Gallery of Touch
Art galleries are designed with a normative art viewer in mind. This dictates everything from the height art is hung on the wall, the font size of wall text and labels, and even the timing of visitor movement through an exhibit. The normative art viewer is understood to be nondisabled, bipedal, of average height, able to stand for long periods of time, to walk for a goodly distance without fatigue, to experience the art and to read labels and wall text visually. Artists with sensory and perceptual disabilities and with nonnormative embodiments, challenge the image of the ideal viewer, and offer new modes of aesthetic experience. Consider touch. Touch tours for blind and visually impaired people are nothing new. In fact, these segregated opportunities for this population have been offered, in some form or other, as long as museums have existed.
Today, most museums around the world offer some form of touch opportunity to blind and visually impaired people, from scale models, raised line diagrams, and self guided or Live docent led hands-on tours of selected works of sculpture. The problem with many of these programs is that they were designed and usually led by sighted people who often have a reductive understanding of what touch perception is or could be. There is a tendency to make a simple analogy between the two eyes of a sighted person and the two hands of a blind person. It's as if merely laying a finger on a work of art will instantly transmit an image of it into the blind person's mind's eye. Touching art is assumed to be a matter of object recognition, simply discerning what the artwork depicts. This understanding fails to take into account the materiality of the object, the textures, temperatures, densities, and sonorities of different substances, and the craft used to shape and manipulate it.
