Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums 1442272058, 9781442272057

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART I: THEORIES ON BLINDNESS, DISABILITY, AND ART
1 Why Do We Think That People Who Are Blind Cannot Understand the Visual Arts?
2 The Earliest Art Education for People Who Were Blind
PART II: CASE STUDY: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK
3 The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A New York Icon
4 Experiences of Verbal Imaging
5 Experiences of Teaching and Independent Visits
6 The Two Questions
References
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums

Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums Simon Hayhoe

Rowman & Littlefield Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Rowman & Littlefield All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hayhoe, Simon, author. Title: Blind visitor experiences at art museums / Simon Hayhoe. Description: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017003385 (print) | LCCN 2017004104 (ebook) | ISBN 9781442272057 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442272064 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Art museum visitors. | Art museums and people with disabilities. | Art museums—Educational aspects. | Museums and people with visual disabilities. | People with visual disabilities and the arts. Classification: LCC N435 .H39 2017 (print) | LCC N435 (ebook) | DDC 704.087—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003385

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

For Vanessa, Nicholas, and Sofia

CONTENTS

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxv PART I THEORIES ON BLINDNESS, DISABILITY, AND ART CHAPTER ONE 

Why Do We Think That People Who   Are Blind Cannot Understand the Visual Arts? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

CHAPTER TWO  The Earliest Art Education for People   Who Were Blind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

PART II CASE STUDY: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK CHAPTER THREE 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art:   A New York Icon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 CHAPTER FOUR 

Experiences of Verbal Imaging . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

CHAPTER FIVE 

Experiences of Teaching and   Independent Visits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 CHAPTER SIX 

The Two Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 vii

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Why would a person who is blind want to visit an art museum, even when he or she cannot touch the exhibits?

B

lind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums examines this question through a case study of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and philosophies of exclusion and access. In the process of doing so, it argues that there is an extra dimension to understanding the visual arts. This dimension can act as a bridge between the awareness of artworks through perception and an understanding of their contents beyond perceptual knowledge. This bridge between awareness and nonverbal knowledge is described as an ambience that is provided by the environment and context of knowing artworks. This ambience is felt in museums, galleries, and monuments and is made possible by the visitor’s proximity to artworks. I also find in Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums that ambience is still there when perceptions of artworks are lessened or removed altogether by the impairment of museum visitors. In the process of examining blindness in the museum, Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums also questions the work of two traditional viewpoints on visual art in the museum. The first viewpoint is given by the art historian Ernst Gombrich, who wrote on an understanding of art. The second viewpoint is given by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote on the role of art in the museum as a symbol of cultural distinction ix

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and artistic tastes—Bourdieu’s writing focuses on the role of art in dividing social classes. Both Gombrich and Bourdieu are similar in feeling that museums play an important role in developing cultural knowledge and a cultural form of identity. Furthermore, both authors also regard the museum building as a receptacle for works of art and as a site for the exercise of discerning vision. As such, Gombrich and Bourdieu feel that museums are palaces for holding treasures of invisible, almost mythical value. Gombrich’s psychological notion of institutions such as the museum is that of a building whose primary purpose is to be a receptacle through which art delivers delight and profit. This delight and profit is conducted through what he describes as an economy of vision. Within cultural institutions such as schools or museums, Gombrich’s ideal art teacher concentrates on understanding artworks from direct sources of experience alone. Working from this idea, he implores art teachers to recognize a “difference between seeing, looking, attending and reading, on which all art must rely” (Gombrich, 1984, p. 95). In his examination of visual culture in an earlier article, Gombrich also proposes that the museum is primarily an institution of cultural education and entertainment alone. He also sees museums as a receptacle through which the order of exhibitions perceptually and aesthetically is the primary consideration in its production of culture for the viewer. Thus, Gombrich proposes, In defining the aim [of the museum] on which I wish to concentrate, I shall adapt the famous line from Horace’s Ars Poetica and suggest that aut prodese volunt, aut delecatare custodies. As museum people you want to offer us profit and delight. (Gombrich, 1977, p. 450)

From a social and cultural perspective, Bourdieu argues that the study of artworks in the museum develops highly formal cultural knowledge, which he terms cultural capital. This cultural capital becomes a habit that has social and cultural value to the person who earns it—much in the same way that money has financial value to someone who works for it or is given it. Unlike Gombrich, however, Bourdieu believes that artworks are translated primarily from the perspective of visual aesthetics by all but sox

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cial and intellectual elites. The purpose of this translation is to determine the distinction between their social classes and those whom they regard as people of lower intellectual status—to put it simply, certain forms of art have snob value. These distinctions are based on elements such as the viewer’s family upbringing and education, through the learned habits of viewing artworks. In this respect, Bourdieu feels that museums play the role of a receptacle of artworks that can be viewed as per upbringing and social class. However, the museum is also a building that represents intellectual and aesthetic exclusion, in the same way that elite gymnasiums are exclusive by developing strength and speed. For instance, Bourdieu noted of one moderately educated middle-class observant that he continued to learn tediously to fulfill a social need as a form of aesthetic recreation. “I wanted to be able to tell myself I’d done the museum, it was very monotonous, one picture after another. They ought to put something different in between the paintings to break it up a bit.” (engineer, Amiens, aged 39, Lille Museum). These comments are reminiscent of those of the conservator of the New York Metropolitan Museum, who sees his museum as “a gymnasium in which the visitor is able to develop his eye muscles.” (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 269)

To examine the viewpoints of Gombrich and Bourdieu, Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums investigates the social and cultural importance of real-world (that is to say, the physical building) and virtual (that is to say, digital representations of) galleries and museums to the understanding of art—or what is traditionally referred to as visual art. This book is an examination of theories that inform museum design and inclusion and exclusion for visitors who are blind through research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As part of this case study, I examine the development of the museum, its website, and its policies of inclusion; individual case studies of visitors to the museum who were blind; individual case studies of teachers at the museum; and individual case studies of visitors who came to the museum without letting it be known that they were blind. The first aim of Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums is to contribute to a debate on the anthropology of art and the role of museums and the web in the development of this debate. In previous research, I found xi

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that there was scant investigation of these issues (Hayhoe, 2003, 2015). I also found that older books generally lacked an understanding of the relevance and role of these issues in promoting culture and art education for people who are blind. In Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums, I argue that more debate on this issue will help tell us more about our approach to inclusion in the education and exhibition of visual culture. In addition to social justice, the types of inclusion discussed in the following chapters are in line with international equality laws, including the relatively recent Americans with Disabilities Act, which is now over twenty-five years old. The second aim of Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums is to provide its reader with a new focus of debate on the nature of visual arts, art education, and visual culture. More particularly, in this book I question the idea that learning about such concepts is always premised on perception. In this materialist formula, less consideration is given to language, emotional attachment, or personal identity. These issues of cultural identity in particular are examined through case studies of people who are blind as per issues such as visitors’ previous education, art practices at home, and cultural upbringing. Before presenting the chapters in the rest of the book, it is important to explain the story of my interest in museums and blindness that led me to write Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums.

The Background of Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums In earlier writing on blindness and visual culture, I questioned one of the most engrained social and cultural myths: this is a belief that people who are blind are less capable of making or appreciating artworks or computer interfaces simply because of their blindness. In my early research, I also looked at whether belief about an ability to understand visual culture was more important than the ability to create or perceive artworks and images. My writing at the time found that theories on blindness have largely been based on a belief that people who are blind have little or no understanding of what is called visual art (Hayhoe, 2015). However, in the same writing I noticed that many people who are blind appreciate, understand, and create artworks and computer images and enjoy public recognition. xii

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I began researching Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums to take this writing a step further and partly to test a further myth in the philosophy of visual art and visual culture. This is the myth that the intellectual, moral, and emotional meaning of artworks is developed purely through physical perception. The case study of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums was based solely in the United States and through searching literature, interviews, and observations. All the visitors I interviewed and observed visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art at some point and are legally blind as per the definition of the U.S. Department of Social Security. During the interviews and observations, I distinguished the visitors’ visual memory, as writers such as Lowenfeld (1981) and I (Hayhoe, 2008) have found that this significantly alters educational experiences. Consequently, this distinction came to represent experiences that formed identity rather than a type of person—this educational distinction has previously been seen in research on computer programmers who are blind using visual languages and art students in schools for the blind (Hayhoe, 2008, 2011a, 2011b). Many of the visitors I interviewed for Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums had participated in guided verbal-imaging tours, touch tours, art classes, and art appreciation classes. Other visitors went to museums and monuments with friends and family without special tours. All the visitors enjoyed, and got value from, visiting museums. The observations of the working life of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that I made were often informal and designed to immerse me in the learning culture of the museum. This form of research was set out in traditional models of cultural anthropology, such as that of Clifford Geertz (1983), which I was influenced by during this research. My focus in this book is the museum’s education department, the arrivals and departures of visitors in the museum, and visitors’ reactions to teaching and exhibitions. I also recall questions that arose in classes and galleries. The lessons and tours I observed consisted of either audio tours of paintings within small groups or individuals in the galleries or structured touch or drawing lessons in classrooms. The recordings of my observations were then reviewed to unpick patterns of participation xiii

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and understand why people visit and participate in exhibitions and the museum’s website. Teachers and visitors who participated in the observations were chosen by key staff members in the education department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These staff members acted as intermediaries between these participants and me during the research.1 The participants in observations were taken from a sample of visitors who identified themselves as blind during the first few weeks of my work. They represent as much of a cross section of visitors involved in the verbal-imaging tours at the museum as could be arranged. In this book, I consider issues such as the visitor’s age, their gender, and their age at their onset of blindness—these issues were particularly important in my previous research. The discussion of these visitors examines the combined influence of the following on experiencing visual culture: the experiences of the visitors who were born blind and do not have visual memories; the experiences of those who became blind in childhood and had been taught about visual images at an early age; and the experiences of those who lost their sight at different stages of adulthood or old age and had been brought up with a visual culture. The stages of becoming blind were considered by the experiences of museum visitors who had no sight and those with some remaining sight (which I refer to as residual vision). The discussion of these visitors’ physical perceptions is contrasted with the cultural experiences of their blindness. During this work, I also examine the experiences of developing a cultural identity and how important sight is in developing—as opposed to experiencing—a visual culture. The development of visual culture in this work is characterized by early educational experiences of culture through family and friends, as well as experiences of schooling. These formal experiences include the following types of visitors’ childhoods: those who attended a school for the blind; those who attended special classes in mainstream schools; and those who had art education at home. During analysis of the interviews and observations, I also consider the visitors’ college education. Importantly, in this study I also examine the effects of visitors’ physical, social, and cultural experiences on their feelings of inclusion in cultural life through the museum and the web—the latter is important, as xiv

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nowadays many museums are putting up images of their collections on the web. In doing so, I examine whether the museum makes these visitors feel a sense of belonging and ownership of the museum.

From My Research to Writing Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums Through the case study of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums examines whether visitors feel excluded because of their impairment. It also examines whether museums exclude people who are blind without sometimes realizing they are doing so. I then continue to examine whether blind visitors lack other opportunities in museums or whether they feel part of the deep-rooted cultural traditions of museums. By examining the experience of visitors who are blind studying art, Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums addresses philosophical issues on the intellectual nature of artworks. It also analyzes why people feel a need to visit museums. In doing so, it asks readers to address broader issues of exclusion and reexamine what I argue is inaccurately described as the visual arts. Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums takes a different approach to studying artworks in the museum. It addresses the fundamental need to be in the presence of artworks when they cannot be perceived as the artists intend them to be. This presence includes situations in which the viewer’s sight is so impaired as to render the image different from its original creation or in which the image cannot be perceived at all. Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums examines the fundamental nature of understanding, valuing, gaining pleasure from, and being educated about art. In doing so, it raises questions about the creation of art from the perspective of the viewer. Consequently, in this examination of art I also address a much broader philosophical question: What is a viewer of art?

Passive and Active Exclusion in Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums In Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums, exclusion is described as both passive and active. This reframing of exclusion is based on an examination xv

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of the literature on disability, exclusion, and institutional access, which inform a debate on physical access to museums. This again is a primary theme of my research. In my readings, I find that literature on disability and exclusion tends toward two poles of exclusion from society. In this book, the first pole is termed active exclusion and comes from the political theory of disability as a direct consequence of a political agenda. Hehir describes this most importantly as the devaluation of disability [which] results in societal attitudes that uncritically assert that it is better for a child to walk than roll, speak than sign, read print than read Braille, spell independently than use a spell-check, and hang out with nondisabled kids as opposed to other disabled kids, etc. In short, in the eyes of many educators and society, it is preferable for disabled students to do things in the same manner as nondisabled kids. (Hehir, 2002, p. 3)

What I call the active-exclusion argument 2 is also based on a more general sociological theory of conscious exclusion. In this interpretation of exclusion, the deliberate oppression of disabled people is said by authors to be analogous to oppression based on race or gender (Hehir, 2002; Smith, 2001; Valeo, 2009). This model sees all disabilities as equal in this oppression, since it is disability as an object of difference that is the target of oppression by the able-bodied person (Oliver, 2001, 2013). An example of what I refer to as active exclusion is described by Valeo (2009). She finds analogies between the prejudice shown to people with disabilities and those prejudices shown to minority ethnic families in Canada across two different centuries. Similarly, Pfeiffer (2002) finds that systematic legislation previously supported eugenic policies and violent acts of discrimination against people with disabilities in the United States. Pfeiffer also tells us that there is openly expressed prejudice by high-ranking officials against people with disabilities. Articles illustrating active exclusion from the arts also draw on the prohibition of life chances and education as a form of oppression by institutions such as museums (Barnes & Mercer, 2003). In this role, it is argued that disability arts, a separation from mainstream arts by disabled people, can redress this inequality in museums and galleries (Barnes & Mercer, 2003; Sandell & Dodds, 2010). xvi

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However, Darke (2003) finds that this movement itself is hijacked by able-bodied people in certain environments, such as access and education departments in mainstream museums. Darke feels that this agenda suppresses forms of culture and removes political and intellectual content from its educational role through hegemony—an unspoken form of power that deliberately oppresses people of what is felt to be lower social status. The second pole in arguments on exclusion is what I call passive exclusion. This literature is based on the argument that our attitudes toward individual disabilities have largely evolved through arbitrary social and cultural factors, such as ignorance and financial hardship. However, power struggles are rarely directly related to gaining power over disabled people and are often the result of different struggles in different parts of society— such as a government’s need to make financial cuts or an academic’s need to simplify his or her arguments. Therefore, our understanding of blindness changes in different environmental, cultural, and historical contexts. These contexts subsequently have real social and emotional effects on the humans that they are designed to analyze and interpret. Passive exclusion is also the result of systems of classification that leave scientifically defined conditions particularly vulnerable to oversimplified, mythologized theories. For instance, in Western societies we tend to classify people who have a range of types and strengths of visual impairments under the single category of the blind—this is opposed to approaching the individual needs of people who are blind based on their individual circumstances, as Warren (1994) proposes. As I argue in an earlier paper, categorizing blindness leads to classifications of what people who are blind can and can’t do in art education (Hayhoe, 2003). This problem is often characterized as per the traits of a few extreme cases, such as many of those described in the psychological and philosophical studies I examine in a later chapter. In my other recent book, Philosophy as Disability & Exclusion (Hayhoe, 2015), I also argue that naive scientific beliefs about visual impairment change over time. For example, attitudes to blindness in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French society as described by Diderot (1999), Jay (1993), and Paulson (1987) exalt blindness. Consequently, a primary feature of the passive-exclusion pole in art is that it looks at the exclusion of individual disabilities. xvii

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Similarly, exclusion of students who are blind from art education in schools and museums is often due to inaccurate information about blindness in academic literature. (This issue is discussed in more detail in later chapters.) This problem leads some people who are blind to believe that they are incapable of art later in life. Thus, I have previously argued that a greater awareness of the ability of students who are blind in art education when they are younger is needed, particularly by mainstream schools. In examining passive and active exclusion, Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums adds to the debate on broader anthropological and philosophical issues of exclusion. These issues relate to the human condition and identity of people who are blind as well as those who are sighted. However, this brings us back to the most important issue in examining this form of exclusion, which is to define the understanding of my core hypothesis in this book: artworks hold significance and value beyond their perceptual content, and a misunderstanding of this content leads to exclusion. That is to say, we do not need to see, touch, smell, hear, or taste artworks to garner meaning from them or develop some value in our minds of knowing that they exist and understand them. In Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums, I argue that artworks in certain environments have unperceivable historical, archaeological, and architectural value that can be inclusive. In addition, proximity to artworks gives greater cultural value and affirms our identity and a higher need beyond verbal understanding or their representation of a reality—that is to say, they hold a more significant worth to us beyond their simple definition as artworks, and, more significantly, they hold a personal, cultural symbolic meaning beyond perception. This meaning is denoted by a mere presence next to artworks beyond their creators’ or curators’ intentions. Consequently, in Blind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums I propose that there is an inclusive power beyond perceiving a piece of art in important art institutions. This power is combined with a presence that we have not previously considered in art and museums, which leads us to consider two important questions that form the focus of this book: 1.  Given the guiding principle of visual art being understood only by sight, what do people understand when sight is diminished or not present? xviii

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2.  Moreover, given the experience of blindness, what are the effects of vision loss or no vision on a cultural identity in art?

The Following Chapters To address these questions, the rest of the book consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 lays out the definitions and concepts used in this study and the medical and psychological terms included in the descriptions of the students’ blindness. It has two sections. The first section is an investigation of two case studies, Esref and Michael, who are both blind professional artists. These case studies challenge traditional ideas of what it is possible for a person who is blind to achieve in the visual arts. The second section of the chapter critically reviews philosophical, educational, and psychological studies, as these largely inform theories on blindness and the arts in education. Chapter 2 reviews the history of this form of education and why art education is important to students who are blind. The second section in this chapter also discusses the epistemology of inclusion and art and the first museum courses for people with disabilities. This section likewise discusses the development of inclusive art education in the modern era. The section continues by discussing pedagogy and resourcing in such forms of education. Chapter 3 discusses the policy and implementation of including people with disabilities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It also has two sections: The first is a discussion on accessibility and museum education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This includes a description of the number of people using the access facilities and attending formal sessions and classes. The second section includes a history of access at the museum, the organization of the departments, the technologies used, and the teaching strategies and methods implemented. Chapter 4 includes case studies of four blind adult visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s education department. The participants are of different ages, became blind at various stages of life, and have different cultural and social experiences of engaging with artworks. Two are female, and two are male. Only one of the students is a former student of a school for the blind, and all but one has higher education. xix

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The case studies in chapter 4 include observations and interviews. The four visitors are as follows:

•  Edi, retired and from New York. Edi is eighty years old, wid-

owed, and finished her formal education at the end of high school. She grew up in Ohio but moved to New York as a young adult, where she continues to live. Edi is late blind, after having lost her sight gradually in adulthood, and has always had relatively normal experiences of learning art through classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which she attends regularly. She is also a former member of the museum. Edi does not use a computer for learning about or viewing art and cites her blindness as a reason for this. Instead, she occasionally asks her friends to find information for her and to search for artworks on the web.

•  Charles, retired and from New Jersey. Charles is sixty-four years

old and educated to postgraduate level. He was born in Jamaica but grew up in Sugar Hill, New York. He moved to New Jersey, close to Manhattan, after he married, and he still lives there. Charles became blind in early childhood over a short period and was registered blind by the time he completed high school. Charles has a broad experience of studying art from childhood and discovered that he enjoyed visiting museums at school and then as an undergraduate student in New York. Charles uses computers to research and write but not to search for or study artworks.

•  Camilla, retired and from New Jersey. Camilla is seventy years

old and studied educational psychology at college but never finished her degree. Camilla is originally from Atlantic City, New Jersey, and is married to Charles—the previous case study—and thus also now lives close to Manhattan. Camilla is almost totally blind, has very little understanding of visual concepts, and only started visiting museums with Charles in recent years. She has no prior experience of art education—she cites her blindness as a reason. xx

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Camilla uses computers for emailing and other forms of communication but not to research artworks—again she cites her blindness as a reason for this.

•  Glen, a technology professional from Washington, DC. Glen is

forty-two years old, married, and has a bachelor’s degree in finance and psychology. He is originally from Philadelphia, but now lives in Washington, DC. Glen has some residual vision and first noticed that he was losing his vision around the age of sixteen, although he thinks that his impairment is much older than this. He is also red-green color blind—something he says he was born with. Glen started visiting museums with a girlfriend from college when he was eighteen or nineteen, first in Philadelphia and then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He now attends the Metropolitan Museum of Art every time he visits New York. He was also taught art at school, but at the time it made little impression on him. Glen uses computers for work and many other aspects of life, and sometimes he researches artworks and museums on the web. He is happy accessing images on the web.

Chapter 5 has three case studies of independent museum visitors without support and the experiences of two teachers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. All three visitors are over fifty years old, and all became blind as children, although their ages at the onset of blindness differ. One visitor is female, and two are male. All four visitors had early experiences of art education and of visiting museums as schoolchildren. These visitors are:

•  Joni, a teacher from San Francisco. Joni is fifty-one years old,

single, and she studied at postgraduate level. She is originally from New York, but now lives in the San Francisco area. Joni has some residual vision left and lost her sight after developing a brain tumor at the age of sixteen—she had total vision before this. In more recent years, she has also developed congenital astigmatism, which exacerbated her sight loss. Joni attended the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums in childhood and had what she describes as a standard xxi

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art education at school. As an adult, Joni continues this education through art classes for the blind; she also continues to visit museums regularly.

•  Pavlos, a semiretired actor from New York City. Pavlos is sixty-

four years old, married, and has studied at the postgraduate level—although he finished his studies early to pursue a professional acting career. He was born into a Greek family on the island of Cyprus but moved to New York as a baby and has lived there ever since. Pavlos has no useable vision, which was caused by the inverse form of retinitis pigmentosa; his sight has deteriorated since the age of five years old. He remembers learning about art at elementary school, where he was taught with what he felt were highly creative methods. Pavlos has attended the Metropolitan Museum of Art, other museums, and monuments since childhood, especially in his native Cyprus. Although Pavlos uses a computer for tasks such as emailing, he does not use it for researching artworks.

•  Tariq, an educational coordinator from Boston.

Tariq is approximately sixty-three years old—his birth was not officially recorded, and he did not celebrate birthdays as a child, so his real age is unknown—and married, and he has studied at the postgraduate level. Tariq was born in Turkey, near the country’s border with Syria, but moved to Boston as a teenager to attend a school for the blind. He remained in Boston for his college education and has lived in Massachusetts ever since. Tariq is totally blind and was born with only minimal light perception; this deteriorated until the age of fifty-eight years old, when he lost his sight completely. Tariq studied art at a school for the blind in Turkey but not in his later mainstream education or in Boston.

Chapter 6 answers the questions posed above and discusses what implications these have for the future of exhibiting art to people who are blind. xxii

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Conclusion Art is still philosophically understood to be a “naturally” visual medium. Consequently, many traditional theorists, such as Gombrich and Bourdieu, see art museums as places to gain differing forms of education through perception (in their case, sight alone—Bourdieu repeating a quote that goes as far as to regard museums as merely “gymnasiums for the eyes”). Visitors who are blind and art museums are felt to be mutually incompatible, as benefiting from art is syllogistically linked to the performance of sight. And yet many blind people enjoy museums, meaning that something must be missing from this traditional logic. This suggests a purpose for art beyond perception. Thus, artworks need to be revalued as objects with merely perceptual value. Similarly, museums need to be reevaluated as institutions that hold little value beyond their contents. Importantly, if such a measure is possible, we need to regard the cultural value of art museums as greater than the sum of all their artworks and their buildings. If we revalue and redefine the art museum in this way, we also need to redefine exclusion from the museum. Too often we simply regard exclusion as an active act—that is to say, exclusion is purposeful and based on the believed inferiority of certain populations and a need to physically exclude these populations because of their believed inferiority. Traditional forms of exclusion—what I call active exclusion—are founded on emotions, such as fear, loathing, and hatred. Undoubtedly examples of this form of exclusion exist. However, as I argue above, this does not explain all exclusion. Some exclusion is based on the simple ignorance of human capacity and is emotionless. (In this book, I call this passive exclusion.) This ignorance is not created deliberately to exclude; it is caused by the ignorance of philosophy or the method of understanding human populations. This ignorance is so pervasive that it excludes by stealth. It forms people’s underlying belief systems—what we refer to as ontologies. This is the dark matter of societies and cultures. Therefore, systems of knowledge—what we refer to as epistemologies— such as philosophy and science, develop in the belief that certain forms of understanding are impossible. These beliefs and this knowledge are so pervasive that many people from excluded populations have a deep-seated belief that they are incapable of mainstream inclusion. For this reason, Blind Visitor xxiii

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Experiences at Art Museums investigates one of the deepest-seated human myths: the scientific and philosophical belief that blind people cannot understand art. To investigate this myth, a model based on epistemology to investigate this passive exclusion is necessary. It is to this model, an epistemological model of disability, which examines knowledge and the practices based on this knowledge, that this book turns to first.

Notes 1. This way of working was suggested by the ethnographer Hammersley (1984). 2. The following description of passive and active exclusion is taken from Hayhoe (2014).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

would like to acknowledge the following for their help in the advice, feedback, research, and reading of this book: Charles Harman, Rebecca McGinnis, access and education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Kennedy, Oliver Sacks, Georgina Kleege, Esref Armagan, Ruby Cohen, Joan Eroncel, Nina Levent, Elisabeth Axel, Joan Pursley, Stuart Wittenstein, Edward Clapp and other editors of the Harvard Educational Review, Rom Harre, Roman Frigg, and the numerous anonymous participants in the research. I would like to acknowledge the Metropolitan Museum of Art for providing a fellowship to conduct the research for this case study and the US-UK Fulbright Commission for providing a Fulbright All-Disciplines Scholar Award to fund this research. Thanks must also go to the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics and numerous staff at Leicester Grammar School for their support during this research and its original proposal. Importantly, many thanks also go to our friends from New York, for all you did for my family during our time at the Met: Tim Barringer, Natsha and Christian Racic, Maggie and Ray Rodriguez.

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Part I

THEORIES ON BLINDNESS, DISABILITY, AND ART

CHAPTER ONE

WHY DO WE THINK THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE BLIND CANNOT UNDERSTAND THE VISUAL ARTS?

Research Notes In lectures on creativity, expression, and cultural access, I start by asking my audience the following question: What can you explain to a person who is blind about a work of visual art? Often, I receive the following answers to this question: “You can explain the scene to the person, such as what is happening in the painting,” or “You can let them feel a sculpture.” And then from some perceptive and experienced audience members, I hear, “You can explain colors to people who have seen before,” and “A person who is born blind would not want many visual references in their descriptions of the paintings.” These comments are logical given our current state of knowledge. They represent what is perhaps the formal practice being taught and debated in museums and galleries throughout the world. These statements are like advice passed on by academics, consultants, curators, and access officers I have known for twenty years or more. However, there are two primary problems with the answers that are given to this question on blindness and art. The first problem is the belief that people who are blind are incapable of understanding or taking part in art they have never experienced, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Although there are many people who are blind in early childhood who engage in two-dimensional visual culture, some people shy away from trying to understand works of visual art (Hayhoe, 2000, 2005, 2008). These findings are paralleled 3

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in related research with computer programmers who were born blind working with visual programming languages, many of whom also did not want to engage with designing two-dimensional interfaces (Hayhoe, 2011a, 2011b). The second issue is more a question of semantics and, more important, about the fundamental nature and components of what we refer to as the visual arts and leads us to challenge whether such art forms are visual at all. When this topic is considered further, it seems illogical that an object can have an inherent perceptual quality. The perceptual quality is in the experience of the viewer rather than the component nature of the object. Consequently, the phrase the visual arts itself appears to be loaded with connotations of visual experience and visual ability as an intrinsic component of its comprehension. As Martin Jay (1993) argues in his book Downcast Eyes, the design of visual artifacts assumes that society and the arts are primarily constructed on visual knowledge. This is an assumption that has intrinsically excluded blind and visually impaired people from social and cultural activity and engagement since the birth of human visual knowledge. Jay terms this exclusionary assumption ocularcentrism or ocularcentricity. Consequently, it can also be argued that ocularcentrism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in and of itself: that is to say, people design a society that is visibly aesthetic; people appreciate the aesthetic visually; subsequently, visual reproduction and evolution develop cultural tradition; in turn, this reproduction is replicated and becomes the social and cultural norm; this cultural norm assumes that the person experiencing visual artworks primarily or only understands the visual artifact through a single organ (the eyes); and, as a result of this process, there is also the assumption that the visual artwork can only be appreciated and understood through perception alone. In this book, I argue that this process is an example of passive exclusion. It is certainly true that fine artists and craftspeople create works with visual perception primarily in mind. This is undeniable. However, to counter passive exclusion, it can equally be argued that the intention of the artworks should not be the intrinsic property of the artwork itself. After creating the artwork and exhibiting it, it could also reasonably be argued that the artwork should not belong to the artist or his or her 4

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original intention. The artist has lost possession for the work to be passed into the public domain. It then belongs to the people who choose to engage with that artwork in whatever way they feel fit. Consequently, redefining the fundamental nature of the visual arts should change the very nature of the visual artwork. It could instead be a linguistic artwork that can be described, a tactile artwork that can be touched, a multimodal artwork that can be experienced through all nature of senses working together, or a multiexperiential artwork that can be experienced through all or many of these channels. This issue raises a further question that is at the core of understanding the connection between perception, the mind, and the body: Can a person who is blind understand enough about the visual world for him or her to create a unique image by hand? To understand this question, I begin this chapter with a case study of the blind figurative artist Esref Armagan and an illustrator whom I call Michael (this name is a pseudonym). Michael’s case study is built solely on notes from taped interviews and observations of his work (Hayhoe, 2005). For Esref’s case study, I use information from his own website, information from academic articles on him, a recent book on his life, films that he authorized, and a recent interview1 by Ruby Cohen, a student at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art, London. Esref has also given informed consent for use of this work and has allowed me to use his name as part of the case study, and Michael gave informed consent at the time of his interviews. Before beginning, it is important to note a well-established theory on the nature of creativity as a form of learning to put these two case studies into context. According to the American philosopher of mind Benjamin Bloom, learning can be divided according to a taxonomy of tasks. In his original taxonomy, which was published in 1956, these tasks were listed as follows: (1) knowledge, (2) comprehension, (3) application, (4) analysis, (5) synthesis, and (6) evaluation (Bloom & Krathwohl, 1956). Bloom not only identified these levels of education but also hypothesized that these tasks are hierarchical; that is to say, each learning task represents a level of understanding and achievement within learning, starting at number 1, the acquisition and memorization of knowledge, and finishing with number 6, the ability to evaluate and be self-critical of what you have made—or what Bloom termed synthesized. 5

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More recent research in psychology reevaluates Bloom’s taxonomy. The most notable of these theorists are Lorin Anderson and her colleague David Krathwohl, a former student of Bloom’s, who have reevaluated Bloom’s taxonomy for use in twenty-first-century educational contexts as (1) remembering, (2) understanding, (3) applying, (4) analyzing, (5) evaluating, and (6) creating (Anderson, Krathwohl, & Bloom, 2001; Krathwohl, 2002). Again, this taxonomy is arranged in a hierarchy, from 1 to 6, of learning achievement. Given this new learning hierarchy, creating something new and unique from previously learned information or sensations is the highest level of learning a person can achieve. To place this taxonomy in the context of figurative art, which I discuss in the following case studies, to be a creative figurative artist you must be able to remember the form of the objects you wish to use in your art; understand its properties, in whatever way makes sense to you; apply your understanding, perhaps through copying the object as exactly as possible; analyze what you have copied, understanding how the material and perceptual properties have been reproduced; evaluate, critically, where you can improve your understanding of the objects you are re-creating; and create a brand-new scene or scenario that has never been imagined before. Consequently, to be an accurate figurative artist, a blind or sighted person must pass through all the previous tasks and have what can be described as a “true” understanding of the visual construction of objects and their environments.

The Turkish Painter Esref Armagan Esref was born in 1953 in Istanbul, Turkey, to a working-class family, and since birth he has never had function in his eyes and no light perception. Esref has never seen colors, shade or shadow, or foreshortening of images—that is to say, the image of an object in the foreground looking bigger than objects in the background. He also has never seen perspective either in paintings or of real objects; that is to say, he has never seen objects disappearing into a vanishing point, as they are seen toward the horizon. During his life, Esref also has never had a visual imagination or visual experience, although it is observed in medical tests that what are traditionally thought to be the visual parts of his brain are stimulated by 6

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imagining visual concepts. Despite this lack of personal experience, Esref paints and draws figuratively using these visual constructs: color, shadow, light, foreshortening, and perspective. To see examples of his images, search for his name on the web, and you will find many images he has painted. Most important, Esref creates wholly imaginative scenes from his imagination using these visual constructions. Since childhood, Esref has drawn and painted visual images, working his way up to becoming a professional artist in adulthood. His work has been exhibited on numerous continents; has been sold through prestigious art auctioneers, such as Bonhams in Dubai; and is held in international collections. Esref’s work contains so many visual references that many people, including scientists, have doubted that he has created these images or that he is blind. “So many people did not believe that I had actually done it myself, or that [I had] seen earlier or similar disbeliefs.” Esref is an enigma to many perceptual psychologists and educationalists. He has taught himself to draw and paint so successfully that he can apply a sophisticated knowledge of visual concepts to wholly new visual figurative scenarios accurately without sight. How did Esref learn to draw and paint two-dimensional images? It can be argued that the secret of Esref’s success was that he was born into a family that had little formal academic education. Esref also was not sent to school and had few academic expectations placed on him—it was unusual for blind children from working-class families in Turkey to attend schools for the blind at the time—this was in common with many sighted working-class children of his generation, who also received little formal education. Most important, he was not told he could not draw or paint—in fact, quite the opposite was true. Esref’s father worked as a light engineer, fixing items by hand in his private workshop. As Esref did not attend school and would not be able to find employment, he often attended his father’s workshop to keep him company. In the workshop, and being an inquisitive child, Esref would often ask his father about the world around him. He also did the same at home and when he was out with his family. When Esref was young, his family described the world around him, letting him touch as many objects as possible and describing everything 7

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in as much detail as possible. Eventually, however, his father devised an alternative method of answering the young Esref’s questions. When going to his workshop, Esref’s father would take pieces of board and a scribe— a sharp, pointed tool designed for marking measurements on metal and wood—and scratch images of the environment into the board and pass Esref’s hand over the line. This allowed Esref to follow this tactile, twodimensional representation with his fingers. After this experience, Esref used his own pointed tool and board to create his own images of objects that were familiar to his touch. Drawing on card gave him a tactile line he could follow easily and gave him a creative outlet that allowed him to understand visual concepts from the outer line of touch—in a visual context, this would be the same context of an outline that distinguishes objects in the foreground from objects and the horizon in the background. Esref continued to develop his drawing technique to represent the world around him in two dimensions, learning at first through touch and then through verbally asking about visual features of objects. As sighted children do when drawing, Esref began drawing freehand images and showing them to people around him. And just like his sighted peers, Esref found this to be an intellectual exercise of reproduction, curiosity, and recognition of his talent by those around him: “I kept hearing people talking about things and I was curious as to what they were and if I could reproduce them.” Esref still uses this original drawing method today in an adapted version. His motivation for creating these drawings and, like sighted artists, his motivation for creating art in general is as much for the sighted viewer of the image as it is a means of understanding the world. For example, during our first face-to-face meeting in 2004, I noticed that Esref carried a clipboard with a rubber undersheet and a piece of paper clipped to it. After our initial greetings, he immediately drew an image of a songbird along with a branch and leaves—his favorite animal—for me and signed it. The drawing was not an exercise that I had set; it was drawn as a form of welcome by Esref, as a keepsake. Esref had also developed an aesthetic signature, which he put at the bottom right of his drawing along with the date of its creation. Prior to the auction of his work at Bonham’s in Dubai in 2011, he created a similar image of a songbird for my infant son, this time at the request of my wife, again signing and dating it for him. 8

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For Esref, it is particularly important that he understands his visual environment when he draws with his scribe and board—this is perhaps because his peers are largely sighted, and he wants to be able to understand and to be accepted in their world just as a sighted person is. He finds that he wants to know about the visual elements of the things that he draws, such as color and foreshortening, and then he incorporates these elements into his drawings. As a teenager, Esref had still not received any formal schooling and so had little literacy. Apart from verbal communication, his only form of communication was drawing with scribe, pencil, and board, at which he had become highly adept. It was then, encouraged and helped by his family, that he started drawing with colors. This process of drawing developed linguistically and was one that was stimulated by his friends and peers talking about colors in their day-to-day conversations. Esref describes this process as one of repetition: “By asking and showing—over and over again.” After experimenting with colored pencils, Esref eventually started creating colorful paintings as a young adult, although he felt unable to use watercolors. This is a technical quirk of his technique rather than an aesthetic preference. As he described of this transformation, “I started with colored pencils and then switched to oil paints. But they took a long time to dry so I finally discovered acrylics. I am unable to use water colors.” To create his initial images, Esref found that he had to develop layers of paint so that he knew what the outline of each layer was before applying the next. This meant that he had to allow each layer of paint to dry before adding the next. When dry, oil and acrylic would give this raised, textured surface that allowed Esref to recognize the form of this first layer through touch. After applying his initial layers and letting them dry, he would apply further layers, one by one. Applying the paint in such a way now allows Esref to remember what colors he used initially and what colors he is applying on top. This also allows him to imagine the image he is producing. On this, Esref gives the following description: I use 7 tubes or pencils in a set order that has not changed for more than 50 years! Over the years, I have requested people to describe objects or scenes to me, memorized their answers for the future [like a sighted 9

CHAPTER ONE

artist taking photographs of a scene or painting from other’s images]. When I paint, I must be alone to be able to concentrate. I have created my painting in my head, including colors, before I ever start to paint. There are no Braille names on my paints, it is strictly memorization.

