauhaus curriculum. And he insisted on it being political.

27. Don’t over-estimate or emulate accepted forms of visual knowledge.

28. Avoid thinking of vision as being more conceptual than touch. Art

history has developed a sophisticated apparatus for making sense of

what we see. The lack of a comparable apparatus for touch doesn’t

mean that touch cannot be conceptualized but that it isn’t yet. Or at

least not adequately.

29. Ask how touch and tactile qualities can lead an audience into an

exploration of content and history.

30. Ask how the tactile qualities of art generate meaning and rational

thought.

31. Remember that reaching out is inextricable from curiosity, investigation,

analysis, examination, pleasure, pain, memory, fear, desire and risk.

Notes

1. For a detailed discussion of their place in art history see Holly (1984) and Podro

(1982).

2. Likewise, it is difficult to accept that Egyptian columns were tactile because they

interrupted large spaces to create small, tactile spaces whereas Greek columns

are optical because they create an impression of recession.

3. Riegl subsequently consolidated this emphasis on sight in an article of 1902

where he decided to substitute the term haptic for tactile. The term tactile, Riegl




thought, was too closely associated with actual touch. Notably haptic no longer

has the same connotation of actual touch. It is now used to mean active, as

opposed to passive touch.

4. Here the translation of kunstbegehren is that of Margaret Iversen (1993). To

underline Riegl’s cultural relativism, Iversen also quotes his comment that:

at the beginning of the twentieth century, most of us have come to the

conclusion that there is no such absolute art-value, and that it is pure fiction

to consider ourselves wiser arbiters than were the contemporaries of

misunderstood masters in the past. (p. 7)

5. The tension between Berenson’s clear pleasure in and understanding of tactility

suggests that his emphasis on ideated sensation might be one protest too far.

6. The distinction between mind and body can be found in Platonism and in much

Christian philosophy which maintains that the mind or soul survives the death of

the body. It is, however, more commonly associated with the work of René

Descartes who argues

I have a clear and distinct idea of myself as a thinking non-extended thing and

a clear and distinct idea of myself as an extended non-thinking thing.

Whatever I can conceive clearly and distinctly, God can create. (Descartes,

1996[1641]: 54)

7. It is notable that within both Riegl’s and Berenson’s accounts touch is situated

outside of the West and that their account of modernity is allied to a move from

the Orient to the Occident.

8. Bill Woodrow quoted in M. Irving (2005) Times online, London, 13 July. The

Blind Art trust has taken a similar stance – each year they run an open

submission exhibition where all the artwork has to be accessible to a visually

impaired audience.

9. Which happened recurrently at the Art Beyond Sight: Multimodal Approaches toLearning conference, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 14–15 October

2005.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the Leverhulme Trust for their support of this project. I would also

like to thank Marq Smith, Georgina Kleege, Jo Morra and Peg Rawes for their

encouragement, time and constructive criticism.

References

Berenson, B. (1938) Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Berenson, B. (1950[1948]) Aesthetics and History. London: Constable.

Descartes, R. (1996[1641]) Meditations on First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Gardner, H. (1993) Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York:

Basic Books.

Grigely, J. (2000) ‘Postcards to Sophie Calle’, in Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Epstein

(eds) Points of Contact: Disability, Art and Culture, pp. 31–58. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press.

Holly, M.A. (1984) Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press.




Irving, M. (2005) ‘Art for the Blind Becomes Reality’, Times online, London, 13 July

[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ article/0,,585-1691367,00.html]

Iversen, M. (1993) Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Panofsky, E. (1991[1927]) Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books.

Podro, M. (1982) The Critical Historians of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Riegl, A. (1985[1901]) Late Roman Art Industry. Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider

Editore.

Rodin, A. (1912) Art, trans. Romilly Fedden. Boston, MA: Horizon Press.

Fiona Candlin is Lecturer in Museum Studies, a joint appointment held at

Birkbeck College and The British Museum. She is also Visiting Professor on

the KonstLab programme at Gothenburg University in Sweden. After working

at Tate Liverpool and completing a practice-based PhD in contemporary art,

she started writing on art institutions and education, and on art and

blindness. She has just completed a one-year Leverhulme Fellowship which

has enabled her to work on a book provisionally entitled The DubiousHistory of Touch: Art, Museums and the Filthy Public.

Address: Birkbeck College, University of London, 26 Russell Square,

Bloomsbury, London WC1B 5DQ, UK. [email: [email protected]]




candlin, fiona - the dubious inheritance of touch (art history and museum access)

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