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): 137154 [1470-4129(200608)5:2]10.1177/1470412906066906

Abstract

Numerous museums and galleries now offer tactile opportunities aspart of their access provision. This article asks why touch is deemed tobe more accessible than vision as a way of learning about art and whatrepercussions that has for blind and visually impaired audiences.

While touch has been discussed in many different contexts, touch alsohas a specifically art historical lineage where it is characterized inpredominantly pejorative terms. This then raises serious questionsconcerning the use of touch within contemporary access provision: istouch used in access provision because it is considered to be more

basic, easier than seeing? Does touch remain an adjunct to vision, alesser, substitutive form of seeing? Alternatively, are art historicalstereotypes so outdated that they are irrelevant for current museumpractice? In which case does access provision show touch to be aqualitatively 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 aswell as feeling?

Keywords

access provision Alois Riegl Bernard Berenson blindness ErwinPanofsky museums objects touch

Museums are no longer places where touch is entirely forbidden. Insteadthere are numerous opportunities for visitors to hold and examine originalartefacts or artists tools. When objects are very rare the museum mayprovide replicas, but otherwise displays of clothing, textiles, ceramics, coinsand metal-ware regularly have selected examples for the audience to handle.

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These tactile opportunities are all offered to the general public but they arealso intended for use by disabled audiences and specifically by blind and

visually impaired visitors. Accordingly, the objects which are available totouch will often be accompanied by Braille labels, specialist audio-guides orlarge print text leaflets. Alongside these more general events there is alsoprovision which is explicitly designed for blind audiences, namely, touchtours, handling classes and description sessions accompanied by raised linediagrams. In short, touch-based provision is provided in the name of access.This article asks why museums position touch as an accessible form oflearning and what repercussions that has, specifically on blind and visuallyimpaired audiences.

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

visible. Museum funding is increasingly predicated on access programmesand on a demonstrable commitment to widening participation. Accordingly,museums count the number of visitors who are designated social class C2DEand 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 themmaking physical contact with objects. Pictures of children touching objectsthus denote an inclusive, welcoming environment and similarly images ofblind people function as a short-hand for access. The tactile experience isactually 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 educationalapproaches, such as those championed by Howard Gardner (1993), thatposit different kinds of intelligence. Touch enables visitors whoseintelligence is bodily-kinaesthetic to explore and understand objects thatare usually presented in ways which appeal to logicalmathematicalintelligence. Thus touch potentially opens up previously prohibited ways ofunderstanding museum collections and includes visitors who havetraditionally been marginalized by an emphasis on visual learning. As such, itcould represent a new and positive step towards recognizing different formsof 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 Ioutline in the first part of this article. Here I concentrate on three writers;

Alois Riegl, Erwin Panofsky and Bernard Berenson. Riegls work was notablenot least because he moved away from the prevailing 19th-century pre-occupation with individual artists to investigate the deep structuralprinciples of artistic style. Crucially these principles included the divisionbetween touch and vision. His account was subsequently challenged anddeveloped by Erwin Panofsky and together the two authors rigorously stakedout some of the central methodological approaches of the early and mid 20thcentury.1Writing over the same period the American connoisseur Bernard

journal of visual culture 5(2)138



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Berenson also investigated the role of touch in visual art but, whereas Riegland Panofsky were enormously influential in art history, Berenson wasknown as an art expert and arbiter of taste primarily within the museumsector. He selected paintings for art collectors and museums, workingparticularly closely with Lord Duveen whose bequests have shaped manymajor museums in Europe and America. While his writing never attained thesophistication of his German contemporaries, his lack of subtlety serves tohighlight 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 isprior to and segregated from vision, detached from rationality and from anyestablished structures of learning. This then raises serious questions con-

cerning the use of touch within contemporary access provision; is touch usedin access provision precisely because it is considered to be more basic, easierthan seeing? If so, doesnt the use of touch actually consolidate and notalleviate the exclusion of disabled visitors and other access audiences? Or,alternatively, are Riegl et al.s ideas on touch so outdated as to be virtuallyirrelevant to current museum and gallery practice? In order to consider theseissues in more detail the second section of the article will go on to examinethree examples of contemporary touch-based provision, all of which areexplicitly aimed at blind and visually impaired audiences. Although therehave been many examples of access provision which adopt the limitedcharacterizations of touch apparent in the work of Riegl, Panofsky andBerenson, here I consider recent events and exhibitions that have actively

tried to negotiate those negative associations. Finally, finding that even thesemore sophisticated ventures can be stymied by a lack of understanding abouttouch as something other than an impoverished prelude to seeing, the thirdsection offers some suggestions for re-thinking touch as a route to arthistorical knowledge.

