[accessibleimage] London Times article

The following article appeared in the Times of London Arts section.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,585-2374239,00.html


The Times        September 26, 2006



 More than a feeling



     However laudable, why is art for the blind always just a tactile
     experience?

Peter Whittle

I used to think that one of the nicest things about being blind was that you didn't have to pretend to like art; but nowadays even this solace is being denied me. Over the past 25 years or so there seems to have been a concerted effort on behalf of the art establishment to beat itself up for not allowing blind people to touch its massively expensive treasures. Today it's a rare week that I don't get an invitation to an exhibition that seeks to satisfy my art starvation.

It must be at least 20 years ago now that I was invited to go along to the Tate, dip my fingers into a pot of talcum powder and very carefully touch some specially selected sculptures. At about the same time the students of Southampton Art College put on a display that invited artists to engage all the senses to create their work; and so the invitations keep coming.



Which is why, when I was asked to review /Sense and Sensuality/ at the Bankside Gallery, I shuddered. Sending an ingrate such as me along to give my opinion really is a bit like asking Carla Lane to judge Abattoir of the Year or Brian Sewell to evaluate the acts at a karaoke night.

And yet, when I went along to the gallery the other morning, I was almost instantly seduced by some of the charm of this enterprise. Part of that charm is that if you're blind, you aren't always sure what's on display and what's part of the building. For instance, just inside the door, and before I'd even begun my semi-guided tour, there's a staircase. Feeling my way along the banister, I became aware that the decoration of it was in the shape of cello keys; further inspection revealed that the bars down the side of the staircase were cello strings, tuned in such a way that running your fingers, or in my case a white cane, along them produced a pleasantly discordant sound, which I proceeded to experiment with. This turned out to be an exhibit created by Nick Hornby -- there are apparently two of them. I'd already made one of the discoveries that the creators of this exhibition intend you to make: that it' s a place to play as much as to examine.

Meanwhile, what had caught my sighted companion's eye was a dark-grey orb hanging from the ceiling, which she described as looking like a boulder. It turns out that if you take it down and turn it the other way up, it's more like a space helmet. Put it over your head and you are instantly cut off from everything around you. This typifies the ethos of this exhibition, in which participants have been told to produce a piece of work that, whatever else it does, can be appreciated by someone with a visual impairment.

The challenge has been wholeheartedly accepted, Sheri Khayami, of BlindArt, the organisation that has pioneered this exhibition, now in its second year, was worried that not enough artists would respond. She needn't have done. BlindArt received about 650 entries, which they then whittled down to a shortlist of 200. There are now just over 70 pieces on display, and after my flirtation with the cello and the space helmet, the real tour began.

Very quickly I remembered what my problem with this kind of experience is -- too much touching. However much you strive for a multi-sensory experience -- and they have -- most of the exhibits are inevitably tactile. I moved with my guide, the exhibition's curator Andrew Lamont, through ceramics, oils on canvas, stainless steel, wires, clay; the artists invariably try to represent colours, changes in surface, forms of a face, by varying thicknesses or changes of texture. But I found what I always find with touch as a vehicle for ideas, rather than just sensation: that it is too particular.

I can only touch one tiny bit at a time: although I can spread my hands across a figure, in reality, if I want to examine it properly, I have to trace it with a finger. Consequently, my ability to take in a piece of art is limited to a very precise examination of a part of it a fingertip wide, or a very imprecise picture of it circumscribed by how far I can spread my arms.

This is not how people see a work of art; they can take in the whole of it at a glance. I feel I want the same. Perhaps this is a failing in me. Many totally blind people assure me that they can get an enormous amount from this kind of experience, both examining and creating it.

This isn't to say there were no almost pure touch experiences that I did enjoy. Gail Troth's /Symbol L/, for example, is the depiction of a lizard crawling into the picture, its bright colours being contrasted by dots with the smooth background. Nicolas Moreton's /Breath/ shows the first breath of a baby after it has emerged from the womb, and I was very taken with the image, but only after I had had it explained to me. Again, this illustrates my point; there is still too much for which I have to rely on someone else.

The exhibition has pressed all the access buttons thoroughly: Braille and large-print signage, a Braille catalogue, audiodescription, British sign language; no complaints there at all, but still I had the sense that I needed an intermediary between me and the work.

It became increasingly clear to me what a very literal mind I have -- things really work for me when I can visualise them. I was particularly taken with Alison Weightman's /Shotgun A/, where a ceramic dish has literally been fired into by a 12-bore shotgun. It conveyed as nothing else has to me the awful, jagged wounds created by such a gun, not the neat bullet holes my imagination had conjured up.

But essentially I was at my happiest when I was invited to play. Nick Ball has created a square construction, hung with 663 transparent plastic bottles, hung from wires of different lengths. They are a satisfying thing to touch, but it's only when you pluck up the courage to try to walk through them that you appreciate the full point of the exercise. As they part in front of you, you are walking through what you thought was a solid object, but also surrounded by the sound they make.

Rather like Jenny Cordy's /Chromosphere/ at the beginning, it's as near as you get to being in a different world. Only one complaint, and it's aimed at my own limited imagination: I had to be urged to do it. Why couldn't I have worked it out for myself?

*/Sense and Sensuality/ is at Bankside Gallery, Hopton Street, London SE1 (020-7928 7521), until Oct 8. Peter White presents/ In Touch/ on Radio 4, every Tuesday, at 8.40pm*

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