journal of visual culture

The Dubious Inheritance of Touch: Art History and

Museum Access

Fiona Candlin

Abstract
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stereotypes so outdated that they are irrelevant for current museum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?

Keywords
access provision Alois Riegl Bernard Berenson
● ● ● blindness ● Erwin
Panofsky museums objects touch
● ● ●

Museums are no longer places where touch is entirely forbidden. Instead

there are numerous opportunities for visitors to hold and examine original
artefacts or artists’ tools. When objects are very rare the museum may
provide replicas, but otherwise displays of clothing, textiles, ceramics, coins
and metal-ware regularly have selected examples for the audience to handle.

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]

Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 5(2): 137–154 [1470-4129(200608)5:2]10.1177/1470412906066906
138 journal of visual culture 5(2)

These tactile opportunities are all offered to the general public but they are
also intended for use by disabled audiences and specifically by blind and
visually impaired visitors. Accordingly, the objects which are available to
touch will often be accompanied by Braille labels, specialist audio-guides or
large print text leaflets. Alongside these more general events there is also
provision which is explicitly designed for blind audiences, namely, touch
tours, handling classes and description sessions accompanied by raised line
diagrams. In short, touch-based provision is provided in the name of access.
This article asks why museums position touch as an accessible form of
learning and what repercussions that has, specifically on blind and visually
impaired audiences.
In the first instance, touch is an extremely effective way of making access
visible. Museum funding is increasingly predicated on access programmes
and on a demonstrable commitment to widening participation. Accordingly,
museums count the number of visitors who are designated social class C2DE
and calculate how many school visits take place each year. Statistics aside,
these new priorities are demonstrated in museums’ publicity and fund-
raising material. While it is difficult to depict a lack of attitudinal or proce-
dural obstacles, touch is a way of illustrating an absence of physical barriers.
Not only can the visitors actually get in but nothing stands in the way of them
making physical contact with objects. Pictures of children touching objects
thus denote an inclusive, welcoming environment and similarly images of
blind people function as a short-hand for access. The tactile experience is
actually less important than the image of contact and what that implies about
the character of the museum.
Secondly, the use of touch in access provision is due, in part, to educational
approaches, such as those championed by Howard Gardner (1993), that
posit different kinds of intelligence. Touch enables visitors whose
intelligence is ‘bodily-kinaesthetic’ to explore and understand objects that
are usually presented in ways which appeal to ‘logical–mathematical’
intelligence. Thus touch potentially opens up previously prohibited ways of
understanding museum collections and includes visitors who have
traditionally been marginalized by an emphasis on visual learning. As such, it
could represent a new and positive step towards recognizing different forms
of knowledge and in correlation acknowledges the rights of blind people,
among others, to access their collective cultural heritage.
Touch, however, also has a specifically art historical lineage, some of which I
outline in the first part of this article. Here I concentrate on three writers;
Alois Riegl, Erwin Panofsky and Bernard Berenson. Riegl’s work was notable
not least because he moved away from the prevailing 19th-century pre-
occupation with individual artists to investigate the deep structural
principles of artistic style. Crucially these principles included the division
between touch and vision. His account was subsequently challenged and
developed by Erwin Panofsky and together the two authors rigorously staked
out some of the central methodological approaches of the early and mid 20th
century.1 Writing over the same period the American connoisseur Bernard
 Candlin The Dubious Inheritance of Touch 139

Berenson also investigated the role of touch in visual art but, whereas Riegl
and Panofsky were enormously influential in art history, Berenson was
known as an art expert and arbiter of taste primarily within the museum
sector. He selected paintings for art collectors and museums, working
particularly closely with Lord Duveen whose bequests have shaped many
major museums in Europe and America. While his writing never attained the
sophistication of his German contemporaries, his lack of subtlety serves to
highlight assumptions which the other authors leave implicit.
Yet, despite its importance in the work of Riegl, Panofsky and Berenson,
touch is characterized in almost entirely pejorative terms. For them, touch is
prior to and segregated from vision, detached from rationality and from any
established structures of learning. This then raises serious questions con-
cerning the use of touch within contemporary access provision; is touch used
in access provision precisely because it is considered to be more basic, easier
than seeing? If so, doesn’t the use of touch actually consolidate and not
alleviate the exclusion of disabled visitors and other access audiences? Or,
alternatively, are Riegl et al.’s ideas on touch so outdated as to be virtually
irrelevant to current museum and gallery practice? In order to consider these
issues in more detail the second section of the article will go on to examine
three examples of contemporary touch-based provision, all of which are
explicitly aimed at blind and visually impaired audiences. Although there
have been many examples of access provision which adopt the limited
characterizations of touch apparent in the work of Riegl, Panofsky and
Berenson, here I consider recent events and exhibitions that have actively
tried to negotiate those negative associations. Finally, finding that even these
more sophisticated ventures can be stymied by a lack of understanding about
touch as something other than an impoverished prelude to seeing, the third
section offers some suggestions for re-thinking touch as a route to art
historical knowledge.

The Inheritance: Touch as a way of seeing . . .