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

In Late Roman Art Industry (1985[1901]), Alois Riegl describes the shiftfrom antique styles of architecture, sculpture, painting and decorative arts tothose of the classical and then Late Roman periods. Crucially these stylisticchanges evince a different historical and cultural perceptual mode. Riegl

posits that in the antique period, sense perception found objects to beconfusing and mixed so their ultimate goal was to represent external objectsas clearly defined, individual, material entities. Although Riegl never explains

why antique peoples, specifically the ancient Egyptians, were anxious aboutmateriality he implies, in passing, that it concerned the separation of self andobject, 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 wereimpenetrable and separate from one another (p. 22). There is no suggestionthat touch could facilitate any kind of symbiosis or juncture between subject

Candlin The Dubious Inheritance of Touch 139



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and object, instead it only marks difference and monadic unity. Once thisseparation had been established a combination of perceptions becamepossible. Whenever the eye recognized a coherent coloured plane, priortactile experience would convince the viewer that he or she was looking at aunified external object. Touch was no longer required to establish certaintyand at an early time, optical perception became sufficient. Nevertheless, thismode of looking was analogous to touch since it was still concerned withestablishing material presence and, as with touch, the form of an object wasestablished through the amalgamation of numerous, successive perceptions.

There are undoubted problems with Riegls conception of tactile and opticvision. As Walter Benjamin pointed out, Riegl locates perception historicallybut he offers no account of what motivates perceptual change. More recently,

Margaret Iversen has noted that Riegl had a tendency to omit styles andperiods that do not conform to his model wherein the tactile is the precursorto the optic, or else his desire to attribute artworks, objects and buildings toa specific period results in some strained interpretation. The Pantheon, forexample, was built at a period when depth was supposedly alien to thecontemporary mindset, so Riegl contends that this large, multiform building

was actually conceived of on the flat plane and understood as pattern againstground; 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 Rieglsconception of tactility risks turning touch into a subset of vision. Rieglsaccount of antique art starts with a conception of actual touch. Touch alone

can assure us of impenetrability and, commenting on the Egyptian statues thatare lifeless from a distance, he writes that the fine modelling [of Egyptiansculpture] can be felt entirely, when one lets the tip of the fingers glide overthem, thereby implying that touch has pleasures that are not equallyamenable 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

Riegls formulation of tactile looking could be read as an expansion of touch;an extension of touch into vision but other aspects of Riegls argumentsuggest that touch is not colonizing vision but being co-opted by sight. Rieglnever explicitly privileges either the tactile or the optic; indeed rather thanassuming a historically unconditional ideal, Riegl seeks to recognize thatthere is no absolute basis for judgement:

In spite of its seemingly independent objectivity, scholarship takes itsdirection in the last analysis from the contemporary intellectualatmosphere 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 sensoryapparatus that could not easily distinguish individual objects. The Egyptians

were like small children learning to focus.




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Moreover, Riegls entire book is an argument for progress and against thecharacterization of late Roman art as a decayed or corrupted form of theGreek. From a contemporary perspective we might not necessarily seeRoman art as a development or improvement, but this is because we dontappreciate the cultural and historical needs those art forms articulated.

Whatever our own preferences, these forms constitute progress and nothingelse but progress (Riegl, 1985: 11). Crucially, the progress is towards themodern use of linear perspective, to naturalistic representation and to vision

within which touch is spatially represented by objects appearing to be threedimensional.

