There is more to touching art than merely using the hands and fingers to recognise depictions of landscapes and victorious kings on horses; ornate chairs and tables with carved and inlaid decorations; geometric shapes and stylised forms of flowers; figurative and abstract fruits and animals. (See our blog on Vision, haptic touch, and hearing.)
In this blog post, I have invited Professor Georgina Kleege, University of California, Berkeley to write about touching art: why she likes to do it, how she does it, and why she thinks others would get something out of the experience. Georgina Kleege has published numerous books and papers, and been awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award twice. She is an art lover and is well known for advocating for more tactile opportunities for all museum visitors, including those who are fully sighted.
As a blind person, I enjoy the incredible privilege of touch access to art works at museums around the world who offer such opportunities. Over the years I have accumulated many observations and insights that inspire me to dispel common myths and misconceptions about touch perception, specifically in an artistic context. For one thing, I find that the notion of sensory translation or substitution can be misleading. People seem to want to make an analogy between the two eyes of the sighted and the two hands of the blind, as if simply laying a hand on the art object will summon a detailed image to the blind person’s mind’s eye. There’s a mistaken impression that the point of touching the art object is merely to determine what it’s representing visually—what it looks like to people who can see. This implies that sighted people don’t need to touch the art because they can see it, when in fact, determining what the art object might be depicting is not always, I’d say rarely, the most interesting thing about the experience.
When touch is merely an exercise to identify a shape, one uses a minimum of the tactile apparatus available. One traces the outline of the object in a manner analogous to the way the visual system separates the object from its background. One uses mainly the fingertips which also deliver some information about the surface texture and temperature. They can also discover fine details in carving, or the seams, joints and welds that hold the thing together, and even signs of past damage and repairs which may not be available to the eyes alone. But to grasp the objects three dimensionality one must grasp: wrap one’s fingers and palms around volumes, drape the whole hand around contours. The action of the hands and the skin of the palms delivers more information. The movement of the hands inspires other movement, of the whole arm, of the spine, as one reaches, stretches, bends and extends to take in the form in its entirety. There’s no point sticking to one place—the vantage point for sighted people. One is better off moving around doing what I have come to call dancing with the sculpture, circumnavigating the object while maintaining light contact with one hand. This action can convey a sense of composition, of symmetry and dynamism. These techniques work equally well whether the sculpture is figurative or abstract.
I used to avoid referencing my emotional response to touching art. English, like other languages, conflates touch sensation with the emotions. We find a work of art touching and it makes us feel happy or sad. This conflation is problematic for blind people who rely more on touch than our sighted peers because touch is often considered to be a lesser way of knowing the world, more animalistic or infantile. Babies rely on touch before their visual perception fully develops. But now I lean into this connection. I actively scan my emotions for a response to what I’m touching. Touch can be intuitional; the sculpture tells me how to touch it. It reveals aspects of itself sequentially, as I experiment with different methods and repeat or reject actions according to what feels most generative. It is an accretive process requiring attention, sensitivity sometimes even playfulness. And the emotions this touching summons in me may have something to do with what the artist hoped to convey. If nothing else, my hands and body replicate the artist’s own gestures and movements which in turn may link me to the ideas and emotions that went into the sculpture’s creation.
Recently, I’ve been advocating for more tactile opportunities for all museum visitors, including sighted people who are typically excluded from this form of access. For now, conservation and crowd management concerns make it unlikely that everyone will be allowed to get their hands on art. So instead, I endeavor to describe my experiences, as here, in the hope that sighted art lovers can profit, if only vicariously. (See also Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii.)
See our blog for Activities; especially 19-21.
Some suggestions for further listening, reading, and watching:
A Conversation about Blindness and Art
Best Things To Touch As A Blind Person
Do Touch The Artwork At Prado’s Exhibit For the Blind
Some Touching Thoughts and wishful Thinking
The Gravity, The Levity: Let Us Speak of Tactile Encounters
Worst Things To Touch As A Blind Person