In Late Roman Art Industry (1985[1901]), Alois Riegl describes the shift
from antique styles of architecture, sculpture, painting and decorative arts to
those of the classical and then Late Roman periods. Crucially these stylistic
changes evince a different historical and cultural perceptual mode. Riegl
posits that in the antique period, sense perception ‘found objects to be
confusing and mixed’ so their ultimate goal was to represent external objects
as clearly defined, individual, material entities. Although Riegl never explains
why antique peoples, specifically the ancient Egyptians, were anxious about
materiality he implies, in passing, that it concerned the separation of self and
object, for the ‘unity of objects [was] . . . a precondition that external objects
were in fact objects independent from us’ (p. 22).
Touch provided the ancient Egyptians with the assurance that objects were
impenetrable and separate from one another (p. 22). There is no suggestion
that touch could facilitate any kind of symbiosis or juncture between subject
140 journal of visual culture 5(2)

and object, instead it only marks difference and monadic unity. Once this
separation had been established a combination of perceptions became
possible. Whenever the eye recognized a coherent coloured plane, prior
tactile experience would convince the viewer that he or she was looking at a
unified external object. Touch was no longer required to establish certainty
and ‘at an early time’, optical perception became sufficient. Nevertheless, this
mode of looking was analogous to touch since it was still concerned with
establishing material presence and, as with touch, the form of an object was
established through the amalgamation of numerous, successive perceptions.
There are undoubted problems with Riegl’s conception of tactile and optic
vision. As Walter Benjamin pointed out, Riegl locates perception historically
but he offers no account of what motivates perceptual change. More recently,
Margaret Iversen has noted that Riegl had a tendency to omit styles and
periods that do not conform to his model wherein the tactile is the precursor
to the optic, or else his desire to attribute artworks, objects and buildings to
a specific period results in some strained interpretation. The Pantheon, for
example, was built at a period when depth was supposedly alien to the
contemporary mindset, so Riegl contends that this large, multiform building
was actually conceived of on the flat plane and understood as pattern against
ground; a conclusion that Iversen understandably finds distinctly uncon-
vincing (Iversen, 1993: 88).2
A more significant issue within the terms of this article is that Riegl’s
conception of tactility risks turning touch into a subset of vision. Riegl’s
account of antique art starts with a conception of actual touch. Touch alone
can assure us of impenetrability and, commenting on the Egyptian statues that
are lifeless from a distance, he writes that ‘the fine modelling [of Egyptian
sculpture] can be felt entirely, when one lets the tip of the fingers glide over
them’, thereby implying that touch has pleasures that are not equally
amenable to vision. Yet the special ability of touch to comprehend impene-
trability is quickly turned into a kind of looking (Iversen, 1993: 170, n 8).3
Riegl’s formulation of tactile looking could be read as an expansion of touch;
an extension of touch into vision but other aspects of Riegl’s argument
suggest that touch is not colonizing vision but being co-opted by sight. Riegl
never explicitly privileges either the tactile or the optic; indeed rather than
assuming a historically unconditional ideal, Riegl seeks to recognize that
there is no absolute basis for judgement:

In spite of its seemingly independent objectivity, scholarship takes its

direction in the last analysis from the contemporary intellectual
atmosphere and the art historian cannot significantly exceed the
kunstbegehren [artistic taste] of his contemporaries. (Riegl,
1985[1901]: 6)4

Even so, Egyptian art is, by implication, the result of a primitive sensory
apparatus that could not easily distinguish individual objects. The Egyptians
were like small children learning to focus.
 Candlin The Dubious Inheritance of Touch 141

Moreover, Riegl’s entire book is an argument for progress and against the
characterization of late Roman art as a decayed or corrupted form of the
Greek. From a contemporary perspective we might not necessarily see
Roman art as a development or improvement, but this is because we don’t
appreciate the cultural and historical needs those art forms articulated.
Whatever our own preferences, these forms ‘constitute progress and nothing
else but progress’ (Riegl, 1985: 11). Crucially, the progress is towards the
modern use of linear perspective, to naturalistic representation and to vision
within which touch is spatially represented by objects appearing to be three
dimensional.
In Riegl’s account, touch is a precursor to modernity and a necessary stage
in a history of perception. At the same time, once the antique peoples have
conceptualized their separation from the world and once they can read
depth in a two-dimensional image, then there is no place for touch in arts
practices. Although a faint trace of touch may remain in the activity of looking
and in the understanding of depth, the pleasures of stroking the subtle
curves of Egyptian sculptures has been entirely repressed or forgotten.

. . . as cannibal . . .

Like Riegl, the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson’s early discussions

of art initially incorporate touch and then shift the emphasis towards touch
as a way of seeing. Yet, unlike Riegl, for whom touch does have a place and
despite Berenson’s apparent advocacy of touch, he actually sees touch as
being entirely alien to a proper experience of art.
In Florentine Painters, written in 1897, Berenson notes that as infants we
understand depth and three dimensions through touch and touch is again
posited as the test of reality, although in this case, it belongs to an
individual’s infancy rather than that of mankind. Berenson also credits these
early tactile experiences with being essential to vision, for although we might
forget the connection, actual touch enables us to attribute tactile values to
retinal impressions.
For Berenson, the task of the artist is to produce an image that is so
convincingly three-dimensional that it will stimulate our tactile senses,
indeed our reaction should be so strong that the viewer ‘must have the
illusion of being able to touch a figure . . . the illusion of varying muscular
sensations inside my palm and fingers’ (Berenson, 1938: 63). Giotto’s
paintings excelled in this respect, having