In Riegls account, touch is a precursor to modernity and a necessary stagein a history of perception. At the same time, once the antique peoples have

conceptualized their separation from the world and once they can readdepth in a two-dimensional image, then there is no place for touch in artspractices. Although a faint trace of touch may remain in the activity of lookingand in the understanding of depth, the pleasures of stroking the subtlecurves of Egyptian sculptures has been entirely repressed or forgotten.

. . . as cannibal . . .

Like Riegl, the American connoisseur Bernard Berensons early discussionsof art initially incorporate touch and then shift the emphasis towards touchas a way of seeing. Yet, unlike Riegl, for whom touch does have a place and

despite Berensons apparent advocacy of touch, he actually sees touch asbeing entirely alien to a proper experience of art.

In Florentine Painters, written in 1897, Berenson notes that as infants weunderstand depth and three dimensions through touch and touch is againposited as the test of reality, although in this case, it belongs to anindividuals infancy rather than that of mankind. Berenson also credits theseearly tactile experiences with being essential to vision, for although we mightforget the connection, actual touch enables us to attribute tactile values toretinal impressions.

For Berenson, the task of the artist is to produce an image that is soconvincingly three-dimensional that it will stimulate our tactile senses,indeed our reaction should be so strong that the viewer must have theillusion of being able to touch a figure . . . the illusion of varying muscularsensations inside my palm and fingers (Berenson, 1938: 63). Giottospaintings excelled in this respect, having

Not only as much power of appealing to the tactile imagination as ispossessed by the objects represented human figures in particular but actually more; with the necessary result that to his contemporariesthey conveyed a keener sense of reality, of life-likeness than the objectsthemselves. (p. 64)




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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 tactileimagination. We are taken beyond the real by Giottos paintings, not into anengagement with it. This is supposedly a purified experience removed fromthe grimy realities of the physical world.

Despite Berensons insistence that tactile values are imaginative or idealized,his own descriptions are rich and highly sensuous. Throughout Florentine

Painters Berenson vividly describes physical pleasure and response theaching of muscles after a wrestling bout, the swell of Hercules calves, theflanks of a Centaur, the caressing hand. Indeed, the pleasure evident inBerensons writing frequently threatens to undermine his rigorously idealstance 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 tactilepleasures. Here Berenson emphasizes physical response when he writes

in order to be life-enhancing an object must appeal to the whole ofones being, to ones senses, nerves, muscles, viscera, and to onesfeeling for direction, for support and weight, for balance, for stressesand counter stresses. (p. 58)

This notion of touch extends far beyond a muscular sensation in palm andfingers to include the whole body, its movement and balance, but Berensonnonetheless insists that tactile values are ideated sensations which only exist

in the imagination:

In art, the object must not arouse any of those wakeful cannibalappetites that can never be satisfied. . . It should not arouse us toaction, although it cannot help influencing conduct; it should not affectany of our productive, reproductive or transitive energies but tune uslike instruments instruments for ecstasy. (p. 59)5

Just in case we missed the point, Berenson goes on to explain that there aretwo types of senses, two which are for signalling and reporting and threemore cannibal ones, namely, touch, taste and smell. Objects such as cocktailsor 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 ofimmediately present and not purely imagined sensations. Conversely, if thosesenses are used to appreciate something which might, in other contexts, beacknowledged as an art object, it will not be an artistic experience:

The princes of Ormuz and of Ind who pass their fingers throughsackfuls of precious stones, not only for the pride of power which greatpossessions give, but also for the touch, and perhaps chiefly for thegaiety and sparkle of colour, will scarcely be credited with enjoyingthem as works of art. (p. 75)




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Berenson is clearly working within a western philosophical tradition whichseparates mind from body and allies art with bodily transcendence.6 Herephysical contact is not merely outside the realm of art but actively negates it.Touch turns an aesthetic experience into an un-aesthetic, cannibalexperience.7

. . . and as antithetical to knowledge

While Riegl consigns touch to the past and Berenson to primitivism and theyboth turn touch into a species of vision, they still spend considerable time onan 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 heelucidates the connection between thought and vision, non-thought andtouch.

