[accessibleimage] Another Review of the Touchable art Exhibit

Here, below,  is another review of the Touchable Art Exhibit that was shown
during
this past summer in Seattle, Washington. A few months ago I posted a
newspaper article about
this exhibit,
and I also posted a report of my trip to the exhibit, along with my partner
and some adult immigrant
students. This new review is written by a friend who
went at a different time before reading my review. So her comments are not
influenced by my impressions.

I think that some people on this list who did not themselves attend the
exhibit will
appreciate reading this review  because of the writer's comments about how
she experiences art.

Best,

Sylvie

A Review of the Touchable art Exhibit, an exhibit commissioned by the
Washington Department of Services for the Blind (DSB) at the University of
Washington art department.

by Dorene Cornwell

Who am I?

 First, I have eccentric visual experiences. Among the informational
materials at the exhibit was a card describing the impact of different kinds
of vision problems. None of the descriptions described my experience. I have
had vision problems my whole life from congenital cataracts, scar tissue and
as an adult glaucoma and substantial changes over the last year after
surgery for a detached retina. My eyes do not fuse and have always seen at
different levels of acuity. I have different amounts of double vision at
different distances. Time has added floaters, silvery bubbles that come
unpredictably around the edges of one eye, and has subtracted blobs of
vision so the area I see well is in a blob off the center of my eye.

 Second, I have lifelong experience interacting with many kinds of art. My
whole life I have gone to museums and listened to lectures about art,
archeology, and other topics. My whole life I have been challenged, though,
about experiencing visual art. Because I have had vision problems my whole
life, I have to stand close to see many details that other people see much
more easily. In some cases I actually do not even see the visual detail or
some visual aspects of art that art specialists can wax eloquently about for
hours. To me art is as much about the story and the themes evoked as about
the visual images anyway, but I never wanted, say, to major in art history.

On a more practical level, I am quite tall, about 5 feet 10 inches. When I
tour museums in large groups of people, I always have to do this dance,
trying to stay out of the way of shorter people while trying to see for
myself too. I really liked getting to be a grownup so it is easier to go to
museums when it is not crowded.

 I also like visiting museums when I can touch and feel the sculptures, but
I am self-conscious: I have read enough articles about preservation to
understand that touching art really does leave dirt, fingerprints, and other
contaminants that can degrade the artworks I admire. I have some particular
affinity for works involving cloth because I used to sew, both basic mending
and even sewing my own clothes.

 Returning to the Touchable Art exhibit, the newspaper article where I
learned of this exhibit mentioned that visitors could ask to borrow a pair
of sleepshades to enhance their focus on tactile experiences. I have a
horror of sleepshades because of certain pedagogical fanaticism about the
topic among some teachers of the blind so I did not request sleepshades.

 I visited the show with a sighted friend. When I got there, the father of a
9- or 10-year-old boy with a white cane said there was a sign on the door
saying "back in 15 minutes." I went to the restroom--I found the restroom in
the first place I thought to look. By the time I came back, the exhibit was
open. The father and son were moving along with the dad guiding his son to
different items. I did not get the impression the son was saying much. Part
way through my tour around the exhibit the sighted friend I agreed to meet
showed up. My friend is pretty plainspoken. I thought we were being
reasonably well-comported. I think the boy's father may have been alarmed by
some parts of our conversation because the father and son did not linger too
long and my friend and I were the only people there for awhile.

The sponsors

 No art show is complete without sponsors. One difference between this show
and others is that the Department of Services for the Blind (DSB) and the
Lighthouse for the Blind are maybe not as well-known or as well-known in the
art world as, say, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporate
Council on the Arts, the (insert state or local name) Council on the Arts,
and Exxon/Mobil. Thus the sponsors of this show seemed to have more need for
self-promotion, or more random material to get rid of.