Not only as much power of appealing to the tactile imagination as is

possessed by the objects represented – human figures in particular –
but actually more; with the necessary result that to his contemporaries
they conveyed a keener sense of reality, of life-likeness than the objects
themselves. (p. 64)
142 journal of visual culture 5(2)

Yet the touch that Berenson extols is not concerned with the material world.
Giotto provokes an illusion of touch and his paintings appeal to the tactile
imagination. We are taken beyond the real by Giotto’s paintings, not into an
engagement with it. This is supposedly a purified experience removed from
the grimy realities of the physical world.
Despite Berenson’s insistence that tactile values are imaginative or idealized,
his own descriptions are rich and highly sensuous. Throughout Florentine
Painters Berenson vividly describes physical pleasure and response – the
aching of muscles after a wrestling bout, the swell of Hercules’ calves, the
flanks of a Centaur, the caressing hand. Indeed, the pleasure evident in
Berenson’s writing frequently threatens to undermine his rigorously ideal
stance when it comes to tactility. A similar tension between description and
conceptual stance is also evident in his later book of 1948, Aesthetics and
History, where he is far more adamant in his renunciation of tactile
pleasures. Here Berenson emphasizes physical response when he writes

in order to be life-enhancing an object must appeal to the whole of

one’s being, to one’s senses, nerves, muscles, viscera, and to one’s
feeling for direction, for support and weight, for balance, for stresses
and counter stresses. (p. 58)

This notion of touch extends far beyond a muscular sensation in palm and
fingers to include the whole body, its movement and balance, but Berenson
nonetheless insists that tactile values are ideated sensations which only exist
in the imagination:

In art, the object must not arouse any of those wakeful cannibal
appetites that can never be satisfied. . . It should not arouse us to
action, although it cannot help influencing conduct; it should not affect
any of our productive, reproductive or transitive energies but tune us
like instruments – instruments for ecstasy. (p. 59)5

Just in case we missed the point, Berenson goes on to explain that there are
two types of senses, two which are for signalling and reporting and three
more cannibal ones, namely, touch, taste and smell. Objects such as cocktails
or pastries which are made to appeal to the latter senses can be skilful,
delicate and delicious but they cannot be art, for they belong to the world of
immediately present and not purely imagined sensations. Conversely, if those
senses are used to appreciate something which might, in other contexts, be
acknowledged as an art object, it will not be an artistic experience:

The princes of Ormuz and of Ind who pass their fingers through
sackfuls of precious stones, not only for the pride of power which great
possessions give, but also for the touch, and perhaps chiefly for the
gaiety and sparkle of colour, will scarcely be credited with enjoying
them as works of art. (p. 75)
 Candlin The Dubious Inheritance of Touch 143

Berenson is clearly working within a western philosophical tradition which

separates mind from body and allies art with bodily transcendence.6 Here
physical contact is not merely outside the realm of art but actively negates it.
Touch turns an aesthetic experience into an un-aesthetic, cannibal
experience.7

. . . and as antithetical to knowledge

While Riegl consigns touch to the past and Berenson to primitivism and they
both turn touch into a species of vision, they still spend considerable time on
an analysis of touch. By contrast in Perspective as Symbolic Form, Erwin
Panofsky situates tangibility as a point of departure and not of enquiry.
Nonetheless, Panofsky remains important for this discussion in that he
elucidates the connection between thought and vision, non-thought and
touch.
In Perspective as Symbolic Form Panofsky (1991[1927]) comments that ‘the
art of classical antiquity was purely a corporeal art; it recognized as artistic
reality only what was tangible as well as visible’ (p. 41). This began to change
in the classical era. Hellenistic artists started to paint objects in their
surrounding space and used overlapping forms to indicate depth. These
suggestions of space and depth are significant for Panofsky because they
represent a shift away from the tangible surface of the picture towards the
picture surface as a window on the world. Yet other aspects of Hellenistic art
represented ‘a fundamentally unmodern view of space’ (p. 43). There was no
single horizon or centre nor any unified light source, and the relationships
between height, depth and width remained undefined.
As such, this antique perspective was ‘the expression of an equally unmodern
conception of the world’ (p. 43). The classical world understood the
universe to be a closed and finite sphere and not an infinite space. Whereas
visual and tactile perception both suggest that objects and space change
according to the position of the perceiver or the direction of measurement,
infinite space relies on a notion of homogeneity: that space will continue to
unfold in a measured and regular manner from any given point. Without a
notion of homogeneous, unified space the ancients literally couldn’t
conceive of systematized perspective. Paintings that have figures of different
sizes, numerous light sources and no horizon line are all indicative of a world
that is tangibly experienced through the body rather than through abstract
concepts.
The acquisition of ‘true’ perspective thus demanded a fundamentally
different world view, both artistically and philosophically. Panofsky traces the
transition from Hellenic art to that of the Middle Ages, which in his view
represented the universe as a homogeneous but immeasurable space, to
Byzantine and finally Renaissance art. Notably, these shifts are conceived of
as an inevitable progression towards a rational, systematized world view. If
the art and philosophy of the Middle Ages conceived of the world as a
144 journal of visual culture 5(2)