InPerspective as Symbolic Form Panofsky (1991[1927]) comments that theart of classical antiquity was purely a corporeal art; it recognized as artisticreality only what was tangible as well as visible (p. 41). This began to changein the classical era. Hellenistic artists started to paint objects in theirsurrounding space and used overlapping forms to indicate depth. Thesesuggestions of space and depth are significant for Panofsky because theyrepresent a shift away from the tangible surface of the picture towards thepicture surface as a window on the world. Yet other aspects of Hellenistic art

represented a fundamentally unmodern view of space (p. 43). There was nosingle horizon or centre nor any unified light source, and the relationshipsbetween height, depth and width remained undefined.

As such, this antique perspective was the expression of an equally unmodernconception of the world (p. 43). The classical world understood theuniverse to be a closed and finite sphere and not an infinite space. Whereas

visual and tactile perception both suggest that objects and space changeaccording to the position of the perceiver or the direction of measurement,infinite space relies on a notion of homogeneity: that space will continue tounfold in a measured and regular manner from any given point. Without anotion of homogeneous, unified space the ancients literally couldntconceive of systematized perspective. Paintings that have figures of different

sizes, numerous light sources and no horizon line are all indicative of a worldthat is tangibly experienced through the body rather than through abstractconcepts.

The acquisition of true perspective thus demanded a fundamentallydifferent world view, both artistically and philosophically. Panofsky traces thetransition from Hellenic art to that of the Middle Ages, which in his viewrepresented the universe as a homogeneous but immeasurable space, toByzantine and finally Renaissance art. Notably, these shifts are conceived ofas an inevitable progression towards a rational, systematized world view. Ifthe art and philosophy of the Middle Ages conceived of the world as a




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continuum, albeit robbed of solidity and, because it was not measured,lacking in rationality, then the very next step on the path toward modernsystematic space had to be the refashioning of the world . . . into asubstantial and measurable world (p. 49, emphasis added). Accordingly theRenaissance invention and the correlative notion of a pictorial ground planeenable us to read the sizes of figures and the distances between theindividual bodies arrayed on them. The patterns of floor tiles in Renaissancepainting are literally the first example of a co-ordinate system; it is acalculable modern space that extends out of the picture frame and intoinfinity. These developments culminate in Brunelleschis procedures forcorrect perspective; whereas the space had been aesthetically unified now itis accomplished mathematically. Single point perspective and the vanishing

point are developed with a full mathematical consciousness and function asnothing less than the visible symbol of the infinite (p. 57). This, writesPanofsky, is a great evolution, a concrete expression of an epistemologicaladvance. Just as philosophers were demolishing an idea of the earth as centreof the cosmos and the celestial sphere at its limit, artists conceptualizeinfinity. Whereas infinite space had been inconceivable for Aristotle and forthe medieval Scholastics it could only exist in the shape of divineomnipotence, it is now a detheologized, empirical, rule-bound reality. Withperspective, scientific and objective representation became possible.

Importantly, Panofsky does not posit perspective as a true representation ofsensory perception. Indeed, perspective makes

two tacit but essential assumptions; first we see with a single andimmobile eye, and second, that the planar cross section of the visualpyramid can pass for an adequate reproduction of our optical image. Infact these two premises are rather bodily abstractions from reality. (p.28)

Perspective is a move away from psychophysical perception towards theabstract conceptualization of space.

Thus, modern empirical knowledge, Enlightenment philosophy and thefuture of science are all predicated on the shift away from tangible sensoryexperience towards an abstracted system of visual representation. Byimplication, then, touch remains subjective and limited, fastened to a world

where space is not continuous and measured but variable depending uponones own position. Just as Berenson conceives of art and touch as utterlymutually exclusive, Panofsky posits touch as antithetical to modern know-ledge. Whereas Riegl also considered touch pre-modern but nonethelessthought that it was a vital moment in human sensory development, Panofskymaintains that modern knowledge is predicated upon the eradication oftouch from artistic, scientific and philosophical practice. From theRenaissance onwards the compasses namely sound judgement [were] inones eyes and not in ones hands (p. 146).