Another technical aspect of Esref’s painting that allows him to physically understand the layers in his painting is that he never uses brushes. They are useless in helping him touch his paintings as they are in progress. As he paints, every new layer of paint must be perceived through feeling its texture, meaning that, in order to understand the position of one layer, he must touch the dry layers as he paints. To put it another way, the information regarding where to place the brush, which a sighted artist gets through seeing the objects on canvas with his or her eyes, Esref must obtain through his fingers. “I think that painting with my fingers just means that I am able to follow what I have done. Brushes don’t do that since I must touch what I have just done.” Constantly evolving, Esref has also improved his tactile painting techniques with his hands over time. For example, to develop tactile lines, he now often uses thin pieces of clay to create the outlines of objects before applying paint inside these lines. The clay is then removed, and the paint dries to form a representation of the solid object that he can touch more easily. In addition, to allow the paint to dry quicker, he uses a hair-dryer to speed up the process. Esref’s tactile painting techniques also allow him to represent foreshortening and perspective more easily in his paintings. Like color, Esref manages to understand how to represent this visual concept both by discussing the concept with those around him and by calculating the nature of perspective through his remaining senses. As he says of this process, “After all, sound has perspective, so the visual side seems very logical to me.” However, sound has it limits, and Esref cannot discern the form of an image by its sound alone; in this respect, tactile information is an essential source of information for artistic creation. For instance, when asked whether he can represent the form of an object by sound alone, Esref told Ruby Cohen, “No—at least not ever having touched it previously.” Esref’s process of painting is also not emotional, and, unlike some artists, he does not associate his ability to be creative with showing emo10

WHY DO WE THINK THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE BLIND

tions. For him, the process is simply technical, logical, and imaginative. For example, Esref does not paint colors as per the mood he feels; he only uses colors as a representation of a true image or as a metaphor for a tactile perception. Esref explains, “Turkish does not associate colors with emotions (red for anger, blue for sadness), but of course I am aware the blue can show cold, red heat, etc.” For Esref, the only emotional element of his artistic process is the pleasure that he derives from knowing that the finished picture means something to its viewer and that viewers appreciate his skill: “I only hope that when I am finished, I will be told what a wonderful painting I have accomplished.” Esref gains extra benefits from intellectually understanding the world around him. For instance, like many artists, Esref likes to take time to develop his physical appearance for his audience, taking time to choose and buy his clothes. Yes, there are fabrics that have a wonderful feel to them. . . . I do most of my own shopping because I can understand the quality of fabrics and, after being told a color, know if it is something I would appreciate.

Also like many artists, Esref likes to have a unique image, one that people will associate exclusively with him. For Esref, this involves wearing a cowboy hat with his smart suit, again an image he feels that people will appreciate and that is portrayed in many photographic portraits. “My cowboy hat is my signature style. I also prefer to wear suits when I am in front of people.” However, for Esref, beauty is not associated with visual imagery. His descriptions of what he finds beautiful are associated solely with his remaining senses. Consequently, it could be argued that, for Esref, visual imagery is associated with technical aspects of communicating direct sensations to gain social acceptance—something that would be the same for many artists, both blind and sighted—more than deriving pleasure from beauty. Beauty is the wonderful smell of a fragrant flower, a newly bathed baby, a loaf of freshly baked bread. Beauty is the sound of a beautiful bird (I especially like nightingales), a wave breaking on the shore, a young girl laughing. 11

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Beauty is the touch of a furry animal, a piece of silk, the feel of a fresh breeze on my face. Beauty is the taste of fresh spring water on my tongue, a juicy piece of watermelon, a roasted chestnut and beauty is hearing people say wonderful things about my work that they find inspiring and lovely.

The English Illustrator Michael Michael was in his mid-twenties during my research, from a middle-class family, and has been registered blind since his early teens. Michael was born and brought up in London during his primary school years—in Britain, primary schooling is between the ages of four and eleven. He then moved to a town in the English West Midlands with his parents at the beginning of his secondary education. Michael works as an illustrator, taking professional commissions, and has completed a post as an artist in residence in a local mainstream school. He lives in London with his grandmother and travels to his old school frequently to visit his old art teacher. During the time of our interviews, both Michael and his teacher, whom I called Harry, were working on a commission for a national trade union. Michael’s blindness is caused by an extreme form of myopia, a distortion of the lens in his eyes causing refractive errors and leaving very little vision, particularly depth perception. This means that Michael finds it difficult to see his environment in three dimensions or see objects that are outside his immediate reach. Michael tells me that he has fewer cones and rods at the back of his eyes than normal and is also photophobic (cones and rods are cells that filter and transmit information from light to the optic nerve). Consequently, he cannot stay in strong light, and he has a diminished perception of colors. I am not allowed to access his medical or school records, so I have to rely purely on evidence from Harry, who confirms this information. Michael’s form of degenerative myopia will also most likely cause further vision problems as he grows older. When he moved from London to the West Midlands as a young boy, Michael tried to conceal his blindness from his school and peers, although both he and his parents knew his sight was poor and deteriorating. Nevertheless, Michael wanted to have as normal a life as possible and 12

WHY DO WE THINK THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE BLIND

so ignored many of the impairments his myopia caused and attended his local mainstream primary school. Michael considered himself (psychologically at least) able bodied as a young boy and wanted to mix with other mainstream children of his own age, whom he regarded as his real peers. Consequently, his parents allowed him to continue attending mainstream school. In addition, and with his parents’ consent, he shunned a pair of prescription glasses. Michael felt that their size and design would have made him an outcast, although this left him without any workable vision or depth perception. At the time [I was in mainstream education], I didn’t know. I obviously went to doctors, and you get given glasses like Michael Caine [these were broad, thick glasses with large frames] and stuff like that. It’s not very pleasant to go to school in them. Your peers are generally decided upon by the things you can and can’t do. And when you don’t connect with the long ball system at break time [a term in soccer, meaning a ball kicked a great distance from a defender to a striker—this is very popular in the British game], you know, it’s a lot less fun.

Paradoxically, Michael’s form of blindness makes him more adept at detailed artistic creation, such as drawing. This is consistent with Michael’s continuing need to be seen as normal and to create a unique educational experience. This means that, like Esref, Michael’s behavior adapts to new visual situations, and he develops strategies to passively include himself in art activities that negate elements of his myopia. Michael’s inclusive strategies are most evident not only in striving to be accepted and then studying for his degree but also in how he has gone on to attain commissions. His current commission comes from another former student of his school for the blind, who is now the outgoing president of a national union. The brief for his project is to create a work of art with the school that promotes a positive attitude toward disability. Michael is to be given free reign over the materials, time frame, and concept of this work of art. With Harry, Michael has produced a collage design of MDF (fiberboard) panels. Each of these panels has the students’ own work, inspired by their interests in fine art. Michael is also engineering a method of putting the panels together so they can be disassembled and reassembled in different environments or displayed in galleries. 13

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As before, Michael believes in his ability to be creative in this project, based on his earlier success in art. He sells his idea to the client as one that he knows holds value, describing it to the commissioner as a “nice idea.” In a meeting with the client, which I was invited to attend, I recorded the following excerpt from their conversation that illustrates Michael’s confidence in his ideas: President: [Sometimes] you need a rule to guide you where you are going. It’s my guiding principle that [the commissioned project is] about participation and positive aspects towards disability. From my point of view, that really is the only criterion that’s being set. And then [Michael] was going on to raise some ideas which were reflecting that principle of the trade union. But perhaps, you know, not everybody would be aware of that but it would have a strong appeal to us. So over to you in terms of where you’ve got with your ideas. . . . Michael: Basically, a rather nice idea I had was to use some MDF blocks, about so big, and so thick [he makes a gesture with his hands], which we could give to the students to do whatever they like with. And then if we have, when we have . . . a number [the idea was to produce these in a series of workshops involving all the students] we could then slot them together to form a, depending on size restrictions or whatever, or space, an overall picture which could then be disassembled or reassembled as you like in various places. [They could be] split up and put back together.

As Michael’s eyesight continued to deteriorate during his early mainstream schooling, subjects relying on handwriting, such as English and math, became more difficult to do. Consequently, as Michael lost interest in written subjects, he started to misbehave to avoid work. This problem became acute when he chose to sit at the back of his class, which meant he could not see the blackboard in the front at all. As he increasingly did not enjoy studying, he would often skip classes and developed a reputation for poor behavior. As Michael found it increasingly hard to continue reading at school, he often doodled in his exercise books to keep himself occupied during classes. Despite his problems in school, art was a subject he found that he could achieve something in—it involved working close to the paper, and so his lack of any long vision was less of an impairment. 14

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At mainstream school I had lots of problems because I was sat at the back of a class and couldn’t see the board. I ended up doing things I shouldn’t be doing. I didn’t like going outside on sunny days [because of his photophobia] . . . so I used to get in trouble for being inside, and I just didn’t get on.

Michael also found that, like Esref in his early years of drawing, he could create new and unique techniques that made the process of working easier. Furthermore, as he hid his blindness and his love of drawing, his teachers did not have low expectations of him, and he could take further risks with inclusion and be more creative—he felt that his teachers were relieved that he had found an activity that he enjoyed, which kept him from misbehaving. Ironically, although Michael’s educational experiences, visual memory, and blindness are different from Esref’s—and subsequently lead to different forms of passive and active exclusion—there are many parallels in their directions as artists that lead to their passive inclusion in fine art. As Michael’s myopia was not recognized in his early years of schooling and he found it difficult to conduct written academic work, he also looked for alternative forms of activity and communication. Consequently, his entire interest in school appeared to center on developing verbal skills and confidence. Michael also tells me that his school career deteriorated around this time, and his mainstream school was increasingly unable to cope with him because of his misbehavior and truancy. Eventually, he was referred to educational psychologists for his behavior. From this point on, he was placed on the Special Educational Needs Register—an official record for students with known disabilities—for learning and behavioral difficulties. Consequently, Michael feels that eventually his visual impairment was used as an excuse to move him to a school for the blind, as his teachers wanted to avoid his misbehavior. I never registered myself as visually impaired [at mainstream school], even though I had the option . . . I was never registered. I was always very firm about that. . . . I had severe problems in mainstream schools. . . . It was behavior and the excuse to get me in here [his school for the blind] was also my eyesight’s very poor. I would guess it, 50/50. Muchos educational psychologists. 15

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It was at his new school for the blind that Michael became more interested in art as an academic subject. Initially, he had trouble getting used to this new environment, as, although his eyesight was very weak, he found that he was surrounded by students who had much worse eyesight than him. He also found that many of the students at his new school appeared to have lower academic attainment than him even though he had previously struggled to learn how to read and write. Michael could see that he was relatively more successful than these students, particularly in art, and so he attended the art classroom at his new school more. As this school had a relatively nonconventional regime, Michael also found he could use the school’s facilities outside of lesson periods, although this came at the expense of other subjects. Consequently, Harry suggested that Michael should start painting to occupy himself, and he became something of an exception at the school. As he explained regarding this situation: When I was [at the school for the blind] you come across people who are worse off than you. . . . It’s quite easy getting into a routine of thinking “well nobody understands, nobody knows.” So, here [in the art classroom] you are less likely to have people that are artistically adept or technically so. So, when I was here I was more appreciated for what I could do, and encouraged more. I felt like it was my own domain, because you never had many people in or the people who were here couldn’t do other subjects. . . . I could come in here, I had my own space, I did some painting, it was [Harry] that first encouraged me to do oil painting. It was something that I really enjoyed and [Harry] got the paint in for me, and I really wanted to do it.

Despite his failing eyesight, Michael’s drive to create two-dimensional artworks on paper and canvas and on his computer led to success in his art exams. Consequently, he fought hard to maintain the identity of a person with sight—which he still had to a small extent. He also appeared to continue to reject the imposition of his official diagnosis of blindness on this identity, even at his school for the blind. For instance, Michael says that as he felt more at home with sighted peers, he refused to board at the school, and at sixteen years old he did day release at a local further education college. However, his existence in a mainstream visual-art environment meant that he had to adapt his drawing tasks. 16

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Many drawing techniques, such as drawing from photographs and working from live scenes at a distance, were not available to Michael at school or college. Instead, he built images from many close to observations. These issues mean that Michael’s illustrations now come more from his visual imagination than those of people with sight. This also means that he has adapted his memory to be more aware of images using his close vision. As he says of this adaption: Also, because, more disability based, because of my eyesight, I’ve developed more of a facility to make things up in my mind. I don’t, although I use reference, I can actually see things in my own mind which I can then draw. I don’t use photos or anything like that. I don’t refer to things when I’m doing it. . . . I’ve got quite an acute visual memory.

After moving to his school for the blind, Michael says that, as he was better at art, had nominally better close vision than other students, and had not been taught in a separate school while younger, he grew further in confidence and saw himself as different. Consequently, in this environment, and backed by Harry’s encouragement and special coaching, Michael was top dog. He eventually gained an A level in art—this is the highest level of exam at school in England and Wales, usually taken at the age of eighteen. Two years after his A level, Michael was accepted on a foundation course at an art college in the English East Midlands. He always felt that this proved to be a new era in his life, one that led to a further adaptation of his artwork to accommodate his blindness. On his new course, Michael found himself in a radically different social and cultural environment. He was with students who were also top dogs in their previous schools. In addition, it seemed to Michael that the other students had the advantage of full vision, and, unlike his mainstream school, he could not avoid tasks that required being able to see at a distance. In contrast to his school for the blind, the curriculum and teaching at Michael’s new art college could not be adapted to cater for his blindness—he found that he would have to be the one to adapt most to his new situation. Michael also could not avoid work by skipping his classes if he felt under pressure, as under such circumstances he would not pass his assessment 17

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and would be dropped from the course. This, he felt, meant that he was technically at a disadvantage, and after occasionally being unable to fulfill tasks, he now found he had to negotiate with his new tutor to survive. For example, when Michael was given the task of life drawing, he found that his lack of long vision became a problem: [On my foundation course] I was made to do life drawing. I found it difficult because I was made to sit at the back of the class, so I didn’t put the other students off. Because I was actually quite good and they’d [the other students] had never done it before. . . . But I found that difficult. So, I ended up drawing them [the other students] because I couldn’t see the model. . . . I ended up adapting the drawings.

After passing his foundation course, Michael enrolled on a first degree (a bachelor’s degree in the United States) in illustration, again at an art college in the English East Midlands. (To take a degree in art and design in the United Kingdom, it is normal for students to have this oneyear foundation course for a year following secondary school.) After starting his degree, Michael found that entering a foundation course had been a wise choice for three reasons. The first reason was that he was particularly good at drawing. He had practiced it a great deal by this stage, and this skill appeared to provide strong evidence that he was ready to become a professional. Michael had also learned that he could negotiate with his lecturers and teachers to achieve a compromise in his assessment, which allowed him a high degree of passive inclusion. In effect, he had created a virtuous cycle; that is to say, if his impairment prevented him from taking part in a task, he changed its parameters to suit his ability. Michael’s second reason was that he discovered, aesthetically at least, he was interested in figurative more than abstract artwork. He was particularly interested in pursuing his desire to paint realistic subjects, encouraged earlier by Harry. This encouraged Michael to apply to study illustration at degree level. Michael’s third reason is related to his near sight. During his foundation course, he discovered that illustration involved work close to his face, and so again his blindness would not cause a significant problem in his later career. 18

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[During my illustration degree] I did photography, computer work, print. Though I knew I wanted to do painting a lot of the students, some of them became 3D illustrators. We all worked very differently. Probably on the course, I was the most, I had the best facility for drawing, which gave me an advantage in some ways. It also meant that some of them started from the ground, so they developed a lot more than I did over the three years.

Despite his early achievements, Michael feels that he did not do as well as he should have done during his degree course. He passed this course with a 2:2—this is the lowest classification of honors degree in the United Kingdom. However, as Michael rejected his blindness at an early age and struggled with written subjects, he became impervious to negative attitudes to his blindness. Of high importance to Michael is that during his education he mixed with people with sight again and he felt comfortable with them as his peers. Although no clear reasons for this are to be found in this interview, it is interesting to note that his belief in his artistic achievement is so strong that it also helped him find a career. I wasn’t any great shakes [on my degree]. And I was very lucky because my dissertation pulled me up into a 2:2 [class of honors degree]. But I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating, in that of the students on the course I was the only one to go on to work straight away. I think in my year there’s been about three people who are now professional illustrators. Of those I’m probably the most successful. And the professional illustrators’ course is going to set you up as a professional illustrator. So it did that. So you know the illustration mark that I got doesn’t actually represent it.

Understanding Blindness and Visual Art from People Who Are Blind There are three main observations that we can take from these two case studies, which help us to understand the study of blindness and art. The first observation is that it is possible for people who are registered blind, even those who were born without sight, to understand, describe, and create artworks using wholly visual concepts. This observation is most 19

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clearly illustrated in Esref’s case study through his description of the development of a visual understanding and constant discussion of these concepts with his sighted family and peers. This information was subsequently used by Esref during his childhood to form a method of artistic creation and evaluation and was supplemented through his remaining senses—such as his analogy of the dimming of sound as it becomes distant with perspective and the touch of something hot with the color red. According to Anderson, Krathwohl, and Bloom’s (2001) updated taxonomy, Esref and Michael have now become so skilled in understanding visual concepts that they demonstrate sophisticated intellectual skill and an understanding of vision. This is established through the creation of new visual scenes wholly by imagination. Subsequently, both artists also have a better academic understanding of two-dimensional imagery than many sighted people. The second observation from these case studies is that education fails to understand the needs of people born blind and, most important, their capabilities. This is why we tend to use the antonym disability when describing people who have impairments such as blindness, as we tend to mistake adjustments to tasks for incapacity. This is a fault of the system we inhabit. It is possible that if Esref and Michael had attended schools for the blind in their early lives, they may never have encountered artworks in the way that they did. Their curriculum would have been based on a system that did not provide the same opportunities for practicing the fine arts in the way that they did at home or on their own in other classes. Although, admittedly, Michael would have had access to a fine art curriculum, he would not have had the chance to draw as often and with the freedom he had at home to occupy himself at school. As Michael observed, his peers in the school for the blind that he eventually attended were far behind his levels of artistic skill when he arrived. His skill in this respect became so developed that he reportedly found his detailed drawings were superior to many of his sighted peers. The third observation is the reason that both Michael and Esref learned to draw and paint was the learning challenge and mental stimulation. To Michael, it seemed to be the challenge of creating images when the other options of literature and numeracy were placed beyond his reach and sight in class. Subsequently, creativity and close drawing took over the academic challenge that he craved. 20

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For Esref, the challenge was to learn about the scientific image of the world around him in a highly logical manner, to understand what he felt those with sight would understand. What Esref perhaps did not realize is that this drive to understand two-dimensional imagery made him a greater expert than many sighted people would be when asked to explain it. Also of interest during their interviews is that neither Michael nor Esref appeared to relate their artworks to beauty or the overt expression of emotion, as much art is supposed to portray. The second reason that both artists created imagery was to gain the acceptance of their peers. Michael and Esref, like sighted artists, have a need for the acceptance of their talent, knowledge, and creative ability; it could be said that they have developed their own cultural identity through passive inclusion, to gain acceptance from their respective cultural peers. In common with Michael and Esref, there is significant evidence for this from autobiographies on the experience of blindness that demonstrates a similar enjoyment of fine art and aesthetic appreciation. These authors find that it is the experience of the remaining senses working in concert—now referred to as multimodalism (Spence, 2010)—that choose how to recognize and interpret objects as beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant. As the consumers of fine art—or what we can also call physical, plastic, or tangible art—people who are blind find that touch and residual vision play a significant role in their understanding, as it lends something to their emotional appreciation of aesthetics and the purpose of art. This enjoyment, I intend to show in the case studies in the second half of this book, is cultural enjoyment, which develops cultural capital and enables passive inclusion in the arts. For example, the influential autobiographies of Helen Keller (2005), Georgina Kleege (1999, 2013), William McNeice and Kenneth Benson (1964), John Hull (1990, 2003), and Paul Gabias (2003) all feature the importance of their sense of aesthetics. Most important, these authors also feel that the communication of cultural symbols is of the utmost importance to their sense of social and cultural identity, which is often missing by other means. As McNeice and Benson write on this topic: We have learned much through our hands, through our tactile comprehensions, and proprioceptive deep muscle sensitivities. We truly 21

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comprehend the meaning of hundreds upon hundreds of word concepts only because we have literally felt the hot stove, the cold ice, the sharp edge of a knife. We recognize the true meaning of smooth, soft and rough, only because our hands have conveyed to our mind the realization of these and other oral expressions. (McNeice & Benson, 1964, p. 46)

This sense of aesthetics is more closely related to the personal experience of people who are blind because of the social attitudes toward their impairment. It is particularly the cognitive and emotional impact of accepting an impairment that shapes how they see the world more than the actual physical experience. A similar point is made by Oliver Sacks (1993, 2010) in a comparison of autobiographies by and interviews with people who are blind. In his study, he compares the imaginations of two authors, John Hull and Zoltan Torey. Torey finds that his visual perceptions are now enhanced because of his blindness. Hull, however, finds he has lost all sense and memory of what it is to see. Both men’s minds chose two different courses for their imaginations, before and since becoming blind—with Torey having an enhanced visual imagination and Hull losing all visual memory. In particular, Hull discovers that it is easier to build a new cognitive frame of reference rather than adapt his old ones. For Sacks, these psychological differences make it impossible to form a single theory of imagination. [One] can no longer say of one’s mental landscape what is visual, what is auditory, what is image, what is language, what is intellectual, what is emotional—they are all fused together and imbued with our own individual perspectives and values. Such a unified vision shines out from Hull’s memoir no less than from Torey’s, despite the fact that one has become “nonvisual” and the other “hypervisual.” What seems at first to be so decisive a difference between the two men is not, finally, a radical one, so far as personal development and sensibility go. Even though the paths they have followed might seem irreconcilable, both men have “used” blindness (if one can employ such a term for processes which are deeply mysterious, and far below, or above, the level of consciousness and voluntary control) to release their own creative capacities and emotional selves, and both have achieved a rich and full realization of their own individual worlds. (Sacks, 1993, p. 59) 22

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Given our understanding of the capability of many people who are blind, why is our knowledge of blindness and art focused on inability? In the remainder of this and the following chapter, I address a possible answer to this question by proposing that philosophers’ fascination with people who are blind has been detrimental to our true understanding of distorted or nonvisual ability (Hayhoe, 2015). This argument is founded in my previous work on the epistemology of blindness and arts, which disagrees with the belief that the lives of people who are blind are materially different from the lived experiences of people with sight (Hayhoe, 2003, 2005, 2008, 2011a, 2011b). Traditional theories on the comprehension of art by people who are blind, in particular, are largely based on traditional scientific theories of perception and cognition—be they medical, cognitive psychological, physiological, and so on. Originally, many of these theories relied heavily on what is referred to as the deficit model of disability—that is, the belief that impairment is necessarily a disability and subsequently reduces the ability to perform social activity (Barnes, 2012). For instance, the phenomenological psychologist Géza Révész made the following comments in 1950 about the potential for aesthetic capacity in people who are blind: [From] what sources could a blind person, who has never seen the world with all its wealth of forms and colour, derive those manifold experiences? He can never create new forms of expression, for that presupposes a rich and variable phenomenal world, free fantasy arising from symbolic comprehension of nature. This comprehension of nature endows the sighted with that aesthetically founded insight which is the basis of all artistic creation. . . . The man born blind apprehends nature in only one manifestation; the strongest ties bind him to the material sphere; no one born blind is able to become aware of the diversity of nature and to apprehend all the rich and various appearances of objects. (Révész, 1950, pp. 316–17)

What is more, twentieth- and twenty-first-century research on perception is largely experimental in nature, reflecting little on the rhetoric of people who are themselves blind. Several of these experiments have also resorted to blindfolding sighted people in the belief that only the immediate experience of perception is needed to appreciate cognition and 23

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perceptual identity (see, for example, the studies of Hartley, 1990; Jones, 1970; and Révész, 1950). This research often takes its lead from studies on the philosophy of perception, the traditional form of research in this field. Subsequently, these researchers have often drawn reference from Enlightenment and humanist philosophical theories. The aim of this research often does not claim to be primarily for the benefit of students who are blind. Instead, this research focuses on cases of congenital, total blindness that represents, as I observe in the preface, a small minority of the blind population and experiences of blindness. Consequently, the claim of many studies is simply to develop an academic understanding of all perception, using total blindness as an intellectual trend. I have referred to this epistemological trend recently as the cult of the born totally blind man—as all original theory always referred to the male gender alone (Hayhoe, 2015). In the twentieth century, this changed into the cult of the person born totally blind. Contemporary research is also largely focused on the perception of raised drawings or the ability to perceive three-dimensional, pseudorealistic artworks (Hayhoe, 2003, 2013, 2015). When, on rare occasions, researchers investigate people who are blind creating their own works of art or appreciating art in situ, this research most often studies the accuracy of their reproduction. Creative or surreal expression such as that demonstrated by Esref or Michael is very rarely mentioned in these studies, nor is abstraction in artworks. Consequently, there is a gap between research examining the nature of reproduction and of creative activity itself. In the few studies that mention creativity and blindness, theories are often only integrated in comparisons of accuracy, understanding, and simple copying of children with sight (see, for example, Jones, 1970). These experimental works can be contrasted with the work of many mainstream art educators in the latter years of the twentieth century. Many of these studies, such as those of haptic and visual types by Viktor Lowenfeld and W. Lambert Brittain (1987) and studies of Esref by John Kennedy and Igor Juricevic (2006), have observed that a preference for tactile aesthetics and comprehension is independent of level of sight. Work such as that by Lowenfeld and Brittain—and I shall discuss more on the work of Lowenfeld later in this chapter—also mirrors other contemporary studies concerned with theories of creativity in mainstream 24

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art and design education. What now follows is a review of a cross section of these studies of blindness, touch, and art.

The Enlightenment on Blindness and the Perception of Artifacts As I have already discussed, the assumption that sight is the most important sense makes total blindness curious to scientists and philosophers studying the impact of the senses on our consciousness—hence my referral to the cult of the person born totally blind (Hayhoe, 2015). To many scientists and philosophers, the perceptual cognition of people who are blind provides a back door into an appreciation of all our minds, sighted or sightless. The early philosophical literature on the perception of people who are blind split religious and scientific paradigms, emanating as it did from the French, Irish, and English empirical philosophies. These philosophies formed the foundation of what we now call the early Enlightenment of the seventeenth century (Hayhoe, 2015). At that time, a different appreciation of nature, understanding, and intelligence emerged, and traditional religious doctrine—particularly that espoused by the Holy Roman Empire—was challenged. This philosophical paradigm of thought elevated an understanding of blindness to that of a controllable cultural concept in visual artistic and literary representation (Barasch, 2001). Philosophers of the early Enlightenment also created an important precedent in the representation of blindness as an abstracted scientific concept rather than an ethical and intellectual deficit (Hayhoe, 2015)— although, as I will show in the following chapter, this view was not one held by the wider society and affected the art education of people who were blind. This mode of argument led to the first debates on the social challenges of disability and how they could all be ameliorated. William Paulson (1987) argues that in postrevolutionary France, this philosophy produced an overromanticized ideal of the moral superiority of people who are blind. Despite philosophers such as Denis Diderot promoting psychological breakthroughs, Paulson observed that this cultural attitude created a new form of negative mythology on blindness. My own research on the history of the philosophy of blindness has made similar 25

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observations about the subjectivity of cultural beliefs at different points in history (Hayhoe, 2015). Analysis of this research has observed that philosophers around the time of the Enlightenment who studied blindness could be classified according to two poles of theory: the metaphysicists, who theorized blindness through the metaphysical deficit of visual art, nature, aesthetic purity, and direct sensory experience, and the perceptualists, who examined the scientific representation of blindness through its deficit of sensory data as material perception—this is what we now refer to as cognition and intellectual comprehension. Prior to the Enlightenment, perhaps the most well-known metaphysician was the artist, mathematician, and engineer Leonardo da Vinci, who lived in the fifteenth century. Despite the advent of the Renaissance some three hundred years before, da Vinci lived through a period when the belief that artworks could transmit spiritual meaning was prevalent. Da Vinci himself argued that to experience an image was to experience the power of a spiritual icon—the dogmatic belief that images themselves possessed spiritual power that could be transmitted to the viewer—whereas poetry merely had the power to describe the spirit through the voice of the reader (da Vinci, 2008). For da Vinci, it was worse to be blind than to be unable to speak, as blindness reduced an understanding of nature, portrayed as it was more directly through the visual arts. Consequently, to da Vinci, to be blind was to suffer the intellectual and spiritual consequences of your impairment as well as a physical condition. To understand the epistemological and historical context of da Vinci, it is important to understand the social production of visual art in the fifteenth century. As Michael Baxandall (1988) finds, in the fifteenth century, literacy—often based on the classic Italian poets—and mathematics were the preserve of the private education of the middle classes. However, most painting was not the task of an individual but of a workshop, which itself was run by a master and staffed by apprentices and journeymen. In Florence and many other city-states on the Italian peninsula at the time of da Vinci, there was a social hierarchy of the arts, with poetry gaining a higher status than painting and sculpture. Consequently, poetry was felt to be more likely to speak directly to the soul than all other forms of art: 26

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The eye which is called the window of the soul is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature; and the ear is the second, which acquires dignity by hearing of the things the eye has seen. If you, historians, or poets, or mathematicians had not seen the things with your eyes, you could report but imperfectly of them in writing. And if you, O poet, tell a story with your pen, the painter with his brush can tell it more easily, with simpler completeness, and less tedious to follow. If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting. Consider then which is the more grievous defect, to be blind or dumb? (da Vinci, 2008, p. 190)

The first perceptualist of the Enlightenment was the French philosopher René Descartes in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, who attributed physical, material properties to light (Hayhoe, 2015). In Dioptrics—which was originally published in 1637—Descartes invoked the cult of the man born blind to hypothesize that light could be observed at an angle and subsequently had similar physical properties to the tilt of a blind man’s cane (Osler, 2008). This material principle of physics was still a culturally dangerous belief in the seventeenth century, as it contradicted Roman Catholic dogma that light was given by God and was beyond mere physics. Subsequently, like Galileo prior to the Enlightenment, Descartes was attacked by Roman Catholic authorities for this theory and was made to leave his native France for Protestant Holland and later Sweden. Less than thirty years after the Dioptrics was published, the Irish philosopher and father of modern chemistry, Robert Boyle (1664), attributed Descartes’s material logic to the properties of color in his groundbreaking work Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours. In this book, Boyle proposed that color should be interpreted in much the same way that a man who is totally blind could tell the identity of the physical property of objects through texture. Boyle’s evidence for this claim was an empirical study of a man born totally blind, Vermassen, from a village near Maastricht, Netherlands, by a friend and colleague, the English anatomist Finch. Vermassen, it was claimed, could tell the colors of pieces of material simply by feeling their texture. 27

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In the century that followed Descartes, two important perceptualist essays on human understanding—which were arguably the foundation of our Western contemporary psychologies and philosophies of mind—evoked the cult of the man born totally blind. The first was John Locke’s (2001) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which was first published in French in 1688, while Locke was a political dissident in Paris, and then in English in 1690. The second essay was David Hume’s (1748/1975) Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which was one of the most significant pieces of literature at the foundation of the Scottish Enlightenment. Although it is arguable that both essays were to become the most significant literature in the foundation of empirical studies of psychology, their effect on the Western philosophy of mind in this period and the later branch on the phenomenological paradigms of philosophy and psychology is undoubted. And of these two theses, the cult of the born totally blind man became most important. In Locke’s essay, one question posed originally by the Irish philosopher William Molyneux, which appeared in the second English edition of Locke’s work, was to inspire over two hundred years of research into perception. In matter of fact, Molyneux’s question to Locke became so important to our understanding of the resulting studies that Michel Foucault later chose rather sarcastically to argue, “This [question] is one of the two greatest mythical experiences on which the philosophy of the eighteenth century wishes to base its beginning” (Foucault, 1973, p. 65). Molyneux’s question, in its original correspondence, was as follows: A man being born blind and having a globe and a cube, nigh of the same bigness, committed into his hand, and being taught or told, which is called the globe and which the cube, so as easily to distinguish them by touch or feeling; then both things taken from him, and laid on a table. Let us suppose his sight restored to him; whether he could, by his sight, and before he touch them, know which is the globe and which the cube? So whether he could not reach them though they were removed 20 or 1000 feet from him? (Molyneux, 1688)

Like Boyle, in both editions of his essay Locke presented evidence to examine what a person who is blind could understand from birth. Locke’s hypothesis was designed to demonstrate that human consciousness and 28

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what was later called cognition was learned rather than born into a person, as had previously been thought in early science—which was itself influenced by Roman Catholic dogma (Hayhoe, 2015). In one example, Locke described a man he had met who had been blinded by smallpox as a small child. Along with people born blind, Locke observed that this man similarly lacked all understanding of color. Subsequently, Locke concluded that ideas could not be inherited or present at birth, as sensory organs were designed for this purpose alone: “God having fitted men with faculties and means to discover, receive, and retain truths, accordingly as they are employed” (Locke, 2001, p. 42). Locke’s hypothesis was supported by Hume, both in his essay and in a debate with the Glasgow-based philosopher Thomas Reid (Wood, 1986). Hume presented two forms of evidence to support the contention that perceptions and their corresponding conscious images had to be learned. The first piece of evidence was that knowledge was built on sensations in all modes of perception; that is, if there is knowledge we have never experienced, we cannot know it exists, as it is not experienced. The second piece of evidence was Hume’s observation that some concepts of consciousness were solely related to a single perception, such as color to vison and sound to hearing. If true, Hume’s second piece of evidence would be a radical departure from Boyle’s hypothesis, as his interpretation of Vermassen’s ability would appear to suggest otherwise. Of this latter argument, Hume offered Reid the following observation on the conscious knowledge of the blinded and deafened: I affirm, that all our Ideas are copy’d from Impressions. I have endeavoured to build that Principle on two Arguments. The first is desiring any one to make a particular Detail of all his Ideas, where he would always find that every Idea had a correspondent & preceding Impression. If no Exception can ever be found, the Principle must remain incontestable. The second is, that if you exclude any particular Impression . . . as Colours to the blind, Sound to the Deaf, you also exclude the Ideas. (Wood, 1986, p. 416)

Hume’s hypothesis was not without its own controversy. In 1749, the French philosopher Denis Diderot’s hypothesis of consciousness and perceptual acquisition challenged Hume and Locke’s perceptualist philosophy 29

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of mind. Jay (1994) discusses the place of Diderot’s thesis in his “Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See” in relation to its influences from Étienne Bonnot de Condillac in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge and Voltaire in his Elements of the Philosophy of Newton. Diderot, Jay argues, declared touch was at least as important as (if not superior to) sight and provided an essential link with the idea that perception may alter the language we use when referring to concepts of blindness. For Jay, Diderot had two motivations for proposing such an argument. The first motivation was that Diderot believed that ocularcentricity was also the philosophy of the status quo, a status quo that Diderot wanted to challenge. Consequently, to find a philosophy that challenged the fundamental premise of the understanding of consciousness—as proposed by Hume—was to challenge the nature of knowledge itself. The second motivation that Jay proposed was his desire—potentially in opposition to Hume—to examine language as a form of consciousness. Until Lev Vygotsky’s (1978) exploration of similar themes almost two centuries later, this was a radical notion in the philosophy of consciousness. Furthermore, Diderot’s (1999) consequent approach to Molyneux’s question is also important to the philosophy of mind for its consequences on methodology in this field. At this point in eighteenth-century philosophy, it could be argued that the study of the material nature of consciousness separated into two. First, after Diderot, perceptualist philosophies often began from the belief that touch was either emotionally normalized or superior to vision—although metaphysical influences on philosophy after this time rejected this notion, seeing blindness as ethical subnormality (Hayhoe, 2015). Second, other writers used Diderot’s arguments to challenge the political and religious powers that had earlier imprisoned him (Jourdain in Diderot, 1999). In his letter, Diderot exalted blindness and the importance of touch in social movements such as public education, as well as its role in the challenge to religious and academic power. Through touch, people who were blind could now become culturally as well as physically attached to their environment rather than simply understanding the pragmatic material nature of the object. 30

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Subsequently, in formulating his hypothesis Diderot looked beyond the immediately obvious and attempted to imagine what was previously the metaphysical as material. He asserted that touch could be important for social justice and not simply phenomenological understanding. Consequently, Diderot also argued that touch was more important in understanding a person’s existence in relation to the world. Without sight of objects, the memory of existence remained. However, without permanent tactile contact with the world, Diderot had hypothesized a different quality of existence. The nature of the world was not experienced as an outside world but instead as an abstract notion of imagination and consciousness. Consequently, on Molyneux’s question Diderot offered the following hypothesis, giving an observation of sighted infant learning: Is it not a more likely hypothesis that children think that what they no longer see no longer exists, especially as their joy when things they have lost sight of appear again is mixed with surprise? Nurses help them to acquire the notion of a continuance of absent persons by playing a game which consists in hiding the face, and showing it again. Thus, they learn a hundred times in a quarter of an hour that what ceases to appear does not necessarily cease to exist. From this it follows that we owe the notion of the continuous existence of objects to experience, of their distance to the sense of touch; that it would be surprising should the aid of one of the senses be necessary to another; and that touch, which ascertains the existence of objects exterior to ourselves when present to our eyes, is similarly the sense to which the confirmation not only of these figures, and other details of these objects, but even their presence is reserved. (Diderot, 1999, p. 181)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the new philosophy of phenomenology again sought to understand the nature of human perception and consciousness. Critical of Descartes and Locke, phenomenological philosophies of mind again attempted to approach perceptualist methodologies from a fresh perspective (Husserl, 2012). Although the phenomenological movement sought to reformulate the philosophies of the early Enlightenment, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002) resurrected Descartes’s perceptualist example of the