continuum, albeit robbed of solidity and, because it was not measured,

lacking in rationality, then ‘the very next step on the path toward modern
“systematic space” had to be the refashioning of the world . . . into a
substantial and measurable world’ (p. 49, emphasis added). Accordingly the
Renaissance invention and the correlative notion of a pictorial ground plane
enable us to read the sizes of figures and the distances between the
individual bodies arrayed on them. The patterns of floor tiles in Renaissance
painting are literally the first example of a co-ordinate system; it is a
calculable modern space that extends out of the picture frame and into
infinity. These developments culminate in Brunelleschi’s procedures for
correct perspective; whereas the space had been aesthetically unified now it
is accomplished mathematically. Single point perspective and the vanishing
point are developed with a ‘full mathematical consciousness’ and function as
nothing less than the visible symbol of the infinite (p. 57). This, writes
Panofsky, is a great evolution, a concrete expression of an epistemological
advance. Just as philosophers were demolishing an idea of the earth as centre
of the cosmos and the celestial sphere at its limit, artists conceptualize
infinity. Whereas infinite space had been inconceivable for Aristotle and for
the medieval Scholastics it could only exist in the shape of divine
omnipotence, it is now a ‘detheologized’, empirical, rule-bound reality. With
perspective, scientific and objective representation became possible.
Importantly, Panofsky does not posit perspective as a true representation of
sensory perception. Indeed, perspective makes

two tacit but essential assumptions; first we see with a single and
immobile eye, and second, that the planar cross section of the visual
pyramid can pass for an adequate reproduction of our optical image. In
fact these two premises are rather bodily abstractions from reality. (p.
28)

Perspective is a move away from ‘psychophysical’ perception towards the

abstract conceptualization of space.
Thus, modern empirical knowledge, Enlightenment philosophy and the
future of science are all predicated on the shift away from tangible sensory
experience towards an abstracted system of visual representation. By
implication, then, touch remains subjective and limited, fastened to a world
where space is not continuous and measured but variable depending upon
one’s own position. Just as Berenson conceives of art and touch as utterly
mutually exclusive, Panofsky posits touch as antithetical to modern know-
ledge. Whereas Riegl also considered touch pre-modern but nonetheless
thought that it was a vital moment in human sensory development, Panofsky
maintains that modern knowledge is predicated upon the eradication of
touch from artistic, scientific and philosophical practice. From the
Renaissance onwards ‘the compasses – namely sound judgement – [were] in
one’s eyes and not in one’s hands’ (p. 146).
 Candlin The Dubious Inheritance of Touch 145

Negotiating the Legacy

One answer, then, to the question of why touch is considered to be suitable

for access initiatives is that touch is deemed an earlier and more primitive
sensory mode. Just as the ancients grasped their world because they hadn’t
developed either the sensory or cognitive sophistication to see and represent
it in an ordered, conceptualized manner, then those blind and visually
impaired visitors will be able to form some basic understanding through
touch. This comprehension will not equate to the scientific analysis of
Panofsky’s account but will be more akin to that of Riegl’s child-like
Egyptians and Berenson’s nomads. Alternatively, it is possible to argue that
most of Riegl, Berenson and Panofsky’s views have been discredited for some
time and that it is extremely unlikely that today’s museum professionals
would ever advocate their work as offering an unproblematic model for art
education. While touch does have this dubious inheritance it is arguably no
longer relevant to contemporary practice wherein touch has been recast as a
positive tool for learning.
Undoubtedly some museums and galleries have implemented touch in
unimaginative and unconsidered ways. For instance, basic raised line
drawings are often used to describe images that can’t be seen and thus posit
touch as nothing more than a substitute for looking. Likewise, touch tours
often function as a way of filling in the visual gaps rather than as an
opportunity to explore temperature, weight, solidity and fine texture, none
of which are accessible to vision. More recently, however, some galleries have
attempted to counter this limited and pejorative characterization with more
sophisticated opportunities for touch. This section explores three
institutions that actively promote tactile provision and asks how they
position touch, whether it is characterized as easy or primitive, and if the
legacy of Riegl, Berenson and Panofsky is still an issue.
The Tate Modern in London has an excellent track record in the area of art
education for blind and visually impaired audiences. Nevertheless, when the
artist and Tate trustee Bill Woodrow heard a talk about their provision and
the specific needs of that audience, he noted its limitations and was
prompted to comment: ‘Why . . . can’t blind people have access to complete
and new works of art rather than just being given embossed sheets showing
details of existing works?’8 Woodrow’s solution was to ask a number of artists
to make new drawings that would be transformed into complete tactile
images. Ostensibly, then, these drawings were commissioned against Riegl’s
assumption that touch was secondary to vision and Berenson’s suggestions
that touch was antithetical to art since, instead of tactility substituting for
vision, these works would be made to be touched.
Originally, the drawings were intended for use in schools and other
educational contexts but a later decision resulted in them being collectively
displayed as Raised Awareness during the summer of 2005. On first seeing
the exhibition the appearance of equivalence is striking. The original
drawings were shown with the tactile versions placed beneath on a
146 journal of visual culture 5(2)

