Touch as an aesthetic experience

ABSTRACT

Touch is gaining attention in sensory studies and in art practice where the over-emphasis on sight and visuality in academic discourse is increasingly been questioned. The exhibition The Blind Astronomer (2013) by South African artist Berco Wilsenach participated in this larger critique of visuality by inviting audiences to engage with the works through the sense of touch. In particular, the artworks exposed the limitations of the spectatorial epistemology of modern Western scientific discourse. In this article, I explore some of the ways in which the exhibition questioned long-held assumptions about the primacy of vision in Western science and aesthetics, the relationship between touch and vision, and touch as an aesthetic experience. The eviction of touch from the gallery and museum as well as from what is considered to count as aesthetic experience has led to an absence of language adequate to describing the complex nature of aesthetic touch. I suggest that first-hand accounts of blind peoples’ haptic experiences with art, combined with insights gained from research in psychology as well as experiments by artists who encourage tactile encounters with their work can enrich and enhance how we understand an aesthetic experience that is simultaneously visual and tactile.

KEYWORDS:

• Touch
• tactile aesthetics
• The Blind Astronomer
• blindness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Jenni Lauwrens http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0336-7356

Notes

1 In the industrialised world as few as 3 out of 10,000 babies are born congenitally blind (Kleege 2018, 4). In this article, I use ‘blind’ as a category that includes people born with no visual perception at all, people who have lost their vision completely later in life and who may still have some visual memory, as well as people who are partially sighted.

2 For a more extensive discussion of various attitudes toward the senses in Western thought see Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses (2005).

3 The hierarchisation of the senses is culturally relative and highly diverse as Classen (2005, 147–163) cogently points out in her study of the sensory worlds of three nonliterate cultures, namely, the Ongee, the Tzotzil and the Desana. For a more recent analysis of the coding of sensory modalities in a far wider variety of languages, see Majid et al. (2018).

4 On the so-called ‘Molyneux problem’ see Degenaar and Lokhorst (2017).

5 For a useful overview of important insights about sensory experience gained from neuroscience and especially the application of this research in art see Bacci and Pavani (2014).

6 One of the limitations of Grice’s book Touch the Universe (2002) was that some prior exposure to astronomy and space science helped the blind reader understand what they were touching. Without this information, they were lost.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenni Lauwrens

Jenni Lauwrens teaches Visual Culture Studies in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her current research focuses on the multisensorial and embodied nature of a spectator's encounter with art and visual culture.