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blind man’s cane in the 1940s. In doing so, he re-theorized the notion of vibrations to hypothesize the importance of the realm of touch. Reformulating the cult of the born totally blind person, phenomenologically influenced perceptualist hypotheses were also still being discussed in the later years of the twentieth century and in the new millennium. For instance, in his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the Yugoslavian American philosopher Thomas Nagel (1991) analyzed the subjectivity of perception through the experience of an animal for whom inherent sightless is normal. Like Hume, Nagel argued against the hypothesis that language can be used as a mode of supplementing perceptual understanding, finding instead that analogies such as those based on synaesthesia are misunderstandable. More particularly, Nagel hypothesized that using language with direct links to visual reference, such as describing bread as “looking warm” or sky that “looks cold,” with people who are congenitally blind is less likely to garner understanding from them; that is, if a person has never seen, he or she will never be able to understand that which he or she has never experienced. This would tend to suggest a deficit hypothesis of the cognitive potential of people who are blind. As he stated on this subject, One might try . . . to develop concepts that could be used to explain to a person blind from birth what it was like to see. One would reach a blank wall eventually, but it should be possible to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present, and with much greater precision. The loose inter-modal analogies—for example, “Red is like the sound of a trumpet”—which crop up in discussions of this subject are of little use. That should be clear to anyone who has both heard a trumpet and seen red. But structural features of perception might be more accessible to objective description, even though something would be left out. And concepts alternative to those we learn in the first person may enable us to arrive at a kind of understanding even of our own experience which is denied us by the very ease of our description and lack of distance that subjective concepts afford. (Nagel, 1991, p. 179)

The British philosopher Brian Magee (Magee & Milligan, 1998) also hypothesized a similar deficit of cognitive ability in those who are born blind, against Diderot’s notion of sensory equality. During a correspondence debate with his friend Martin Milligan, a British philosopher who 32

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was born blind, Magee argued that Milligan’s blindness did not allow him to comprehend the experience of a sighted person. More particularly, Magee hypothesized that Milligan’s sensory experiences and cognitive understanding of the world were broken into chunks of time and comprehension; that is, Milligan had to experience his environment by sensing only single objects at a time. Consequently, Magee hypothesized, it was impossible for Milligan to think of sighted concepts requiring distance. Like Diderot, Milligan countered Magee, arguing that sight is a hungry perception, as it must experience everything all the time. In this way, sighted people have a desire to perceive constantly, imagining all visual experiences as false aesthetic experiences. For Milligan, sighted people in general could not make the distinction between genuine, truthful experiences and aesthetics. However, for Magee, sight had different levels of aesthetic understanding, and only during moments in seeing were the sighted exposed to “higher” aesthetic pleasures that could never be experienced by someone born blind. On this argument, he stated: Because the realization seems to be lacking, your conception of the pleasures of sight appears altogether too aesthetic, as if someone were to suppose that the only pleasures involved in eating and drinking were those of the gourmet. There are, of course, aesthetic visual pleasures, but for most of us these are associated with rare or special occasions— looking at a painting or a landscape, seeing a beautiful woman, going to the ballet. Not many of us are lucky to see beautiful objects every day, whereas the normal pleasures of seeing, which is some sort of hungeredfor and deeply needed satisfyingness, accompanies us all the time we are awake. (Magee & Milligan, 1998, p. 135)

There are modern perceptualists who have argued against regarding blindness and art solely in the realm of deficit, pointing instead to qualitative differences rather than quantitative grades of experience. For instance, the English philosopher Robert Hopkins (2003) argues that sighted people differ from those who are blind only in their perception of tactile pictures, although he observes that what he regards as largely visual concepts, such as distance and perspective, have different qualities to people who are blind. Consequently, Hopkins has argued that sighted 33

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people have an advantage in this regard, even when their interpretation is tactile. Hopkins also argues that sculpture is an exceptional art form for people who are blind and subsequently one in which they can achieve equality. When feeling a sculpture, Hopkins argues, the viewer is an individual participant. This is because sculpture stimulates all the senses and is a unique form of art in this respect; it lends itself to further interpretation beyond that of mere sightedness. Subsequently, whereas paintings are created primarily for vision, Hopkins finds that sculpture is a more democratic form of aesthetic. It is one that lends itself to a far freer, qualitative interpretation. [Sculpture’s] fundamental source is our awareness of our own possibilities for movement and action. That awareness is not something we derive from any particular sense, so much as something which informs experience in every sense modality. Thus, in offering us the form of engagement [Suzanne] Langer describes, sculpture is neither visual, nor tactile, but a complex mixture of the sensory, as standardly conceived, with our awareness of our own bodies, and their possible interactions with the world. (Hopkins, 2003, p. 26)

These philosophies have provided testable theories through experimental methodology. More important, these philosophies have also provided educators with a toolkit with which we can view changes in social and academic attitudes toward blindness. However, it would also seem that these attitudes reflect the changes in fashions of culture and the trends in a greater social discussion as much as they try to discover truths about blindness. It can be argued that knowledge on blindness in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in particular has seen a shift toward more quantifiable notions of performance ability. Consequently, this has enhanced the notion of blindness as assessable deficit, reinforcing the attitude of educators that people who are blind are less educable than sighted people. Furthermore, it has fueled a modern scientific discussion that regards perception as almost the only aspect of blindness worth studying and one in which the study of cultural development is largely ignored. It is to this experimental and observational literature that I now turn to in the remainder of this chapter, to illustrate what I find is a modern scientific misunderstanding of blindness. 34

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Experimental Studies of Shape Perception and Distance in Blindness and Touch The perceptualist philosophies discussed above can be seen within a paradigm of understanding blindness in the realm of natural science and philosophy—this was often expressed in the Enlightenment as a “natural” biological or God-given order (Hayhoe, 2016). The primary common denominator of many of these studies is the classification of blindness as lack of perception and subsequently a deficit of consciousness. A substrand of these studies also centered on the common understanding that the bodies of people who are blind adapted to favor touch or hearing perceptions to compensate for their lack of sight. This process allowed what would normally be considered an understanding of secondary perceptions to develop more than they would in people with sight. However, truly empirical evidence to support such hypotheses was rare in the early development of this philosophy. Consequently, in 1709 the Irish philosopher, physician, and Protestant cleric George Berkeley (1899) designed the first advanced experiment to address Molyneux’s question. Berkeley’s study became possible because in this period, surgical techniques had allowed remarkable advances in medicine, and he gained the opportunity to study a boy recovering from congenital cataracts—that is to say, cataracts that had been present since birth. Berkeley’s study had such an impact at the time that it was cited in Diderot’s “Letter on the Blind” and provided evidence for the ethical as well as the sensory equality of the born totally blind man (Diderot, 1999). Berkeley’s data was based on structured observations of the boy performing tasks given by Berkeley and monitored within a controlled environment. What Berkeley observed made him conclude—like Locke, Boyle, and Descartes before him—that vision was not an inherent physical function of consciousness; it was one that was learned individually. Berkeley noted that when his subject gained sight for the first time, he had to readjust from his previously tactile environment to the new sighted one. Berkeley then found that the boy had little notion of visual shape, distance, or perspective. On this, he noted: [A] man born blind, being made to see, would at first have no idea of distance by sight; the sun and stars, the remotest objects as well as the 35

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nearer, would all seem to be in his eye, or rather in his mind . . . each as near to him as the perceptions of pain and pleasure, or the most inward passions of his soul. (Berkeley, 1910, p. 187)

It was Berkeley’s study that informed further phenomenological studies in the twentieth century, informed largely by the German psychologist David Katz’s (1925, 2013) attempts to develop an empirical vocabulary of touch. There are two significant paradigms in the exploration of nonvisual perception of objects and space, in accordance with deficit models of blindness connected to what I call Anglo-German strands of philosophy—that is, studies that largely originated in German- and Englishspeaking academic cultures. The first paradigm was a strand of experimentation that tested quasimedical tests conducted by the German psychologist M. von Senden, who published his results in German in 1932 (Hayhoe, 2015). This study also appears to be the first study of its kind to examine Molyneux’s question specifically in relation to the arts by using contemporary notions of experimentation. Von Senden’s research investigated the link between the perception and understanding of aesthetic objects and space through structured observations and the examination of medical records of a small sample of people who were blind, although these records were made post hoc by numerous surgeons and doctors and consequently had little similarity in terms of method of diagnosis or treatment. A result of von Senden’s lack of empiricism was that his work received significant criticism for its methodology and analysis of evidence (Révész, 1950; Dobson, 1982; Dodds, 1980; Gregory, 1974). Corresponding to a deficit understanding of blindness, von Senden concluded that people who are blind had no sense of space or objects from tactile experience alone. The first person to publish a significant rebuttable to von Senden was Révész (1950), a psychologist who was Hungarian by birth but who had later studied under Katz in Germany. Sampling his participants more thoroughly than von Senden, Révész conducted his study through structured observations of people who were early blind or born blind, sighted, 36

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and sighted but blindfolded. Each person was asked to model objects Révész provided or observed in contrived touch exercises. In addition to conducting these observations, Révész referred to historical case studies of artists born blind or who became blind as a result of war. Révész’s findings were presented as verbal observations, photographs of artifacts, and acts of creation. He also analyzed the data using mainly qualitative comparisons of his subjects’ case studies. Révész’s analysis shows that, in general, the perception of space of people born blind and their ability to identify objects through touch was better than that of sighted participants. However, despite this observation on the ability of his blind participants, in his conclusions Révész doubted the relationship between touch and higher cognitive or creative functions. In particular, Révész concluded that people who are blind did not seem to be able to appreciate aesthetics through touch as people with sight do visually—this aspect of Révész’s finding was despite his beliefs in the existence of creative visual and haptic types, whose creative preferences were separate from levels of sight. Von Senden’s and Révész’s theory that blindness signified aesthetic deficit was itself rebutted in a later study by the English psychologists R. L. Gregory and Jean Wallace (Gregory, 1974) in the early 1960s. This study was possibly the most important contemporary study of recovery from blindness in respect of what it achieved and the citations it received as a general model by later studies. Based on the empirical study of Berkeley, Gregory and Wallace studied a man they named SB who was born blind and had just had congenital cataracts removed through surgery. During their study, Gregory and Wallace observed SB from the time he came around from surgery through his readjustment to his sighted life after hospitalization. In addition, Gregory and Wallace also interviewed members of SB’s family to discover how he previously perceived objects, and they examined SB’s school and medical records. During their study, they also asked him to undergo testing using basic medical instruments to check on his eyes’ physical recovery. During observations, Gregory and Wallace included cultural elements in their observations, taking SB to see museums and monuments in city centers. In these new visual environments, Gregory and Wallace recorded SB’s reactions and his ability to readjust to these settings. As Berkeley 37

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observed in his earlier study, SB appeared to take time readjusting to this visual environment, and he found it difficult to readjust cognitively to this new conceptualization of his world. In addition to observations and tests, Gregory and Wallace diverted from strict experimental models of study, incorporating educational and creative exercises where possible. For example, when SB had begun adjusting to his newly acquired sight, they asked him to do advanced visual exercises, the most difficult of which was drawing. On this they observed, “[SB] was most doubtful of his ability to draw, but once started, he enjoyed it, and attacked it with concentration” (Gregory, 1974, p. 107). It is arguable that what makes this study one of the most important studies of its kind was Gregory and Wallace’s hypothesis of cross-modal transfer. This hypothesis proposed that while readjusting to sight, SB managed to relate his previous experience of touching objects to his new sighted experience of the same objects when given time to relate both sensory experiences. For instance, although he did not automatically recognize an engine he had felt while blind, when he felt it and saw it simultaneously, he could later recognize its pieces by sight alone. Since Gregory and Wallace’s study, several other researchers have attempted to reproduce cross-modal transfer using experimental models. These studies have either taken place in laboratory settings, such as those of the British psychologists J. Dobson (1982) and A. Dodds (1980), or observed participants in situ as Gregory and Wallace did, such as the British neurologist Oliver Sacks (1993). For instance, Dodds studied the tactile perception of children who were blind and sighted in parallel. Although his experiments attempted to refine von Senden’s methodology, Dodds’s analysis also produced strong evidence to support Révész’s and Gregory and Wallace’s observations on spatial and tactile awareness of artifacts. Consequently, Dodds wrote: We are still far from understanding the actual processes involved in visualisation. However, von Senden’s view that the congenitally blind cannot represent space must now be laid to rest. Even when one further restricts his statement to mean the representation of space by means of the Euclidean system, the findings that at least one congenitally blind 38

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subject could achieve such a feat leads to a fairly firm rejection of such a notion. (Dodds, 1980, p. 133)

However, unlike Gregory and Wallace, Dodds’s studies focused on perceptual development in blind children, a form of study that was the focus of the latter decades of the twentieth century; children had been seldom studied since Berkeley’s original experiment. Although it could be argued that these experiments reflected an era when the ethics of experimentation were questionable, this work formed a more sophisticated empirical model of early tactile development. For instance, Dodds (1980) observed that sighted children did not have a better sense of pattern recognition, whereas blind children simply grew used to different forms of pattern recognition. Additionally, like Gregory and Wallace, these studies doubted the deficit of blindness, proposing a separate perceptual culture. Similar arguments were also made in this era by researchers studying the social and educational development of people who are blind. The American educationalists Emerson Foulke and Philip Hatlen (1992) produced similar conclusions on studying the interplay between language and tactile perception. Although they also observed qualitative differences in the development of language by children born blind, like Dodds did, Foulke and Hatlen disagreed with the premise that this signified a deficit or disadvantage. Instead, Foulke and Hatlen argued that many of these qualitative differences could be overcome practically through the contrivance of modern technologies. As they wrote on this issue, The devices spawned by today’s technology can often reduce and sometimes eliminate handicaps resulting from visual impairment. If the products of modern technology are properly chosen and used, many VIPs [visually impaired people] who are now unemployed or under-employed can become productive members of their communities, and enjoy full lives. With well-developed skills and appropriate technical aids, they need not be passive participants in life styles dictated by others. (Foulke & Hatlen, 1992, p. 49)

Over the span of the twentieth century, experimental psychology has also been entrenched in the minutiae of perception and its relationship to 39

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consciousness and cognition. Conversely, studies in education have made inroads into understanding how tactile sensory experience can benefit children’s cognitive, linguistic, and emotional development. For instance, prior to World War II, Viktor Lowenfeld (Lowenfeld, 1951; Michael, 1981) and his brother Berthold Lowenfeld (Lowenfeld, 1971) studied the educational development of blind children. Unlike their contemporaries, their research observed that visual art had immense emotional benefits for people who are blind. The Lowenfelds also studied blindness as a holistic concept rather than treating it as per physiology, cognition, and consciousness alone. Viktor Lowenfeld was a sculptor by training and began his teaching career in a school for the blind in 1930s Austria, prior to its annexation by Hitler. While at this school, Lowenfeld taught a girl called Camilla who was born deaf-blind and whom he described as initially uncommunicative, socially introverted, and unruly (Michael, 1981). Traditional teaching methods with children who were deaf-blind appeared ineffective with Camilla, leading Lowenfeld to experiment by teaching her a conceptualization of her world through sculpture. Initially, Lowenfeld created a system of communication involving touch and reproduction of body parts, observing that Camilla’s tactile awareness developed her confidence. Following these lessons, Lowenfeld noted that Camilla also became noticeably happier at school. Lowenfeld later re-created this system of education in the United Kingdom and then the United States, broadening his focus of research to encompass comparative studies of sighted and blind children. In the United States, his research also changed from a focus on creative performance to the interpretation of products and artifacts; this I refer to as object-based research. This new strand of research led Viktor Lowenfeld to a hypothesis of visual and haptic types, like that of Révész in the same era. This hypothesis represented a significant departure from the conceptualization of tactile engagement, with clay sculpture being more than simply a productive activity for students who are blind. Instead, Lowenfeld hypothesized that sculpture could also be a predictive qualitative measurement of the emotional and intellectual preferences of all students. This is how Lowenfeld described these two types: 40

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Some weak sighted people immediately apply their eyes too closely to anything which attracts their attention, even if they have only the most rudimentary vision. Others, even though they possess considerable visual power, approach everything through the sense of touch and use their eyes only when some external factor compels them to do so. The former try to maintain contact with their environment also visually. They react strongly to light stimuli and are visually easily distracted. The latter react exclusively to light stimuli. Let us call the first the visual type; and the other the haptic type, although both designations are imperfect. (Lowenfeld, 1952, p. 87)

Lowenfeld’s findings influenced writing by later teachers such as the American educationalist R. W. Harris (1979), who argued for a more diverse art curriculum for students who are blind. It would be the purpose of these advanced curricula, Harris suggested, to allow for a greater emphasis on haptic perception. However, away from the creative pedagogical methodology of educational studies, traditional psychology continued to focus on the perceptualism of the Enlightenment. Consequently, scientific studies on blindness and the perception of artifacts were still largely influenced by a presumed quantitative deficit of blindness. This focus on deficit has arguably limited research and done little to help us understand how we relate different sensations to thought processes. William Schiff and Emerson Foulke (1982), for instance, maintained that Katz and Gibson influenced later studies of psychological hypotheses, although they felt that further hypothecation should focus on the meanings and effects of this perception on higher-conscious understanding. Similarly, Nagel and Magee suggested that tactile experiences have a quantitatively different quality to that of the processing of visual perceptions, relegating people who are blind to almost a subspecies of humanity. As politics, art, and the social sciences have their postmodern eras, it would seem that research on blindness and the perception of artifacts—or any other form of nonvisual spatial perception—is finally approaching a truly post-deficit era (Hayhoe, 2015). Importantly, this body of literature now regards blindness as a subjective trait; that is, social and cultural facets of a person who is blind’s personality are more important than his or her level of blindness in comprehending the world. 41

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The most important body of research on this subject is that on the understanding and performance of drawings and language by people who are blind. Although this research has no historical question to refer to, researchers examining this topic appear to be attempting to gain an understanding of drawings themselves, and not just of people who are blind. Subsequently, the product itself is fundamental to these researchers rather than its process of creation (Eriksson, 2003). Twentieth-century studies on the influence of language on perception have also observed that pattern and object recognition is as much a problem of memory as one of perception or the ability to reproduce from perception. Such studies have supported a qualitative interpretation of perceptual difference, supporting the notion that blindness is not a deficit in the comprehension of art. For example, prior to World War II, Leonard Carmichael, H. P. Hogan, and A. A. Walker’s (1932) experiments found that labels can influence sighted people’s reproduction of images. More recently, perceptualist psychologists and educationalists have also hypothesized that the symbolic comprehension of graphic imagery by people who are blind performed in a similar way. Similarly, British psychologists Linda Pring and Alison Eardley (2003, 2007) studied the structure of touch perception and examined the conception of information derived from tactile drawings. In the report of their studies, both researchers hypothesized that language, when used in conjunction with tactile works of art, often affects the way that blind viewers perceive such images. The postmodern perceptualist research examines the way that threedimensional objects and environments are converted into two-dimensional representations by the imagination. These studies centered on the perception of tactile drawings and were undertaken in highly controlled laboratory conditions. For instance, many researchers in the latter decades of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century compared the work of children with sight and those who were blind. Their purpose was to portray what have previously been visual concepts, such as visual metaphor and perspective, as not reliant on a single sense (see Gabias, 2003; Grunwald, 2008; Heller, 2000, 2003; Heller & Ballesteros, 2012; Heller, McCarthy, & Clark, 2005; Jansson & Holmes, 2003; Kennedy, 1974, 1993, 1997, 2008, 2013; Kennedy & Juricevic, 2006; Kennedy & Merkas, 2000; Millar, 1975). 42

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Similar postmodern research is also focused on the interaction of all nonvisual senses from impressions, particularly in cultural environments such as museums (Levent & Pascual-Leone, 2014). Recent research has also examined the interplay of the senses, concluding that individual senses should not be examined in isolation. For instance, the work of Anglo-Canadian and Canadian psychologists John Kennedy and Cynthia Merkas (2000) observed that there is a universal understanding of perspective and visual metaphor beyond vision. Furthermore, theory derived from the multimodal laboratory of British psychologist Charles Spence (Spence, 2010; Röder, Rösler, & Spence, 2004; Gallace, Tan, & Spence, 2006) found that senses interplay to form a single sensory image, and that senses have similar mechanisms. Although disputed by philosophers such as Hopkins (2000), Kennedy has also been particularly successful in establishing the tactile ability of people who are blind in comprehending multimodal creative development. For instance, Kennedy (2008, 2013) observed that people who were born blind perceived elements of drawings that were previously only thought to be visual through touch alone. In addition, he has hypothesized that by comparing ancient drawings such as cave paintings to those of people who are blind, we can observe creative activity in a nonsocially manipulated state (Kennedy, 1993).

Conclusion Given the nature of this contemporary research, studies on the creative and cultural development of people who are blind appears ready to claim a new interdisciplinary paradigm—one that is beyond the crude analysis of perceptualist Enlightenment philosophies and early psychological phenomenologies. In other words, we are now on the edge of a new form of the post-deficit model of blindness and a truer understanding of the holistic relationship of creative activity, picture comprehension, and a more complex notion of identity. In terms of this book, this understanding should be understood as based on art as intellectual development rather than on art as immediately perceived object. Although modern philosophies appear to be unable to deviate from this form of hypothecation, perceptual artistic comprehension 43

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is at last emerging as an activity that can be equally valuable for people who are blind and sighted. Consequently, as I argued above, this form of study needs a new research paradigm beyond the realm of experimentation and quantifiable notions of culture and creativity. This call for a change is not unique, though it is still rooted in a philosophy of mind and a phenomenological psychology. However, before moving forward to understand this new holistic understanding of cultural development, it is important to understand how the deficit paradigm discussed in this chapter has been applied in cultural institutions and educational activities. The next chapter turns to this issue.

Note 1.  I would like to thank Ruby Cohen, a fashion design student from Central Saint Martin’s School of Art, London, who allowed me use of part of her interview with the artist for this book, as well as Esref’s manager, Joan Eroncel, for translating our discussions and Ruby’s questions.

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THE EARLIEST ART EDUCATION FOR PEOPLE WHO WERE BLIND

Research Notes Museums in North America and Europe have made exhibitions inclusive to people who are blind for over a hundred years. The first of these recorded tours and courses were in northeast England and New York and were based on natural history collections (Hayhoe, 2013). This chapter discusses these developments, examines the development of museum initiatives, and examines the educational philosophies they are based on. This discussion is designed to provide the reader with the cultural context and environment of the study of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the following chapters. The intention of this chapter is to put the case study of the Met in a social, cultural, and historical context. After originally finding a dearth of writing on the background of art in museums,1 I earlier decided to research this field to cover the core issues. The literature search started in the research libraries of national and local associations, a search of library databases, and the web. This literature provided a good sample of existing research, unique literature, and relevant older documents, such as school and society annual reports. From this search, literature was found in other specialist repositories relating to schools and older institutions too, such as royal societies, records offices, universities, museums, and galleries. In this further search, historical organizations were approached directly, and some of their original sites were visited to collect data. However, 45

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because of the variable archiving in different locations, documents were collected from some organizations more than others, and this is reflected in the literature I cite in this chapter. After reviewing the documents some years ago, and after conversations with individuals in these organizations, trends were identified in the field of formal touch, aesthetic, and arts education. These trends show that over the past two centuries, in different locations, educators and philanthropists have created educational movements that govern the way arts are taught. These movements have overlapped but also seem to have been constructed of four basic elements: religious morality, vocational training, academic education, and personal expression. Current Developments in Providing Inclusion for People Who Are Blind in Museums Museum courses and tours for people who are blind have increased over the course of the last century and are expanding further in the early decades of the twenty-first century. For example, in the 1950s J. E. Bartlett (1955) found a growing number of exhibits and tours for blind visitors in the United States, although their scope remained limited. In the late 1980s, the results of a survey of five thousand museums in the United States discovered that eleven hundred schemes provided access through specialized tours and support (Shore & Jacinto, 1987). Inclusion in art education also became a legal requirement for all museums, galleries, and monuments after the introduction of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990—for public museums, compliance has become an important requirement for access to funding. Surveys on blindness and inclusion in the public arts have largely advocated nonvisual approaches as a form of inclusion. For instance, touch is an essential element of teaching and learning for people who are blind in museums according to a survey of museums for the United Kingdom’s Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB; Hillis, 2005) in the new millennium. More particularly, the RNIB’s survey discovered that touch exhibits and Braille were still prevalent (Hillis, 2005). Similar literature has also argued the problem is the purely visual nature of many artworks, with 46

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much literature emphasizing the emotional importance of being able to touch objects (Chan & Siu, 2013; Chatterjee, MacDonald, Prytherch, & Noble, 2008; Devlieger, Renders, Froyen, & Wildiers, 2006; Levent & Pascual-Leone, 2014; Wojton, Heimlich, & Shaheen, 2016). Comparable findings are made by Katie Stringer (2014) within the broader spectrum of special needs in cultural education. Traditionally, approaches to inclusion in museums have also followed the practice of developing special courses and tours, which leaves people who are blind separated from sighted visitors—with these separate tours largely being based on touch (see, Kleege, 2013). For instance, earlier in this millennium Elisabeth Axel and Nina Levent (2003) reported on many initiatives, both in museums they have worked with and through Art Education for the Blind (AEB). These initiatives centered on handling sessions and descriptions of artworks (Art Beyond Sight, 2016a; Henrich, Cleveland, & Wolverton, 2014; Levent & Muyskens Pursley, 2013). More recently, AEB’s protocols have led to city and monument tours of America, such as their New York Beyond Sight initiative in the new millennium (Art Beyond Sight, 2016b). Customized in-museum approaches have also been developed in response to antidiscrimination laws and attempts to reach out to a diverse community. For instance, Street Thoma (2013) discussed his approach to touch tours and classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, examining the availability of their collection for handling sessions. In London, Barry Ginley (2013) established a holistic approach to developing inclusion for people who are blind at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). Ginley’s approach involves removing physical barriers to touch, staff training, developing technologies, and employing disabled people as accessibility officers; Ginley, the disability and access officer at the V&A, is himself blind. A similar approach to developing independence for blind visitors in the museum was advocated by Georgia Krantz (2013) at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. In addition to theoretical and in-museum approaches, technological approaches to cultural inclusion are evolving rapidly. Traditional approaches in this literature largely focus on the use of three-dimensional and touchable objects to make cultural environments more inclusive. For instance, Gabriela Celani’s research team (Celani, Zattera, de Oliveira, & 47

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Lopes da Silva, 2013) recently proposed a system of touchable architectural models that could be used to teach urban environments to students who were blind. Similarly, Beth Ziebarth’s (2010) white paper saw an increasing use of tactile technologies in inclusive information, such as maps of galleries and cities and standards for Braille texts, and in exhibits themselves, including talking touchable models. A similar trend in intelligent systems also saw the development of technologies that can detect the location of visitors and provide information relating to specific exhibits. For example, Joe Strechay and Tara Annis (2012) surveyed many devices that provided electronic audio and tactile descriptions of environments and exhibits. These devices often used GPS to locate the visitor in the museum or monument, triggering information about the artworks nearby. Protocols for devices that can locate a person who is blind in a museum and provide information have also been proposed to standardize digital approaches. For example, AUXie and similar multimodal mobile guides are written about in mainstream computing journals and books (Dulyan & Edmunds, 2010; Ghiani, Leporini, & Paternò, 2008). These interactive technological models also influence theatrical artworks in the twenty-first century. The most notable of these models was used by The Question, designed by Extant in 2010 (Rolfe, 2010). This installation was staged wholly in the dark and navigated by a vibrating handheld tool called “the Lotus,” which responded to GPS signaling. As of recently, a growing body of literature also focuses on web-based provision of information within and descriptions of museums as a tool of inclusion. For instance, Eleanor Lisney’s research team (Lisney, Bowen, Hearn, & Zedda, 2013) found that the provision of inclusive information on museum websites using universal design strategies, such as the description of graphics and the development of inclusive text to discuss inclusive provision, increases inclusion prior to visits. Similarly, Jonathan Bowen (2003) emphasized the importance of technical text and graphic protocols that can be read by screen readers such as JAWS to make museums inclusive. Despite these initiatives, there remains criticism of inclusive provision in cultural environments, such as museums. For instance, Belıks Garip and M. Şahin Bülbül (2014) applied the barrier hunting method to education, identifying six primary barriers to museum education for people who are blind—these include barriers to the physical area, materials, information, 48

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validity of information, safety of areas, and safety of materials in museum exhibits. By another measure, in a study of inclusion in Greek museums, Harikleia Kanari and Vassilis Argyropoulos (2014) found that inclusion is stifled by a lack of cooperation between museums and schools. More worryingly, students who are blind see little relevance of museums in their general education. Similarly, Beaux Guarini (2015) and Judi Davis (2008) argued that inclusion is not simply the provision of information or separate courses that bring people who are blind into the museum. Instead, they feel that inclusion relates more to philosophical than material provision, calling for a greater engagement of people who are blind in general as a greater need. This approach presupposes that separate courses and labels only provide token inclusion and access, whereas a universal policy that provides parity of exhibits in the museum is more effective. Access is not just elevators and Braille beneath the buttons on elevator panels or Braille on bathroom doors; access is not curb cuts, ramps, or wheelchair-accommodating toilet stalls with sturdy rails around the toilets. Access means that there is an equal opportunity for the disabled to enjoy any public presentation. (Davis, 2008, p. 21)

There is also controversy in the belief that inclusion for blind visitors should exclude elements of vision. For example, in a recent study I find that despite the fact that most people who are blind in the United Kingdom have residual vison, the use of enhanced visual experience remains rare in English museums (Hayhoe, 2013). Likewise, Karen De Coster and Gerrit Loots (2004) see that art education for people who are blind needs to include more visual media, as most people who are blind will relate to this sense more than touch perceptions alone—even if visitors have only a little vision. What follows in this chapter continues this criticism of the separate nature of inclusion in museums. It does so by continuing the argument from the previous chapter that inclusion is affected by legacies of cultural contexts. In addition, I feel that the notion that touch is the sole or main sensory experience of most of the blind community is wrong. I also hypothesize that the stereotyping of people who are blind detrimentally influences notions of access and inclusion. 49

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More specifically, in this chapter I hypothesize that Hume’s theory that nothing can be understood of natural concepts without sensing them contributes to passive exclusion. I start this process by examining the influences on the arts education of people who are blind in separate institutions. In doing so, I make a case that to understand current strategies of museum inclusion, we must see it as a part of the evolution of earlier asylums and schools for the blind. These educational influences are a separate and pernicious form of passive exclusion, developed largely on cultural influences external to learning theory. These influences also see the application of a moral dogma—which itself is influenced by religious doctrine—and economic expedience.

The Influence of Protestant Asylums on Art Education The first approaches to museum education for people who are blind were designed to be part of touch education within schools for the blind, to teach the scale of objects discussed in classes (Charlton Deas, 1913; Laidlaw Vaughan, 1914). These touch courses and tours for people who were blind, which appeared in the early twentieth century, mainly featured natural and anthropological history that were not normally available in schools. Consequently, a cultural tradition of accessing exhibits through touch evolved as part of the educational provision of many museums, galleries, and monuments and as an extension of formal education. On examining the touch education that was reproduced in these museums, what further strikes the reader is the way that morality influences theories of teaching. In this way, the influence of morality also detrimentally affects the logical development of a powerful strategy of education and inclusion. Through this education, elements of the visual world can also be taught. This has previously led me to describe what I call the ethic of disability as being as important as a classification of human ability to inclusion (Hayhoe, 2015, 2016). This observation on Western education is far from unique. For example, nonconformist Protestant doctrine became more readily 50

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available to the working and underclasses after the time of the English Civil War in the seventeenth century (Thompson, 2001). In the underclass, I include people who are financially disadvantaged as well as working-class disabled people and others whose traits were thought to be abnormal. Under the previous linking of church and royalist state, social inclusion was restricted by a lack of public education in many professions and activities that bore high cultural status. Subsequently, the public system of education that evolved in Europe and then North America in the nineteenth century often relied on wealthy philanthropists. These philanthropists mainly provided an education for the poor of their communities. As this book examines a U.S. context of touch education, it is important to note the religious background that drove teaching in schools for the blind. In the United States, the philanthropists who founded these schools were often Protestant and driven by an ethical sense of public duty as part of their religion. Importantly, Protestant denominations in the nineteenth century also felt that it was their duty to provide technical careers to people who could not afford fee-paying schools so that they could earn a living. This form of education produced opportunities for self-development and increased the population of ethically educated and skilled working-class craftspeople; I do not use the masculine gender alone in this context, as having a trade was not exclusively male at the time, and education was often for mixed genders. This form of education would also influence the art education of students who are blind. The legacy of Protestant vocational education is still very much in evidence in modern forms of teaching in schools for the blind (Hayhoe, 2015). Up until the early 1980s, for example, handcrafts were a large part of vocational education and training for students who attended these schools. In the United States, the then American Federation for the Blind (AFB) regarded the training of handcrafts as an important element of touch education. Moreover, their term for this form of activity, industrial arts, was directly linked to the production of goods for sale. The phrase industrial arts is itself telling. In this era, arts and morality were still linked heavily to the production of wealth and self-maintenance. 51

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The following teacher training manual published in 1960 by the AFB illustrates this ethic powerfully: [A] frequently expressed value of the industrial arts is its vocational guidance or “finding” value. Whether the teacher gives special attention to the possibilities of shop courses for aiding youth to make wise educational and vocational choices, such values may be obtained. (American Federation for the Blind, 1960, p. 13)

The ethic that was the founding philosophy of these schools focused on a need to make what Protestants termed asylums financially viable and to prevent laziness. It is to this Protestant influence on education that I turn first in my analysis of art education for the blind, as it was through Protestants that this ethic surfaced during the Enlightenment. Protestant asylums began at the end of the eighteenth century in a time when the first asylums were formed by wealthy foundations in Liverpool, Edinburgh, and Bristol. However, despite these Protestant influences, it is important to mention the differences between Protestant asylum culture and the Roman Catholic institute culture at the end of the eighteenth century. Prior to the first asylum for the blind, the social theory of enlightenment through touch education was formulated by a blind Presbyterian minister called Thomas Blacklock. His social theory was subsequently published anonymously in 1774 in an essay on the education of people who were blind in the Edinburgh Magazine and Review (Demodocus, 1774). Blacklock, an acquaintance of Hume, was known as an enlightened philosopher in this era and one who had earlier been refused a parish because of his blindness (Heller, 1979; Weygand, 2010). Written in the same correspondence style as Denis Diderot’s “Letter on the Blind,” Blacklock signed his name with the pseudonym Demodocus—a name given to the blind oracle and bard in Homer’s Odyssey. Like Diderot, in his essay Blacklock observed the increasing number of people who were blind without professions and reverted to begging in Edinburgh. This was an issue that he proposed would need an ethical solution. Citing instances of academically successful blind peers—such as the mathematician Professor Nicholas Saunderson of Cambridge University— 52

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Blacklock proposed an initial approach of vocational education and literary instruction. Blacklock’s approach separated curricula as per the given talents of the student and was designed to provide students with a moral trade at an early leaving age. On this issue, Blacklock believed that education should be developed through the stimulation, not the denial, of sensory experience: [Previously the] blind were objects of compassion, because their spheres of action and observation were limited; and it is certainly true. For what is human existence in its present state, if you deprive it of action and contemplation? Nothing then remains, but the distinction which we derive from form; or from sensitive loco-motive powers. But for these, unless directed to happier ends by superior faculties, few rational beings would, in my opinion, be grateful. The most important view, therefore, which we can entertain in the education of the person deprived of sight, is to redress, as effectually as possible, the natural disadvantages with which he is encumbered; or, in other words, to enlarge as far as possible his sphere of knowledge and activity. This can only be done by the improvement of his intellectual imagination and mechanical powers, and which of these ought to be most assiduously cultivated, the genius of every individual alone can determine. (Demodocus, 1774, p. 676)

Although apparently ignored by many of his counterparts on the European Continent, Blacklock’s letter was to guide the founding of Protestant asylums. The letter would also have a profound effect on the understanding of blindness as a political and ethical issue as well as a medical and philosophical one. Furthermore, the philosophical essays of Diderot and Blacklock together would do much to raise awareness of blindness and transform access to a liberal and vocational education. To understand this eighteenth-century movement of access to education, it is important to understand the attitudes of Protestants in a broader cultural as well as social context. Moreover, as I recently observed, it is important to understand the influence of causes of blindness at the time in relation to ethics (Hayhoe, 2015). Here I turn more specifically to the work of the German philosopher Max Weber (2001) and his writing on the Protestant work ethic to provide a marker as to an ethic of industrial transformation. 53

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In the eighteenth century, a significant number of people who were blind in Europe had lost their sight due to the sexually transmitted disease syphilis (Frith, 2012). Although it is difficult to judge the spread of this disease, it is generally held that syphilis and similar sexually transmitted diseases were a significant problem. The causes of syphilis, whether inherited from parents or otherwise, were also heavily associated with promiscuity (Frith, 2012). A consequence of this moral approach to syphilis was that many people who were blind posed a threat to two basic tenets of moral attitudes evolving from Protestant theology: the first was the nonenjoyment of sex, even during marriage, and the second was hygienic sex, whether inside or outside marriage. These tenets, Weber (2001) feels, were ideals that can be traced directly to the Old Testament. This development of ideology also leads to a similarity between Protestant theology and the industrial ethic of working for society as a moral purpose. Importantly, Protestants were an oppressed minority in the inquisitorial Europe of the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries and formed a more powerful social conscience. Members of Protestant denominations had been turned out of several countries in Europe. For example, persecuted and tortured French Huguenots had largely sought their own asylum in recent centuries. It was this insecurity that subsequently led Protestants to develop strong moral codes that emphasized economic sustainability and hygiene. Consequently, Protestant ethics also became entwined with the impulse to survive as a religious and ethnically forward-looking population. The tenet of the nonenjoyment of sex was particularly important in socially controlling Protestant Puritan populations to enforce discipline. Consequently, what transpired from the reformation of Catholic ideology in the Renaissance was a rebirth of the deep-seated need to control sexual behavior through religious doctrine and education (Foucault, 1989). Puritan theology, Weber feels, provided a pretext that largely confined sex to procreation in this era. As a result, sexuality was reduced to a medical, utilitarian, and clinical activity. Subsequently, surgeons enjoyed elevated positions in this ethic, and science and medicine often became entwined with moral philosophy—it can also be said that this was why the debates of the Enlightenment fea54

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tured in chapter 1 were largely based in the practical, scientific realm of medicine. As Weber writes on this issue: “A sober procreation of children” is [sex’s] purpose. . . . To treat [a wife] as a prostitute and to fail to distinguish the powerful sway of human passions from sexual intercourse for hygienic reasons, both are thoroughly [uncongenial] to the Puritan. Similar for instance, is the typical specialist’s view, occasionally put forward by very distinguished physicians, that a question which extends so far into the subtlest problems of personality and of culture as that of sexual abstinence should be dealt with exclusively in the forum of the physician (as an expert). For the Puritan the expert was the moral theorist, now he is the medical man; but the claim of competence to dispose of the questions which seem to us somewhat narrow-minded is, with the opposite signs of course, the same in both cases. (Weber, 2001, pp. 233–35)

What was also particularly important to European culture in this period—although this is common to all Semitic religions2—was the oppression of homosexuals. For example, homosexuality was not legitimated in U.S. law until the late twentieth century. In the latter years of the eighteenth century, it was treated as a form of immoral mental illness (Foucault, 1989). In recent decades, epidemiological studies have shown that male homosexual intercourse is physiologically more likely to lead to sexually transmitted diseases than male heterosexual intercourse (Judson, Penley, Robinson, & Smith, 1980)—although this finding does not relate to nonpenetrative homosexual sex. Although the linkage was circumstantial at the time of the foundation of asylums, there is a cultural link in the Old Testament in which blindness is seen as a punishment for male homosexuality. This suggests an early epidemiological link between the causes of blindness and homosexuality. One passage featured in the book of Genesis describes the threat of rape to angels who were boarding with Lot by the Sodomites and the Sodomites’ subsequent punishment by blindness (Hull, 2001). To further illustrate the role of religion in the formation of art education, it is also important to see its place in the separate touch education of people who were blind in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. As immoral and sinful as sexual eroticism and uncleanliness were to these 55

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Protestants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so were laziness and noncharitable attitudes. In terms of many nonconformist Protestant ethics, laziness particularly equated to noneconomic production. This morally affected both the individual and his or her community.