projecting shelf. All the originals were A4 or A3 in size and with only two
exceptions were black on white paper. The tactile drawings are identical in
size and are similarly monochrome, giving the impression that art is now as
accessible to blind as to sighted visitors. This image of accessibility was
reinforced by the exhibition’s situation. Instead of being pushed into a
separate education suite or the corridors, Raised Awareness was located
within Tate Modern’s main complex of galleries, thus giving tactile and visual
experience an apparently equal status. This move towards parity is
undoubtedly welcome but to some degree it is misleading. Artworks do not
invariably come in black and white. Colour does not translate into touch and
so the vast majority of artworks do not make convincing tactile drawings.
Here the impression of a visually impaired audience having full access to art
is predicated on an extremely tight selection of drawings.
Moreover, the attempt at equivalence was itself problematic, for the faithful
reproduction of visual images assumes that touch operates in the same way
as sight; that once the visible lines and tones are rendered tactile they will be
equally comprehensible to the hand. This is not the case for, while the
experiences of looking and of touching can overlap, they can never be
identical. For instance, Richard Wilson’s intricate and playful Butterfly
(Figure 1) uses a technical style of drawing to depict an aeroplane that has
been deconstructed or is about to be folded together but, because touch can
rarely discriminate between receding planes, decipher perspective or make
out multiple fine lines, its highly complex visual structure remains
incomprehensible to touch.
The disparity between seeing and touching is even more vividly illustrated in
Damien Hirst’s drawing, Untitled, which is a pair of circles made up from a
pattern of black spots. In one circle the spots radiate out in straight lines
from a central point and, in the other, they spiral outwards. The tactile and
visual images look identical, but one of the effects of these circles is that they

Figure 1 ‘Butterfly’ – 2003. © RICHARD WILSON @ The Wapping Project

Space, London.
 Candlin The Dubious Inheritance of Touch 147

shimmer and appear to move. Obviously, this is a visual effect and the tactile
dots do not similarly vibrate meaning so, while the literal pattern is
translated, the optical effects cannot transfer in any direct way.
Raised Awareness forgets that touch functions differently from vision and has
its own perceptual specificities and limits. If these drawings were going to be
understood through touch then many of them would have to be converted
into different sizes or broken down into sections. These works are concep-
tually and aesthetically engaging to the sighted viewer but Richard Wilson’s
Butterfly would need to be magnified while the different overlapping
household objects depicted in Martin Craig Martin’s Hearing Things would
have to be separated out before the layered, composite version would make
any sense to a blind visitor.
Here touch is not necessarily considered to be easier than vision but it is
certainly lacking in complexity. The exhibition assumes that touch can accom-
plish the same perceptual tasks as vision, but only so long as the image is pared
down to its monochromatic small-scale basics. Touch becomes equivalent to
vision but only in a poor, restricted context. In effect, the exhibition has similar
problems to those evident within Alois Riegl’s account of touch. Riegl thought
that tactile looking could comprehend all the aspects of an object previously
perceived by touch; that vision could accomplish what touch does and more.
Touch is not credited as having any additional worth for, when the transition
from touch to tactile looking takes place, nothing significant is lost and touch
simply becomes a variety of looking. Whereas Alois Riegl’s model moved
from touch to vision Raised Awareness reverses the transition, but similarly
nothing is lost or gained in the process. Yet since the visual image is so
restricted, Raised Awareness, like Riegl, posits touch as being less than
vision, as more limited and without any range or specificity of its own.
Like Raised Awareness, Sensing Sculpture at Wolverhampton Art Gallery was
aimed at visually impaired visitors; however, unlike Raised Awareness, this
exhibition deliberately eschews tactile drawings and the correlative process
of translating visual images into a tactile experience largely stripped of
colour, expanse and effect. Instead they created a permanent exhibition
where visitors are allowed to touch all the artworks on display. Nevertheless,
this more direct approach also has its problems. When the curators selected
the exhibition they rightly paid attention to texture and surface and, at the
same time, they acknowledged that understanding artwork through touch is
not a primitive, unlearnt or easy process. Unfortunately, the gallery offers
little guidance on how the relationship between touch and meaning can be
developed. On touching the sculptures visitors might register warmth or
cold, roughness and smoothness, size and weight, but there is no way of
knowing how these properties are connected to the meanings of the art
works. For instance, how does the smoothness of Man and Woman by Nancy
Havers impact upon their place within late 20th-century feminism and
debates on sexuality? Does it matter that one of Sophie Zadeh’s Pod Series
has tiny metal spikes that grate against your fingers or that the bronze head,
Flight, by Robert Jackson Emerson is cold to the touch?
148 journal of visual culture 5(2)