 A typical art show will acknowledge the sponsors in one or two lines on a
poster near the front entrance to the exhibit and maybe special
acknowledgements such as "Funding to print the catalog was provided by...."
Alternatively, "this piece appears through the generous support of ... with
special assistance from (the Consul General of Norway / The Throckmorton Q.
Addlebury Memorial Foundation....) Only by careful schmoozing with the
docent or the curator of the exhibit, would one find out how to convey one's
thanks personally to the Consul or to present one's long-lost kin yarn to
the Addlebury family, but there would certainly be some carry-away pamphlets
and perhaps catalogs available for purchase for mortals who want to remember
the pieces. Meditations on what a catalog might mean for this exhibit might
address comments further along in this document.

 At this show on the other hand, there were no carry away brochures in print
let alone in large print, Braille or audio. Instead, the sponsors seemed to
have grabbed slightly random boxes from their vast storehouses of
educational promotional materials.

 How else would one explain an information sheet about DSB's job placements
in 2004, a CD about services for the Deaf-Blind at the Lighthouse for the
Blind, and the DSB service description booklet in contracted Braille. It's
true that some art exhibits are expected to be so provocative that provision
is made to put visitors in touch with organizations which might be able to
help about the focus of the show, but this show was not in that category. In
fact any comments about visually impaired people actually experiencing or
producing art were nowhere to be found.

The presentation

 The 15 or so pieces were mounted against the walls of the room or on one
divider in the middle of the room. Pieces were shown next to a piece of
paper with the name of the piece and the artist's name in large print and
with these two information items in reverse order in contracted Braille on
the same piece of paper.

 I would have done things differently in two respects. First, the titles of
the pieces were quite cryptic. I think it would have been lovely to permit
or even insist on 25 to 100 words of explanation about the artist's point in
doing the piece, the media used, or other topical material.

 Also, as a new Braille reader with only very spotty experience with
contractions, and as someone who observed a blind child visiting the
exhibit, I would have preferred uncontracted Braille.

The "docent"

 "Docent" may be too strong a word for the silent college student sitting at
a desk in the corner reading a book and not interacting with the visitors.
One friend thought that an a nearly inert docent was preferable to one who
was too intrusive. I agree that this exhibit needs to be experienced by each
person in their own terms, but well-schooled docents can have admirable
powers of observation and sense about when to provide information or to
suggest some interesting point about the exhibit.

The catalog and alternative formats.

 There was one copy of the catalog, a booklet in contracted Braille. The
booklet cover and insides were on white paper lying on a small white exhibit
block near the entrance. The catalog was located on my blinder side as I
entered the exhibit. I only saw it after I had seen most of the exhibit when
I was scanning the exhibit, getting my bearings and getting ready to leave.
I saw it because it has a black binding. As already noted, I do not read
contracted Braille. Other blind visitors I know--who do read contracted
Braille--missed the Braille booklet entirely.

 I attended the show on the last day it was open. Interestingly, there were
NO printed materials listing each of the pieces, nothing in large print,
nothing in regular print either. Nor were there any materials in audio
formats for the many blind people who, for any number of reasons, cannot use
Braille or large print.

 As a digression, I have two experiences with audio guides to exhibits. I
once visited Graceland, Elvis Presley's home in Memphis TN. Graceland issues
all visitors small tape players on neck straps with tapes available in a
variety of languages. The tour is designed to be moved through linearly.
Little provision is made for wandering out of sequence, but I believe there
were forward and rewind buttons to provide some control over the
presentation.

 My second experience with audio exhibit information was when I toured the
Experience Music Project in Seattle. There, museum visitors were issued Palm
Pilots and earphones. The screen of the Palm Pilot was utterly unreadable.
There was no large print mode. The lighting was mostly dim but punctuated by
various kinds of spotlights. However much "atmosphere" this lighting was
intended to create, it was aggravating for me in its own right and made
reading the visual display to do whatever I was supposed to do to find the
desired narratives all but pointless. I quickly gave up on the audio devices
but I was glad I visited with friends.

 For this exhibit I think it would have been fun to have some kind of player
that would read a description of the piece perhaps even in the voice of the
artist.