The Role of Religion, Sexuality, and Laziness in Asylums For Protestants, handcrafts and trades were largely considered a major component of economic morality. In eighteenth-century Protestant Europe, syphilis could also be seen as both the cause and the effect of the sin of unhygienic sex; that is to say, prostitutes, homosexuals, and hedonists who enjoyed promiscuous, unclean sex would be considered sinful. These groups of people were also more likely to be thought of as industrially less productive; their propensity to blindness would subsequently compound this belief that blindness needed to be treated morally. Consequently, education had a moral, therapeutic as well as a social function. To Protestants, if this disease increased generation on generation, the nature of the nation’s industry and society would be threatened. For similar reasons, in the eighteenth century begging was also perceived to be immoral by Protestants—although, as I will show later in this chapter, this was also true of Roman Catholics in this era, albeit for different reasons. Beggars getting money for what was immoral work went against what Puritans believed in—even though the Protestant faith also preached charity for those who could not help themselves. Again, Weber (2001) identifies the precedence for this ethic in his view of Calvinism, finding that morality embodied in charity was related to a rejection of absolution. This presents a dilemma, however: How can Protestants be charitable but also save sinners from indolence? For Weber, the Protestant answer to this is good works, evangelism, and achieving conversion through the sinner being converted to the moral good: The rationalization of the world, the elimination of magic as a means to salvation, the Catholics had not carried nearly so far as the Puritans and before them the Jews had done. To the Catholic the absolution of 56

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his [sic] church was a compensation for his own imperfection. The priest was a magician who performed the miracle of the transubstantiation, and who held the key to eternal life in his hand. . . . The God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system. There was no place for the very human Catholic cycle of sin, repentance, atonement, release, followed by renewed sin. Nor was there any balance of merit for a life as a whole which could be adjusted by temporal punishments or the Churches’ means of grace. (Weber, 2001, p. 71)

What Was the Significance of This Ethic for Early Protestant Asylums? To address this question, we first need to understand the nature of the environments of the first Protestant asylums, which were based in the major port cities—in the United States, this meant Boston, New York, and Philadelphia (Hayhoe, 2015). Consequently, war and wealth were to be major components in bringing asylums to wealthy ports and areas of conflict. For example, the first reports of a syphilis epidemic in Europe came at the end of the fifteenth-century war between French and Spanish armies in Italy (Frith, 2012; McGough, 2005; Heymann, 2006). The epidemic spread across borders and through ports over the course of centuries. By the end of the eighteenth century, syphilis had become a major cause of blindness and mental illness in European countries. This changed little until the widespread use of antibiotics at the beginning of the twentieth century (Frith, 2012). Consequently, in port cities syphilis was more likely to be a problem, since these cities would have large populations of sexually active single men in the military and merchant navies. Port cities would also be an entry point for prostitutes from a wider range of cultures and nationalities than inland cities. During this time, port cities additionally hosted staging points for armies and navies. The likelihood of contracting diseases from a range of other countries in port cities was subsequently increased. As well as being environments of promiscuity, rich port cities were also more likely to be an attractive place for beggars, as affluent cities are now. As I will show later in this chapter, people who were blind were among this movement of people. To the Protestant philanthropists who made money 57

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in these port cities and those close by, hard work in the industrial and mechanical arts through evangelism was a moral cure for begging.

The First Protestant Asylums The first of the Protestant asylums was opened in 1791 in Liverpool by a foundation of nonconformist and Anglican Protestant members of a debating society. This asylum was also the second recorded institute for the blind in the world. The founders of the Liverpool Asylum were led by a blind and radical antislavery campaigner named Edward Rushton (Hunter, 2002). These philanthropists felt suspicious of government and appeared to form institutions as an alternative to the status quo. In 1793, two years after the foundation of the Liverpool Asylum, the Bristol and Edinburgh Asylums were opened by foundations led by similarly wealthy philanthropists (Le Cue, 1992; RBAS, 1993). The Bristol Asylum was founded by a consortium of Quakers, led by Edward Long Fox and a man known only as Bath; the Edinburgh Asylum was opened by a Presbyterian foundation headed by Rev. David Johnston, Thomas Blacklock, and David Miller. To the Bristol and Liverpool foundations, blind adults—in those days, categorized as anyone over the age of twenty-one—were not prioritized for training through industrial arts, as it was felt their behavior was more irreversible. Consequently, only blind children could be protected from the streets and receive charitable support in the form of training and moral instruction (Liverpool School for the Blind, 1849). We are happy in being able to inform the public that a Society is now forming in this City for promoting the happiness of blind children, instructing them in some useful employments, and that the [Quaker’s friends’] meeting house in Callow Hill Street is now ready for their reception. We hear that no less than eight of these distressed and pitiable objects have already applied for admission. (Unsigned article. (1792, November 10). Bonner and Middleton’s Bristol Journal. Archives of the Bristol Royal Society for the Blind.)

Despite their similar Calvinist ethics, the approach taken in Edinburgh appeared to be different. The Presbyterian founders of the Edin58

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burgh Asylum decided it was important to relieve begging immediately (RBAS, 1993). Consequently, they admitted all local beggars into the asylum for the blind to effect a cure for immorality. The concept of the industrial blind workshop was central to the work of the Institution from the outset. The Shakespeare Square Covenant House was opened to provide the blind with a realistic alternative to begging. (RBAS, 1993, p. 10)

This difference in emphasis on either curing begging or developing industry between the asylums was also reflected in the names of the different institutions. For instance, Bristol and Liverpool simply used the term industrious to describe their students, implying that they could be steered from the path of laziness. In the nineteenth century, the Bristol Asylum was renamed the Bristol School for the Industry of the Blind. Edinburgh, by contrast, used the terms indigent—indicating a lack of moral work, in this case begging—and industrious to describe its students. This suggested that begging could be cured immediately; it was also later to be renamed Edinburgh Asylum for the Indigent and Industrious Blind. To all foundations, however, indigence was sinful and lazy, whereas industry was a source of moral pride. Despite their technical differences, there was general agreement in the early asylums about the method of curing immorality once students were admitted. For example, in numerous nineteenth-century reports, the asylums emphasized the link between morality and handcrafts (e.g., Bristol Asylum, 1838; Bristol School of Industry for the Blind, 1887; Liverpool School for the Blind, 1849; RBAS, 1993). Like the AFB in 1960, the original asylums also referred to their crafts as the mechanical arts (Le Cue, 1992; RBAS, 1993), emphasizing a lack of creativity and understanding in their practice. Because of this emphasis on industry and the curing of laziness, the intellectual arts were passively excluded from asylums until the late twentieth century. For example, in the Bristol Asylum basket and mat making, sewing, and knitting appeared to be the staple industries well into the twentieth century (Le Cue, 1992; Bristol School of Industry for the Blind, 1908). In the Edinburgh Asylum, staple crafts for women were knitting stockings and sewing bedcovers and for men, making mattresses, mats, brushes, and baskets (RBAS, 1993). 59

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In the Liverpool Asylum—later renamed the Liverpool School for the Blind—boys and girls were instructed in basket making and sewing, respectively. These Liverpool trades are illustrated in a report from this era: [Sammy], of the Parish of Sutton, Cheshire, aged 22 years, is boarded and lodged in the school, and employed at basket making. . . . [Jo], of the Parish of Toxteth Park, Lancashire, aged 12 years, is boarded and lodged at the school, and employed at sewing. (Liverpool School for the Blind, 1849, p. 7)

Reports from asylums in the nineteenth century went beyond emphasizing handcrafts as a Protestant medium. The students’ daily regime also emphasized the power of working days that were longer than those of average schoolchildren. In Protestant asylums, children were expected to work from early in the morning well into the evening; few breaks were given, and the moral, behavioral code was strictly applied. Deviancy, especially what was considered sexual deviancy, was never tolerated. For example, the following is from a report of the Bristol Asylum in the eighteenth century: [Of] the indigent blind, by far the greater have lost their sight in infancy, and it is unhappily too often the case, that the entire neglect of education added to their infliction, not only renders them examples of extreme ignorance, but lays the foundation for incredible habits of idleness and disinclination to mental and bodily exertion. . . . [The] powers of their minds would thus become developed,—they would readily acquire information that would yield them rational pleasure in an afterlife,—religious knowledge and virtuous impressions might be communicated with more certainty of a permanent influence on the heart,—they would be prepared to be more docile and skilful as labourers in the Asylum, and more competent to maintain themselves with efficiency and respectability when they leave it. . . . The committee feel it to be their duty to employ the time and improve the skill of the pupils in . . . manual work only, as they will be able to pursue with profit to themselves when they leave the institution. (Bristol Asylum, 1838, p. 3)

Perhaps because of the historical causes of blindness, when asylum students reached their late teens or early twenties, they were banned 60

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from having physical relationships. An example of this regime is given below from the register of the Bristol Asylum, showing two students who had been expelled for having a physical relationship. Although they married, as a punishment the two Bristol students were removed from the institution and left to fend for themselves on the streets with their peers. No record of what happened to them—or possibly to their child, which is intimated in the following document—appeared afterward. [Jennifer], Aged 17 years a native of Ireland. Came in Dec 1796. Dismissed in January 1803. She acquired the knowledge of making fine [cane] work baskets, by which she could procure a comfortable livelihood, but having been guilty of very immoral conduct, she married [Jamie], one of the blind lads when they could no longer conceal their wickedness & both were dismissed, and are now begging in the City. (Bristol Royal Society for the Blind, n.d.)

As immoral behavior was punished in the early asylums, good behavior and adherence to the moral codes and therapy of good handwork was rewarded. Asylums also appeared to show a maternalistic interest in well-behaved students well into their adult lives. For example, loyalty shown to the asylums by the students and communications with former asylum students were praised. When former students died, this was noted in the reports of the asylums. Students’ ability to carry on their trade was consequently a point of pride for the asylum. An illustration of this adherence to moral codes can be found in a register entry from the Bristol Asylum. In this excerpt, it is made explicit that the students were part of the asylum’s family—perhaps because the students were lodged in the asylum and had little or no family of their own. [Girl A] Aged 8 years a native of Bath. Came in Dec 1796. Left the 2nd April 1817 to make room for application of the admissions of others—was given 2 Guineas & a set of tools. [Girl B] Aged 20 years, a native of Downend, came in March 1797. Died Dec 7th 1812. She was at the asylum from a few years after it was first opened: by her diligence & industry, she made a considerable proficiency in fine Basket Work, by which she procured a comfortable maintenance—She seemed studiously to promote Interest of the Institution & 61

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was amiable in her manners by which she obtained the love and esteem of the family. (Bristol Royal Society for the Blind, n.d.)

This adherence to moral codes was also something I noted during previous fieldwork in the 1990s and the early millennium in the United States. For example, when I visited former U.S. asylums, ex-students were almost always still employed in the offices or at the front desk. In one U.S. school, the receptionist told me her history since entering the school decades earlier as a young child (Hayhoe, 2015). Hume’s Theory of Perception and Religious Ethics in Early Asylums Hume’s notion that nothing could be understood unless it was perceived also took on a further meaning in the Protestant asylums, where it was applied to a perception of God. This was similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s metaphysical belief, mentioned in the previous chapter, that God could be understood directly through the visual arts. Consequently, some of the earliest original documents produced by the earliest asylums provide evidence of the role of the emotional, romantic nature of charitable foundations. One report (Bristol Asylum, 1800) showed evidence for a further biblical reference to the ungodly aspects of the lack of perception from blindness. An anonymous poem published in an eighteenth-century report of the Bristol Asylum, signed simply “A Philanthropist” (reproduced below), expresses feelings of charity in terms of moral worth. As with previous literature, this poem expresses the founders’ belief that people who are blind are downtrodden by their poverty and that their inactivity is a cause for concern. However, this attitude is coupled with a belief that all forms of blindness would cast their perceptions into total darkness and lack perception of visual understanding. Such a feeling would possibly also multiply this torment in the minds of Protestants: Then view you pensive, interesting group, Hard is their lot,—with poverty they stoop, The shades of darkness on their eyelids dwell, They know not how to chase the mystic spell. View nature’s soul! doth not that god of day! Pour in delight upon the visual ray?— 62

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View Flora’s beauties in their gay attire, Say, do not these a secret joy inspire? The charms of nature, and the works of art, To different minds their various joys impart; Save where the darken’d optics ne’er could learn, Objects of arts, or nature to discern. This night of nature striving to illume By their honest toil, to cheer this visual gloom, Fair Charity with kind, unwearied hand, Supports the cause of virtue’s chosen band. Their aim is blessings on the blind to pour, Make useful that, which useless was before; Yes, charity will flow the useful grain; And cheerful, industry each good obtain. (Bristol Asylum, 1800)

The Bristol poem importantly builds a moral connection between godliness, beauty, and the arts, romanticizing nature and the visual to a metaphysical as well as material impression. It is not unthinkable that this Quaker, as part of a worldly intellectual community, would be familiar with the essays of Diderot. For example, Friends Meeting Houses have hosted academic and philosophical debates from all religions for centuries. Quaker communities also go out of their way to meet and connect with people of other religions. The founders of the asylums were also likely to have been aware of the debates of the Enlightenment, appearing to redefine a potential for ethical goodness of people who are blind. Even in the face of these feelings, however, their paradigm appears not to conceive of Diderot’s ideas in the same light as their religious beliefs. This belief in the ability to perceive God primarily through visual perception also gives a further moral dimension to handcrafts and the development of industrial arts. It indicates that it was not just the causes of blindness that were morally problematic. In the eighteenth century, blindness was also perceived as an ethical state of being blind and the potential biological and psychological cause of immorality. 63

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Darkness was, after all, the symbol of evil for Christian denominations (Hull, 2001)—for instance, through metaphors such as the devil being known as the prince of darkness. The permanent state of being blind, subsequently, was thought to detrimentally influence the intellectual and moral state of the individuals who suffered it. The attitudes of Protestants as illustrated in the Bristol poem are in contrast to the institutes for the blind on the European Continent in the same decade. For example, a poem written in 1796 by the father of a boy educated in the Roman Catholic–influenced Paris Institute, reproduced in and translated by Paulson (1987), provides a philosophical comparison. Like the Bristol philanthropist, the French poem praised virtue, and the author made the effort to capitalize the V in an emphasis on this word. However, throughout the poem the author makes no mention of God’s glory, praising education, wisdom, and knowledge, and no mention of capital and industry for their own sake: Since my son must give up light At least open to him the path of wisdom And may the radiance of Virtue at the bottom of his heart Compensate him, alas! For the daylight he has lost. (Paulson, 1987, p. 231)

Like the quotation from Diderot in chapter 1, the author of the Paris poem believes in a more inherent moral goodness in his son that is beyond perception. He believes that there is good in his son’s heart that has to be released, not developed, as with all children no matter what their level of sight. Paulson (1987) and Jay (1993) feel that such beliefs can themselves represent a different type of pernicious myth, represented largely in the literature of the French romantic period. In the nineteenth century, this myth came to favor class division and the values of a new ruling class rather than common hard work, whereby those who were literate were morally purer. Despite alternative approaches to educating children who were blind in Continental Europe, it was a Protestant model of morality that was largely favored by the first U.S. asylums (Howe, 1833a, 1833b). This influence is seen most clearly than in the asylums’ political, vocational, economic, and administrative models, which favored private charitable status 64

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and sales of goods. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this influence was largely because the founders of these asylums were also powerfully influenced by Calvinist theology. U.S. asylums were notably founded in cities that were administered by the descendants of Protestant immigrants. The first asylum was in Boston—and is now the Perkins Institute—the second in Philadelphia, followed by San Francisco and New York. Like their forebears, these asylums were in increasingly wealthy port cities with military populations, prostitutes, and beggars, not in centers of government like in Continental Europe. Many asylums that followed were also in the strongly Calvinist southern states, and many of their original founders had noticeably Protestant surnames. There is also evidence to suggest that the influence from Protestant handcraft and art training on influential U.S. institutions continued into the twentieth century. For instance, in my recent book on English art education and blindness, I discussed a letter from the director of the Perkins Institute, Edward Allen, to the head of the Bristol School (formerly the Bristol Asylum), known only as Stevens, dating from 1930 (Hayhoe, 2015). This letter indicates a close working relationship with what was then the Bristol School. Although the Bristol School had a well-advanced academic curriculum at this point, it still felt that handcrafts were of importance. In this letter, Allen is impressed with the work ethic of Bristol’s students, which he wanted to reproduce in Boston, as the United States was still suffering economic hardship. Consequently, Allen asked for advice on the best methods of vocational education, especially in motivating his students to work as they did in Bristol. The students’ work rate, though, was not only seen in terms of their economic future. The school’s ethos also seemed to be envied by Allen as a means of financing the school and developing a factory for adults and a society for the welfare of people who were blind in the community.3 Dear Mr Stevens, My grandson, David Malan, of Old Malthouse School, is here visiting us. On cold days he wears his grey sweater made by you; and we like it as well as he does. Though I know you make these articles, I don’t know how you sell them. Do enlighten me on this process. 65

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Dr. Ritchie says in his excellent book that we American blind school men conduct our works departments half-heartedly. He isn’t far wrong. As for Perkins it has tried hard to have its corresponding department of manual training, educational and prevocational rather than vocational. Now since in this country you never can tell what a fellow will follow in life, our plan has worked very well indeed, so long as pupil material remained largely promising and the times kept propitious; but now that these two elements are less favorable, we feel called upon to experiment in industry and need advice how best to do it successfully at school. . . . Your big school boys learning basket making dress for work, sit on the floor and labor hammer and tongs as though life—or dinner—depended upon it. How long at a time do they keep this up? How many hours a day? a week? What is their incentive? Is it pay? Piece pay or saleable product? And your large girl apprentices still at school—how do you motivate their anxiety to learn and produce as evidenced in their diligence? . . . That is to say,—when Dr. Ritchie claims that we press our works departments only half-heartedly, the natural inference is that he and Mr. Gray and other headmasters do it whole-heartedly. I seek the secret to apply to you to acquaint me with it. . . . Cordially yours, Edward E Allen (Allen, 1930)

This all being said, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was growing Continental influence on the arts education of people who were blind as it developed in North America. These sentiments were not wholly the morals of a nation, or even of an era, but the morals of a changing Protestant economic, political, and social environment. This point is demonstrated in an earlier training manual from the Boston-based Perkins Institute (1906), in which a modern criticism is made on the overreliance on industrial production: Instead of [mechanical arts] being used as auxiliaries or as a means to education [in early schools], they were its aim and end. Thus the special care and a great deal of time were devoted to the acquisition of several trades, which appeared to be profitable, and some of the leading schools for the blind in [the United States] . . . although they paid considerable attention to the mental development of their pupils were no less industrial in their distinctive characteristics. . . . 66

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Broadly speaking we may say that this system of training tended to neglect intellectual development and aesthetic culture to a secondary position and to place above them more drilling in mechanic arts, which had little educational value. . . . Considering handicrafts work to be the occupation in which the blind can compete to less advantage with seeing men than any other, it should be resorted to only in the case of those who manipulate no decided talent for anything else. (Perkins Institute for the Blind, 1906, pp. 4–5)

So what influences affected this change of philosophy from a purely vocational arts curriculum to one in which handwork became a means of intellectual development? Moreover, how has this affected art education for students who are blind today?

European Institutes and Touch Education In Continental Europe, the first asylums were founded in the same era as institutes for the blind. However, neither type of education originally appeared to be seen in relation to the other. Consequently, different political and cultural events later brought these two forms of institutions together to produce a more pluralistic understanding of blindness. Valentin Haüy was the founder of the Institute for Blind Youth in Paris around 1785 (Heller, 1979). Although there had been education of blind individuals in Europe prior to the Paris Institute, most notably in Germany and Austria, his was the first recorded institution for the blind (Hayhoe, 2015). In his earlier academic career as a translator, interpreter, and scholar of manuscripts, Haüy revered Diderot—although it is notable that Haüy was more conventional in his outlook than Diderot and was a continual ally of the French monarchy—and felt disgusted by the maltreatment of people who were blind. To Haüy, literature was to be a tool of inclusion, allowing people who were blind to develop moral understanding and releasing them from poverty. In 1784, a year before he officially founded the Paris Institute, Haüy taught an early form of touch literature to a seventeen-year-old blind beggar named Lesueur. Haüy had promised to pay Lesueur as much money as he could gain from begging if he agreed to be taught, and Lesueur later became a teacher at the Paris Institute. 67

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However, this approach to emancipating people who were blind from poverty was also regarded as an experimental project in enlightenment by the ruling classes—a form of education that objectified people who were blind as the metaphysists and perceptualists had done. For example, Paulson (1987) sees that this experimentation led to a glorification of people who were blind in France in this era. This promoted an overly romanticized, almost magical image of blindness in French literature and philosophy. As I say in chapter 1, the religious and literary enlightenment examined the role of perceptions and a primitive understanding of cognition. These philosophies were also designed to challenge the traditional political authority of Roman Catholicism, which was still a powerful force in Continental Europe. For many French philosophers, subsequently, the political cause of equality for people who were blind appeared to be inconsequential. What was important to these writers were the practical or mythical differences in perception that blindness engendered. Consequently, handcrafts were only a small part of the curriculum of the original Paris Institute. Haüy (1889) played down their role as an important element of the institute’s curriculum in comparison to its later Protestant counterparts. Haüy saw handcrafts as merely a secondary skill connected to the essentially academic purpose of a moral education. He focused instead on mechanically reading the Bible, math, and music to develop religious enlightenment. This was not a wholly popular choice. In the early years of the Paris Institute, there was also a suggestion by other educators that economic crafts should play a larger role in teaching. It was felt that economic crafts would allow institutions to support themselves financially if given the opportunity. Consequently, letters were printed in a French journal by a teacher named Sébastien Guillié (1819); he would later become politically important in this process, as he was a strict prorevolutionary zealot who found favor after the French Revolution. Guillié later took over the administration of the Paris Institute. Despite his liberal preferences, Haüy was in many respects as much a dogmatist as his Protestant counterparts. Haüy was determined that literature and religious philosophy would best serve people who were blind, and even literate trades were not considered. Little real consideration was given to the economic independence of the Paris Institute, and Haüy’s 68

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students were exhibited at the Academie Royale des Sciences, Paris, to raise money. It is true that a need for literature and intellectual arts was also considered in Protestant culture at the time. The letter by Blacklock in the Edinburgh Magazine and Review shows this most of all (Demodocus, 1774). However, in Protestant asylums and schools the institutional education of people who were blind was not involved with monarchy. These institutions also remained suspicious of causes promoted by bourgeois intellectuals and academicians. Haüy’s financial approach to developing the Paris Institute was consequently radically different from the later asylums. As a result, the longevity of asylums would later influence many Continental European curricula, administrations, and institutes. To further understand Haüy’s approach, it is important to understand the political culture of French Enlightenment and Diderot above all. Diderot was in the vanguard of radical French philosophy in this era and an editor of the Encyclopedie. He was also friends with other bourgeois academicians, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Diderot, 1999). This influenced Haüy profoundly. However, although Haüy was a translator and scholar of ancient manuscripts, which gave him intellectual status, he was not highly regarded as a philosophical scholar. Consequently, charitable work was Haüy’s means to grandeur, and his demonstrations would cement this position. Haüy continued to find favor by making the Paris Institute appeal to bourgeois and mercantile society through public demonstrations of touch literacy by his students. This also gave him more power among pedagogues in France. Fatefully, Haüy’s success was caused in part by Diderot’s questioning of the link between perception and morality, which left Diderot a political outcast. This, however, opened the way for a belief in the intellectual capacity of people who were blind. It also had the cynical effect of making Haüy’s students a focus of dependence rather than independence during their education. As Paulson explains regarding Haüy’s social philosophy in this era, The teacher, and to an even greater extent the administrator, while committed to the Enlightenment project of reducing differences, of 69

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ending exclusions by communication, has an institutional interest in affirming differences, in replacing one kind of social isolation, that of the blind beggar, with another, that of the blind pupil or ward. We might say teachers are concerned with rationalising the difference that is blindness, with reference to the two meanings of this expression: the rendering accessible to reason of a hitherto indescribable difference, and the justification of its continued existence. (Paulson, 1987, pp. 95–96)

The exhibiting of his students’ literacy skills led Haüy to a strategy that supported the poor blind and elevated his own social position as a provider of charity. This ultimately led Haüy (1889) to dedicate his influential paper titled “An Essay on the Education of the Blind” to Louis XVI of France. In the short term, Louis XVI’s dedication gained Haüy financial support as well as social patronage from the monarch. It also led to an invitation to Haüy and his students to attend Versailles to demonstrate his students’ skills in literacy. After this visit, the Paris Institute gained a royal warrant and was renamed the Royal Institute for Blind Youth. This was ultimately the institute’s downfall. In the short term, the royal ascent and the new name of the Paris Institute gained favor among the social elite, who wished to be linked with its royal cause. Subsequently, the Paris Institute also became a symbol of the philanthropic bourgeoisie and raised the cultural profile of young blind beggars. However, during the French Revolution, which began in 1789, Haüy’s association with Louis XVI made the Paris Institute particularly vulnerable. Then in 1791, the Paris Institute was put into the hands of the new people’s regime.4 After its change of status, and under the greater influence of Guillié, funding to the Paris Institute was cut, and the amount of handwork that students undertook increased significantly. Haüy was left destitute by these changes, although he was involved in the new French politics. Subsequently, in the early 1800s he left the Paris Institute and then Paris itself. After leaving Paris, Haüy led a movement to build a similar institute in Russia. Prior to the revolution, he had met the Russian czar, who agreed to provide Haüy further patronage. This invitation left Haüy’s philosophy of enlightened literature and religious instruction to be continued later in the nineteenth century, most notably through the invention of Braille. 70

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Unfortunately, in Russia, Haüy found that his proposal for a Moscow Institute for the Blind was labeled politically dangerous by the nobles who advised the emperor. The advisors appeared to be especially wary of the French experience. During his travels in Eastern Europe, however, Haüy influenced the inception of institutional education for the blind in Austria, the Vienna Institute for the Blind, and a further institute in Berlin. This temporary exile would later prove a pivotal moment in the history of this form of education. The Vienna Institute was founded in the early 1800s by the educator Johan Wilhelm Klein (Lowenfeld, 1971). Like Haüy, Klein had educated blind children individually in the late eighteenth century, particularly focusing on teaching the creation of Roman Catholic imagery. More relevantly, the Vienna Institute founded the first of what we would now describe as creative fine art education through touch. The most famous of Klein’s students was the blind Tyrolean crucifix sculptor, Kleinhans, whose work still exists in several churches in southern Austria; these records were subsequently researched by Révész in his book, Psychology and Art of the Blind (1950). Important to his educational philosophy, Klein’s devote Roman Catholic culture had a significant influence on the Vienna Institute and introduced a different strand of enlightened philosophy. As both were devout Roman Catholics, Klein was greatly influenced by Haüy in his ethical approach to teaching in the Vienna Institute. Consequently, Klein attempted a less commercial or industrial balance of literate, didactic subjects and creative handcrafts. Also like Haüy, Klein sought the patronage of his own monarch, the emperor of Austria. Consequently, in 1805 the Vienna Institute was renamed the Imperial Royal Institute for the Education of the Blind. This again emphasized a Continental European philosophical and religious difference with Protestant asylums, which continued to concentrate on the indolence of their students. Instead of industry, Klein’s approach emphasized the difference between social class and academic attainment, witnessed earlier in France. Consequently, it is important to understand how Roman Catholic ethics, 71

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although no less idealistic, changed this form of education from mechanical to emotional sensory development. This being said, there is a significant difference between the rhetorical and philosophical approaches of Haüy and Klein. Haüy still acknowledged that handcrafts were primarily a means of vocational training and then an aside to the education of literature and philosophy. Haüy’s was the language of Diderot and the romantic literature of postrevolutionary France. Klein, however, placed emphasis on noncommercial handplay as part of separate, nonvisual expressive development.5 This was a more traditional interpretation of Roman Catholic ethics, which patronized people who were blind, keeping them dependent on charity after finishing school. This reflected the more conservative philosophies adhered to by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Subsequently, Klein reflected metaphysical interpretations of child development through children’s handplay. Moreover, he felt that the movement of children’s hands as a means of keeping them busy would positively stimulate children’s emotional—which to Klein were moral— responses. This use of touch later became a premise of teaching models such as the Montessori system, which found favor in Austria (Murphy, 2003). In a paper originally published in 1836, Klein (1971) applied religious motives to handcraft through his mention of souls, with his main concern being to prevent masturbation in children who were blind:6 [The] blind person who cannot be stimulated by vision and who is thus used to gaining pleasure from feeling objects is more liable than others to involve himself in the vice of masturbation that weakens the body and soul. Exercise and occupation can prevent this most effectively. (Klein, 1971, p. 235)

Klein’s academic belief in the moral and intellectual inequality of his students who were blind was not simply the rhetoric of Roman Catholic academics and professional educators—at the time, morals, ethics, and intellect were still felt to be the same. It was also the rhetoric of aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty and intellectual prowess by dogmatic Protestants. 72

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This belief can be seen in negative moral philosophies of fundamental Calvinists, such as the Presbyterian academics Foulis and Hutcheson in the eighteenth century (Herman, 2001). Similarly, although believing in the deficit of blindness, the belief in the intellectual and ethical inequality of people who were blind was not universally held.

Early Intellectual and Moral Inclusion Rhetorically, at least, Haüy (1889) believed students who were blind were equivalent to sighted students in several subjects, most notably in math; this belief even extended to geometry exercises using two-dimensional diagrams. Arguably, math had been opened to people who were blind by earlier academics. For example, Saunderson, the blind Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, mentioned earlier, was renowned for his abilities and is cited by Blacklock, Haüy (1889), and Diderot (1999). Saunderson had even created his own touch language for numerical notation and geometry. The cultural memory of Saunderson also had an impact in the early nineteenth century, only a few years prior to the foundation of the first U.S. asylums. In one of the earliest manuals for the education of students who are blind, William Taylor (1828), the Anglican minister and teacher at York School for the Blind, discussed the equality of his students in math. Moreover, Taylor felt that the equal abilities of people who were blind could be stretched to most subjects that employed two-dimensional diagrammatic principles. This philosophy reflected those discussed in the early years of the Enlightenment, when René Descartes and John Locke hypothesized cognitive equality as educational instruments. As Taylor wrote, The imagination in some individuals deprived of sight, it is well known, has taken nobler flights and reached to a sublimer height than under any other circumstances. And although this must depend upon application and the mental powers of the individual, . . . the probability, or even the possibility, that much and great progress may be made in the higher branches of knowledge, by blind persons,—that they may attain not only to peculiar accuracy and precision, but also to an eminent degree of excellence both in mechanical and mental operations[—]ought, I 73

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think, to be a sufficient inducement to employ every practicable means of exciting and exercising the powers which remain to them, in order to compensate, as far as possible, for that which they have lost. The chief means through which this must be attempted is through touch. (Taylor, 1828, p. 6)

However, despite these early attempts to demonstrate the educational equality of children who were blind, there was still an emphasis on manual training in European schools for the blind. These schools were designed for working- and underclass students, who would otherwise be begging on the streets.7 The Early Development of U.S. Asylums and Educational Philosophy Although largely dominated by the Protestant asylum movement, the approach to institutional education for people who were blind in the United States represents a further cultural revolution. In one way, it acted as a laboratory of a combination of early European ideals while reflecting the Protestant economy of the intellectual heartland of New England. However, despite the rhetoric, new U.S. asylums failed to break away from Hume’s hypothesis that what was learned needed to be perceived in the mind. They also continued the passive exclusion of people who were blind, believing that the main purpose of educating people who were blind was to prevent begging and indolence. As Ernest Freeberg writes on the early influence of Hume on the education of Laura Bridgman, the first student who was deaf-blind, This Scottish philosophy seemed to restore the trustworthiness of observation against Hume’s skepticism, and refuted French materialism by reaffirming the presence within each body of an active mind. For those reasons, it was extremely popular in the United States, appealing to all sides of the philosophical spectrum, from Deists to Unitarians to orthodox Calvinists. (Freeberg, 1992, p. 196)

The first of the U.S. asylums, which largely became the model for U.S. institutional education of the blind, was the Boston Asylum. This asylum was in the heart of the port city and founded by Dix Fisher and its first director, S. G. Howe. 74

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The foundation for the asylum itself began in 1829, and the first students entered the asylum in 1833 (Perkins School, 2016). This asylum was inspired by a mixture of French Revolution and Enlightenment and the Protestant approaches to industrial education and training for vocation (Howe, 1833a). As Howe recalls regarding his association with the asylum: In 1832, a few days after my return from Europe, while riding with [Dix Fisher], the subject of the education of the blind came up incidentally and he told me of the difficulties in the way of getting up and organizing an institution. Though they had been incorporated nearly four years, no direct attempt had yet been made to instruct a blind child. I proposed to undertake the work, and in ten minutes we agreed upon measures subsequently approved by Brooks, Prescott and others, and in less than a week I was on my way to Europe to procure teachers, books, etc. (Howe & Howe Richards, 1909, p. 46)

This image of educating students who were blind was later to inspire the writer Charles Dickens on his travels around North America. In his American Notes, Dickens (2000) lamented the nature of European asylums he had observed for their overconcentration on industrial training. The influences on U.S. asylums were not coincidental. Boston Asylum was conceived in a politically radical era, as the early idealistic asylum movement had been in Europe. This era was one in which slavery was being abolished in the United States, inspired by the same political movement that had provided asylums. Boston was also an area originally populated and culturally developed by fundamentalist Protestants some two hundred years earlier (McGiffert, 1994). In this period, these fundamentalist Protestants were fleeing what they felt were corrupt Anglican and Roman Catholic orders. It was the ancestors of these fundamentalists who formed the first U.S. asylums and projected their image as one of philosophical modernity. The original northern states of the United States, and later westerly states such as Utah and Oregon, were to form what they felt was a better, more superior Protestant order. This attitude was reflected in its educational institutions. The attitudes of fundamentalist Protestants had earlier conceived the first North American universities, such as Harvard, Yale, and the other 75

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Ivy League colleges. They were responsible for the first asylums for deaf as well as for people who were blind (Howe & Howe Richards, 1909). They were also responsible for the first American public school system (Mann, 1839), which was latterly heavily influenced by Perkins’s regime through Howe’s friendship with Mann. Protestant educators in New England favored their new, brave, nonconformist, purer Calvinist country. They saw this movement evolve culturally through sacrifice and a choice of politics and religion—although it can be said that many remained Protestant and persuaded others to do the same. A consequence of the radical foundations of the new fundamentalist Protestant United States was the use of its educational institutions as a symbol of its new model society. Howe (1833b, 1836a, 1836b),8 for example, wrote several papers promoting the national superiority of his asylums and their methods of education. These, Howe argued, challenged the superiority of the Old World while buildings on its foundations. Furthermore, Thomas Mann and S. G. Howe’s rhetoric mirrored the new cultural, religious, and scientific order: they sided against unpopular Roman Catholic– and monarchy-dominated Europe on philosophy and the more traditional, neocolonial US southern states on social issues. Above all, Mann and Howe had strong nonconformist Protestant beliefs that favored politically more radical notions of a new world order. This rhetoric from New England, however, came despite Howe’s belief in the natural, psychological, and biological inferiority and weakness of people with disabilities and African Americans (Howe, 1837; Howe & Howe Richards, 1909; Hayhoe, 2016). These beliefs seem even stronger than those of liberal Christians in the traditional southern states, such as Virginia, who proposed systems of higher education for African American students. [The narrative in this first paragraph is provided by Howe’s daughter.] In 1854 he writes to William Langhome, a benevolent gentleman of Virginia who had consulted him on the practicability of higher education for the negroes of the South: “The plan seems to me to be fraught with grave if not insurmountable difficulties; nevertheless I would never discourage anyone from entering upon any work of beneficence by dwelling upon the obstacles. My experience leads me to doubt the capacity of the blacks for such attainments 76

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as you look to. Like all of God’s children, however, they have capacities capable of improvement. He forbade us to bury even the one poor talent in a napkin, and He will reward you for any honest and earnest effort on behalf of the unfortunate even if it should not be crowned with earthly success. (Howe & Howe Richards, 1909, pp. 41–42)

Consequently, Howe argued for eugenic policies of restricted breeding for people with disabilities, seeing it as God’s will. This policy was particularly targeted at the deaf community, in whom Howe had observed generations of disability. What is important to emphasize about this period is that despite this Calvinist emphasis in New England, the asylum model of education appeared to survive partly due to its U.S. influences—albeit using different rhetoric. The pure French Enlightenment–inspired philosophies only took hold in the use of literacy, because they were too rooted in a dependent notion of charity. In addition to the money-generating use of labor, selling goods made by U.S. students was also an efficient approach to raising charitable donations from Protestant philanthropists. The Protestant ethic was not sentimental toward its fellows, particularly those from the working and underclasses. As I show earlier in this chapter, asylums’ nineteenth-century funders seem to come mainly from the nonconformist Protestant industrialists rather than aristocratic-influenced forebears. The early U.S. asylums, subsequently, maintained handcrafts for financial incentives as well as moral reasons, much as the earliest asylums did. However, as the nineteenth century progressed, the belief that an academic education for students who were blind was needed grew throughout the United States. The belief in academic education eventually culminated in the foundation of a new generation of institutions. These institutions include the American Printing House for the Blind in 1858 and the American Association of Instructors of the Blind in 1871 (American Action Fund, 2016). As with a new and increasing generation of European schools, this ethic believed that people who were blind should be more literate as well as economically productive. A balance of literacy was also encouraged in this era by the first international congresses on the education of the blind in the latter decades 77

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of the nineteenth century. These congresses hosted representatives from many continents, not only North America, and helped to develop a more homogenous educational approach (Lowenfeld, 1981). With new educational theories came creative and intellectual development. Consequently, noncommercial handwork became a primary goal of more schools rather than being used as a moral-industrial method by Protestant asylums. This understanding of professionalism in institutions for the blind led to what became international standards of teaching and expectations in schools for the blind. However, in this process an education in what were traditionally thought to be the fine arts was still left out for many. This belief is reflected in the presentation of one of the leading educators of students who were blind, M. Pablasek, in 1873 at the first international congress: The greater the area of human experiences and the accumulated treasure of beauty, the more means are at the artist’s disposal. A blind person will never be able to achieve real harmonious balance in art as indeed the mirror of the human soul. (Pablasek, 1873, p. 48)

In North America, as they were earlier in Europe, these initiatives were burdened by the social class system. Consequently, although there was a recognition of the talents of people who were blind, even the most progressive schools felt that their students should only be taught to be part of manual professions. This belief was still very much part of the cultural consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century and is evident in the first access sessions in museums. Furthermore, although some students who were blind from this new generation entered universities, many were not prepared for a cultural life beyond music and a limited embossed literature. This was the legacy of this new enlightenment of inequality.