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Negotiating the Legacy

One answer, then, to the question of why touch is considered to be suitablefor access initiatives is that touch is deemed an earlier and more primitivesensory mode. Just as the ancients grasped their world because they hadntdeveloped either the sensory or cognitive sophistication to see and representit in an ordered, conceptualized manner, then those blind and visuallyimpaired visitors will be able to form some basic understanding throughtouch. This comprehension will not equate to the scientific analysis ofPanofskys account but will be more akin to that of Riegls child-likeEgyptians and Berensons nomads. Alternatively, it is possible to argue thatmost of Riegl, Berenson and Panofskys views have been discredited for some

time and that it is extremely unlikely that todays museum professionalswould ever advocate their work as offering an unproblematic model for arteducation. While touch does have this dubious inheritance it is arguably nolonger relevant to contemporary practice wherein touch has been recast as apositive tool for learning.

Undoubtedly some museums and galleries have implemented touch inunimaginative and unconsidered ways. For instance, basic raised linedrawings are often used to describe images that cant be seen and thus posittouch as nothing more than a substitute for looking. Likewise, touch toursoften function as a way of filling in the visual gaps rather than as anopportunity to explore temperature, weight, solidity and fine texture, noneof which are accessible to vision. More recently, however, some galleries have

attempted to counter this limited and pejorative characterization with moresophisticated opportunities for touch. This section explores threeinstitutions that actively promote tactile provision and asks how theyposition touch, whether it is characterized as easy or primitive, and if thelegacy of Riegl, Berenson and Panofsky is still an issue.

The Tate Modern in London has an excellent track record in the area of arteducation for blind and visually impaired audiences. Nevertheless, when theartist and Tate trustee Bill Woodrow heard a talk about their provision andthe specific needs of that audience, he noted its limitations and wasprompted to comment: Why . . . cant blind people have access to completeand new works of art rather than just being given embossed sheets showingdetails of existing works?8Woodrows solution was to ask a number of artists

to make new drawings that would be transformed into complete tactileimages. Ostensibly, then, these drawings were commissioned against Rieglsassumption that touch was secondary to vision and Berensons suggestionsthat 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 othereducational contexts but a later decision resulted in them being collectivelydisplayed asRaised Awareness during the summer of 2005. On first seeing

the exhibition the appearance of equivalence is striking. The originaldrawings were shown with the tactile versions placed beneath on a




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projecting shelf. All the originals were A4 or A3 in size and with only twoexceptions were black on white paper. The tactile drawings are identical insize and are similarly monochrome, giving the impression that art is now asaccessible to blind as to sighted visitors. This image of accessibility wasreinforced by the exhibitions situation. Instead of being pushed into aseparate education suite or the corridors, Raised Awareness was located

within Tate Moderns main complex of galleries, thus giving tactile and visualexperience an apparently equal status. This move towards parity isundoubtedly welcome but to some degree it is misleading. Artworks do notinvariably come in black and white. Colour does not translate into touch andso 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 faithfulreproduction of visual images assumes that touch operates in the same wayas sight; that once the visible lines and tones are rendered tactile they will beequally comprehensible to the hand. This is not the case for, while theexperiences of looking and of touching can overlap, they can never beidentical. For instance, Richard Wilsons intricate and playful Butterfly(Figure 1) uses a technical style of drawing to depict an aeroplane that hasbeen deconstructed or is about to be folded together but, because touch canrarely discriminate between receding planes, decipher perspective or makeout multiple fine lines, its highly complex visual structure remainsincomprehensible to touch.

The disparity between seeing and touching is even more vividly illustrated inDamien Hirsts drawing, Untitled, which is a pair of circles made up from apattern of black spots. In one circle the spots radiate out in straight linesfrom 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 ProjectSpace, London.



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shimmer and appear to move. Obviously, this is a visual effect and the tactiledots do not similarly vibrate meaning so, while the literal pattern istranslated, the optical effects cannot transfer in any direct way.