Despite the best efforts of the curators, Sensing Sculpture remains within the
paradigms set by Riegl, Berenson and Panofsky. While the three authors all
imply that physical contact has no place in a modern appreciation of art,
Wolverhampton Art Gallery has given visitors permission to use touch. That
licence is, however, undermined by the absence of any guidance on how to
touch the exhibits. Without instruction, neither blind nor sighted visitors
necessarily know how to touch art objects or how their bodily experience can
contribute to interpretation. In short, the curators have discarded canonical
art historical approaches that dismiss touch as easy and immediate but there
is no new model to take their place. Thus, while the audience is allowed to
touch, both curators and visitors are left in a position where touch remains
antithetical to art and lacks complexity simply because there is no clear
alternative.
In contrast to Wolverhampton Art Gallery where the curators wanted touch
to contribute to a discussion of meaning, staff at The British Museum
developed handling opportunities precisely because they were not equated
with intellectual learning. Here, handling tables contain a number of original
artefacts from which six are selected by the volunteer for the day, thereby
ensuring that repeat visitors will be able to pick up and hold different
objects. From one initial table in the Coins and Medals department the idea
has spread through the Museum, becoming a regular component in any new
gallery provision. There is even a working group on handling that, in an
internal memo on the scheme, stated that the aim of the tables was:

To provide visitors to The British Museum with a more direct, personal

and welcoming experience of the Museum by offering them the
opportunity to handle objects related to those on display and to talk to
people about the objects handled and on display, and thereby give
them a sense of intimate engagement with the collections and of
sharing the curatorial expertise of the museum. (British Museum
working group memo, 2003:1, emphases added)

While the document does mention shared curatorial expertise, in practice

that expertise is shared verbally. The curators brief the Museum volunteers
who then tell the visitors about the history and function of the objects. As in
Riegl, Berenson and Panofsky, there is little or no suggestion that touch could
provide any information which is inaccessible to vision or that touch is a skill
which an audience may need to be taught.
Indeed, object handling is considered to be so far removed from scholarship
that it was introduced into The Enlightenment gallery at The British Museum
as a deliberate attempt to forestall criticism. The gallery, which opened in
2003, is a recreation of 17th- and 18th-century patterns of display and
collecting and, during preparation, there were anxieties that the exhibition
concept and format was too complex for a general audience (although this
has not proved to be the case). The handling table was set up to offset this
potentially intimidating environment since the small number of pre-selected
‘star’ objects could counteract the overwhelming numbers of unfamiliar
 Candlin The Dubious Inheritance of Touch 149

exhibits. In addition, the volunteer staffing the table would be a point of

contact, someone who could answer questions or engage in discussion.
The emphasis on personal and intimate engagement is undoubtedly a radical
step forward for The British Museum. Unlike art museums where emotion is
often privileged, feeling has not been considered an appropriate response
within the scholarly environments that prize objectivity. Actively encouraging
personal and intimate engagement with the objects thus suggests that the
Museum’s definitions of learning and of who is allowed to know might be
changing. Instead of being populated by academics who have supposedly
learned to distance their feelings, the Museum is using handling objects to
welcome new visitors.
At the same time, this characterization of touch is remarkably close to that
expounded by Erwin Panofsky. Touching objects is assumed to be an easier
way of engaging with them than looking, reading or thinking. Although the
public might learn from touching objects this is in spite of, not because of,
the structure of handling provision and instead knowledge is presented
either visually or verbally. Whereas vision remains firmly allied to rationality,
touch is a way of soothing the visitors’ anxiety when faced with extensive
displays and established scholarship. These visitors are allowed to begin with
the most apparently basic form of sensory perception and, having touched
and been made welcome in the galleries, may be able to progress onto
looking at exhibitions. The handling table is the equivalent of medieval art
and remains a stage to pass through.
Riegl, Berenson and Panofsky’s attitudes towards touch are not simply
mirrored or replicated wholesale in contemporary access initiatives. Indeed
the advocacy of touch at Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the high profile
position of touch at The British Museum and in Raised Awareness actively
refute their conclusions. Nevertheless, while these three institutions do not
maintain that art and touch are antithetical, the dubious inheritance of touch
is still evident in the lack of tactile opportunities that are not reducible to
looking and in the equation of touch with more basic, immediate and non-
intellectual approaches to art. Ironically, this means that the very terms upon
which access initiatives are based undermine the possibility of inclusion for,
if touch is even inadvertently characterized as a lesser form of vision, as an
easy, primitive process that requires no particular skill or as something that
inspires feeling but is unconnected to thought, then it will continue to
occupy a lowly position in the hierarchy of knowledge. Moreover, without
new approaches to touch, tactile provision potentially reinforces the link
between touch and a lack of conceptual sophistication. Thus, blind and other
audiences are being offered a deeply marginalized form of knowledge in the
name of access. Instead of alleviating exclusion touch-based initiatives can
consolidate it.
This has serious repercussions for access audiences, not least because they
have historically been linked to ignorance in various forms. This is
particularly true of blind and visually impaired people. For example, in the
New Testament, blindness denotes an unwillingness or an incapacity to
150 journal of visual culture 5(2)

recognize a Christian God while the miraculous restoration of sight indicates

revelation and literally seeing the truth. This elision between not being able
to see and refusing to see is still replicated today, for example in Elaine
Showalter’s comment that ‘We have so long lamented the blindness, the
deafness, and indifference of the male critical establishment towards our
work’ (quoted in Grigely, 2000: 37). Equally it is evident in the protestations
of access curators who prefix lectures with ‘blind people aren’t stupid they’re
just blind’.9 Thus, touch-based initiatives can perpetuate stereotypes of blind
people as debarred from knowledge and as inherently incapable of seeing
the truth.