Conclusion This chapter has shown that traditional approaches to teaching art and providing information for people who were blind has not been a simple process of scientific logic, as many have argued. 78

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Instead, it can be claimed that challenging the inappropriate treatment of people who are blind is more than an issue of providing courses or handling sessions. It has much to do with the political and moral beliefs of what inclusion is and, more important, how we measure inclusion. On this issue, two points arise from the discussion that has gone before in this chapter, both of which have direct relevance to my study of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first point is that traditional forms of education passively excluded students who were blind through the belief that they could not understand what was thought to be beyond perceptual ability. This belief became the foundation of museum initiatives designed to include people who were blind through touch, with visual perception and intellectual discussion being subsumed. Furthermore, social class, more than a disabled identity, was also important in this process. This was because people who did not receive a privileged education when younger were less likely to have access to higher forms of cultural education when older. This finding is very different from the idea of the oppression of a blind community through active exclusion alone, in which people are oppressed due to a society invented by the able. Subsequently, exclusion from cultural education, be it in museums or schools, is mostly the politics of social class, dogmatic education, and the academic presentation of disability as special. It is not a single issue of politics per se—that is to say, the exclusion of disabled people is fighting for the privilege of the able bodied. The most striking evidence for this point is that many people who create separate institutions for people who are blind are privileged and educated people who are blind themselves. Middle-class students who are blind also have their own separate form of education. My second point is that although the theory of passive exclusion does much to describe people who are blind’s exclusion from art education, it also needs a few additions—these are discussed in the following chapters. The most important of these additions is the concept of what I call externality. Certainly, on the evidence of this chapter, there are external problems and cultural shifts in individual nations that have influenced the education of students who are blind more than individual theories of education. 79

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Subsequently, there is an uneven understanding of inclusion in different places and at different times. For instance, the initial problem of taking beggars from the streets was as much a political and religious problem of seventeenth-century Europe as it was an educational one. Similarly, the problem of educating middle-class blind children academically in the nineteenth century was again affected more by external stigmas and cultural snobbery. The same could also be said of the problems of the causes of blindness, national economics, philosophy, politics, and so forth that I have discussed in this and recent work (Hayhoe, 2015, 2016). I now turn to the main study of this book: the experience of blind visitors and their families at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. These experiences are based on the notions of inclusion and exclusion in this and previous chapters. In the following chapter, I begin this discussion with the history and nature of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and inclusion for visitors who are blind in the museum.

Notes 1.  Although I have written a book wholly on the history of English art education recently, which is referred to in this chapter, surveys of international art education are rare. 2.  Semitic religions in this context are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 3.  Handcrafts in a factory for the blind existed as a source of income in the Bristol society until the last decade of the twentieth century, although the school was closed before this time. The Bristol Royal Society for the Blind now exists as an association to provide support to the local blind population. 4. This regime was supported by the founder of the Liverpool Asylum, a wealthy, blind nonconformist Protestant merchant who was known for supporting other contentious social causes. The most notable of these was his argument for the abolition of slavery. 5.  However, it should be emphasized that Klein also wrote to a lesser extent about the importance of a vocational education, as many students in the Vienna Institute were also previously beggars. 6.  Kleinhans, as I noted above, Klein’s most successful art student, was kept busy making crucifixes for churches in the Tyrol. He became particularly well known as an expert in this area. 80

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7.  The only school for the blind that considered mainstream university education as the aim for its students until the latter years of the twentieth century was Worcester College for the Blind Sons of Gentlemen—the college is now called New College Worcester. This college was originally founded in 1867. 8.  I acknowledge the Perkins Institute for its generous use of the Howe archives and the school’s facilities. Of particular help and generosity were Betsy McGinnty (of the Hilton Perkins Foundation), Jan Seymour-Ford (research librarian), and the minister of the Unitarian church who discussed Thomas Mann’s legacy with me. For their time and information, I owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

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Part II

CASE STUDY: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

CHAPTER THREE

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: A NEW YORK ICON

Research Notes To understand the culture of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), I first made sure to understand its organizational environment. This research focused on the Met’s collections and formal culture and became an exposition of the human evolution of its host and founder, the people of New York City (for simplicity, in the rest of this book I refer to the city as New York and its state as New York State). I soon realized during my research that this exposition was an imperative step in the research, since, in order to understand the culture of the Met, I had to investigate the greater history of New York. Most important, this inquiry allowed me to place the museum in the city’s urban consciousness; in doing so, I had to understand the physical position of the Met as a geographical anthropology. It is this cultural position of the Met within New York that I turn to first. Much of the information about the administration of the Met is provided by a senior educator for access and community programs whom I call Sara.1 Sara is responsible for access for visitors who are blind and visually impaired and has expertise in this field. She also helped by identifying documents and policies where necessary. The programs I participated in were developed and administered by a separate educator whom I call Mariam, who was part time during this research, and an administrator whom I call Sam.

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Sara focuses on the policy-related, museum-wide access issues with departments such as the counsel’s office and design, while Mariam and Sam work on museum-wide issues, including those relating to visitor services and security. In addition, Mariam is responsible for programs for younger audiences and took the lead on Discoveries, a Sunday family program for people with learning disabilities and autism. She also trains school-tour volunteers. Previously, Mariam was the liaison for the special education services volunteers, who taught special education classes through the Met. In addition, Sara and Mariam train volunteers in the use of multisensory strategies for conducting tours. Sam is responsible for the logistics of programs, including reservations, booking rooms, interpretation, paying contractual educators, and contracts. However, all three work in the office in a collegiate way on the development of the programs.

The Position, History, and Culture of the Met in New York The Met is a symbol of the modern wealth and power of New York, located as it is in one of the wealthiest residential areas of the city, all in Uptown Manhattan. Its building, collection, and location represent the ambition of its city and has followed the financial and commercial rise of New York’s power in the United States and the world. The Met is in a concentration of museums—mainly on or around Fifth Avenue—called Museum Mile. Museum Mile is also a cultural symbol itself. Other wealthy, iconic museums in the area include the Guggenheim Museum, which has a famous spiraling circular building, rather like an upside-down coil; the Frick Collection; the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, which specializes in design exhibitions; the Museum of Modern Art, otherwise known as MoMA; and New York’s American Museum of Natural History, which is across Central Park on the Upper West Side. The Met, however, is the jewel in the crown of Museum Mile. It is by far the largest and wealthiest of New York’s museums in terms of buying power and has the advantage of projecting into Central Park at its rear (The Met, 2016)—as does the American Museum of Natural History. From a visual standpoint, its location provides a remarkable backdrop of skyscrapers to the south of the museum; mansions to its north, east, and 86

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west; and wide-ranging panoramic views across the green of Central Park to the west. Manhattan itself is one of five boroughs of New York—the other four are Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx (New York City, 2016). All but the Bronx are situated on an island: Queens and Brooklyn are on Long Island, which stretches over a hundred miles beyond the city into the Atlantic Ocean, and Manhattan and Staten Island are each their own islands. The five boroughs of New York were unified as a single city in 1898. This followed a referendum of the separate boroughs’ residents in 1895, after which time the city formed a bicameral government of a municipal assembly and a board of aldermen. At the time of its unification, the city was made up of fifty-six smaller towns and cities and over two thousand farms. Subsequently, its urban environment and culture is relatively modern in comparison to many other cities in the world. Culturally, Manhattan is the most important of New York’s boroughs, largely because of its geographical position. It is a long, thin island to the west of Queens and Brooklyn; to the south of the Bronx, which stretches up into rural and suburban New York State; and to the north of Staten Island. Consequently, Manhattan lies at the heart of the other New York boroughs and connects the city to urban New Jersey, as well as to the road and rail networks beyond its western shores that lead to the rest of the country. Manhattan is at the institutional heart of the New York conurbation and houses its most famous buildings, societies, and organizations. The island is also the center of the unified city’s governance and wealthiest industries and a magnet for visitors—for tourists and for people who choose to move to and work in New York. This is not to say that there are no important cultural institutions in the other boroughs of the city; the most famous sports stadia, zoos, and botanical gardens are in the Bronx and Queens, and the most famous theme park and beaches are in Brooklyn. However, the wealthiest and most well-known institutions of so-called high culture, such as museums, elite universities, theaters, and opera, are almost entirely in Manhattan. Manhattan culture is also defined by a combination of its history and geography, which is reflected in the names of many of its districts. First are the districts, which are divided roughly according to their physical location on the island: Uptown, Downtown, and Midtown Manhattan. 87

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From these three approximate areas, smaller districts are distinctly named after latter-day migrant, historical, economic, and physical reference points. For instance, the districts of Manhattan include the main commercial practices they were famous for in the late nineteenth century, such as the Garment and Meatpacking Districts; points of the compass, such as the Lower East Side and Upper West Side; their most famous buildings in the early twentieth century, such as the Flatiron District, which centers on the Flatiron Building; old and original villages populated in the colonial era, such as Harlem and Greenwich Village; names that describe an area in relation to the colonial areas of the borough, such as SoHo, which is the area immediately “south of Houston Street,” and Tribeca, the “triangle below Canal Street”; or the names of more recent migrant communities that settled in the lower parts of the borough in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Chinatown and Little Italy. From this, it follows that the history of New York’s main governmental and economic institutions can also chart their cultural importance in their physical position on Manhattan. Importantly, the southern tip of the borough, Downtown Manhattan, which now includes the Financial District, is a mass of curving, asymmetric streets, which illustrate the initial colonial area of the city’s government and housing. Subsequently, Downtown Manhattan includes institutions such as New York City Hall and the law courts. These are institutions with which the city’s administrative, legal, and economic foundation was built. Downtown Manhattan also hosts many of the borough’s historically important buildings, which chart the earliest colonial development and growth of the city. These buildings include some of the oldest churches and synagogues in New York and a former graveyard for slaves; this graveyard dates from when the slave trade was still active in the northern states of the United States and when racial apartheid was constituted into law. The early history of Downtown Manhattan was characterized in Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York in 1928, before the skyscrapers were built in the relatively unpopulated Uptown and Midtown Manhattan; it should be noted that Asbury uses the language of his era in this description, including words we now find offensive. The book details the mixture of migrants, ethnicities, and religious minorities in what is now the downtown area and highlights their contributions to the development of a newly urban Manhattan: 88

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The old Five Points section [in the heart of Downtown Manhattan] now contains three of the city’s principal agencies for the administration of justice—the Tombs, the Criminal Courts Building, and the new County Court House—but in colonial times, and in the early years of the Republic, when the Negroes’ burying ground at Broadway and Chambers street was on the outskirts of the town and the present Times Square theatrical district was a howling wilderness in which the savage Indian prowled, it was chiefly marsh or swamp land, surrounding a large lake which was called Fresh Water Pond by the English and Shellpoint, or Kalchhook, by the Dutch. (Asbury, 1998, p. 1)

In contrast to Downtown, Midtown and Uptown Manhattan were largely developed in the latter half of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. As the city expanded more rapidly, the earliest skyscrapers started to appear in this area from the 1930s and onward (Howe, 1998). The early lack of colonial development in these areas is largely why they are now based on a modern grid system—a geometric road system of wide avenues and cross streets. The original grid system in Manhattan was important to the location of the Met. This system was first planned by civil engineers in 1811 above Greenwich Village, with little fetter from urban development. Its design was subsequently passed by the New York State Legislature—although it was many more decades before the road system that now characterizes Uptown Manhattan was built—and large rectangles of land, now termed blocks, emerged from more diverse private ownership (New York City, 2016). Importantly, Manhattan is also the home of the greatest personal and institutional wealth of New York. Centering on Wall Street, the Financial District is one of the wealthiest in the world and hosts the New York Stock Exchange, which itself sells stocks for the largest companies in the United States. Manhattan is also the home of other national and global markets, such as the markets of U.S. technology stocks (the NASDAQ), commodities, and currencies. Manhattan is also the location of the most expensive housing in New York—and the most expensive housing in the eastern United States. The richest districts in Manhattan are now in Uptown. Sometime residents of this large district have historically included billionaires, such as former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michael C. Rockefeller, and the 89

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Lehman family, alongside rock stars and artists such as John Steinbeck, Sting, various Beatles, Andy Warhol, and P Diddy. New York is also regarded as one of the most culturally diverse cities in the United States. This accolade is largely due to its position as one of the original port cities in the United States after independence and to its sea port, before airlines made it easier to enter the United States through other cities. From 1892 to 1954, Ellis Island, a small, almost nondescript island in the channel to the south of Manhattan, was the most important focus of this migration. Ellis Island was the main point of entry for migrants to the United States by the great ocean liners that offered cheap passage to North America (CUNY, 2016). On Ellis Island, migrants were often renamed and quarantined and then sent on to the city. Although many of these migrants went on to live and work in different parts of the United States, a large number stayed in New York, developed commerce, and provided new forms of industry. The development of industry and commerce that followed the mass migration and wealth of the port of New York in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused a boom in philanthropy—particularly in Midtown and Uptown Manhattan. Subsequently, money and location became more than a means to an end for New Yorkers. It was also a symbol of social potential and cultural power. As Midtown and Uptown Manhattan were areas that were originally sparsely populated, newly wealthy industrialists and bankers could build their large mansions, offices, and apartment buildings easily within the rectangular plots left by the grid system. These buildings were the symbols of a newer, brasher, and more confident New York. Uptown Manhattan was also the home of the attractive and pastoral Central Park, which was founded in 1859 (CUNY, 2016). This was the start of a new metropolis that had previously been nicknamed Gotham City—the home of goats—for its outrageous early culture of violence and egregious politics. As New York became one of the wealthiest cities in the world in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it also competed on a global scale in cultural acquisitions and architectural development. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, it overtook Philadelphia to be the largest and wealthiest city in the United States. 90

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In the early twentieth century, New York’s opulent Uptown housing was designed largely in the style of European palaces and mansions. However, as it grew in stature and confidence in the first half of the twentieth century, New York developed cultural institutions and skyscrapers in its own distinctive image. These buildings were designed to show the city’s dominance and power, as well as its place in the new world order. The more Manhattan grew, the wider and taller its buildings became and the wealthier and more opulent the cultural objects in its institutions needed to be in relation to the rest of the United States—and the world. These were also symbols of the city’s pride, and their presence was a symbol of the new cultural importance of New York in the twentieth century.

About the Met The Met was not the first museum in New York. The first was an institution of curios called the Tammany Society, which was founded in Manhattan and opened in 1791 (Howe, 1913). However, unlike the Tammany Society and other early museums, the origins of the Met were not homegrown; like the Statue of Liberty, the Met’s roots lay in postrevolutionary Paris. This perhaps was the first indication the Met wanted to be an international rather than a local institution. Although they met in Paris, the Met’s founding group of philanthropists and academics were American, led by a lawyer from New York called John Jay (The Met, 2016). It was Jay who had the ambition of establishing the Met as the United States’ “national institution and gallery of art” (The Met, 2016). However, rather than a facsimile of European institutions, Jay felt that this new museum should be developed in the image of the New World. This would be represented through lavish buildings as well as the museum’s collections, much as the city itself was doing in Midtown and Uptown Manhattan. On their return to the United States, Jay and his colleagues enlisted the help of other wealthy philanthropists, artists, and academics, as well as—and this was especially important to the project—members of the New York State Legislature. The institution of the Met was officially founded four years later, when its charter was incorporated by the New York State Legislature in April 1870 (The Met, 2016). 91

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The Met’s initial collection was also acquired in 1870 and was composed of a single Roman sarcophagus. A year later, 174 European paintings, including French, Flemish, and Italian masters, were added to this collection (The Met, 2016). The original charter of the Met sets out the gathering of this collection, as well as the aims of its foundation and the accessing and showing of its works, as follows: [The museum is to] be located in the City of New York, for the purpose of establishing and maintaining in said city a Museum and library of art, of encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts, and the application of arts to manufacture and practical life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and, to that end, of furnishing popular instruction. (The Met, 1870)

Subsequently, education and access to the arts for all who wanted to study it, and who felt themselves to be kindred spirits, were at the heart of the Met’s charter. In 1872, the Met’s collection was eventually housed in what was the Dodworth Building, at 681 Fifth Avenue, opposite Saint Thomas Church and less than half a block from the MoMA. This building was in the upper stretches of Midtown Manhattan. In 1880, the museum moved to a larger site further up Fifth Avenue, and into its first purpose-built house of art—the initial facade was originally constructed in the neo-Gothic style, which was fashionable in New York in the nineteenth century. This new building was added onto on several occasions, from 1888 until the early years of the twentieth century. The front of the Met’s building was transformed again into a neoclassical beaux arts facade in the early 1920s and was finished in 1926 with neo-Grecian and neo-Roman decorative features, such as columns, porticos, and angular window arches. Although its frontage has not changed radically since the building of this facade, the Met has expanded further. It now physically incorporates modernist, less visible facades on its upper levels, sides, and rear. In the latter years of the twentieth century, the architects Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo remodeled much of the interior of the building to make its galleries and academic collection accessible. More recently, one of the roofs of this main building was transformed into the Iris and 92

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B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, which hosts temporary sculpture exhibitions, a seating area, and a bar. The location of the Met is also designed to be visually spectacular, and its more modern redesigns have been planned with the ambition of enhancing these views. On its then new site in 1880, the Met buffered the east side of Central Park. And the Met’s main site is still located on the same Fifth Avenue plot as this initial purpose-built art house. Nowadays, the Met’s plot has expanded to four blocks wide, between the cross streets of Eightieth and Eighty-Fourth. The main building is also surrounded by some of the wealthiest real estate in the city. The views from its roof garden are designed to inspire awe, as they face the south side of Central Park, Midtown Manhattan, and the Upper West Side. From its relatively modest beginnings, the Met’s collection expanded rapidly over the latter decades of the nineteenth century and continued to expand exponentially with only two breaks. This growth was curtailed during the First and Second World Wars, when its collection and building programs were all but frozen and part of its collection was placed in storage (Tomkins, 1970). This first hundred years of the Met was the period of its greatest growth. In this era, the Met was nurtured and represented by numerous curatorial departments and purpose-built collections, such as that found in the American Wing. Largely because of this early era, the current collection now numbers in the region of two million objects, with its own reported history highlighting its most exciting acquisitions: A work by Renoir entered the Museum as early as 1907 . . . in 1910 the Metropolitan was the first public institution to accept works of art by Matisse . . . by 1979 the Museum owned five of the fewer than 40 known Vermeers. (The Met, 2016)

The funding of much of the Met’s collection and buildings during its powerful rise came from private financiers, with the wealthiest, most influential donors having wings named after them. These wings include the Robert Lehman Wing, the Henry R. Kravis Wing, the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, the Sackler Wing, and the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. 93

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The main building of the Met has galleries over five floors, with other public facilities on two additional floors. These galleries house numerous exhibitions, ranging from features of modern art, photography, and design to old masters—exhibited as per country and period—and cultural objects from every populated continent in the world. In addition, the Met now has two further sites in Manhattan: the Cloisters and the Met Breuer. Again, these sites are based in the wealthiest areas of Manhattan, with the area around the Cloisters being a highly desirable wooded suburb, Washington Heights, whose park overlooks the whole of Manhattan, and the Met Breuer being a few blocks away from the Met’s main site on the Upper East Side. The Cloisters, which is also based in a purpose-built house on the northwestern tip of Manhattan, was opened in 1938. Its collection of European medieval and Byzantine art was largely acquired for the museum in 1925 by John D. Rockefeller Jr. Although this building and collection is not featured in my research, it is mentioned by several visitors. The Met Breuer is the Met’s newest site and is the home of the Whitney Museum of American Art—the Whitney has now moved to a new building in Downtown Manhattan, and the Met occupies the entire Breuer building. This new building—named after its original architect, Marcel Breuer—which is five streets and two avenues southeast of the Met’s main site, was opened in 2016. It is now redesigned to hold much of the museum’s modern art collection. How is the Met regarded by New Yorkers and New York culture? Although it did not technically achieve its ambition of being a national gallery and institution, the Met has engendered pride and patriotism in New Yorkers since its inception. Most important, much like New York’s other significant architecture and demonstrations of wealth, it is a showcase for the city’s visual culture and acts as a space for education; entertainment, through activities such as movie shows, concerts, and performances; and socializing. The Met also has a significant collection of historically important objects from many continents; it could be said that it often sees itself as the repository of an international culture that has come to define New York. The beaux arts facade of the Met’s main site is also arguably one of the most visually recognizable buildings in New York—alongside others such 94

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as the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and Times Square— and it is the setting for numerous films and photo shoots. This pride that New Yorkers have in the Met has led to a high-profile promotion of the museum and occasionally exaggerated claims by some previously associated with it. For example, in his autobiography, Making the Mummies Dance, Thomas Hoving, the director of the Met from 1967 to 1977, claimed that the museum represented the greatest collection of visual art that has ever existed—anywhere. In one tract of his autobiography, Hoving proposes that the Met’s collection is equivalent to all of those in London’s national museums and galleries collectively. However, in what is a self-admission of the need for such a collection, he also feels that the foundation itself was born of the cultural insecurity and youthfulness of the United States—and of a need to make a cultural and intellectual statement to the world. When it comes to art treasures, in quality and quantity, old or modern, the Met puts most fabled art repositories of all other cities to shame. Few museums on the globe have amassed more art or showed it off in a more vibrant way. It’s rather like having the best of London’s National Gallery, the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert all rolled into one incomparable art metropolis. Why the Met has become so rich has probably something to do with America’s deep-seated cultural inferiority complex. New York, having started with little more than a few Indian beads and some Dutch silver and crockery, was driven to possess a slice of every culture on earth. The oligarchs and the affluent gave unstintingly with money and works towards the goal of making the Met nothing less than an encyclopedia of mankind’s visual history. How well the Met succeeded! (Hoving, 1994, p. 13)

Some of Hoving’s pride in the Met still exists in the public image of the museum, and its collection is vaunted through similar language on its own website. The collection itself is also measured largely for its material value in its own literature, much like New York often counts its material power. For example, on its website the museum makes the following assertions of its most prized collections: The American Wing holds the most comprehensive collection of American art, sculpture, and decorative arts in the world . . . the Egyptian 95

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art collection is the finest outside Cairo . . . the Islamic art collection is without peer. (The Met, 2016)

Hoving and others’ enthusiasm aside, it is difficult to quantitatively compare the collection in the Met to that of other museums in quality and financial appraisal—particularly as many international museum pieces are so rare as to be irreplaceable and consequently beyond a normal understanding of financial or cultural value. Unlike many national museums, such as France’s Louvre, Italy’s Uffizi, the British Museum, or Russia’s Hermitage, the Met does not have what may be called “headline” objects in its collections. For example, the Met has no artworks as celebrated or discussed as the Mona Lisa (La Giaconda), da Vinci’s cartoons, Michelangelo’s David, or the Romanovs’ Fabergé eggs. The Met also has no wonder of the ancient world, such as the Parthenon Marbles, and it has no archaeological objects that changed the way that we see and research ancient Egypt, such as the Rosetta Stone. Arguably, and heavily featured on its own website, the Met’s most iconic artworks are ancient Egyptian objects gathered at the beginning of the twentieth century or salvaged later in the same century (The Met, 2016). For example, its most famous piece is a complete Egyptian temple, built as a gift by the Roman Empire to the Egyptian Empire around 15 BC. This is known as the Temple of Dendur. Hoving himself helped to save the Temple of Dendur from destruction after the construction of a dam near its original location in 1965 by the Egyptian government. The temple is now housed in the purpose-built Sackler Wing, with its floor-to-ceiling windows backing onto Central Park. This wing opened in 1978 and is now the site of many private functions, bringing significant revenue into the museum. On a different scale, perhaps the most iconic piece in the Met is a small ancient Egyptian blue Hippo nicknamed William, which is often regarded as the museum’s mascot; this is featured in many of the Met’s publications, particularly its children’s literature. William is part of a larger collection discovered by archaeologists that was commissioned by the museum in southern Asasif, western Thebes, Egypt. This said, the Met is in the top tier of world museums according to two numerical indicators: the first indicator is its gallery space, and the second indicator is its visitor numbers. 96

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The gallery space on the main site of the Met is the United States’ largest in a single museum by square feet. Although in total the Smithsonian Institution’s gallery spaces are larger, they are counted as several single museums, and no individual building’s gallery spaces are larger than that of the Met’s main building. The Met’s main building gallery space is also the second largest in the world, behind the National Museum of China in Beijing (Siegel, 2011). As per recent figures, in 2015 the Met was also the third most visited museum in the world, with 6,533,106 visitors a year. This number was behind the British Museum, with 6,820,686 visitors, and the Louvre, with 8,600,000 visitors (Pes, da Silva, & Sharpe, 2016). In this index, published in the Art Newspaper, the Met is reported to be regularly in the top five for visitor numbers year on year and reflects its status as the United States’ most visited museum in its most visited city. In terms of its current administration, the Met has seventeen curatorial departments, each acquiring, conserving/preserving, and managing its own collections. These departments are the American Wing; Ancient Near Eastern Art; Arms and Armor; Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; Asian Art; the Costume Institute; Drawings and Prints; Egyptian Art; European Paintings; European Sculpture and Decorative Arts; Greek and Roman Art; Islamic Art; the Robert Lehman Collection; Medieval Art and the Cloisters; Modern and Contemporary Art; Musical Instruments; and Photographs (The Met, 2016). The Met’s director is currently Thomas Campbell, a British curator who previously presided over the Met’s textile collection. Prior to Campbell, another foreign-born director, Philippe de Montebello, a Frenchman of aristocratic heritage, led the museum for over thirty years. Like Hoving, their directorships oversaw further radical changes to the Met’s structure and collection. However, its mission, as published in its annual return, has changed little since its original charter of 1870: The mission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is to collect, preserve, study, exhibit, and stimulate appreciation for and advance knowledge of works of art that collectively represent the broadest spectrum of human achievement at the highest level of quality, all in the service of the public and in accordance with the highest professional standards. (The Met, 2011, p. 66) 97

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In previous decades, the administration’s quest to build a superior collection has led to many controversies in its acquisition strategy. And in common with several other U.S. and European museums, the Met has acquired artworks looted by the Nazis during World War II (see, for example, Dezell, 2000; “Follow the Leader,” 2000). In other cases, the Met has acquired objects of disputed provenance, taken without permission from archaeological sites, monuments, and historical sites and sold on to the museum (see Hamlin, 2006; “How Did That Vase,” 2008; Knöfel, 2005; “When Museums Decide to Return,” 2013). Also in common with many other high-profile museums in the United States, many of the Met’s controversial acquisitions have resulted in several high-profile lawsuits. Consequently, in more recent years the Met’s administration constituted a robust collections management policy (Comap). Comap is a set of protocols for acquiring, selling, loaning, storing, preserving, displaying, and accessing the museum’s collection for the common good of all (The Met, 2016). Comap also states its commitment to abide by several laws relating to antique objects, such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the National Stolen Property Act, and the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act. This policy covers acquisition, preservation, and ensuring that the Met’s collection complies with these state, national, and international laws; ethical standards; and the Met’s updated charter. The Met’s Comap is largely administered by the Met’s Acquisitions Committee, Board of Trustees, Executive Committee, and individual curators. Depending on the approximate value of the acquisition, all purchases, loans, and sales of objects must go through an extensive process of approval. For low-value objects, permission need only be approved by the manager of the curatorial department. However, high-value items must be approved by either the Met’s administrative committees or the director himself. In addition to its commitment to fair purchasing, loans, and sales, Comap also lays down the principle that any object sold from the collection can only be used to buy new objects. This has relevance to education and other forms of knowledge provision at the Met, as Comap also states a commitment to making its collection accessible to the public. This is achieved principally through its galleries, libraries, and, more recently, the web. 98

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As with most large, modern museums, the Met makes its collection accessible to the public through two primary channels: physical access to the collection (that is to say, being in the presence of the collection through visiting the Met’s buildings) and representations of objects in the collection (that is to say, learning about the collection purely through facsimiles of objects or through paper and electronic documents with images). Physical access is through galleries, archives, and educational activities. Representational access is largely through libraries, publications, and the web, although its educational activities can also have reproductions of objects. Physical access to the Met’s collection for knowledge development is also supported by information in many different forms: print; audio recordings; detailed diagrams; maps; facsimiles, including models and representative samples; and live descriptions of the objects. This information is particularly important as it is in keeping with the education and access remit of its charter. The Met largely provides much of its information informally in galleries and through its information desks, which are close to the entrances of the museum. This information is largely produced by two large departments in the Met: the Education Department and the Publishing Department. As these two departments feature heavily in my research, it is to their functions and activities that I now turn.

The Education and Publishing Departments The Met’s Education Department (Edep) provides twenty-five thousand events a year. These events include free, ticketed, and prepaid courses, lectures, entertainment, informal tours, descriptions of collections, gallery talks, and bespoke imaging of artworks (The Met, 2016). Although many of these courses are informal, others carry educational credit or are self-contained short courses. Edep also works with New York’s Department of Education to ensure curricula overlap with the latest school projects and courses. Edep provides teaching and training at a range of academic levels, from postdoctoral and postgraduate research and training to teaching school curricula and preschool activities. It also hosts exchanges and 99

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training sessions for other museum professionals and educators and offers fellowships to people wanting to conduct research at the Met. The Met has classrooms, lecture halls, theaters, and cinemas for its Edep events—the theaters are for performances, such as movies, artists’ talks, plays, readings, and concerts. Many of these events are part of its Spectrum program of education for people who have studied at college level. Edep rooms are largely based in a separate wing in the southern lower ground floor of the main building, although its complex of offices is on the upper floors of the museum. In addition, Edep is responsible for self-directed learning and inclusion at the Met. Self-directed learning usually takes the form of selfguided maps and literature or audio guides, which can be taken, bought, or borrowed from the information desks, depending on the nature and accessibility of the tour. Inclusion also consists of bespoke events, translation, physical access, or communication for often-excluded social groups. These groups include disabled people, people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and people from a range of underrepresented language groups. Similarly, the remit of the Met’s Publication Department (Pudep) is to produce and disseminate public information and scholarly material through multiple sources and platforms. These sources include print literature and the Internet. Under the administration of Pudep, the Met now increasingly makes information and images accessible through its extensive website and other Internet-based platforms. As part of its inclusion remit, Edep is highly active in developing multicultural events. These events represent New York’s diverse communities and are developed in partnership with these local communities, as well as those from within the Met and other local museums. For example, the Met is developing events in conjunction with the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New York Times Community Affairs Department, the New York Historical Society, El Museo del Barrio, and the Museum of Chinese Art in America, among many others (The Met, 2016). As with its collections, the Met’s access provision is financed by many private donors and foundations. These donors include the MetLife and the Filomen M. D’Agostino Foundations; the Ceil & Michael E. Pulitzer Foundation, Inc.; the Renate, Hans & Maria Hofmann Trust; the Allene Reuss Memorial Trust; the Murray G. and 100

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Beatrice H. Sherman Charitable Trust; the Dorothy S. Fried Trust; and the Jane B. Wachsler Funds. These donations allow many visitors attending programs from underrepresented groups to attend the museum free of charge, often with an extra person, such as a sighted guide or family member, to support mobility. To keep up with modern technology, in 2014 the Met also launched its own app for smartphones and tablet computers. This app has similar contact with the Met’s collection database and visitor information as its website but is more easily accessible. The app also allows for personalization of information and for the saving of favorite objects. In keeping with its policy of accessibility, at the end of February 2016 the Met relaunched its updated website to coincide with the launch of Met Breuer. This new website has more than five hundred thousand pages and continues to include artworks from its database collection via search functions and sophisticated time lines. At least part of the reason for the relaunch of the website is the Met’s belief that the original website favored the collection and location of its main building on Fifth Avenue more than the Cloisters; by extension, it also had the potential to overshadow the Met Breuer after its launch as well (The Met, 2016). This new website is also designed to be integral to the “in-house” information offered in its latest building and developed as part of its public image. As its press release says: [At] The Met Breuer, one of the first things visitors will notice is a large-scale media wall in the lobby. This giant screen, made of 28 feet of LEDs and state-of-the-art display technology, is a critical component of the building’s public experience. Marcel Breuer designed the lobby around the information desk, and we are updating its display wall to current technology—essentially allowing The Met Breuer a highly flexible and engaging means of delivering information, branding, and even digital art to our visitors. (The Met, 2016)

The launch of this updated website also allows the Met to keep up to date with its digital access in line with the latest trends in web technologies and data sources. To this end, the website’s designers have examined connections with mobile devices further; although this web access is mostly still via traditional keyboard and mouse devices, mobile technologies now make up around 40 percent of its use (The Met, 2016). 101

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This switch of emphasis to smaller, more flexible, and easy-to-change technologies makes the website potentially more inclusive. This new technology also makes the Met’s broadcast information and data collection easier to access by all users in most localities—including the many Wi-Fi hotspots around New York. The new version of the website also allows the Met to promote a new corporate image and design, in line with its book, catalogs, brochures, and so forth. The Met’s new website takes advantage of the increased use of data and modern Internet speeds by modern, commercial marketing departments. GPS facilities in mobile devices can also find the user in or near the museum and provide highly accurate information based on his or her location. The increased interaction between the Met and its visitors on its new website and app also makes up-to-date data on commercial, academic, and search users of its website instantly available to the museum. Consequently, the Met monitors the data from web hits—that is to say, the number of times people access, tap, or click on individual webpages—and unique visits to its website by visitors. Mangers at the Met also use information recorded from users to monitor trends. This information includes the type of pages visitors access, such as whether visitors examine information pages about opening times or collection preferences; the number of times visitors access certain types of pages; visitors’ most popular searches; and information on pages at the Met and other websites that visitors have accessed individually and in combination over a period of time. Data can also be used to classify groups of visitors, such as people with disabilities or people who are older. The number of objects that are represented in the Met’s online collection is growing rapidly. Images and descriptions of these objects are stored in a database, and full access is provided to visitors. As I write this in October 2016, the Met’s database now has 431,665 entries. This is up from around three thousand objects from just over a month ago and is a little over a fifth of the entire collection. These objects can be accessed through a search page. Although much smaller in scale, seven thousand objects from the database can also be browsed through the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: The New Edition. The latest version of the time line was redesigned and launched in January 2016. The objects represented in the time line 102

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also link to scholarly essays about similar parts of the collection and chart similar objects visually. The objects displayed on the Heilbrunn Timeline are presented graphically according to their historical importance and geographical region. This time line accounts for around 40 percent of the Met’s entire web traffic now (The Met, 2016). Objects in the Met’s online database are classified according to artist or the culture that created them. This can range from the full name of the artist to simply identifying an unknown regional craftsperson; the type of object they are or the material they were made from, such as silver or sculpture; the geographical area they originated from, by either continent or smaller region; the era in which the object was thought to have been made, which can span thousands of years BC or hundreds AD; and the curatorial department they are stored in. The purpose of this virtual collection is largely for scholarly activity. However, the Met also makes reproductions of several of its images available for external teaching, although the museum stipulates that it must be consulted for permission before these images are used. The Met also allows alternative websites to display images from its collections and complies with external protocols for distributing images of its collection. These websites and protocols include, but are not restricted to, the following:

•  ArtStor—This web resource is said to hold over nine thousand

photographs of the Met’s collection for use in publications and teaching. Most of these photographs are high resolution, and all these images are strictly controlled by copyright.