Raised Awareness forgets that touch functions differently from vision and hasits own perceptual specificities and limits. If these drawings were going to beunderstood through touch then many of them would have to be convertedinto different sizes or broken down into sections. These works are concep-tually and aesthetically engaging to the sighted viewer but Richard Wilsons

Butterfly would need to be magnified while the different overlappinghousehold objects depicted in Martin Craig Martins Hearing Things wouldhave to be separated out before the layered, composite version would makeany sense to a blind visitor.

Here touch is not necessarily considered to be easier than vision but it iscertainly 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 pareddown to its monochromatic small-scale basics. Touch becomes equivalent to

vision but only in a poor, restricted context. In effect, the exhibition has similarproblems to those evident within Alois Riegls account of touch. Riegl thoughtthat tactile looking could comprehend all the aspects of an object previouslyperceived by touch; that vision could accomplish what touch does and more.Touch is not credited as having any additional worth for, when the transitionfrom touch to tactile looking takes place, nothing significant is lost and touchsimply becomes a variety of looking. Whereas Alois Riegls model movedfrom touch to visionRaised Awareness reverses the transition, but similarly

nothing is lost or gained in the process. Yet since the visual image is sorestricted, Raised Awareness, like Riegl, posits touch as being less than

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

LikeRaised Awareness,Sensing Sculpture at Wolverhampton Art Gallery wasaimed at visually impaired visitors; however, unlike Raised Awareness, thisexhibition deliberately eschews tactile drawings and the correlative processof translating visual images into a tactile experience largely stripped ofcolour, 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 selectedthe exhibition they rightly paid attention to texture and surface and, at thesame time, they acknowledged that understanding artwork through touch isnot a primitive, unlearnt or easy process. Unfortunately, the gallery offerslittle guidance on how the relationship between touch and meaning can bedeveloped. On touching the sculptures visitors might register warmth orcold, roughness and smoothness, size and weight, but there is no way ofknowing how these properties are connected to the meanings of the art

works. For instance, how does the smoothness ofMan and Woman by NancyHavers impact upon their place within late 20th-century feminism anddebates on sexuality? Does it matter that one of Sophie Zadehs 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?




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Despite the best efforts of the curators,Sensing Sculpture remains within theparadigms set by Riegl, Berenson and Panofsky. While the three authors allimply that physical contact has no place in a modern appreciation of art,

Wolverhampton Art Gallery has given visitors permission to use touch. Thatlicence is, however, undermined by the absence of any guidance on how totouch the exhibits. Without instruction, neither blind nor sighted visitorsnecessarily know how to touch art objects or how their bodily experience cancontribute to interpretation. In short, the curators have discarded canonicalart historical approaches that dismiss touch as easy and immediate but thereis no new model to take their place. Thus, while the audience is allowed totouch, both curators and visitors are left in a position where touch remainsantithetical to art and lacks complexity simply because there is no clear

alternative.In contrast to Wolverhampton Art Gallery where the curators wanted touchto contribute to a discussion of meaning, staff at The British Museumdeveloped handling opportunities precisely because they were not equated

with intellectual learning. Here, handling tables contain a number of originalartefacts from which six are selected by the volunteer for the day, therebyensuring that repeat visitors will be able to pick up and hold differentobjects. From one initial table in the Coins and Medals department the ideahas spread through the Museum, becoming a regular component in any newgallery provision. There is even a working group on handling that, in aninternal memo on the scheme, stated that the aim of the tables was:

To provide visitors to The British Museum with a moredirect, personaland welcoming experience of the Museum by offering them theopportunity to handle objects related to those on display and to talk topeople about the objects handled and on display, and thereby givethem a sense of intimate engagement with the collections and ofsharing the curatorial expertise of the museum. (British Museum

working group memo, 2003:1, emphases added)

While the document does mention shared curatorial expertise, in practicethat expertise is shared verbally. The curators brief the Museum volunteers

who then tellthe visitors about the history and function of the objects. As inRiegl, Berenson and Panofsky, there is little or no suggestion that touch couldprovide 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 scholarshipthat it was introduced into The Enlightenment gallery at The British Museumas a deliberate attempt to forestall criticism. The gallery, which opened in2003, is a recreation of 17th- and 18th-century patterns of display andcollecting and, during preparation, there were anxieties that the exhibitionconcept and format was too complex for a general audience (although thishas not proved to be the case). The handling table was set up to offset thispotentially intimidating environment since the small number of pre-selectedstar objects could counteract the overwhelming numbers of unfamiliar




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exhibits. In addition, the volunteer staffing the table would be a point ofcontact, someone who could answer questions or engage in discussion.