Re-thinking Touch

I am not advocating that museums abandon touch-based access initiatives.

Indeed, I do think that touch-based provision can live up to its promise and
offer new ways of understanding collections that are more inclusive than
those predominantly visual and scholarly approaches. Yet in order for this to
happen, it is vital we understand the capacities and the limits of touch as
touch and not just as an adjunct to seeing. Only then will touch be credited
with being a legitimate route to knowledge and not just a substitute for vision.
This is clearly an enormous undertaking but, rather than simply calling for
change, this article concludes with some starting points. We need to:
1. Re-assess the separation of touch and vision. We do not pass through
touch to reach vision. Our visual comprehension of objects and their
representations is dependent upon prior tactile experience. Chardin’s
still lives only make sense because we have experienced silkiness and
sharpness. Equally, our tactile investigations can be stimulated by what
an object looks like. The appearance of smoothness or shininess can
motivate touch, as can a lack of clarity which impels us to check the
surface with our hands. Once we start thinking about vision and touch
as being intimately related then correlative equations of touch with body
and not mind, nature and not culture, the past and not present, become
equally untenable. While we’re at it we should also consider their over-
laps with taste, smell and sound.
2. Stop trying to work out which sense developed first: it’s not a competition.
3. Recognize that Condillac’s model of a statue which acquired each sense
in turn is not really applicable to humans.
4. Avoid jumping to the opposite conclusion, namely, the senses all
function in perfect holistic harmony. Instead we need to know more
about how the senses overlap, over-ride and contradict each other.
5. Consider the specificities of touch; include rhythm, balance, cadence,
stretch, pace and pause. Touch is not limited to a static contact between
our fingertips and a surface. It involves our muscles and bones and
complex somatosensory systems. Waltzing, walking, swimming, leaning,
jumping, climbing, lying down and sitting can all fall within the category
of touch.
 Candlin The Dubious Inheritance of Touch 151

6. Take time into account, as well as speed. Touch doesn’t take place in
the blink of an eye; it is usually a slow, cumulative experience. Touch
can also flip and twist time. Museum visitors say that holding a
Palaeolithic hand axe puts them in touch with the person who used it.
These responses should not be dismissed as irrational; imaginative
leaps give us a sense of our place in the world, of history stretching
back and springing towards us.
7. Differentiate between touches. It makes a great deal of political, sexual,
social, scientific and philosophical difference whether visitors gaze,
stare, glance, glimpse, blink, observe, scrutinize, scan, survey, behold or
contemplate the art and each other. Unless we have similar levels of
tactile distinction then the subtlety, nuance and range of touch will
remain unrecognized. What then are the differences between brushing,
stroking, patting, rubbing, scratching, tapping, tracing, picking,
knocking, hitting, punching, handling, holding, pinching or slapping?
8. Be attentive to the history of touch. A pinch in 21st-century New York
is not the same as that which Dickens describes in 19th-century
London, nor can we assume that Riegl’s experience of stroking an
Egyptian sculpture is comparable to that of a blind visitor taking a
touch tour in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
9. Stop equating nicely coloured brain scans with an explanation of how
touch functions or why it matters.
10. Stop using ‘embodiment’ as a sufficient explanation of all the different
kinds of touch, its practices and processes.
11. Begin a cross-cultural comparison of touch.
12. Deconstruct accounts that link touch to particular races, nations, ethnic
groups or genders.
13. Give up the equation between blindness, lack and touch.
14. Remember that we are all always touching, albeit not in the same way.
15. Grasp that who touches matters. Touch didn’t disappear with the
Greeks, the invention of perspective or with the Enlightenment.
Connoisseurs, collectors, curators, artists and all those people whose
touch is judged to be clean, free of damage and legitimate are still
picking things up and holding them.
16. Acknowledge that the curious, inquiring, playful public also carried on
touching but that their touch was deemed damaging and dirty.
17. Be sceptical of claims that objects lose their aura once they’ve been
touched. Sometimes the wear and damage leaves the power of an
object unaffected or even adds to it.
18. Bear in mind that the border between the toucher and touched is not
fixed. In touching something we erode and create it and we are also
moulded by the experience. This contact, however, is rarely
symmetrical; even touching oneself one body part tends towards
activity and the other passivity, an imbalance that certainly doesn’t
make the passive recipient of touch any less aware or responsive than
the active toucher. Indeed, the opposite is often true.
19. Examine the effects of temperature. The borderline between self and
other can shift depending on whether a surface is hot or cold. Laying
152 journal of visual culture 5(2)