•  Open Access for Scholarly Content (Oasco) and Images for

Academic Publication (Imap)—This is a scheme that specializes in making images available specifically for academic publishing. Images available using Oasco are made available directly through the Met’s main website, and Imap images are made available through ArtStor. Images published through these schemes are open source and are made available free of charge, although the images are bound by a strict set of terms and conditions. The images available using this scheme are 103

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available on the Met’s database and are identified by a logo indicating their availability.

•  Art Resource—This is an independent agent representing the

Met’s collection and is based on Broadway, New York. Art Resource also handles permissions for the representation of images for much of the Met’s collection in external publications. For scholarly publications, Art Resource abides by the Oasco scheme and can provide permissions. For purely commercial publications, Art Resource sets the pricing for image reproduction.

•  Scholars Resource, Inc.—This is an agency that works in a similar way as Art Resource but is for educators who wish to use the Met’s images for teaching and lecturing external to the Met. Images are similarly bound by the Oasco scheme and are generally free to use. The agency is based in the city of Portland, Maine.

What are the issues of representing the Met’s collection to visitors who are blind? In terms of the focus of this book, the increased accessibility of much of the museum’s collection represents a significant issue and has the potential to passively exclude people who are blind, particularly if they visit the Met independently. Importantly, most of the collection remains untouchable or incomprehensible through touch, due to fragility, chemical composition, and/or value. It is also significant that, in common with most art museums, the Met’s collection is largely two dimensional; that is to say, the objects are largely pictorial representations, as paintings, drawings, or photographs. There are extremely few touchable representations of these images in the galleries, and the labels describing the paintings are typed and give only brief technical information about the images. As disabilities like blindness make mobility difficult—particularly mobility in unfamiliar areas—support can be expensive and inconvenient for visitors who are blind. Accessing the Met’s buildings can also be physically problematic. For instance, the only public transport that comes within a block of the museum is the public bus system. Unless you live 104

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conveniently close, the bus system also requires frequent changes to catch the right bus. For those coming from out of Manhattan, the closest train station to the Met is Grand Central, on Forty-Second Street in Midtown, and the closest subway station is on Eighty-Sixth Street and Lexington Avenue— Lexington is three avenues east of Fifth. The buses and subway also have steep steps, although there are accessible features such as pneumatic lowering doors on buses and lifts in some subway stations. Consequently, using public transport can be hazardous. Getting to the Met via private transport or on foot can also be difficult. Fifth Avenue is one way and has several lanes that must be crossed before getting to the curb. There is constant traffic, as Fifth is a main highway in Manhattan that leads to Harlem, Midtown, and the roads crossing Central Park. It is also illegal to park a car in front of the museum; there is a covered parking lot to the rear of the Met, but access is severely restricted. As I described earlier in this chapter, the architecture and surroundings of the Met’s main site are designed to be visually spectacular. Consequently, much of these settings can be restrictive to visitors who have severely impaired sight or no sight at all. Many of the visual elements of the main building—such as the high, steep stone steps to the front of the building; the smooth, hard stone staircases inside; the overhangs on the stairs themselves; the proliferation of columns in the older parts; and the smooth floors in many of the corridors and galleries—are also potentially awkward. This is a common problem with many historic museums, which are designed to be beautiful first and practical second. The lighting in the Met also varies greatly, which can be a problem for people who rely on their residual vision. As the building is so large, its lower floors often have no windows, and natural light is restricted. Some galleries, because of their displays, have low lighting, which can potentially prove hazardous and restrict the viewing of objects by people with very low vision. Many exhibitions also replicate the original settings that the objects would have been found in. This can provide hazards such as unexpected steps, alternating surfaces that make the use of a white cane inaccessible, and objects displayed in different, unexpected areas of the environments that fetter blind visitors’ general mobility. 105

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The lack of a standard gallery plan and the constantly changing designs can also potentially make it difficult for visitors who are blind to develop a spatial map of galleries for future visits—that is to say, a memory of the spaces they must navigate. If the visitor’s purpose is to understand certain parts of the Met’s collection, then gaining information on the Internet could make visiting the museum virtual and potentially easier. This being said, although more access to knowledge through the Met’s website provides greater access to information, it remains largely graphical and difficult to comprehend with impaired vision. For instance, although it links to essays and comprehensive written information, the showpiece Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History is particularly graphical and features multimedia. Modern technologies exist that can read the websites’ hidden codes, such as the software JAWs, which can read labels given to images on the web. However, where useful information for visitors who are blind is provided, the website rarely gives a comprehensive representation of the image, as the description size is limited. There is particularly little or no historical information provided about the images on image labels, although searches of the Met’s object database can provide larger amounts of information through its standard descriptions.

Education and Inclusion at the Met The Met provides access to its collections for visitors who are blind through its Access and Community Programs (Acop) section. As I previously mentioned, this access is provided through the museum’s Edep and works in conjunction with many other museum officers, such as curators, lawyers, and buildings staff. Acop provides courses specifically for different sensory impairments and learning disabilities, including hearing impairment and older people with dementia. Subsequently, programs and strategies are tailored to the groups’ or individual’s prerequisites. Sara described this as follows: We work closely with everyone in [Edep]—since a person with a disability can be a school child, a student, a teen, a family member, an adult, etc. etc. We also work closely across the museum on access issues

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not necessarily related to education. I always say we wear three hats: we develop programs tailored to meet the needs of people with disabilities; we coordinate accommodations to programs, exhibitions, etc. across the museum; and we act as internal advisors on accessibility across the museum, including offering disability awareness training to staff and volunteers.

Access for blind and visually impaired visitors is mostly delivered through educational programs. These programs first started at the Met in the 1970s with touch tours, and they have been administered ever since by several different divisions within Edep. The Met expanded this provision in 1997 through its previous access coordinator, who specialized in access for visitors who are blind. She introduced a structured touch tour of many items in its Egyptian collection and then introduced verbal imaging tours of the Met’s collections around the same time. This has expanded significantly under the Met’s access officer. From the beginning of the new millennium, the Met also began formal classes alongside its bespoke tours for visually impaired visitors. These were introduced when it was recognized that some people felt too intimidated to ask for a private guide. Consequently, Picture This!, a scheduled program taught mainly through verbal imaging and multisensory experiences, was launched as a regular Thursday-a-month workshop. This program is based in several of the museum’s galleries. Most access programs have evolved over the course of the last decade, and an additional Picture This! family program now runs in the museum, although this program is more irregular as it has been harder to find an audience for the program. Around four years ago, the Met also started offering classes such as Seeing Through Drawing and several photography courses for visually impaired visitors, although this type of course predates Picture This! The teachers running these tours are art historians or practicing artists. Acop also differentiates its access programs. To book a session, an appointment is initially made by telephone or email with Sam. During an initial conversation, Sam questions the visitors about their needs and preferences.

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After these initial discussions, Sam pairs the teacher and topics with the visitor; this is dependent on the teacher’s knowledge of the technical aspects of the paintings or other artworks requested or the general area of the teacher’s historical specialism. Consequently, the type of teacher involved in the touch tour provides information about the needs and requests of the visitors. Acop also runs several other structured classes in the museum’s studios, which are dedicated to creating and appreciating pieces from the museum’s collection through multisensory experience. In the fiscal year that ended just before my research did—which runs from July 1 through June 30—the Met had around sixty-five hundred participants on these formal access programs. In addition, the Special Education Services volunteers in Edep served around another seventeen hundred visiting schoolchildren in special education classes. In addition to its formal programs, support services—such as signlanguage interpreters, large-print labels, tours with listening devices, or the self-guided touch tours picked up from the information desk—were also coordinated by Acop. Although these services catered to a much larger number of visitors, no statistics were kept on visitor numbers, as their interaction with the museum was informal. The design of these programs has largely remained in the same form within Edep since the early years of the new millennium. However, Edep was recently restructured, and Acop is now part of a larger division within the department. This new division represents all nontraditional forms of education and is renamed Gallery and Studio Programs. It also encompasses the programs department, with extra duties being taken on by the Met’s volunteer and access staff. In addition, Acop runs many structured creative programs based on creative-making pieces in the museum or studying a department’s collection. These programs include drawing classes (the most well known of these is Seeing Through Drawing) and verbal imaging and touch tours of predefined pieces that the museum allows to be handled under supervision (the most well known is Picture This!). These structured programs are advertised to members of a mailing and telephone list, and information about them is provided through the Met’s Edep webpages. These courses are again arranged by Acop’s administrator and held in a classroom or studio, which is based on the ground 108

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floor of the museum. These rooms are also reserved from time to time for several lessons and training courses for teachers and mainstream classes. Acop advertises important information about accessibility on its website, outlining facilities that are available for independent visitors. This includes information on facilities, officers with responsibility for access, links to services, and email addresses and telephone contacts. For example, the following is an excerpt from information for blind and vision-impaired users from Acop’s accessibility pages and is typical of the support it provides: Service Animals: Service animals are welcome in the Museum. Large-Print Labels: Large-print labels may be found in dispensers at the entrances of selected special exhibitions. Audio Guides: Audio Guide players are free for visitors who are blind, partially sighted, or hard of hearing. Self-Guided Tour: In Touch with Ancient Egypt—Self-Guided: This touch tour consists of six ancient Egyptian sculptures. Visitors who are blind or partially sighted are invited to touch these sculptures of pharaohs, gods, and goddesses. Visitors may take the tour independently. A recorded Audio Guide with information about the sculptures is available at the Audio Guide desk in the Great Hall. A large-print booklet with descriptions and locations of the sculptures can be obtained at the Information Desk in the Great Hall. This information is also available in Braille and Braille labels identify the sculptures in the galleries. (The Met, 2011)

The Met’s website also makes information available about objects, which are illustrated through electronic images and can be increased in size in using accessible settings available on most computers. This system makes it possible for visitors who are blind to research access to the Met—such as events, routes, transport, and accessible entrances—before visiting. Subsequently, using web information and accessible software is increasingly becoming an important tool in reducing passive exclusion.

Conclusion Although it never achieved its ambition of being a national museum, like elite universities, opera houses, and other cultural icons, the Met has achieved an almost religious status in New York. As with cathedrals in 109

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the medieval world (Camille, 2013), the Met has been designed, built, and rebuilt as a status symbol of the power of the city and the culture it is intended to represent. The Met is not only visually spectacular to sighted outsiders who visit its collection of mainly untouchable items. Like medieval cathedrals, the Met was also designed as a visual icon to represent the power of New York to the rest of the United States and to the world and is consequently an impressive and remarkable edifice to look at. The porticos and steep steps of the facade make the viewer look up when approaching the building. In addition, the sheer scale of its doors, windows, and ceiling height is designed to inspire its visitors, those who pass by, and those who see its image in photographs, postcards, and posters. The vistas that can be seen from the Met also look onto wealth, power, and beauty, a view made use of by its roof garden. Also like medieval cathedrals, giving to the Met has been a sign of power and wealth and can buy immortality by attaching a name to its reputation, scholarship, or wing. Subsequently, donors who have had wings named after them are among the most famous and wealthy philanthropists in the world—Henry R. Kravis, Acheson Wallace, Arthur M. Sackler, the Lehmann family, and Michael C. Rockefeller. Not content with donating money for new collections or buildings, these donors have bequeathed entire art collections and, in one case, the entire interior of a house. This worship of visual wealth is unsurpassed. However, unlike the medieval cathedrals that drove the development of the cities around them, the history and evolution of the Met has mirrored the rise of New York. It has also been driven by its cultural importance. Its main building is one of the most recognizable in New York, and its changing design has reflected the shifting architectural trends of Manhattan. This being said, those who founded the Met meant for it to be much more than an icon of wealth, power, and pride. They envisioned an institution of education for people in the United States, attracting what they thought would be kindred spirits. This allowed for access to the fine arts beyond private salons and wealthy homes, as was often the case in the nineteenth century. Although it was eager to accept its gifts, the Met also formed and evolved a charter in conjunction with the local government, which stated an educational and intellectual aim. This was to be its focus 110

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beyond its building plans and was developed on a modest platform in its earliest days. More recently and through an updated mission statement, it now sees itself as the ethical guardian of its collection. This is perhaps at least in part due to the controversies that surrounded its earlier development of collections through accepting or buying stolen or looted objects. However, it is fair to say that the Met is also aware of its heritage and founding charter and sees itself as an academic leader and guardian of knowledge on visual culture and fine art. Consequently, in its modern era a management structure has evolved at the Met that attempts to think more strategically about the development of its collection, its purpose, and its mission. It attempts to live up to its place as an international place of learning and entertainment in the arts, as well as a place where people can connect with their own past or those of other cultures. Its modern administration has given the institution of the Met more security, an image that is less dependent on its surrounding commercial environment. It is now an administration that can raise its own funds through commercial activity as well as accept donations, and it can have a greater say in its development. This has almost given it a life of its own as a preserver of culture, and not just an exhibitor of wealthy objects. And yet, in keeping with the great majority of museums, galleries, and institutes of art education, there is still an intractable problem with making its collection wholly accessible. Most cultural objects are visual, two dimensional, and untouchable—or, rather, can be less discernable through touch. In their effort to act as conservators of world culture, museums also make their works distant, and proximity becomes impossible because of either frailty or sustainability. Given the problem of proximity to art, how effective are programs and support in providing access to visitors who are blind? And if they only seek knowledge about the Met’s main collection, is the description of the collection provided by the website preferable, as it does not mean having to physically access the building? These questions are addressed through case studies in the following two chapters and have significance in three ways: they help us understand 111

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more fully what people who are blind want from the Met and similar museums and how we can provide more effective access; they can examine whether knowledge about what is considered disability, such as that examined in chapter 2, can ever help us to overcome the passive exclusion of disabled people in general; and, importantly, they give us a philosophical significance in that they tell us something about the purpose of what we call visual culture and the palaces that are built to house it. This can help us understand whether the power of visual culture is just in its perception or also in its physical proximity.

Note 1.  Sara and I worked together throughout the summer of 2011. She also filled out a questionnaire that was sent on September 9, 2011.

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EXPERIENCES OF VERBAL IMAGING

Research Notes In the preface, I problematized exclusion as either passive or active, and in the following chapters I attempt to identify examples of institutional passive exclusion. In defining passive and active exclusion, I also argue that the development of institutions for the blind and mainstream museum access for visitors who are blind are powerful examples of exclusion. This is because museums assume that people who are blind do not have any vision and, consequently, that they cannot benefit from many aspects of the visual arts. The study now continues to examine the application of passive and active exclusion through three case studies of four adults who participated in access programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). Two of the case studies are individuals who took part in activities with sighted friends, and one case study is of a married couple who visited together.1 All the case studies are of differing ages and levels and types of blindness—from distorted vision in certain environments to total blindness—and they became blind at various stages of their life. I have made the sample as diverse as possible. Two visitors were women, and two were men. They culturally represent visitors from different parts of the United States and people born outside the United States.

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Only one of the adults is a former student of a school for the blind; the other visitors went to mainstream schools. All but one visitor had higher education. The visitors were interviewed in a public space of the museum straight after at least one tour. We usually sat on one of the Met’s benches nearest their last exhibits, and I audio recorded the interviews. I did not have a single set of questions to ask the visitors during their interviews, only a set of topics. This allowed me greater freedom to ask them about their recent experiences and made the interview more like a conversation. In these case studies, I illustrate how the early experiences of artworks—as sighted people or people educated outside of the institution or as part of their institutionalization—have led to passive exclusion. I then show how passive exclusion of people who are blind has led to different cultural and social experiences of engaging with museums based on their personal histories.

Edi Edi is eighty years old and lives alone in New York. She is a widow and grew up in an upper-middle-class family in a town in Ohio. As a child, Edi attended a mainstream school and matriculated through high school but did not continue on to university or college. Edi remembers doing art at school and had good experiences of visiting museums as a child but decided not to continue practicing the subject later. She told me that she did not have a talent for it: “I was never good at painting. . . . It was never my thing!” Edi also said that it was not that she felt less attached to practicing art but that she enjoyed listening to music and singing more as a young girl. Edi’s love of music later became more than pure enjoyment. After graduating high school, Edi became a professional singer—she said was taught privately, which was her reason for moving east—and in her early adult life she was employed in various clubs around New York. Edi says she enjoyed her career and developed her own cabaret act: “I used to sing jazz, pop, like Edi Gourmet.” However, Edi gave up this career when she married her husband, who was then a banking executive 114

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who could support her without her needing to work. “I never made it, but I always enjoyed it. I love music, music is my whole life.” Edi’s visual impairment is progressive—that is to say, it has not come on suddenly but slowly over time—and is caused by macular degeneration. She feels her condition was worsened by an earlier car accident and unsuccessful surgery. Edi also mentions having an early cataract operation but does not know the effect that this had on her current blindness. Edi has been blind for around ten years. In her earlier adult life, she had relatively normal sight and held a driver’s license. In addition, Edi tells me that she has a hearing impairment brought on by old age. However, this impairment is considerably weaker than her macular degeneration and does not affect her lifestyle significantly. As she grew up with sight, Edi has a strong and vivid visual memory despite her distorted vision; that is to say, she can remember complete scenes from her earlier life with complex visual details. Subsequently, Edi largely thinks of herself socially as a sighted person: she is determined not to use a cane, and her remaining vision allows her to distinguish colors in certain environments, although she says that these are becoming “foggier.” Edi also still sees herself as largely visual in her cultural preferences and describes taking part in a number of activities that are felt to be largely visual despite the problems associated with such activities. For instance, regarding colors Edi contrasts her experiences in cinemas to those of watching television. “When I go to a movie, I don’t see the color as I once did. Movies look black and white due to the dark environment.” Although when watching television, Edi said she sees “everything, full colors, everything. It’s just in a big movie theater [that I don’t].” Subsequently, Edi’s transition into blindness is both psychologically and socially difficult. Due to her age and increasing impairment, Edi still feels that she has to be much more cautious in planning activities and is developing an increasing sense of unease. Coupled with age, this feeling often puts her off going out as much as she did before. “I am just very careful of not going on steps or falling.” Edi’s blindness even causes her uneasiness in familiar places, such as her apartment building. For instance, Edi says that in her building, “the hallway seems vague. I get used to it, I know where I am. I don’t like strange places. I like to be where I know I am.” 115

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However, Edi’s transition to blindness and aging hardly affects her confidence when traveling locally, particularly if it means socializing within her closest circle of friends. For instance, although in her general environment Edi cannot tell visual details apart, she can see enough to get around familiar buildings with help if she preplans. She also finds that she can still use the subways and the steps to walk up and down different levels when needed. “I just take my time. The first step, you just go down. So, you just take your time.” Despite its complications, continuing to use public transport also provides Edi with a greater sense of psychological freedom and lessens the stress on her social and cultural life. She also feels that it helps being in Manhattan, as there is a wide choice of public transport around her apartment, although she has to be more thoughtful when using it. Simon: So you still take the subway? Edi: And taxis. New York is a great town for that kind of thing.

Edi at McQueen Edi is now an irregular user of the access services at the Met. During my observation with Edi, I accompanied her, a companion of hers, and a teacher from the museum on an imaging tour around the retrospective exhibition of fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Edi’s companion is a long-standing female friend of a similar age who is also from New York. My observation took just over two hours to complete and started in the Met’s education department. The imaging was led by the teacher who I call Anne, who is an art historian by training. The McQueen exhibition itself was organized and curated by members of the Met’s Costume Institute. The objects featured came from the Alexander McQueen Archive, London; the Givenchy Archive, Paris; and numerous private collections. There were approximately one hundred complete outfits and seventy accessories that McQueen had designed on display, and the exhibition had been designed as a multimedia show as much as a curated display. The exhibition covered the working life of McQueen, from his 1992 graduation exhibition from Central Saint Martin’s College, London, to his final runway presentation after his suicide in 2010. 116

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Anne’s narrative as we went around combined a physical description of the objects we stopped at with a story of the exhibition and the artist. She described how McQueen was discovered in London when he was a tailor’s cutter in Saville Row; how he developed his career with the help of the wealthy philanthropist Lulu Guinness; links to his designs and his family, friends, and education; and how his friends encouraged and sponsored his work when he was unknown. Anne also discussed carefully chosen pieces in terms of both their design and the background of the fashion world, punk influences, and European design; although McQueen was British, he designed for many European fashion houses. Anne also included imagings of materials, textures, colors, and forms; a description of the rooms themselves; and how the exhibits were put together. During the tour, Edi asked several questions about the pieces. Many questions were related to their materials and structure—she was particularly interested in how they looked and how they were constructed—their practicality, and whether they were wearable. Edi was also interested in the history and personal background of McQueen, why he made what he made, and how he developed his ideas. Edi’s blindness was not a significant bar to her visit. As we walked to McQueen’s gallery past more traditional objects, Edi understood the large blocks of color around her. She also had a good awareness of her place in the exhibition space when we eventually reached the main outer gallery of the exhibition. For instance, she was not fazed by the line, recognized where the gaps in the line were, and walked ahead with Anne easily. Edi also took in the artworks from the exhibition comfortably. For instance, when different dresses were pointed out to her in the first room that we entered, Edi turned toward the dresses without needing any verbal instructions. Edi also showed recognition of many elements of the shapes and colors of the garments by looking in the direction of the details as they were named or described to her without being prompted. Even though the entrance to the exhibition was dark, the exhibits themselves were of extremely light colors, like white or cream, as well as shocking and vivacious colors and tartans. The whole appearance of the exhibition was easily seen even with low vision. It was also curated in a number of different rooms that were lit slightly differently from their altered settings—from bright to ambient—and with different themes. 117

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Despite sounds, such as the buzz of the soundtrack accompanying each collection in the room, no other perceptions were significantly engaged in the imaging—no touch, taste, or smell. The highly visual description did not confuse Edi, even though all the pieces were displayed at a distance from the viewers and she could not interact with them (many exhibits were behind glass, on television screens, or in cubbyholes, with stewards and barriers present to ensure that visitors to the exhibition did not get too close to the objects). For example, in one room there was an exhibit of clothes relating to historical highland clearances in Scotland. To illustrate this concept, there was an ethereal Scottish-themed soundtrack playing in the background, including the sound of the Scottish moorlands. This became the stimulus for Anne’s description of this collection. The challenges to Edi’s hearing impairment also had been lessened by the curators’ design of the exhibition, although it was uncertain whether this was part of the regular design or meant to include people with hearing impairments. This also helped the music and soundtrack make a significant impact on the displays. For instance, although the ceilings of the galleries were high, there was no echo, as the walls had soft material covers. Furthermore, despite hard surfaces, such as glass cases and false walls, the acoustics in the galleries were dampened, which made the soundtracks that accompanied the exhibition clearer. However, despite these design features, Anne had to adjust to the difficult human environment, particularly the crisscrossing of voices that surrounded the four of us. There was also an ambient buzz to contend with from the other visitors’ audio guides and the conversations and general crowd noise from other parts of the rooms. The loud recordings of McQueen catwalk shows and his use of models in ways that had not previously been conceived likewise detracted from Anne’s description on many occasions. An unfortunate consequence of all this noise was that Anne often had to talk loudly straight into Edi’s ear. This exacerbated the difficulty in understanding the imaging as a consistent narrative and made the tour more uncomfortable than normal. Some of the more esoteric multimedia elements of the exhibition also presented problems with Edi’s mobility around some of the displays. For example, one display had a slot through which visitors could see a hologram show of the supermodel Kate Moss slowly coming into focus to the 118

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accompaniment of music. This exhibit had purposely been set at the waist height of an average adult to allow wheelchair access to the piece. Sara later confirmed that there had been a number of wheelchair users who had seen the exhibition, and this had helped them. However, the height meant that, in attempting to alleviate one issue, other visitors such as Edi could not bend down so easily to see through the slot. The McQueen exhibition also featured several written descriptions next to the pieces, although none looked as though they had a Braille description or larger print. Some of the descriptions that were in place had large blocks of writing that were not easily read and had been placed on the wall vertically next to displays. Other descriptions were much smaller and placed flat on the platform of individual or runs of artworks. This labeling issue was similar to problems I had seen in other esoteric exhibitions in the past (Hayhoe, 2012, 2008, 2000). The coloring and placement of the descriptions by the exhibits looked as though they were designed as much for their aesthetic impact as for their practical use. The color of the labels’ text varied from white on medium brown, black on white (this was in small print), or black on clear Perspex, which was set on a mottled wall in slightly larger print. None of these texts were used during our tour. During the observation, there was also a clear social problem with following the tour for people who are both blind and sighted. The Alexander McQueen exhibition was one of the most popular exhibitions that the Met has had. Before our tour, the exhibition had seen 660,000 visitors, which is almost unprecedented in most contemporary museum exhibitions. The lines for the exhibition also snaked through several corridors in the main building and went out along Fifth Avenue and, at one point, into Central Park. On the day of our tour, crowding was supposed to be less of a problem, as it was a Monday, when the museum was normally closed to the public. However, as the exhibition had proved to be so popular, a number of people had been allowed to attend after paying $50 a ticket; this was again an unheard-of amount for a public exhibition. Despite these filters theoretically making it easier to get around the exhibition, Edi’s companion and I found it difficult to follow Anne and Edi. There was close physical contact with the rest of the attendants as we toured the exhibition and an uncomfortable atmosphere. 119

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There was also a great deal of resentment about us going past the lines and into the exhibition ahead of the paying customers. Moreover, the people who were already in the galleries and touring at their own pace often pushed past us, blocked our paths, and were particularly resentful of Anne leading Edi with her arm, which made a wider presence of their bodies in the exhibition. At one point, I even heard one woman telling her friend that she wanted to attack Anne, as her description was interfering with the woman’s audio guide and the exhibit’s audio. After this tour, I reflected on how different this was from the traditional classes and guided tours in the Met and the museum’s quieter historical monuments that I visited with adults during other tours.2 The most noticeable issue during the observation was not so much that the crowds were smaller in these previous locations per se—it was the naked and hostile behavior of people to an obviously blind visitor or an outsider to what was a fashion-led crowd. Although fashionable galleries had done little to show thoughtfulness regarding access for people with impairments and disabilities (Hayhoe, 2012), this was the first time I had seen this issue turn to hostility. In mitigation, the audience had been waiting for a long time, and they were packed tightly into a relatively small exhibition space. In this space, the visitors had only a limited amount of time to view the objects and displays, and then move on. However, the naked and public prejudice toward an older person with an impairment was palpable. Was Edi Excluded? Despite this naked hostility by the general public at the McQueen exhibition, Edi did not feel she was actively excluded from taking part in exhibits or shows. She also did not relate the behavior of these visitors with the Met and found that she still enjoyed attending the exhibition; she was almost sanguine in saying that this was the culture of New York. From her previous experience of visual culture, she felt she was motivated to revisit the museum time and again; she had previously been a member. This was largely due to her early attendance at the museum and the habits she had developed as an adult; that is to say, coming to the museum regularly became a part of her cultural and social identity. 120

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Although Edi had been to the Met since moving to New York, she first had good experiences of being part of a visual arts culture through school, family, and institutions in Ohio as a child. She soon decided that art was something that was part of her normal routine and something that she is now drawn to. “We had a nice gallery there. And they had things when I was growing up. They had some art classes.” Importantly, Edi had developed the habit of visiting museums in earlier adult life, especially the Met after moving to New York. These habits had been honed through her visiting and attending lessons at the museum, her performance of music, and her memory of paintings. Although she was not a university graduate and did not practice art or even feel that she was good at the practice of art, she enjoyed learning from the Met, although her attendance now waned. However, this strong desire to stay part of an art world remained despite her blindness. Edi’s early experiences also led to more motivation to learn about art when she found herself with time on her hands, especially after she married and traveled with her husband for his work. This opportunity to travel, plus her initial experiences, meant that museums were a place of cultural development, especially with respect to visual arts and particularly paintings. So it was this form of art that was always associated with museums, not the individual artists themselves. I really came into painting when I travelled a lot. The one in the UK, the one in Spain: The Prado, the Louvre, and all that. Even in Russia. So, I go to museums a lot.

Parts of Edi’s identity when she was younger could be compared to Bourdieu’s description of middle-class French society, discussed in the preface (Bourdieu, 2010). For instance, she said that she always preferred modernist and postmodernist European paintings; she named Gauguin and the Barbizon school of art and particularly cited a respect for Rembrandt’s works. During our discussion, Edi also discriminated between portraits based on their likeness and considered her taste to be predicated on her love of paintings as a whole rather than their intellectual ideas: “I’ve always loved European paintings . . . but I love all paintings.” However, Edi’s notions of culture were not just evident in her love of visual arts as a tool of her middle-class identity. Whenever she could, she 121

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preferred moving our discussion to her love of music and theater, an art form she was more emotional and confident discussing and had more love for. For instance, without any prompting, Edi turned to discuss attending ballet and opera, which she said she also related to her visits to the Met: “Anything visual [in music] . . . Anything theatrical.” Edi’s cultural identity was subsequently predicated more on an aesthetic emotional connection with the art through her love of music as much as a social deconstruction of its elements. I like to have an emotional connection, especially with music. . . . I love good music, even going through there [the Alexander McQueen exhibition, which had a soundtrack accompanying it].

Subsequently, Edi’s visits to the Met were also beyond using the museum as a simple art house, where she can be educated, entertained, or develop cultural capital, as Ernst Gombrich (1984) and Pierre Bourdieu (2010) suggest it was. The Met becomes more of an institution that defines who she once was and still wants to be. The Met also adds to Edi’s identity through her membership, which is beyond a simple connection with its objects and exhibitions. It is particularly noticeable, for instance, that Edi often talks more about the Met than she did any specific exhibitions in her interview. Consequently, the Met itself is a habit and cultural homeland. Edi: I used to come once a week. Simon: So, you really liked the Met then? Edi: Oh, I love it. I’ve been coming here 50 years, at least. . . . I came to concerts; I came to exhibits. I love this museum.

However, with aging and its associated physical impairments encroaching on her, Edi’s cultural identity is more under threat than when she was younger. As access is only available through the museum and other scattered institutions in New York, getting to these institutions becomes harder. Consequently, she is facing a different form of passive exclusion based on fragility. Edi does not attend ballet much anymore, either, as she cannot see it well. She also finds that ballet performances are not always described, and such descriptions are not always appealing. However, she still enjoys 122

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going to Broadway shows, as they are more accessible to her impairment. “Because it is more lit, and you can see better . . . but I’m not all visual.” Edi also finds that she has to adapt her social habits—even if it is not her first preference—and although she has lost large amounts of sight, she still feels she maintains a role in the Met by visiting popular exhibitions. This said, as getting transport and mobility becomes harder, even her motivation to join in events such as the McQueen exhibition is diminishing. It’s less and less this than last year, because it’s harder for me to get around. I can get around because I know it, but it’s just that I don’t have the incentive to come here as much as I did. Before I’d come here once a week. I’d come to all the exhibits.

Web access also does not help Edi. Even though she knows she can find artworks through the Internet, Edi’s need to visit museums did not connect accessing artifacts via technologies and being part of the museum virtually. For Edi, it is important to attend in person. Subsequently, the social function of getting to the institution is not substituted by visiting its galleries online. Edi said she does not use the Internet at all for learning about objects in the Met’s collection, getting information about access, or general browsing: “I don’t see well. It’s one of those things I don’t have at all. Sorry! I have a friend who looks everything up on the internet for me.” Her dislike of the impersonality of the web even leads her to cite her impairment as a reason for not using it, even though she still takes on dimly lit challenges, such as watching television.

Charles and Camilla Camilla is seventy-one years old and Charles is sixty-four. They are both retirees, married to each other, and they live in New Jersey, not far from Manhattan. Charles had previously been an administrator. Camilla has always lived in New Jersey and was born and brought up in Atlantic City, further down the coast from New York. By contrast, Charles is a New Yorker by upbringing. Although he is originally from Kingston, Jamaica, he grew up in Sugar Hill, Manhattan, an area of artists and sports people on the Upper East Side of Harlem and Manhattan that 123

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stands distinct from Harlem in the Hamilton Heights. He remained there until he married Camilla. I was right across the river from the Yankees [the baseball team] and right next to where the Giants [another baseball team] used to play— they’re now in San Francisco. . . . It’s an enclave that was so fantastic an era at the time [of my childhood]. It’s a very peculiar area.

Camilla was born with congenital cataracts and Charles with congenital glaucoma. This left them both with minimal light perception and little functioning vision throughout childhood, and both had deteriorating vision throughout their preretirement adult lives. Charles describes his impairment with medical precision: “Most of my optic nerve cells were destroyed since birth, so I was always visually limited.” When they were much younger, Charles and Camilla developed visual impressions of two-dimensional images and some limited visual memories of blurred images with little detail; the visual memories they describe during our interviews were mainly early experiences. Camilla also had residual vision in earlier adulthood but lost it completely in her mid-fifties. Camilla: I had pretty good vision, partial vision, up until I was fifty-five, and then I lost it all from low blood pressure in the eye. And they [Camilla’s doctors] don’t know why. Simon: So, you had a strong visual impairment from a young age? Camilla: Yes, but I saw pretty well. With glasses, I could read print, everything. So [as a child] it wasn’t so bad.

Camilla had previously had mobility training and always visits the Met with her guide dog, which I call Harry. Charles is comfortable using a cane to get around and has also previously had mobility training. Although he was registered blind in early life, Charles’s vision has become considerably more impaired throughout adulthood. For example, Charles describes seeing me as having no detail or features: “I am not completely blind. I can see some. The thing is, that I don’t see things clearly. I can’t see your face, for example.” 124

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As a child, Camilla attended mainstream school at first but then went to a school for the blind as her eyesight deteriorated and she found that she needed specialized support. Camilla graduated comfortably from this school. By contrast, Charles attended a mainstream school throughout his education even though he could have gone to a school for the blind. At school, he says that he had trouble learning a few subjects, such as laboratory science, without support. But he still did well and also graduated with a good grade point average (GPA). Both Charles and Camilla went to college. Camilla spent three years as an undergraduate and majored in educational psychology but left before graduating. Charles attended Long Island University (LIU) and graduated with his undergraduate degree and then obtained an MBA (master of business administration). He also tells me that he has recently studied history independently and wants to take this study further, even mentioning that he is considering conducting research for a book. Charles had a broad art education when he was young. He has vivid memories of learning art at school and took sculpture as a minor at LIU. He says that he really enjoyed these classes. Throughout his childhood, Charles also enjoyed practicing crafts at home after school and on vacation and enjoyed almost all creative activities. This was something that he feels was normal in his home environment and in his Sugar Hill culture. For example, during his interview Charles describes several works he has previously made: I used to get papier-mâché and make things. . . . I used to have a place I could go and buy the papier-mâché. They don’t have that any more. And you would just make things. You could just put things on hangers and around bottles, you know.

