The Dubious Inheritance of Touch: Art History and Museum Access

Numerous 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 dis...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of visual culture Vol. 5; no. 2; pp. 137 - 154
Main Author Candlin, Fiona
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Thousand Oaks, CA SAGE Publications 01.08.2006
Subjects
Blindness
Cultural studies
Disability
History of art
Museums
Object
Senses
Touch
Visual culture
Alois Riegl
museums
blindness
Bernard Berenson
Erwin Panofsky
objects
access provision
touch
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Summary:Numerous 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 Alternatively, are art historical stereotypes so outdated that they are irrelevant for current museum practice?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?
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
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ISSN:1470-4129
1741-2994
DOI:10.1177/1470412906066906