your cheek against a warm bronze on a summer’s day is not the same
as touching it on an icy day.
20. Stress that surfaces matter. Even the quality of a piece of paper has
meaning and affects.
21. Re-think the politics of surface. If the image of late capitalism is shiny is
its texture slippery and smooth?
22. Stop thinking of things as if they were only images. The world is not a
slide-library.
23. Read Rodin’s diaries (1912: 63–5).
Instead of imagining the different parts of a body as surfaces more
or less flat, I represented them as projections of interior volumes.
I forced myself to express in each swelling of the torso or of the
limbs the efforescence of a muscle or of a bone which lay deep
beneath the skin.
24. Remain undaunted by the prospect of inventing a tactile art history. The
history of art is already tactile. Joseph Beuy’s fat is not just a visual
image, it smells, we know how it feels, we can imagine it smeared over
his or our body. Ditto Franz West’s Adaptives, Giuseppe Penone’s
paintings with acacia thorns, walking on Carl Andre’s Copper Square,
the grain and texture of stone, the caked ridges of impasto, the fragility
of Eva Hesse’s latex sculptures, the curves of a Barbara Hepworth and
virtually everything Lygia Clark ever produced. We just need to take it
into account.
25. Be wary of art historical precedents for touch.
26. Applaud Lazló Moholy-Nagy. He made tactile training a compulsory part
of the Bauhaus curriculum. And he insisted on it being political.
27. Don’t over-estimate or emulate accepted forms of visual knowledge.
28. Avoid thinking of vision as being more conceptual than touch. Art
history has developed a sophisticated apparatus for making sense of
what we see. The lack of a comparable apparatus for touch doesn’t
mean that touch cannot be conceptualized but that it isn’t yet. Or at
least not adequately.
29. Ask how touch and tactile qualities can lead an audience into an
exploration of content and history.
30. Ask how the tactile qualities of art generate meaning and rational
thought.
31. Remember that reaching out is inextricable from curiosity, investigation,
analysis, examination, pleasure, pain, memory, fear, desire and risk.

Notes
1. For a detailed discussion of their place in art history see Holly (1984) and Podro
(1982).
2. Likewise, it is difficult to accept that Egyptian columns were tactile because they
interrupted large spaces to create small, tactile spaces whereas Greek columns
are optical because they create an impression of recession.
3. Riegl subsequently consolidated this emphasis on sight in an article of 1902
where he decided to substitute the term haptic for tactile. The term tactile, Riegl
 Candlin The Dubious Inheritance of Touch 153

thought, was too closely associated with actual touch. Notably haptic no longer
has the same connotation of actual touch. It is now used to mean active, as
opposed to passive touch.
4. Here the translation of kunstbegehren is that of Margaret Iversen (1993). To
underline Riegl’s cultural relativism, Iversen also quotes his comment that:
at the beginning of the twentieth century, most of us have come to the
conclusion that there is no such absolute art-value, and that it is pure fiction
to consider ourselves wiser arbiters than were the contemporaries of
misunderstood masters in the past. (p. 7)
5. The tension between Berenson’s clear pleasure in and understanding of tactility
suggests that his emphasis on ideated sensation might be one protest too far.
6. The distinction between mind and body can be found in Platonism and in much
Christian philosophy which maintains that the mind or soul survives the death of
the body. It is, however, more commonly associated with the work of René
Descartes who argues
I have a clear and distinct idea of myself as a thinking non-extended thing and
a clear and distinct idea of myself as an extended non-thinking thing.
Whatever I can conceive clearly and distinctly, God can create. (Descartes,
1996[1641]: 54)
7. It is notable that within both Riegl’s and Berenson’s accounts touch is situated
outside of the West and that their account of modernity is allied to a move from
the Orient to the Occident.
8. Bill Woodrow quoted in M. Irving (2005) Times online, London, 13 July. The
Blind Art trust has taken a similar stance – each year they run an open
submission exhibition where all the artwork has to be accessible to a visually
impaired audience.
9. Which happened recurrently at the Art Beyond Sight: Multimodal Approaches to
Learning conference, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 14–15 October
2005.

Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the Leverhulme Trust for their support of this project. I would also
like to thank Marq Smith, Georgina Kleege, Jo Morra and Peg Rawes for their
encouragement, time and constructive criticism.

References
Berenson, B. (1938) Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Berenson, B. (1950[1948]) Aesthetics and History. London: Constable.
Descartes, R. (1996[1641]) Meditations on First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gardner, H. (1993) Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York:
Basic Books.
Grigely, J. (2000) ‘Postcards to Sophie Calle’, in Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Epstein
(eds) Points of Contact: Disability, Art and Culture, pp. 31–58. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Holly, M.A. (1984) Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
154 journal of visual culture 5(2)

Irving, M. (2005) ‘Art for the Blind Becomes Reality’, Times online, London, 13 July
[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ article/0,,585-1691367,00.html]
Iversen, M. (1993) Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Panofsky, E. (1991[1927]) Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books.
Podro, M. (1982) The Critical Historians of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Riegl, A. (1985[1901]) Late Roman Art Industry. Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider
Editore.
Rodin, A. (1912) Art, trans. Romilly Fedden. Boston, MA: Horizon Press.

Fiona Candlin is Lecturer in Museum Studies, a joint appointment held at

Birkbeck College and The British Museum. She is also Visiting Professor on
the KonstLab programme at Gothenburg University in Sweden. After working
at Tate Liverpool and completing a practice-based PhD in contemporary art,
she started writing on art institutions and education, and on art and
blindness. She has just completed a one-year Leverhulme Fellowship which
has enabled her to work on a book provisionally entitled The Dubious
History of Touch: Art, Museums and the Filthy Public.

Address: Birkbeck College, University of London, 26 Russell Square,

Bloomsbury, London WC1B 5DQ, UK. [email: f.candlin@bbk.ac.uk]