By contrast, Camilla has little recollection of being taken to see artworks or meeting other forms of visual culture as a child. When I ask her whether she has any experience of learning about painting, she replies, “No, not really.” The only form of creative education Camilla remembers as a child is handcrafts, which she continues practicing for pleasure as an adult: “I did clay and origami. I just did a little box [using origami] today before I left the house.” 125

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Charles and Camilla in Three Classic Galleries Charles and Camilla are regular participants in imaging tours at the Met and had visited regularly before. I participated in three observations with them, which were one-hour guided visits taught by the same teacher, Carmen. Carmen’s case study is featured in the next chapter. Charles and Camilla usually arrive early to the Met, leaving an additional ten minutes on either side before we set off or arrive at the pickup point in front of the Met. This is so they can take their accessible bus, which has to be booked in advance and arrives just outside the main entrance to the museum. However, during my observations its punctuality and willingness to wait varied, which meant shaving time from the beginning of the imaging and finishing early at the end. The three imaging tours I participated in were of collections of Spanish art, two in the main European art collections and the third in the Lehman Collection—this is a collection of art and furniture donated by one of the founders of the Lehman Brothers’ Bank. Our first imaging focused on a landscape by the Greek artist Domenikos Theotokopoulos, who was more commonly known as El Greco—although El Greco was born in Greece, he moved to Spain to become a professional artist and was named El Greco by the Spanish. The painting A View of Toledo was painted in 1598–1599 with oil on canvas and had been bought for the Met in 1929 by bequest. The piece itself is rectangular, just over 1.2 meters tall, and just under 1.1 meters wide. Our second imaging focused on a portrait by the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Goya), who was most famous as court painter to Charles IV of Spain from 1788 to 1808. The painting is of a small boy, Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, who was the son of the Count and Countess of Altamira and who tragically died at the age of eight. The portrait was painted between 1788 and 1789 as oil on canvas and was donated to the Met as part of a larger collection. The piece is rectangular and was just over a meter wide by just under 1.3 meters tall. Our final imaging was focused on another portrait by Goya. The painting is of a mother and child—the Condesa (Countess) de Altamira and her daughter, María Agustina. The portrait was painted between 1787 and 1788—a year before the portrait in the previous imaging—again as oil on canvas. 126

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This painting is part of the Lehman Collection that was part of the Lehman mansion, donated to the Met along with the interior of the house. Subsequently, the gallery is set out as one of the mansion’s rooms. The piece is again rectangular but much taller than the previous pieces, being 1.5 meters wide and almost 2 meters tall. The imaging of these three paintings were part of a series of discussions and imaging tours with the couple on different eras in painting and exhibited in different galleries—some were in small rooms holding only a few paintings. These paintings are held in atmosphere-controlled rooms, and viewers are not allowed to stand too close to the images, even if they have a visual impairment. En route to the galleries, Charles and Camilla allowed Carmen and me to guide them through the halls from the entrance of the education wing and back again. Camilla also had Harry to guide her and provide a familiar pattern of mobility. There was an elevator from the education entrance to the Met, where we entered, so we did not have to climb stairs. Despite Carmen’s contingencies, the negotiation of the route to the galleries was perhaps the most problematic part of the tour. The first two tours in particular took place during days when the McQueen exhibition was open. This meant that we had to negotiate the line, which made the corridor spaces narrower in places. However, there was an upside to the McQueen exhibition for our imaging. During these two tours, when we arrived at the exhibitions we found them quiet and uncluttered; the McQueen exhibition had almost the opposite effect on the remaining galleries. This made discussing the paintings a particularly private and calm dialogue, with little or no interruptions from visitors around us. By contrast, the journey through the galleries and corridors to the third imaging had to be negotiated through busier galleries on the first floor. This floor housed the most popular set of rooms and collections for general visitors, such as the Egyptian, Roman, and American collections. On the first floor, there also tended to be more exhibits in difficult positions to navigate around, such as sculptures, pillars, and floor-mounted exhibition cases. The Lehman Wing includes representations of the rooms from Lehman’s mansion in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, including details such as his original wallpaper. In addition, the rooms’ ceilings are lower 127

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than those in the other galleries. This made the setting far more intimate and the acoustics softer, which provided an easier atmosphere for the third visit. Furthermore, as several areas of the museum have been built in different eras by different architectural firms, there was no set pattern or defined route for us around the whole building. This was made even more challenging by the practical difficulty that the exhibits are untouchable and few tactile images are available. Consequently, during these three imagings Carmen and I had to provide more verbal descriptions of our routes while guiding Charles and Camilla toward the galleries. This frequently meant changing direction as we walked to the Lehman Wing while at the same time asking several visitors to move aside as we walked past. Camilla’s dog, Harry, was generally used to visiting the Met after his previous visits, although he was a little unsure of the larger crowds. However, he also found it difficult to navigate the galleries and corridors to different exhibitions as there was never a regular route. This meant that at some points in the tour, he would change pace or direction erratically, leaving Camilla occasionally fighting to be led by him. Charles and Camilla had not specifically wished to learn about Spanish art alone during my observations but had previously talked about periods in history that they found interesting—this included the political periods of El Greco and Goya. However, as Carmen was Spanish, she asked if she could start with these paintings and in subsequent visits move on to pieces from other countries. In addition, Charles and Camilla originally asked if they could have a touch tour as well as an imaging. However, Carmen had discovered that Charles and Camilla were not necessarily interested in individual artists or styles of art but in the art of historical periods. Subsequently, Carmen asked if she could do imaging tours alone, as she felt that imaging by itself would not only be sufficient but also help to stimulate their imaginations. Before the imagings, all three decided to focus on discussing single paintings during each visit, as our hour did not provide enough time to discuss many works in detail. However, during these tours I noticed that Charles, Camilla, and Carmen developed a strong relationship, and repeat tours of different areas of the collection have since been requested. 128

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During the imagings themselves, we sat either on gallery benches or on stools provided by the museum’s education department, the latter of which we carried with us to the exhibits. On the first two tours, this was no trouble, but on the third tour the limited room gave us little space to negotiate around and left us closer to other visitors. After settling for the imagings, Carmen always began her narration by describing the galleries we were in. This included details about the size, dimensions, and color of the room; the gallery or room in proximity to other collections and exhibits; and details about the environment, such as its size and color. Charles and Camilla were interested in this description and would often ask questions about technical details. After imaging the gallery, Carmen also took time to verbally image the other artworks in the room and in the case of the Lehman Collection, the furniture and ornaments: why they were hung or placed together; the general history of the curation of the collections; and the size and dimensions of the pieces. This discussion stimulated a number of questions. Later, Charles and Camilla told me that they always appreciate this detail, as it includes them in their environment. During the first two observations, there were several other Goya and El Greco paintings among other more minor artists of the period. All these artists’ paintings hung as per aesthetic and historical period as well as by artist, which meant that the same painter could appear in several galleries. After discussing the galleries, Carmen began her imagings by describing other paintings in the room, placing them in their historical environment and their subjects’ intellectual context. She then described the physical size of the paintings in question; the frames, including their ornamentation and color; materials; and the general coloring and emotional mood of the paintings. In her discussion, Carmen gave few technical details of how the painting was constructed, such as the perspective or the brushwork used in its construction. The only detail she did include was the system of organizing painters’ studios. (In the second observation, Carmen also described whether similar paintings were the product of the artist themselves or the work of several apprentices.) After the introduction, Carmen continued her descriptions with a discussion of the composition of the paintings. In her description, she focused on where the subjects of the painting were allegorically placed in 129

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the foreground and background and the materials that were represented by the painter. For instance, in the first imaging she described the structure of El Greco’s depiction of the individual buildings, structures, and hills in the landscape of Toledo. She was meticulous about the size and scale of these buildings and particularly their position. This was because, she explained, they were actually in the wrong place. Carmen used this description because she wondered whether El Greco used this painting to idealize Toledo, his home city after moving to Spain and one that he said he felt a passion for. She explained that she would do the same if she were painting New York, as the most famous landmarks were too far apart to make any meaning of them in a very broad, realistic landscape. Carmen used a similar method to describe the material of the clothes and accessories used in both of Goya’s paintings in the second and third observations. She also brought in a discussion of the animals, furniture, lighting, and even the walls and flooring surrounding the subjects in the two portraits and their allegorical significance. As she did so, Carmen placed them in the historical context of the era and the importance of the aristocrats who sat for these pieces. She likewise included details of the nature of a painter’s trade at the time. This detail included the lady in the painting featured in the third observation—also the mother of the small boy in the portrait in the second observation— who would only have sat for certain parts, such as her face. At other times, Goya would have had a model sit for her. Included in Carmen’s descriptions were the emotional states being portrayed in all three paintings and what we knew of the historical facts surrounding the composition of these paintings. For instance, in his landscape of Toledo, El Greco had painted a stormy sky above the city in which he lived and worked. This was allegorized as showing the stormy political period at the time, with an invasion by France imminent. Were Charles and Camilla Excluded? Again, both Charles and Camilla tell me they are not actively excluded in the Met and other museums. However, because of their different educational backgrounds, Camilla was more susceptible to passive exclusion than Charles. 130

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However, there are distinct differences between the experiences of Charles and Camilla as children, which affects their passive exclusion from the museum in later life. Camilla had been passively excluded by her early lack of experience of museums and art education. By contrast, Charles had been attending museums as part of his personal education, so it was almost natural for him to participate in visual culture. Subsequently, he is not much affected by passive exclusion. Camilla had only started visiting museums relatively recently, which was some time after losing her sight completely: “I first came here two years ago. I never visited any museums before.” This was despite her vision being relatively manageable as a child. However, this early lack of experience has done little to diminish her confidence in attending the museum or affect her approach to these visits or supplementary art classes. “I’m coming here on the 27th, to [learn to] paint.” Despite her resilience, Camilla’s inexperience has caused her to adapt her understanding of the objects at the Met, as Charles did when younger. Her initial visit to the Met came through Charles, who had used the access facilities at the museum numerous times before, and she had first come out of curiosity. Lacking an early visual art education, Camilla prefers to learn about the nontechnical aspects of paintings and their creation in the collections she visits. During the imagings, Camilla said she preferred learning their scholarly context and the stories that they represented. I don’t have a visual image [of the painting being described]. . . . You see that’s a problem with the culture [of description]. It depends on who it is describing it to you.

Camilla’s tastes in artworks are now also like those of Charles. He had developed different notions of taste because of his visual impairment and lack of visual memory. Unlike Bourdieu’s and Gombrich’s representation of the museum as a collection of artworks, Charles has little aesthetic preference and likes the historical context of painting more. Consequently, Charles often regards visiting the museum as of greater cultural value than imaging the individual pieces contained within it; that is to say, the institution represents a whole that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. This makes his contact with the access department 131

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particularly important, as Charles allows them to guide the pieces that he is taught, a little like a sommelier does with wine in a restaurant. Charles’s approach to visiting museums has evolved over the course of his earlier education. For example, Charles says that he would almost routinely visit museums in New York when he was an undergraduate, even though he did not have a visual sense of the exhibits. For him, it is the museum as a place of learning that is important. Charles likes to study: “I would live in the museum sometimes [when I was younger], like the museum of natural history, all day long.” Furthermore, Charles does not follow the view that attitudes to disability arts restricts normalized notions of enjoying the visual arts, which I discussed in chapter 1. His visits are a chance to define his own lessons at the Met and his own direction of cultural development. This counters his and Camilla’s lessening physical independence in older age. Charles’s choice of contents also enhances the intellectual content of his visits beyond that of the mainstream visitor rather than rob him of his independence. Subsequently, these imagings become more like college seminars or tutorials than simple museum visits and allow questions to be put to the teacher at all points. This approach to visiting museums challenges the traditional notion that the purpose of museums is solely to show paintings as aesthetic objects, partly drained of context, which I discussed in the first chapter. The lessons Charles and Camilla requested for the most part were not predicated on an understanding of aesthetics. For example, Charles did not mention genres or question the teacher about the painting’s aesthetics during these visits. It is also noticeable that Charles specifically requested tours of art from specific countries and historical eras—especially of monarchs— rather than specific artists or artworks. Furthermore, although he still enjoys learning about artworks at the Met, he says that he cannot fully comprehend all the exhibits he visits. Again, as with Edi, it is almost a ritual habit to visit the museum rather than visit individual artworks. [When I was young] I used to come here. In those days I would come to a museum and look at a painting, but I could not really tell what [was there] because I didn’t have an organized person. I don’t believe they had a [system] like they have now. 132

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Subsequently, Charles’s purpose for visiting the museum has evolved to make it an authentic college for intellectual development. This development becomes a love of the history of the paintings in particular rather than a taste for a genre of art, as Gombrich and Bourdieu originally felt it was. In this way, the role of art changes to become less an aesthetic object but to signify standing in the presence of history and the artist, along with simply enjoying the museum for itself. For example, during one observation featuring the work by El Greco, Charles questioned the teacher on El Greco’s personal background. Charles particularly wanted to know the importance of El Greco’s home in Toledo and the political unrest that the city signified at the time. As he recalled after this tour, Charles: It’s strange, [when El Greco] was described and that was fine and all the different characters that [went into] the painting, but all the time I’m thinking more about the painter himself. Simon: Right, the historical background. Charles: Yes, and how he was able to paint it all just using all of his experiences that he had. That’s why I, when I mentioned his being steeped in history . . . [and the teacher mentioned] his intellectual prowess. So, I was more fascinated with him.

Conversely, despite his intellectual development through discussion and imagings in the museum, Charles rarely uses the museum’s website for research or education. He tells me that he rarely uses the Internet at all for any form of cultural activity, and so images of paintings on the web have no relevance for him at all. Charles says that his preference for imaging is more for developing his writing and book-based research at this moment: “I’m more into writing, actually. . . . I’m looking at allegory. I’m teaching myself.” By contrast, Camilla uses the Internet at home to look for information and for communicating with others. However, she does not use it at all for looking up images or engaging with images, as she feels that her accessible technology discourages her from engaging with pictures in any way. Like Charles, this leads to a reluctance on Camilla’s part to focus on images as aesthetic objects, as she finds that learning about art as an autonomous exercise is unnecessary. Camilla’s visits to the museum are 133

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now a highly interactive cultural experience of art devoid of technology. They allow her to engage with art history and intellectual engagement on a level that previously had not been available to her. Camilla: No, no, I can’t do any of that [download images], because I can’t see and they haven’t anything for a blind person to do that. Simon: Do you go through verbal descriptions at all? Camilla: Well, you know, we have a software and it’s limited. So we don’t have all the advantages. Simon: Are they accessible, or not? Camilla: No. Simon: So you’ve found none of this accessible? Camilla: No.

Glen Glen is forty-two years old. He was brought up in a middle-class family and originally came from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but he now lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and family. Glen attended mainstream schools throughout his childhood and finished his formal education some twenty-five years previously. He also graduated with a bachelor’s degree in finance and psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Glen works as an executive for a technology institute for people who are blind and works out of its office, not far from his home. He tells me that his job is mostly desk based, interacting with researchers and working with computers for the most part. He is also a regular user of the web and email systems at home and at work. Glen has been blind for around twenty years—since his early twenties—although he was born with retinitis pigmentosa and his sight had been deteriorating for many years before that. He describes his visual field as follows: “So, I have very limited, sort of teeny tiny tunnel vision, and one or two degrees of visual field.” This impairment gives Glen almost no depth of vision and means he must get very close to an image or object to see its structure. Glen is also 134

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completely red-green color blind from birth, something that has been a constant in his life, he said. Although Glen’s retinitis pigmentosa is degenerative, he feels that it did not affect him considerably when he was a young child, and it did not have much of an impact on his education. In matter of fact, he tells me, he did not notice it much until later in childhood. Consequently, he attended mainstream schools throughout his life and did well academically. Glen remembers having what he feels were relatively normal visual experiences as a young child. However, he also feels that these were not always the same as many of his peers and friends at school and home, largely because of his color blindness. This could sometimes lead to embarrassment, as he mistook colors in everyday situations, making them strange. It was not until Glen was around sixteen or seventeen years of age and he started to drive that he noticed that his sight loss was having a serious impact. At that time, he found it difficult to use his long sight for driving classes and practice. This was when he had to have his eyes checked for serious sight loss. Glen had what he describes as a relatively normal art education before college, even in his senior years in high school when he noticed that his sight was getting worse. However, although his impairment did not affect him adversely, he feels that he did not have a talent for the subject and did not take his studies further. His academic interests lay more in the sciences and technology. I have done most things [in art] through high school. I did pottery, and found that to be sort of fun, but that was not an interest or a talent; it was more of an appreciation than a capability.

As he had relatively normal sight as a younger child, Glen did not have any additional support during his education, either before or during his college career. This did not affect him detrimentally, he emphasizes during our interview, and he managed to maintain his high GPA despite deteriorating sight. Glen then managed to obtain a high SAT score in his final year of school and to matriculate college without special provision for his sight loss. Simon: At high school, was there any provision made for your red-green color blindness. 135

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Glen: [For the most part at high school,] I was not aware of anything other than being red-green color blind. There was no provision for that, and other than other children teasing me, I muddled through OK.

For no reason related to his sight loss, Glen did not visit museums as a child: “Absolutely not!” It was largely due to his lack of interest in and no curiosity for viewing fine art during his childhood. Losing sight later gave him an interest in visiting museums more. Glen first started to visit museums when he was at college, when he was around eighteen or nineteen. He started at the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art, which he said he liked enormously, and then he visited the Met with a girlfriend who was living in New York. I came to the Met for the first time, and did tour after tour after tour for two days straight. And I thought, “Wow, this is amazing.” That actually piqued my interest in art. And at the same time my sight was diminishing I just thought, “I just want to learn about as much art as possible.”

Despite taking an interest in museum pieces while at college, Glen did not want to study art history formally at college or in greater depth as a personal project. It was not that he had no interest in the study, he tells me, it was just that he lacked confidence in his ability to understand artworks visually. As a result, he opted for subjects that he felt he could study more easily. This became a way he could cope with his sight loss. I was afraid to take art history [at college]. I had been red-green color blind all my life, and there was a lot of stuff that I couldn’t observe or sort of notice. And so I thought taking an art history class would be very difficult. There was only so much I was picking up.

Glen Visiting Historic Rooms with Friends Glen visits the Met every time he and his wife pay their regular visits to New York, and he had arranged the tour I followed before traveling to the city. I accompanied Glen, his wife, another married couple who are friends of theirs from college, and the teacher conducting the imaging tour, Anne, whom I had previously followed during Edi’s tour. Glen and his wife requested a tour that highlighted decorative art and architecture in eighteenth-century Europe. This tour was subsequently 136

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organized for one of the complete rooms the Met had acquired and reconstructed from North America and Europe, which provides examples of this period. Anne chose three specific rooms for them, which had been acquired complete by the Met and installed in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts collection. The route to our galleries took a similar path to the previous imagings—that is, we met in the education department in the basement floor, we were led to the elevator, and when on our floor, we were guided to the galleries in that part of the wing. As we walked through the adjacent galleries and corridors, the group talked about the exhibits they passed along the route itself, recalling previous visits. At all points, Glen took part in the lively conversation. I reflect that, in the main, our passage to the exhibits was easier than in the previous imagings. I feel that this easiness is largely due to our group as a whole not standing out as an imaging tour to other visitors, as Glen was accompanied by a large number of sighted peers. I also feel that being mistaken for a mainstream tour had two significant effects. First, as his wife and friends moved as a single group with their own well-rehearsed rhythm, Glen was guided more easily and his blindness was less obvious to other visitors. Second, and perhaps paradoxically, as we were a larger group and highly sociable, the surrounding crowd made fewer concessions for us as we passed by. As with Charles and Camilla’s imagings, our galleries had relatively few people when we entered. This made the imaging easier for Anne, as she did not have to raise her voice, making the occasion more of a discussion. The acoustics in this gallery were also softer and, as in the Lehman Wing, the walls and soft furnishings absorbed much of the background noise and prevented echoes. The first exhibit Anne imaged is a large reconstructed salon—a main living room—most of whose decoration comes from the Hôtel de Cabris, Paris. The room was originally commissioned by the owner of the Hôtel, Jean Paul de Clapiers, Marquis de Cabris; despite its modern connotations, the term hôtel in eighteenth-century France referred to any large, often-palatial building. The celebrated architect of the Hôtel is Giovanni Orello, who was from Milan, Italy. Orello designed the salon in a neoclassical GrecoRoman style, with highly stylized patterns and objects in relief. The salon 137

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itself was finished in 1774 and added to throughout the later years of the eighteenth century by de Clapiers. The salon’s most notable decorative feature is its boiserie—this is the oak and plaster paneling that lines much of its walls. This paneling was painted a soft white color and gilded and was added to the room a year after it was built. The salon also has decorative gilt mirrors on its walls, the original oak-panel flooring, and furniture and ornaments from the original period in its space. The space is almost entirely roped off to prevent it being touched or walked on. Also on one of the walls of the room is a white marble fireplace, which originally came from the Hôtel de Greffulhe, Paris. Like her imaging of the McQueen exhibition, Anne narrated the exhibition by combining physical descriptions of pieces and the historical background of the decoration and ornaments. And also like the curation in the previous imagings, Glen, his wife, and his friends were not allowed to touch or get close to any parts of the room. The conversation in the group was remarkably different from the tours of Edi and Charles and Camilla. As the group was larger, the conversation was dominated by their memories, their previous visits to museums, and a general conviviality. Anne was also less stressed as she delivered her imaging in comparison to that of the McQueen exhibition. Instead, she engaged the group more with intellectual conversation, which was possible because the gallery was emptier and quieter. The second room we visited is significantly smaller than the first and is called La Toilette—the dressing room. La Toilette was again disassembled from its original setting in Paris and reassembled at the Met. It is attributed to a member of the French upper class and a musician, JeanMichel Moreau the Younger, and dates from 1773. The room is again highly decorative, designed in a classic style, and has many decorative items within its space. Like the previous room, it has a large amount of gilding, with many gold-colored ornaments—this was the fashion in the late eighteenth century. The walls of the room are also covered with images, which have a musical theme, with furniture in the room including an ornamental dressing table and mirror. Again, Anne began her imaging of this room by describing its structure, furniture, and the ownership of the house. She also described 138

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intriguing details, such as the dressing table, theorizing who may have used the room, as it had been owned by a famous musician. This imaging provoked discussion from Glen and his party, who were particularly intrigued about the decoration and layout. As the ceiling of La Toilette is much smaller, the soft furnishings and the room are more intimate, and the sound quality in this gallery is of a much higher quality. This allowed Anne to soften her voice further during the imaging and deliver a description at an intimate conversational pitch—almost a whisper. The softer acoustics had a significant impact on the nature of Anne’s discussion during the imaging. As the discussion was almost conversational, it became an intimate dialogue, with more questions being asked by Anne and Glen and his group than any of the other parties I had followed before. The intimacy of the situation and the close relationship within the group also helped ease possible problems with the imaging. And knowing Glen well, the group helped with communication when he found imagining certain elements of the room difficult. For example, at one point in the imaging of La Toilette, Anne was describing an element of a particularly intricate and complex part of the room’s design that confused Glen. In response, his friend recognized Glen’s confusion and drew out an image of its design on his arm, using his fingers as the pieces in the room. Glen was familiar with this way of communicating imagery by his friend and could discuss the design more comfortably with Anne afterward. The third room we visited is a large dining room from Kirtlington Park, a mansion house in Oxfordshire, England, commissioned by Sir James Dashwood. The room was completed in 1748 and designed by a well-known architect of the period, called John Sanderson. It was taken in its entirety and again installed as it was built originally. Like the previous rooms, the room contains highly decorative features. In common with the first room, the most prominent feature is its chimneypiece, whose design is attributed to Sir Henry Cheere. However, instead of a boiserie, the dining room has highly decorative white plasterwork on its walls and ceiling, which is attributed to a famous plasterer called Thomas Roberts. Due to its size and architecture, the acoustics of this room are like the first room that we visited, and Anne’s imaging altered to suit its environment. As with her previous imagings, she began with the physical 139

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description of the room, weaving in historical details and interpretations as to elements of its design as she did so. Anne continued to describe this exhibit in the same manner as previous ones. She started with the plasterwork—the main decorative feature of the room—and its importance in English country houses at the time. She then continued by describing the furniture and the other decorative features of the room. As before, this discussion was relaxed, and Glen and his party were happy to ask further questions and take part in the conversation. After the imaging, Glen and his party carried on into the rest of the museum. They planned to visit exhibits they had not previously seen but had researched prior to their visit. As Glen mentions in his interview, an exploration of the Met has become an almost habitual visit during their trips to New York. After the imaging, I reflected on the difference between Glen’s group and other imagings I had been a part of. As Glen visited in a group of mainly sighted people, I feel the imaging became more of an emotional discussion and an intimate social occasion than others I had followed. The discussion also developed into a general talk about the rooms as a group activity. The size and nature of the group was subsequently more like a recurrent social gathering and an academic seminar, and the focus on Glen’s blindness became less of an issue. This group had such a close relationship and had experienced so many similar imagings together that visual ambiguities could be overcome relatively easily. Was Glen Passively Excluded? It is without doubt that Glen felt excluded from the study of art history at college. He told me during his interview that he purposely felt that he could not productively study an art history module at college. This feeling is due to his belief that his blindness would hinder these studies— something that could have damaged his final GPA. Although not actively excluded from these classes, Glen was in an academic environment in which he believed that he could not study this module with comfort, or he was not given enough support to feel comfortable doing so. 140

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However, as for exclusion from museum environments now that his GPA is not under threat, Glen’s case is perhaps the most complex of all the visitors who participated in the study. During his undergraduate career and before he lost his sight, Glen started visiting museums when he was eighteen or nineteen years old with a girlfriend from college, who was from New York. Perhaps like most teenage men, he felt that his romantic partner was probably his greatest motivation at the time. Glen’s first museum visit was in Philadelphia, at the Museum of Fine Art (MFA), and then the Met. The first time Glen visited the Met with his then girlfriend, he was so enthusiastic that he said he toured for two days straight. Since then, he says he attends the Met every time he visits Manhattan. Glen’s self-observations about his own intellectual development and love of museums also challenge Gombrich’s notion of the museum as a place focusing on a simple form of education and delight. For Glen, museums are not simply institutions for viewing art; they are also institutions that can define his cultural identity and preserve a sighted identity. For example, Glen is loyal to the MFA and the Met, surpassing a love of their individual works of art or his interest in other museums. This is why he contacts the Met beforehand and describes what period, form, and topic of art he is interested in rather than choosing a museum for its particular contents. This signifies a sense of connection with and trust for these institutions. Subsequently, given the context of his early visual impairment and then blindness, there is a high probability that Glen can feel passively excluded from visual culture, including his later museum visits. And yet Glen tries to visit because of his blindness. These visits avoid a sense of exile from his former sighted self and develop a sense of continuity through what can be described as passive inclusion—that is, he adapts his visits and attends more frequently in order to deliberately keep in touch with a visual society of friendship, relationship, and family. This need is powerfully illustrated in his memories from his twenties. Although he started touring before he lost significant amounts of sight, his visits became more meaningful when he knew they were his last chance to see artworks before he became blind. It was also around this time that he developed his strongest connection to visual culture. 141

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Challenging Bourdieu’s notion of seeking forms of art to create cultural distinction, Glen discovered an interest in art because of visiting museums, not as a reason to first attend them. Like Charles, through his newly acquired blindness, Glen also discovered that he is able to study art more intellectually, gaining a greater depth of understanding from his visits. An example of this view is described below: Simon: Do you link the description [of the artwork] into its historical background? Glen: Correct, and part of it is kind of, art is partly based on the context of what was going on, what people were experiencing. So, in today’s discussion there was a whole discussion about Chinese art [which was fashionable in Europe in the eighteenth century]. And for me, being a history buff, art is just one more way you can get over the lives of individuals and the experiences they’ve had—and that anything that was Chinese was high fashion in the 1770s—it ties you into the moment of the art.

Glen’s understanding was not always this clear, however. In his earliest museum visits, Glen felt that he lacked focus in his approach to exhibits. He knew that he wanted to experience artworks and was interested in the pieces but did not know how to approach studying individual artworks, pieces, or histories. Ironically, it was only when he lost his sight and had to examine the minutiae of paintings to understand their form that he managed to gain this focus in art history. When I did these two days straight at the Met, I didn’t know I was losing my vision. It was only a year later that I found this out, and that I realized that, that was the way I could comprehend the art. Because it [the gallery] wasn’t just a room with lots of paintings, it was going to specific works of art: look at them, study them, find out the history, comprehend them. And that worked better for me, as I could look just at a piece at a time; which I didn’t realize at the time, that’s what I was doing. But, even then, I had a limited visual field, and was picking up what I could.

Since losing his sight, Glen’s museum visits have developed to become largely based on imaging tours, a method he has stuck with for many 142

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years. “When we come to town, we’ve come to the Met every time we’ve been here.” However, as he thought beyond his blindness, it is not necessarily the physical description of the painting Glen is interested in during these imagings. It is more the focus on intellectual engagement with the artworks. So, that’s why I think I love doing the tours, because [previously] I did not know what to pay attention to. And having someone describe to me, or at least talk about the painting, even in the standard tours—I assume that the Met still does the every-hour, on-the-hour, tours—that helped me to understand the context of what was going on.

Challenging Gombrich’s and Bourdieu’s notion of the museum as a place of delight, learning, and cultural distinction, Glen’s intellectual interests evolved over time to reflect more sophisticated interests. For example, Glen described a period to me when he was traveling in Europe and developed an interest in different forms of art, specifically because his visits reflected a historical period. After visiting European churches and cathedrals, Glen says that his interest in Christian art was piqued, especially the use of halos in many religious pieces. This interest later progressed to a study of light within artworks and other related pieces. The following is his description of this period: While I was there in Italy, I would sit there and watch the frescos on the ceiling, because they were massive in proportion, and I could take them in for a period of time; a big fresco taking it in just a piece at a time. It was neat. And partly because it’s so not an American phenomenon. And for a while, I got into the impressionists, and I discovered I was not a fan of modern art. I do see and enjoy sculpture, and I enjoy decorative art as well, and only at home [in the United States] that became more important.

Perhaps of all the visitors involved in the study of the Met, Glen is most comfortable with his use of the web and was less susceptible to passive exclusion through technology. Most of all, his career is centered on computing and, he tells me, he uses his home computer for work and many other aspects of life. Consequently, it is not a surprise to learn that he occasionally uses the web to research artworks and history. 143

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Glen says that he is happy accessing other forms of image on the web. He uses computers almost constantly at work and home and often for social communication; he says that he frequently researches future museum visits at home. He also often divines the nature of images through their written descriptions, tags, and accompanying text on websites, something that has become more frequent on the Internet. However, despite having access to information on the web, Glen is sanguine about much of its contents. Simon: How do you find the descriptions on the websites you have been on? Glen: So, the descriptions are great, but I don’t know that the descriptions necessarily [work]. The descriptions told me a lot about the painting and the period, and the artist, etc. But did they actually tell me what’s in the painting? That I don’t know. . . . I don’t know about paintings and two-dimensional art.

In a further instance, Glen also told me that he has previously examined images on the websites of several large museums with international reputations and has found them to be well designed. This is typical of larger museums with enormous resources, which can research the latest web standards and employ or contract the best designers. However, in comparison to a visit to the museum itself, Glen finds this experience mostly unfulfilling. To Glen, no webpage can ever substitute for discussing an artwork while being close to it. I have tried to understand [pieces on the web]. So, for instance, recently we’ve bobbed around, trying to figure out what we can see at the Whitney Museum [of American Art, New York], and some other museums. Part of it is reading a description of what the museum collection had. I have not gone piece by piece, trying to understand things.

Conclusion Gombrich and Bourdieu do not paint a complete picture of the true purpose of the museum. For the imagings’ visitors, the museum is more about identity and feeding a lesser aesthetic form of intellectual curiosity. 144

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Moreover, what is most apparent in the imagings I followed is that although blindness influences visitors’ understanding of artworks, other issues have a greater effect on their exclusion. Most important, the age of the visitors, their education, and their opportunities to visit museums at an early age have a more significant effect than their blindness. Edi tells me that her encroaching old age makes it increasingly difficult to visit the Met and take part in its activities. As for passive exclusion, the visitors’ interactions with artworks at the Met challenges the notion that artworks in museums are objects of vision alone. Instead, all four visitors actively tried to include themselves at the Met, either to preserve their sighted cultural identity or to create an alternative nonvisual identity. Because of their blindness, through these imagings these visitors have a different relationship with untouchable objects and often evolve an alternative narrative of learning about artworks. Moreover, this narrative comes from their own historical understanding of political, cultural, and social eras that an object represents. This lesser emphasis on visual interaction with artworks in the museum also hints at a further underlying need for museums and the visiting of artworks. For all four visitors featured in this chapter, a lack of sight stimulates another, deeper need for art: that of artworks as stories, a purpose that many forms of art were primarily designed to fulfill. These case studies again challenge Bourdieu’s and Gombrich’s notion that artworks are premised on vision alone. For example, for Charles, a nonvisual relationship with artworks is due to his early blindness, his early radical conceptual art education, and his experiences of visual artwork, which are often tactile. For Glen, a relationship is developed from an interest in visiting two museums, the MFA and the Met, at first through a close human relationship and then as an academic relationship. Consequently, for Glen and Charles, these relationships create a connection between their love of the study of history and cultural heritage. To illustrate this point, Charles is not interested in paintings as visually aesthetic works but simply as representative objects fixed in their era. For him, these objects possess little aesthetic capital, with power and value being largely derived from being in their presence while learning about them. Similarly, early blindness means that Camilla’s and Charles’s early educational and cultural experiences are largely tactile in the outside 145

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world. Consequently, both visitors rely primarily on this perception over what remained of their vision when younger. However, their current experience of museums is largely nontactile and nonperceptual. This tactile experience leads Camilla and Charles to develop a relatively limited interest in artworks as aesthetic objects. Instead, they concentrate more on the sophisticated narratives of artworks as historical place markers. These place markers are more and more to possess intellectual and emotional meaning, ones that they gain cultural value from being in the presence of. These experiences consequently have a further bearing on Gombrich’s contention that understanding visual artworks is purely the role of visual perception. Instead, as suggested in these case studies, the psychological relationship and the cultural capital that these four visitors gain increases an emotional and intellectual closeness to objects. Beyond individual works of art, all four participants in the case studies also have a great sense of loyalty to the Met as an institution. This loyalty leads all four visitors to plan visits to New York City—in Glen’s case, traveling hundreds of miles—just to tour its exhibits. Consequently, the museum is an icon and an attraction of the city for all four visitors. For example, although Edi experienced paintings when she had sight, she says it is the institution itself, her membership, and its shows and lectures that bring her to the Met more than specific artworks. Furthermore, her continued attendance even after losing her sight suggests it holds other attractions beyond the exhibits she tours. Similarly, Charles’s well-founded youthful habit of visiting the museum was not primarily motivated by a desire to develop a taste of aesthetics in its crudest sense. Attendance at the museum and the symbol of his participation in an intellectually and culturally important institution now provide a greater desire for further cultural education. Camilla is also affected by Charles’s love of the museum, and now she feels this loyalty too. This drives her to go beyond simply visiting its galleries and spurs her to enjoy attending drawing classes alongside Charles, even though she had no experience of art education at school. Likewise, although Glen has broad experience of paintings through his tours as an undergraduate, he lets it be known that it is the Met itself that is important for him to visit. These experiences also challenge Gombrich’s and Bourdieu’s underlying principle that the museum is solely a receptacle of artworks. For these 146

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visitors, Bourdieu’s belief that artworks provide a form of hegemonic distinction is almost unimportant. Instead, their imagings are more to symbolize a sense of place, a sense of cultural identity, and a sense of security and achievement. Ironically, access to the web, which is designed to make access to the museum easier, turns out to passively exclude three of these visitors most, although this is possibly more likely due to a vocational or generational barrier rather than blindness, as Glen uses the Internet to access information before visiting museums. Subsequently, access to the Met’s images and their descriptions through online catalogs little affects or democratizes these visitors’ museum-visiting habits. When I asked about their use of the web to access images, Charles, Camilla, and Edi held the view that it is the museum visit that is more important than surfing for information. These three visitors also see little linkage between their visits and researching images. For example, Charles feels that physical forms of literature hold far greater significance as a form of education, even though he has access to the web through friends. Similarly, Edi says that she cannot see images on her computer screen even though she can see almost everything on television, which presents a similar visual experience. These imagings raise three questions that I take forward to the next stage of my research at the Met: Are these issues experienced by teachers in other imagings? Do all the visitors who are blind want the same imaging experience of the museum, or are there other reasons for visiting the Met? Does visiting the Met without organized imagings radically change the experience of visiting the museum?

Notes 1.  The fieldwork—which included several observations and interviews—took place from July to September 2011. 2. These were from previous studies of museums and monuments in the United States and the United Kingdom (Hayhoe, 2008).

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EXPERIENCES OF TEACHING AND INDEPENDENT VISITS

Research Notes What follows in this chapter are two case studies of teachers who run verbal imaging tours and three case studies of independent museum visitors who are blind. Having followed their tours, I felt it was appropriate to interview the imaging teachers to interpret what I observed from their perspective.1 During the interviews, I also took the chance to go beyond my original questions and discuss their previous tours and working backgrounds. I asked these questions as I wanted to build a more holistic picture of their imagings and their development of imaging techniques—there are few theories on this topic—and find out why they originally wanted to lead imaging tours. The teachers are two of four teachers from the Met whom I worked with during the research for this book. I name them Carmen and Fiona. Neither teacher is blind or visually impaired or has any form of disability. I feature these two case studies in this chapter because one is a practicing artist and the other an art historian, meaning they have different styles of imaging. Both teachers also have different numbers of years of teaching practice and different backgrounds and training in teaching imaging. I interviewed both teachers in their shared offices on the lower ground floor of the Met after I had followed each of them during imagings and

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classes. I did not have a set list of questions, just themes to discuss, allowing each teacher to build on her own experience. After interviewing the teachers, I followed up the research on access services with populations highlighted by these and my previous interviews: this includes younger people in schools for the blind and independent adult visitors who do not—or rarely—use the access services of the Met and other museums. As it is the focus of this book, the teacher case studies are followed by case studies of three of these independent visitors; the interviews with school students are published in a separate research article (Hayhoe, 2014). In contrast to the teacher case studies, the independent visitor case studies are carried out and chosen differently. As it is unknown how many visitors who are blind pass through the Met independently, by their nature they are relatively anonymous. For this reason, it is not possible to identify a typical independent visitor who is blind, and consequently my case studies are an unscientifically chosen cross section of visitors. These three case studies are people who identified themselves to me, known to people outside the Met whom I knew previously, and who wanted to participate in my research. The first of these visitors is Joni, a teacher from California; the second is Pavlos, a retired actor from New York; and the third is Tariq, an educator from the Boston area. I interviewed each of these subjects in their places of work or leisure, wherever they felt most comfortable. As with Carmen and Fiona’s interviews, I did not use a strict set of questions—only themes for them to discuss. I then asked subsidiary questions based on their answers and the topics they choose, making the interviews more like a conversation.