The pieces and my rating criteria

 I am rating these pieces on two sets of criteria. First is my view of their
success, idiosyncratically defined, as art. Only a fraction of the titles of
the pieces registered, so they are listed here by title if I remember it and
by description if I do not remember the title.

 I do not necessarily expect great realism, but I do like pieces that bring
me in contact with some larger theme or tension. I like pieces that hit an
esthetic note both up close and, to the extent that I can see, at a
distance. I prefer pieces that are interesting to touch, that is either
because of a variety of tactile sensations or because of other tactile
esthetics.

My second set of criteria have to do with the pitfalls I see of expecting
the exhibit pieces to fulfill an intended mission as touchable art in the
lobby of a busy administrative building. Will a piece hold up? Will a piece
become encrusted with sweat and grime? Is a piece easy to dust or clean.
Does the piece have parts that might easily get detached or mechanical parts
that might break?

 Safety Net: I saw this piece first. It is a multicolored net of bows made
from different colors and kinds of ribbon. The bows are sewn together like a
net. I could see the bow loops visually, but I do not know whether people
would detect them tactilely.

The other conceptual problem: I would expect a safety net to be anchored at
more than two points and across something in order to catch anything. This
net was anchored to the room divider at only two of its four corners. It is
a good thing I saw the piece or I might have walked into the room divider in
the middle of the room.

This artwork is bright and cheerful, but it is unclear how well it would
hold up and retain its cheer.

 Daisy Chain I and II: I liked these as ribbons full of interesting fabric
blobs, some of which had more texture than others. I had no concept of
anything related to actual daisies, and the other senses I know for the term
"daisy chain" would be either too nerdy or too risqué for showing in a
public place.

 The Daisy Chain pieces do not come with laundry instructions despite being
made of both light and dark colored cloth. On the other hand the list of
materials used did not include stain resistance treatment either.

 The Bird in the tactile landscape: This piece was a white bird with a long
tail perched on some kind of a branch. The color scheme was shades of brown
and tan. Usually I like bolder color schemes, but the textures in this piece
were so diverse that any more color would have been superfluous. The bird
and the branch were set against something that could be sky and there was
ground or undifferentiated greenery of a different texture below the branch.

I really liked this piece. It was compact. It used media with several
different textures. It used texture well to create a sense of space deeper
than the plane represented in the foreground. Even the picture frame the
piece was mounted in was tactile and interesting.

 I think this piece would hold up well. It has no moving parts and will dust
easily. I am not sure how some of the rougher-textured areas will do about
finger grime, but I would say give it a try and see.

 Déjà vu and the China Face: I read about these pieces in a newspaper
article before I came to the exhibit. I came prepared to dislike both these
pieces because of a strange reluctance to touch strangers' faces. First, I
am just a stiff northerner. Also, I read a satirical article once about an
unpleasant airplane trip. Many disasters befell the hapless passenger; one
was that he got seated next to a blind woman who wanted to feel his face.
Finally, I have a certain visceral ambivalence about "china doll" images of
femininity.

Perhaps the best things I can say about the China Doll piece: there were
plenty of other pieces that drew more attention.

The lack of features like eyebrows and especially ears somehow seemed more
amusing, more evocative of some science fiction world in Déjà vu, a piece
with 16 head shown at different angles relative to a common plane. Both
pieces turned out to be fun to touch, almost embarrassingly so when touching
involved sticking fingers into eye sockets. I liked thinking about the
different orientations of the faces in Déjà vu.

These two pieces are both white. The China Doll piece has painted or fired
in features. If the color features are fired into the glaze it would be
almost as easy to keep this piece clean as Déjà vu. I am still not sure I
would ever feel entirely easy touching the faces though.

 The stack of door cozies: I know of no other way to describe this piece. I
grew up in Montana where it gets COLD in the wintertime. People there make
all manner of cloth tubes filled with sand or rice or buckwheat husks or
other grainy material. These tubes are long enough to stretch across past
both edges of a doorway and people put them down along the door for
insulation, to fight drafts. These items are called door cozies, draft
stoppers, or a variety of other names.