The emphasis on personal and intimate engagement is undoubtedly a radicalstep forward for The British Museum. Unlike art museums where emotion isoften privileged, feeling has not been considered an appropriate response

within the scholarly environments that prize objectivity. Actively encouragingpersonal and intimate engagement with the objects thus suggests that theMuseums definitions of learning and of who is allowed to know might bechanging. Instead of being populated by academics who have supposedlylearned 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 thatexpounded by Erwin Panofsky. Touching objects is assumed to be an easierway of engaging with them than looking, reading or thinking. Although thepublic might learn from touching objects this is in spite of, not because of,the structure of handling provision and instead knowledge is presentedeither visually or verbally. Whereas vision remains firmly allied to rationality,touch is a way of soothing the visitors anxiety when faced with extensivedisplays and established scholarship. These visitors are allowed to begin withthe most apparently basic form of sensory perception and, having touchedand been made welcome in the galleries, may be able to progress ontolooking at exhibitions. The handling table is the equivalent of medieval artand remains a stage to pass through.

Riegl, Berenson and Panofskys attitudes towards touch are not simplymirrored or replicated wholesale in contemporary access initiatives. Indeedthe advocacy of touch at Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the high profileposition of touch at The British Museum and in Raised Awareness activelyrefute their conclusions. Nevertheless, while these three institutions do notmaintain that art and touch are antithetical, the dubious inheritance of touchis still evident in the lack of tactile opportunities that are not reducible tolooking 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 aneasy, primitive process that requires no particular skill or as something thatinspires feeling but is unconnected to thought, then it will continue tooccupy a lowly position in the hierarchy of knowledge. Moreover, withoutnew approaches to touch, tactile provision potentially reinforces the linkbetween touch and a lack of conceptual sophistication. Thus, blind and otheraudiences are being offered a deeply marginalized form of knowledge in thename of access. Instead of alleviating exclusion touch-based initiatives canconsolidate it.

This has serious repercussions for access audiences, not least because theyhave historically been linked to ignorance in various forms. This isparticularly true of blind and visually impaired people. For example, in theNew Testament, blindness denotes an unwillingness or an incapacity to




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recognize a Christian God while the miraculous restoration of sight indicatesrevelation and literally seeing the truth. This elision between not being ableto see and refusing to see is still replicated today, for example in ElaineShowalters comment that We have so long lamented the blindness, thedeafness, and indifference of the male critical establishment towards our

work (quoted in Grigely, 2000: 37). Equally it is evident in the protestationsof access curators who prefix lectures with blind people arent stupid theyre

just blind.9 Thus, touch-based initiatives can perpetuate stereotypes of blindpeople as debarred from knowledge and as inherently incapable of seeingthe truth.

Re-thinking TouchI am not advocating that museums abandon touch-based access initiatives.Indeed, I do think that touch-based provision can live up to its promise andoffer new ways of understanding collections that are more inclusive thanthose predominantly visual and scholarly approaches. Yet in order for this tohappen, it is vital we understand the capacities and the limits of touch astouch 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 forchange, 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 theirrepresentations is dependent upon prior tactile experience. Chardinsstill lives only make sense because we have experienced silkiness andsharpness. Equally, our tactile investigations can be stimulated by whatan object looks like. The appearance of smoothness or shininess canmotivate touch, as can a lack of clarity which impels us to check thesurface with our hands. Once we start thinking about vision and touchas being intimately related then correlative equations of touch with bodyand not mind, nature and not culture, the past and not present, becomeequally untenable. While were at it we should also consider their over-laps with taste, smell and sound.