 The 4 or 5 door cozies in this piece were made of some kind of cotton
poplin. They were about 6 feet long, and were stacked, some laying
horizontally, some folded back on each other. I liked the associations with
warmth in the winter and the spatial effect of feeling the pieces spread out
and stacked up. I think I also missed some fun tactile features hidden at
various points along the length of different parts of the piece. One of my
criteria for successful art is wanting to experience it more than once.
Suffice it to say the missed features put this piece into that category.

 Despite my sort of irreverent description, I liked the variability implied
by the movable pieces, but the light color, the thin fabric, and the loose,
completely unattached pieces might not hold up well for extended use.

 The rows of smooth black mats with the clumps of different-sized red peas.
I liked this piece for its visual simplicity. It also evoked pleasant
concepts that might have made the parents of young kids uncomfortable to
articulate very bluntly. I did not spend enough time touching the piece to
find the tactile items another friend reported though.

 Of the cloth pieces I think this one would hold up best in a public place.

 The three houses of different noises. This piece had a cryptic 3-word name.
It was probably the most mechanically and sonically complex piece in the
show. The total effect was of a large house at the beach. The ground all
along the house was full of seashells. There was a roof with some kind of
fabric in what one might call an attic. Between the ground and the attic
were spaces that could be seen as three rooms, each with wood or metal
slats. Under the sets of slats was a long dowel with a large number of small
dowel bits hammered in around the dowel.

All of these features are a tactile delight in themselves. Even more fun was
to realize that the large dowel turned and the small dowel bits made most
satisfying noises striking against the sets of slats.

Some of the features that make this piece so much fun, though, are also
features that make me fret about how well it will hold up on permanent
public display. I am afraid the different moving or glued on parts might
fall off over time. Other parts of the piece may be hard to dust or clean.
Still, this piece offers so many different things to find that even the most
frequent visitor should be delighted for a long time.

 Hive: I have seen working beehives. They tend to be buzzing places full of
a fruity, fermented smell. I have never been close enough to need a
beekeeper's suit or risk anaphylactic shock from beestings. When I have seen
bits of honey in the comb, it has been waxy or sticky. I have read books
about structure of honeycomb and about the 6-dimensional system of bees'
spatial orientation systems. I even had an exotic stint reading standardized
test writing exercises about bees. This piece did not come anywhere close to
all my ideas about hives from this background.

 That said, even though this piece was a pale reflection of my experience
with hives, I found it interesting. I liked that the hexagons of a comb were

easy to feel. I enjoyed tripping the motion detector that turns on buzzing
when someone stands in front of the piece. I liked feeling the buzz of small
fans when you stick your finger in some cells of the hive. I wonder whether
some people with neurological problems in their hands would find the buzzing
fans painful to touch. I also wonder how well the electrical parts would
hold up and what DSB would do with the piece if the fans ever quit working.

 Lapel: I got that this was a lapel right away because of pulling the flower
out of the buttonhole, because the piece was made of purple corduroy, and
because I could see the notch next to where there collar would start. This
last point may have been because of the interesting at a distance effect.
The dark purple stood out very clearly against the white walls, but I don't
think I could even reach the collar notch to find it tactilely.

Purple corduroy and a pink daisy-like flower, instead of say wool gabardine
and a rosebud, suggest this was an artist's lapel, not a more formal one. I
would want to know that this piece was treated with some kind of dirt
repellant and the flower well-secured before trying to exhibit it.

Postscript: On the way across campus for coffee after the show, my friend
and I visited a new sculpture next to the new law library. The sculpture
from a distance looks like a couple of Buckminster Fuller's balls have
collided. Up close it is hollow with some openings covered with sunburst
grating, and it makes a variety of satisfying sounds when one knocks on it
in different places. We thought this piece deserved mention in the touchable
art category too even though it's too big for the DSB lobby

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