2. Stop trying to work out which sense developed first: its not a competition.3. Recognize that Condillacs 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 moreabout 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 betweenour fingertips and a surface. It involves our muscles and bones andcomplex somatosensory systems. Waltzing, walking, swimming, leaning,

jumping, climbing, lying down and sitting can all fall within the categoryof touch.




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6. Take time into account, as well as speed. Touch doesnt take place inthe blink of an eye; it is usually a slow, cumulative experience. Touchcan also flip and twist time. Museum visitors say that holding aPalaeolithic hand axe puts them in touch with the person who used it.These responses should not be dismissed as irrational; imaginativeleaps give us a sense of our place in the world, of history stretchingback 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 orcontemplate the art and each other. Unless we have similar levels oftactile 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 Yorkis not the same as that which Dickens describes in 19th-centuryLondon, nor can we assume that Riegls experience of stroking anEgyptian sculpture is comparable to that of a blind visitor taking atouch tour in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

9. Stop equating nicely coloured brain scans with an explanation of howtouch functions or why it matters.

10. Stop using embodiment as a sufficient explanation of all the differentkinds of touch, its practices and processes.

11. Begin a cross-cultural comparison of touch.

12. Deconstruct accounts that link touch to particular races, nations, ethnicgroups 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 didnt disappear with the

Greeks, the invention of perspective or with the Enlightenment.Connoisseurs, collectors, curators, artists and all those people whosetouch is judged to be clean, free of damage and legitimate are stillpicking things up and holding them.

16. Acknowledge that the curious, inquiring, playful public also carried ontouching but that their touch was deemed damaging and dirty.

17. Be sceptical of claims that objects lose their aura once theyve been

touched. Sometimes the wear and damage leaves the power of anobject unaffected or even adds to it.

18. Bear in mind that the border between the toucher and touched is notfixed. In touching something we erode and create it and we are alsomoulded by the experience. This contact, however, is rarelysymmetrical; even touching oneself one body part tends towardsactivity and the other passivity, an imbalance that certainly doesntmake the passive recipient of touch any less aware or responsive thanthe active toucher. Indeed, the opposite is often true.

19. Examine the effects of temperature. The borderline between self andother can shift depending on whether a surface is hot or cold. Laying




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your cheek against a warm bronze on a summers day is not the sameas touching it on an icy day.

20. Stress that surfaces matter. Even the quality of a piece of paper hasmeaning and affects.

21. Re-think the politics of surface. If the image of late capitalism is shiny isits texture slippery and smooth?

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

23. Read Rodins diaries (1912: 635).

Instead of imagining the different parts of a body as surfaces moreor 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 deepbeneath the skin.

24. Remain undaunted by the prospect of inventing a tactile art history. Thehistory of art is already tactile. Joseph Beuys fat is not just a visualimage, it smells, we know how it feels, we can imagine it smeared overhis or our body. Ditto Franz Wests Adaptives, Giuseppe Penonespaintings with acacia thorns, walking on Carl Andres Copper Square,the grain and texture of stone, the caked ridges of impasto, the fragilityof Eva Hesses latex sculptures, the curves of a Barbara Hepworth and

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

25. Be wary of art historical precedents for touch.

26. Applaud Lazl Moholy-Nagy. He made tactile training a compulsory partof the Bauhaus curriculum. And he insisted on it being political.

27. Dont 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 ofwhat we see. The lack of a comparable apparatus for touch doesntmean that touch cannot be conceptualized but that it isnt yet. Or atleast not adequately.

29. Ask how touch and tactile qualities can lead an audience into anexploration of content and history.

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

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




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thought, was too closely associated with actual touch. Notably haptic no longerhas the same connotation of actual touch. It is now used to mean active, as

opposed to passive touch.

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

underline Riegls 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 Berensons 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 RenDescartes 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 Riegls and Berensons 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 ArtBeyond Sight: Multimodal Approaches toLearningconference, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1415 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 UniversityPress.

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. 3158. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press.

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

University Press.




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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 atBirkbeck College and The British Museum. She is also Visiting Professor onthe 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 andblindness. She has just completed a one-year Leverhulme Fellowship whichhas enabled her to work on a book provisionally entitled The Dubious

History 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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