Carmen Carmen is an art historian by training. She is originally from Spain and came to the United States as a PhD student in her early twenties some forty years previously; she tells me she never finished her PhD but remains enthusiastic about the subject and her study of it. While in her early years in the United States, she met her American husband and settled down with her new family on Long Island. She is a naturalized American citizen. Consequently, she chose teaching not 150

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because it was her family’s main income but because she was passionate about her study of art. As I conduct our interview, Carmen is celebrating her thirtieth year of teaching at the Met. She has never taught at any other institution. “Always at the Met, and it was continuous.” When she first started teaching in the museum, she taught art history and gave tours of galleries that fit her specialism of seventeenth-century European art. She also tells me she has taught people who are blind and visually impaired for between twenty to twenty-five years. Carmen feels it was almost an accident that led her to imaging for visitors who are blind, as her first such tour was with a person who came for a mainstream tour and happened to be blind. Carmen also recalls that the visitor was born blind and had no visual memory. Carmen says that she would never forget the first painting she described to the visitor. The painting is a self-portrait of Peter Paul Rubens, also featuring his wife and child, and is set outdoors. At first, Carmen explains to me, she did not know how to approach her tour, but then the visitor started questioning her about the painting. This provided a relief to the situation but also gave Carmen a direction for her description. Subsequently, the description became an imaging in the form of a conversation, one in which the visitor all but led the discussion. “And I fell in love with the way of teaching,” Carmen tells me. As she was discussing the image for the first time with this visitor, Carmen says that she noticed part of the painting that she had not focused on before. She describes this as seeing the picture for the first time even though she had looked at the painting many times before, much as Ernst Gombrich (1984) discussed. Carmen also found this process difficult initially, as the party of visitors really challenged her technique of teaching. They wanted to know each little detail of the painting. Carmen: I always remember, so they were tough on me. They would ask me about everything. Simon: Were they asking about color? Carmen: Colors, brushwork, and parts of the picture—and this is a picture that I know very well because it is right in my field, seventeenth 151

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century—they would ask me things and I would say, “It is a nice day,” and then they would say, “So the sky is blue, or it has a few clouds,” and I would tell myself that I had never seen the clouds before. And they would say, “On top of their heads there is sky?” And I would look up and I would say, “Oh, there is a pergola.” And I would say [to myself], “Thirty years and I have never seen the pergola.”

Following her first experience, Carmen volunteered for further sessions with visitors who are blind—this was before there was an official imaging service or tours advertised at the Met. She often reflects on this practice and develops her own technique, developing a more sophisticated understanding of the artworks as well as her visitors with each imaging. Carmen feels that this now increases her intellectual understanding of the artworks she describes on each tour. So to me, working with someone who is blind is seeing for myself, it slows me down. It helps me enjoy the picture. . . . Doing verbal imaging is a guide for me. They are my guide. They are the ones that ask the relevant questions. They are the ones that guide me through the picture.

On Visitors Who Are Sighted and Visitors Who Are Blind During our interview, Carmen observes that all visitors have a common need in the museum that is beyond perceptual differences, although she acknowledges that there are also individual cultural differences beyond perception, which she feels reflect each visitor’s point of view and aesthetic taste. The most important need in the gallery, she feels, is proximity to the artwork and to know the story of the image, whether that story is a discussion of the aesthetic elements of the artwork or the history of the era and artist, much as I observe in the previous chapter. In this way, the feeling of being in front of the artwork has a benign power over its viewer. Carmen: I find that there is a combination. . . . Different people, who are sighted and blind, are interested in different things. . . . I just don’t see much difference to be honest with you. . . . There’s a reason I don’t want to see El Greco on a print. It’s worse. I need to be in front of El Greco to see the work. That’s what moves me. I don’t want to cheat somebody who is blind and show them a print. Or worse yet, one of 152

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those dioramas [three-dimensional tactile images]. In a lot of museums there are dioramas for the blind. Simon: So it’s the gallery itself? Carmen: It’s the whole thing. When we went to the Lehman collection [with Charles and Camilla], the gallery works much better for a blind person. Simon: You have the furniture, the acoustics? Carmen: Everything! And the smell . . . All that they are missing is their eyes; they can make up for it with their words. And the noise. They can always hear the words.

Subsequently, for Carmen, this proximity exclusively conveys the authenticity of the artwork, something that a copy can never possess or communicate. Moreover, proximity to the artwork can also provide other sensory information. This information is not necessarily about the artwork itself, but about the context of its intended environment—again, Carmen tells me, it is the sound of the gallery, the smell of the surroundings, and even the conversations of other people looking at the same artwork. Of all my interviews at the Met, Carmen is the first person to explicitly describe this need for proximity beyond sensory information as an ambience, something that is more emotional than physical. This proximity, Carmen feels, illustrates the importance of the curation of an object and communicates its cultural value through its individual story. This value is set against the backdrop of the gallery itself and its cultural importance. I always want to bring the [viewer] in front of the picture. This is because I want them to know what distance they are. . . . This is my belief. I think that it is important to actually bring someone who is blind in front of the actual work. . . . It is the ambience; it is the smell. It is the noise. It is the other people, the other reactions. And I really do think that when you have them [visitors who are blind] in front of the work of art there is a connection, not just the eyes. They are observing the picture many other ways by being in front of it.

Despite observing commonalities in her visitors, Carmen also notices subtle differences between some visitors who are blind and those who 153

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are sighted in her previous tours, although these differences are beyond changes in perception. Importantly, Carmen feels that some visitors who are sighted behave in a way that is like the description by Pierre Bourdieu (2010) in the preface to this book; that is to say, they often feel that they must view the pictures almost as a chore, without necessarily having a deep understanding of the artworks’ contents beyond aesthetics. Subsequently, it is almost as if some visitors with sight take their vision for granted when they are in front of an artwork: [People with sight] have much lower expectations. People with sight, they don’t see anything. With people with sight we tell them, “Stop!” With my gallery talks I say, “Take two minutes to look at the picture.” Because nobody looks at pictures. . . . That’s why I worry about people, that they don’t see. . . . For me, it’s like they are all blind; I have to teach them how to see.

According to Carmen, and in common with my observations of imaging tours in the previous chapter, visitors who are blind sometimes want more about the story of artworks—that is to say, the artist’s biography, the politics of the era, and the other artworks of the era. It is through these pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that people who are blind often develop an alternative image—a biographical image of a historical object rather than an aesthetic attraction to an appealing, technically drafted object. Let’s just stay with one picture, with Rubens’s picture. . . . “So how are they dressed?” So I would go, “He has an extremely fashionable outfit.” [And they would say,] “What does he want to say? Why is he painting himself? What does he want to say for the future? Why do we have this picture?”

In addition to the cultural history of artworks, Carmen observes that visitors who are blind try to understand the emotional context in which the artwork was created. For Carmen, invoking emotions is part of the process of creating a piece of art, something that is possibly subconscious and intrinsic to the creative process. For the visitor who is blind, understanding this emotion verbally becomes increasingly important. 154

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I would find that most people [who are blind] are most interested in the mood of the picture, which I think is fascinating, because I think the artist himself is creating a mood. And I think that’s what they feel the most.

Within the realm of blindness, Carmen also notices a discernible difference between those who are late blind or have small amounts of vision and those who have not had any form of vision, a finding that both Berthold Lowenfeld (1981) and I (Hayhoe, 2008, 2011a, 2011b) assert in similar research. For visitors who have seen, it is important to reimage the artwork using direct comparisons of what has been seen previously. Similarly, for people with small amounts of vision, it is important to provide extra visual information to enhance the image of the artwork. In contrast, those who have never seen need to image the artwork through metaphor and analogy. Symbols and extra information therefore become particularly important during imaging for visitors who have never seen. I find that someone who is [born] totally blind . . . they don’t ask me about brushwork, for example . . . they will ask me more about composition, and texture—“Is it flat? If I touch it what do I feel?” Usually someone who is totally blind will ask me to describe the color; in a way that is much more difficult for me. I cannot get away with saying something is red, because they are going to say, “What kind of red? Is it a red that burns?”

Fiona Fiona is an artist and is originally from New York. She is also a freelance teacher at the Met and teaches adult and child art classes, works with visitors with physical disabilities, and conducts imaging tours. Fiona’s training was in fine art, but as part of her education she also studied art history and is an expert in several of the collections at the Met. Fiona has been a teacher at the Met for around ten years; she cannot give a precise date when she started but remembers it was early in the new millennium. She had never taught before taking this post, and, like Carmen, she started teaching mainstream classes and tours 155

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(although, unlike Carmen, she started by teaching children, mainly in school groups). Fiona moved to access services at the request of the education department, she tells me, and started touring and teaching visitors who are blind. Unlike Carmen, however, the imaging tours were well established by the time Fiona began in access services, and she was trained to take this form of tour. Prior to working at the Met, Fiona had never worked with people who are blind or those who have other disabilities. Along with other teachers in the access department, she is now involved in a project touring with people with Alzheimer’s, a condition that subverts the memory of older people, leading to confusion and stress. It was found recently that touring museums such as the Met and providing familiar images from the past can help relieve stress in these visitors. Fiona observes that her classes at the Met often have a social aim: “I would say that 80 percent of people who come to those classes, I mean it mixes up every time, but I think they come because they love the camaraderie.” This camaraderie is always positive, although Fiona finds that this social occasion can sporadically take over from the imaging or art making that is the focus of her teaching. But we love that, because it’s all part of the wonder for them. The enjoyment, I should say. . . . I think the friendships that are forming in our drawing class, I think they stay and have lunch or they go back into the other galleries. . . . The ones who are more [physically] independent seem to have more fun in the class.

In Fiona’s experience, there are existing dynamics in the groups she tours with or teaches when they arrive because they already know each other. This dynamic is particularly strong within families who come along. Fiona also finds that most groups she has are friends. This is often a visitor with a disability or several visitors with disabilities coming with their friends without disabilities. The most regular type of group that Fiona sees are groups of friends who live in New York and have a friend who lives out of town who is blind or who has other disabilities. It is almost as if the New Yorkers want to show off the Met to these people who live elsewhere. Fiona gives many 156

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examples of these types of visitors, particularly of younger visitors who have come in such groups, such as a recent quartet of three boys with sight and a friend who is blind. Fiona: They were [college] freshmen. . . . It was unusual because that age group of kids can be a little uncomfortable. Simon: When they came in, did they see it more as a social event? Fiona: Amongst themselves they do, for sure. . . . They’re all allowed to get involved in the touching aspect. So I find that it is very hard for the sighted people to let themselves do that. So that’s a social opportunity that we offer them that I can’t say a lot of people take up. But these guys are really social, because they would even say, “Oh, look at this one over here,” and they’d say, “It was such and such.” And then we’d go to another piece. So I think it was very social for them. . . . And I also think that they stay in the museum after I leave.

Fiona also finds that visitor groups are increasingly younger and have an increasing interest in specialized cultural studies when they come to the Met. Since they are young, it is an advantage for these visitors to be accompanied by teachers from the museum, as this makes it easier to plan tours: “I’ll get young girls and boys. I think the youngest I’ve had is twelve or thirteen. . . . Sometimes they’ll come with a friend, sometimes they’ll come with family.” The groups accompanying these younger visitors, Fiona finds, are less social than similar groups of even slightly older peers. They more often have a specific purpose for visiting, such as a school report, projects, or revision. Fiona gives a recent example of a young girl who is blind and who wanted to focus on an era and a set of objects. She knew they were in the collection when she arrived. I have one girl who comes back a couple of times, because she’ll have a report to do for school. And so I’ll sit with her in front of works that she’s interested in. It’s interesting, because she comes prepared. And then we go back and forth, and she touches.

Fiona has observed that there are still instances of active exclusion in the general education system that lead visitors who are blind to feel uneasy about working with or creating artworks. However, this reaction to active 157

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exclusion is not universal. For example, she finds that younger people who are blind see the museum as a place where they can form an alternative relationship with artworks, ones that are less dangerous, as their visits are not assessed and exist outside mainstream education. For example, we have a fifteen-year-old coming to this program on Saturday. Well most of these are kids. And Francesca [another teacher in the class] decided to let her come [despite the class being aimed at adults] most of all because the girl said, “I wanted to come to this because my teacher”—and she’s in an inclusion school—“told me that I can’t make art, and that I wouldn’t be good at it.” And she wants to come, and we said, “Come on in.”

On Visitors Who Are Sighted and Visitors Who Are Blind During her imaging of artworks, and as per Carmen, Fiona finds that visitors are not easy to categorize culturally as per their sight or blindness. However, there are aspects of the way visitors who are blind approach a tour and the questions that they ask during the imaging that set them apart. Fiona believes that visitors who are blind are more likely to talk about the texture of the artwork being imaged or the detail of the subject that an artwork is conveying. For example, I was presenting a Japanese piece with a kimono. They couldn’t understand the visual structure of a kimono with the big sleeves and what the material might be made of. So we talked about that as well as the painted material.

Fiona feels that a bigger difference between visitors with sight and those who are blind is that visitors who are blind want to know more detail about the objects they experience in the museum. Alternatively, visitors who are sighted feel that they can rely on their vision and their own perception of the artwork, without having to take in more information from Fiona. You know, [visitors who are blind] feel a stone and they’ll say, “What kind of stone is it?” And I don’t get that so much from sighted people. . . . [Visitors who are blind] like to know the name. I usually tell them if it’s a harder stone. Or they can feel sometimes if they’re feeling a granite. 158

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In developing an intellectual image of the artwork, Fiona finds that visitors who are blind often want to know what can be called the big questions about the artworks. This is information that provides depth to the objects and the exhibits, questioning the curation of the artwork. Pieces that she finds to be relatively unremarkable items, such as armor or cutlery, in one era can be given added meaning by their history. On these objects, Fiona finds three questions are particularly important to visitors. Fiona: Why it is important? Why the piece is in the museum? What makes it art? Simon: Are these quite common questions? Fiona: Yes, in various ways of asking it.

Fiona also finds that visitors who are blind want to know the details of the galleries as they get to their exhibitions. Finding that this is an aspect they enjoy, Fiona has now developed this activity as part of her imaging so that when she enters a gallery she gives a quick description of the room they pass through. Like, this gallery has a higher ceiling. There’s twenty paintings in it. There’s carpet on the floor, although they’d probably notice that. And I’ll say, “We’re walking through the Egyptian hallway. The part that we’re passing through is when the Romans were leading the empire.”

Although Fiona is rarely asked where they are at a specific point, she finds during her initial imagings that as they approach galleries, visitors appreciate information about their location. Fiona also finds that visitors also like it when these galleries have a historical or cultural connection to the exhibition they are heading to, and she can discuss this connection. For example, on her regular Egyptian tours—including touch and imaging—as her parties walk through Urus, she will mention that they are walking through a small area of Hellenistic art. She then explains the connection. She will then tell them how they are walking through the culture of ancient Greece, which existed in a parallel era. Fiona will often tell her visitors that the museum is an encyclopedic collection, something that helps them to understand the time period up to present. In this way, she feels that she is covering a greater wealth of 159

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information about this era. This also makes the museum feel like a more important place, a place where history not only is preserved but also has an intellectual and cultural purpose. This provokes questions and discussion. Simon: Do they ask questions about the galleries you’re walking through? Fiona: Yes. Especially in Egypt when we are on the way to a piece, [visitors who are blind] will ask, “What’s around us now?” And I actually have one person who is so inquisitive that he stopped and I asked, “Do you want a verbal imaging tour of Egypt, or would you like a touch tour because I can do it half and half.” And we can switch to verbal imaging, because he was very inquisitive about everything. And it seems to me that he had a little bit of vision because he was drawn to things.

Like Carmen, Fiona also notices the difference between visitors who have some vision remaining and those who have no vision, particularly those who have never seen. Fiona often finds that those with remaining vision would like to have an enhanced visual imaging during which they can fill in gaps in their sight. Consequently, Fiona has learned to ask visitors what type of discussion they would like to have during their imaging and tailors her imaging to their responses. When I feel it is all right for me to do it, I’ll say, “Would you mind letting me know how much you’re seeing? Can you tell me if you’re seeing, like, dark?” And sometimes I’ll be describing it and they’ll say, “Yes, I can see that part of it.” So I’ll ask, “What is it that you’re not getting? What is it that you don’t see?” So it’s kind of, like, a hand-in-hand thing, where if they’re doing it, I’ll do it, and we work together.

Perhaps a more significant factor in museum visiting that emerges from Fiona’s interview is the early art education of visitors on imagings and touch tours. One point that Fiona notes is that visitors are now much more likely to have had art education before coming to the museum. Although there are cases of visitors with no previous experience of art, such as Camilla in the previous chapter, those who do attend usually do so because they came with others who have experience. Fiona provides a recent example of a young girl whose tour became problematic because of the attitude of her family toward her: 160

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I had a young girl with her grandparents and her niece a few weeks ago. She was probably sixteen. She had another potential disability because her choice of words for descriptions wouldn’t always make sense for what she was handling. Her grandparents were overprotective. Like, they would jump in and tell her what it was. . . . I don’t know if they were overprotective because she has another disability that I was not able to see the extent to which it would go if they hadn’t jumped in.

Fiona also notices that there is a significant difference in attitude toward touch for visitors with sight and those who are blind. Visitors who are blind and who have been taught to rely mainly on touch tend to experience little reticence in handling a piece. For example, Fiona finds that visitors who are blind are much more likely to dig their fingers into the crevices of artworks to get to the detail. By contrast, visitors with sight, except for younger visitors, are likely to think there is something inappropriate about touching. Fiona: I get some people who come and they use both hands, and they really explore. And then there are people who are like this, and they touch with their fingers. There is a timidity in some. . . . Simon: So there are people who are experienced touchers, and they’ll be all over the piece? Fiona: Yes, and I always compliment them on it. . . . I feel like they must have been able to touch other things with permission without always being thwarted. And so they’re comfortable touching. And they must use touch more in their life, to manage their life. . . . Sighted kids will go right in, but I find even if I invite [adults with sight], they’ll start out and then they’ll just back off.

On the nature of touch, consistency of touch materials can also distinguish visitors with touch from those who are blind. Fiona feels that, although preferable for practical purposes, touch tours can be more problematic than imagings for visitors who are blind. She finds that it is difficult to maintain a consistent approach to using touchable objects to represent the artworks at the Met. Although Fiona uses maquettes from the museum to represent larger, untouchable objects, these are only available for certain artworks. If a 161

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whole period is to be discussed, it can be unhelpful to discuss objects based on this availability. Sometimes we don’t have anything that represents what we’re looking at because, as you know, we’ll go fairly deep into a collection. And we don’t always have [a maquette].

Conclusion There are two important issues from the teachers’ interviews that gave further evidence of the ability to understand artworks. The first issue is that much of what the teachers came across was passive exclusion, often based on educational belief systems in common with the case studies in the previous chapter. Significantly, older visitors who are blind often have some form of art education, suggesting they have not attended a school for the blind; as shown in previous chapters, visual arts were rarely taught in these schools until recently. Importantly, of those visitors who had little art education but came to the museum anyway, most were young. This suggests a greater willingness of young visitors to question a system that has excluded them because of their impairment. For this reason, access services at the museum have a role in providing an alternative belief system and broke a frequent link between blindness and what was regarded as visitors’ disability. This also suggests that there is another aspect to passive exclusion that needs consideration: that of passive inclusion—that is to say, when given a belief system that a person who is blind is incapable of an activity, such as understanding or practicing art, some people will ignore this belief and plunge into an activity anyway. In the cases described above, this passive inclusion is often because the visitor who is blind has had an experience of alternative ontologies—belief systems—when younger and therefore feels no reason to act disabled. Their identities therefore assume an impaired but not a disabled form. Such alternative ontologies are apparent in the case studies discussed by Carmen and Fiona, such as Fiona’s inclusion class student who asked if she could attend the drawing class. This was also a factor in the case of Charles in the previous chapter and of Esref and Michael in chapter 1. 162

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Also important in the notion of passive inclusion is the observation by Carmen and Fiona that there is a commonality of cultural tastes for visitors with sight and those who are blind. This suggests that there is also a commonality of need for cultural stimulation and identity, which goes beyond a simple perceptual grasp of the world outside. This need can be measured against environments and places, such as museums and galleries, which give objects cultural value for those who are near them. Subsequently, visitors develop aesthetic, symbolic, intellectual, and emotional connection with artworks and the museum through engagement—perceptual, verbal, or a combination of both—and real proximity. The second issue is related to the first. Both Carmen and Fiona notice a different approach to understanding museum exhibits by visitors with sight and those who are blind. Furthermore, both observed subtler differences between those visitors who have never seen, those with some remaining vision, and those who rely on their visual memory. During tours, Carmen and Fiona notice that people with sight have a certain perceptual complacency when viewing artworks. This supports Gombrich’s (1984) theory that art educators need to distinguish a difference between looking, seeing, and viewing. Carmen finds that she was guilty of complacency prior to conducting tours with visitors who are blind. It is only through imaging artworks that she is allowed the luxury of slowing down and examining the symbolic value of individual elements of exhibitions. Visitors with minimal working vision have a sense of an image, and the verbal content of the imaging can help to fill in gaps missing from their immediate perceptions. Although they also find themselves drawn to the biographical status of the object, the primary focus of visitors with remaining vision is still the aesthetic nature of artworks. For visitors who are blind, particularly those who have no sight and have never seen, the historical and biographical details of the artwork now become of paramount importance. The value of the artwork is as an object of politics, religion, and war. The visitor is connected to people in power, either through their representation or through their patronage of artists. Aesthetics, in the case studies I examined, is of no importance to these visitors. It is the role of the symbols, if it contains an image, and the tacit nature of the object in relation to its era that are important. 163

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The two issues raised in this conclusion help provide a further focus for the final three case studies. This focus is the development of a cultural and intellectual identity through engagement with artworks, particularly through their imaging.

Joni Joni is fifty-one years old. She is a special education teacher in Northern California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. She grew up in a middle-class family in New York and then moved out west after finishing school, although she says she still misses being in New York. Joni now lives alone, close to her school. Joni has a very small amount of vision remaining and a strong visual memory as she became blind after suffering a brain tumor at the age of sixteen. She now uses a white cane and has a guide dog for mobility. Although her vision is weak, Joni recognizes that her right eye is stronger, leaving an unbalanced sense of her remaining vision. Joni’s vision has not weakened further over the years, although she has now developed a condition called astigmatism, which leaves her color blind. Joni feels that this lack of color has become more problematic over the years, as it distorts her remaining vision. I can see you, it’s kind of blurry. I always say it’s like a TV set that’s not in focus. In the left eye, I have almost no vision. I’m color blind . . . if something’s very vivid I can see it. I can’t tell you what color your jacket is. It’s sort of like a light color and that’s about all I can tell you.

Despite her blindness and the effects of her tumor on her mobility, Joni attended mainstream school throughout her education. During the last two years of high school, she also attended a Braille resource room in the school to relearn reading and writing; this is a subject that she now teaches in California. Joni would return to her regular classes in between lessons in this resource room to study academic subjects, take tests, and organize independent study with the rest of her class. Although this separate class made her feel different, it did not affect her relationships with her school friends, and she has largely good memories of this time. 164

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Joni did well in high school and achieved high grades. She also did well in her SATs. Joni attended college straight after school and completed her undergraduate degree in the standard time for such programs, majoring in English language. Joni then continued her studies with consecutive postgraduate programs, attaining a first master’s degree in special needs education with an emphasis on teaching students who are blind and then a second master’s degree in anthropology and education. Following this, she taught as a specialist teacher of students with disabilities. She finds this fulfilling, she tells me. Is Joni Excluded from Art and Museums? Joni’s earliest memories of the fine arts were positive, and she often studied artworks at home and school and remembers visiting museums on numerous occasions. This lay the foundations for her later inclusion. In her early teens, Joni also recalls visiting a friend’s house and studying her parents’ books on art history. This early exposure to art meant that Joni became attracted to several genres of figurative and landscape artworks, particularly the impressionists and postimpressionists. As a child, she feels that this interest was largely premised on the aesthetic appearance of these artworks, mainly in museums, more than on her strong historical love of art: I guess I was about eleven then and I guess what intrigued me was the shapes and maybe the color. I remember enjoying the exhibits of medieval art when I went to the Metropolitan the first or second time I was ever there. But, I think I’ve always been, ironically enough, attracted to things with color.

Joni’s education in the fine arts continued in junior high school, where, she tells me, she often worked on paintings and drawings and remembered particularly enjoying ceramics classes. Even though Joni has not painted since these school years, she has done some drawing after becoming blind, although she must adapt her technique to work with brightly colored crayons; they must be almost fluorescent, she tells me. In common with the observations of the teachers at the Met, Joni’s reminiscences of creating art in school differ significantly from before her 165

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sight loss and afterward. This said, during our interview she emphasizes just how much she loved art throughout this transition from a sighted to a blind girl and then as a woman: “I took an art history course in college, which was probably not the best thing to do because I really struggled, but all right, you try it and what the heck.” Despite these problems, Joni persevered and gained credit for all her art classes. Joni’s determination to continue studying and creating art matured as she entered adult life, although her art practice again had to adapt to minimize the effect of her impairment. When she became a teacher in her early twenties, she took art courses in her spare time, but this time the courses were developed for students who were blind and centered on touch. Joni’s first such course was on Egyptian art and was conducted through the Hadley School for the Blind. This school is a correspondence school, offering raised tactile images of paintings and drawings by a charity called Art Education for the Blind, New York. This charity is now known as Art Beyond Sight and is based in the Chelsea area of Manhattan. Joni found this course challenging but ultimately rewarding: “There was a lot of material that was covered in it, but at least I felt I could understand some of it because, again, I had that visual background.” Subsequently, when she could have been passively excluded, as the course made assumptions about its audience’s connection to the material, Joni thrived instead. Joni also continued studying crafts through adult courses, something she remembers with fondness and that reflects her earlier aesthetic tastes, she tells me. Joni took several sewing classes at the National Institute for Art and Disabilities, traveling to Richmond, Virginia, during her vacations to follow the courses. During these sewing classes, Joni chose to create a book, which included a short story and many sewn illustrations. Joni says that she enjoyed the experience, as she had always appreciated fine textiles, even though the mental concentration it took to produce this work wore her out—she was still finding mobility to be a problem, and her failing sight made visual concentration difficult. This tiredness continues now and is the first time Joni described being challenged by her love of art, although she feels this is increasingly a consequence of other illness and her time of life more than her blindness alone. Joni also feels that with her condition worsening, and with the on166

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set of advanced age, she will not be attempting ambitious projects in the future, particularly those involving travel. Joni sounds particularly sanguine about having to accept this transition to a different, less active social and cultural life. This is a part of her life that means a great deal to her cultural identity and her self-image as a person who still had a strong, fulfilling role to play in life. So, I think as I get older and with this astigmatism and everything else I realize that there are things, that there are just some things that I just have to give up. And that’s OK, I mean, I’ve had my fling with life on many levels and I’m not going to just sit down and die, but it’s time to look at things that are far more accessible to me.

Despite this change in temperament, there are also signs that several of Joni’s habits have managed to adapt, although it is a struggle to develop a source of stability in her cultural life. For example, Joni still works with crafts locally to satisfy her need to use color through her visual memory, an aspect of her art making she constantly emphasizes during our interview. As part of this new life, Joni adapts her art making to beading and assembling jewelry. This also gives her a new form of identity that is associated with a sense of independence. So although her condition causes a loss of physical independence, Joni negotiates with the assistants in her neighborhood store to identify colors for her and uses receptacles to divide colors. This allows her to match and identify different textures with colors through touch. Simon: You can imagine the color again? Joni: I could, as long as somebody says, “You could use black and white beads or blue and green beads. Here’s blue and here’s green,” and if they’re separated and I have a way of labeling them. Like, I’ll put one particular bead in one dish and another bead in another dish, then I’ll just bead that way, or if they’re different-sized beads or differenttextured beads, that helps me as well. So, I’m able to do that. . . . I enjoy doing that. I find it challenging, but it’s easier than sewing.

Joni’s first memory of museums was also normal during childhood, with what Bourdieu (2010) describes as middle-class tastes for art. This allowed her the confidence to work for passive inclusion after she lost her sight. 167

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Joni’s first visit to a museum was a field trip to the Met when she was in sixth grade, and these visits continued throughout childhood. After becoming blind, she continued to attend museums, although her impairment forced her to adapt the way that she approached the paintings. For instance, Joni says that she was particularly attracted to works by Vincent van Gogh—an artist she knew before losing her sight and someone she can still appreciate now—because of his use of vivid color. Joni also explains that she must supplement her experience of more subtly colored paintings with detailed descriptions of their images, something she uses prior information to calculate. You show me something that’s fairly complicated, like Chagall or some of the other painters, unless I get those audio descriptions, it’s like a mass of paint to me. . . . I don’t know what I’m looking at.

As with the observations made in the previous case studies, Joni’s development of a cultural identity adapts with her impairment, although the need to feel included is strong. However, Joni does not follow access tours; instead, she follows mainstream museum guides, largely through mainstream audio tours rented from information desks. Subsequently, she is more attracted to the historical details of their descriptions, as well as the background information on the form and colors of the paintings. As with her art courses, at least in part, these guides can fill in the gaps of the details of the artworks she cannot see. I even went when Philippe de Montebello [then director of the Met] narrated a couple of exhibits on van Gogh, and his use of detail is really what saved me. Because if he didn’t talk about this blue sky and the small red figure to the left, it would have meant nothing to me. . . . I really liked the audio description. It helped me, but I think too because I already had a background in visual concepts. Not being born blind has made it a lot easier. . . . [I can] pick up certain things from the paintings if I look at them long enough . . . with that audio description it would come faster.

Furthermore, Joni’s adaptation of inclusive practice in this field more and more includes touching exhibits on mainstream tours when she is 168

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given the opportunity. She says that her most memorable experiences of touch were in publicly touchable exhibits at Madame Tussauds and the Imperial War Museum in London, as well as the Rodin Museum in Paris. Nevertheless, Joni also finds that there are times when she feels excluded because of her blindness, just as others have felt passive exclusion. For instance, she says that she found it frustrating going to the Sistine Chapel in Rome and not being able to see Michelangelo’s ceiling. All Joni could do in these circumstances was simply sit on the floor to stay cool. This need to visit galleries also leads Joni to take risks in order to see the paintings up close, a need that is so strong that it can lead to confrontational situations when she is denied proximity by guards. When she was younger and more active, these experiences did not dismay her, and she said she still largely enjoyed visiting museums. However, as Joni ages, she says that she finds it frustrating. Despite this feeling of exclusion, it is the strength of the institution as part of Joni’s identity that is the most significant draw of the museum. Consequently, when I ask whether she enjoys the institution as well as its exhibits, Joni says it is largely the experience of learning in situ that makes the experience fulfilling. This habit of visiting museums has now gone through a second adaptation, though, and Joni feels that aging has developed a further stigma that she negotiates and adapts to again. Simon: Do you just enjoy going to these places? Joni: I do, and I got to say I went, and that was fine. I just wish I was able to get more out of it visually. . . . I’ve found in the last few years going to Europe, and you see all of the churches and castles and things, and that’s fine, but after a while it becomes so visually tiring that I say, “Well, I did this and this is great and now it’s time to do something else.”

As with the earlier case studies, Joni’s adaptation of cultural identity includes attendance in the museum itself, something that becomes a line that symbolizes inclusion. This means that even when she feels excluded from the artworks, she still participates and feels it is important to travel to do so. 169

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Pavlos Pavlos is sixty-four years old. He has an insignificant amount of vision left and is unable to make out his general environment—he can only tell if light is present or absent. When we meet, it is noticeable that although he has no problem with physical mobility, he must rely on helpers for directions. He finds it particularly difficult to negotiate the galleries and perform practical tasks, such as finding his way to the bathroom. Pavlos started losing his sight at the age of five and described his blindness as the inverse form of retinitis pigmentosa. This led to a loss of his central vision. Pavlos’s remaining peripheral vision then started to go gradually over many years as an older child and throughout his adult working life. Pavlos was also unable to read independently, and needed most of his information to be provided verbally—he particularly relied on audio books and audio guides. As he described of his first experiences of blindness, One day I was playing ball in the park with my father and my sister and the ball fell directly in front of me and I couldn’t see it. And then the minute I turned my head a little bit there it was. But even after the sight loss I had enough usable vision so that I knew colors . . . I knew the sight of a mountain, or a tree, or things that are normally too large to be, you know, felt in one. More sort of glances when you’re talking about tactile matter.

Pavlos was born into a middle-class Greek family in Cyprus and moved to New York City when he was a baby. He went to mainstream schools throughout his education and from the age of twelve attended a sight conservation class, a class for students who needed books and papers enlarged. He then went to a local high school, where he could remain with his cousins and friends. At the age of eighteen, he started learning Braille and using a cane: “I’d say that when I started using a cane was when I really identified with being blind; and then I learnt about all the services and all of the things that were around.” Pavlos recalls that his experiences in mainstream education meant that as he entered adulthood, he had a good recollection of shapes, colors, and other visual concepts, such as perspective. As a teenager, this enabled him to go to museums with his family and take part in art classes. He 170

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says he enjoyed this time and was reluctant to stop art making despite his poor vision. During his mainstream school classes, Pavlos was not provided with special assistance. Although he wanted to be independent, this lack of support was a source of acute embarrassment, and he felt that it had a harmful effect on his self-confidence during his early years at school. Pavlos remembers being singled out in class, having to adapt in lessons around the normal demands of the class and to take extra time to do his work. Pavlos remembers he was not allowed to take certain subjects, such as art. Instead, he was made to concentrate on topics and special classes that the school felt he could achieve more from. It was very hard for me, I was very uncomfortable. This was like before I went off to a sight conservation class, so it was embarrassing. I sometimes had to get up and go up to the blackboard to see what was written there. I wasn’t really able to participate in sports. And then when I was in sight conservation class, there was no art at all of course, because all my free time was taken up by either someone reading to me or enlarging something for me.

Despite feeling uncomfortable at school, Pavlos graduated high school with a good grade point average (GPA) and a good report from his teachers. He also had a good enough SAT score to get into college, although he did not go straight into higher education after leaving high school. When Pavlos eventually attended college, he took a shortened twoyear degree, majoring in the liberal arts, as he said he wanted to “test the waters.” Pavlos feels that he did well given his blindness and continued lack of support in higher education—although he had Braille books for his classes—and he passed his major degree with a good grade. He also recalls that he was encouraged by others from his college class and gained a great deal socially from his years there. Immediately after college, Pavlos took a postgraduate qualification to teach English as a second language. However, immediately after passing this course, he was offered an acting job, grabbed the opportunity, and decided to concentrate on this as a career. Pavlos had various amateur acting roles since the age of eighteen and had enjoyed the performing arts as a sense of self-expression for many years before. 171

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Is Pavlos Excluded from Art and Museums? Pavlos’s identity has the potential to suffer from passive exclusion, although he worked hard to avoid this. In common with my previous research, he was most vulnerable after his experiences in high school, when he was excluded from art classes and had to concentrate on other subjects (Hayhoe, 2008). However, as Pavlos developed a mainstream understanding of visual art in his earliest education through his family and museum visits, he now has a strong cultural identity. For instance, Pavlos remembers painting at a communal easel at elementary school, guided by what he describes as a progressive teacher who encouraged creative activity. These lessons now stick in Pavlos’s mind as a motivation for later creative work as the teacher encouraged a free form of work during these sessions. This form of learning allowed students to choose their subject, experiment with unusual color combinations, and develop unique painting techniques. This was also a time that Pavlos could play with and understand his developing blindness through art. If I would close one eye and look with the other, the image that I was looking at was, let’s say, moved a little bit to the right; and when I closed the left eye, the image would move somewhat off. So when I was trying to do my paintings, there was never an opportunity to see the whole thing at once. And I remember, as young as I was, it was evident that the painting was in kind of two parts. It was just swirly lines, and just using the green, yellow, and red.

Although he says that art is something “I love to do,” Pavlos’s identity reformed through his emerging impairment, his changed perceptions, and the altered experiences this brought. Subsequently, Pavlos did not have the opportunity to repeat his experiences of art making until many years later, after he dropped art in high school. In the intervening years, he concentrated on math and languages and was more attracted to theatrical, spoken arts. Like Bourdieu’s (2010) notion that cultural identity comes primarily through habits that are influenced by family and peers, Pavlos enjoyed drawing and painting at home when younger. He still remembers being encouraged by his close and extended family members, who felt he had a talent for visual art and acting, a habit that he carried into adulthood. 172

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Well, like, my aunt who realized that I had some talent was always giving me art books and charcoal whatever-it-is, and I would try and follow the things in the book . . . or we would make up a basket or some bird made out of felt or a sock that had eyes on it; whatever; you know, really silly kinds of stuff.

Pavlos now sees this early encouragement by his family as perhaps the most significant part of his emotional as well as aesthetic development, even more than his academic growth. Consequently, his cultural identity in later life is still premised on arts practice more than analysis of practice, and his appreciation of arts in general is both aesthetic and intellectual. Like many of his school friends and family, Pavlos remembers revering museums and cultural sites. At elementary school, he also remembers his first visit was to the American Museum of Natural History, New York, around the age of eight or nine. Pavlos does not remember visiting museums during the rest of his school career; this first visit came at the time that he began losing his sight. However, he feels that this was not unusual for his mainstream school at the time and was not related to his blindness at that age. He also was not especially excluded from other creative or unconventional experiences of learning at this young age because of his blindness. This point in our interview is where Pavlos’s identity departs from the notions of Bourdieu and Gombrich on aesthetics and the function of museums. For example, and in common with most participants I interviewed, Pavlos thinks of the museum as an institution with more cultural and national value than its exhibits alone. This value is partly driven by his reverence of the cultural position of the museum but also by the proximity to artworks that the museum affords him: “I enjoy the whole museum. . . . And the question remains why do I come to a museum, because I think I could get that kind of cultural information elsewhere?” Consequently, Pavlos feels that it is important to passively include himself, and he visits museums and other historical sites frequently; this is something that he says became important as he entered adulthood. This is a practice that reinforces his identity as an artistic man. Pavlos’s frequent visits are also often related to his Cypriot cultural identity. He still remembers with great fondness enjoying Greek art for the first time with his family in Nicosia, Cyprus, when he was around eighteen. 173

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Despite his heritage, this issue of Pavlos’s Cypriot identity is also important to his American identity, and he now sees himself in relation to both cultures through interacting with art. This acceptance of his unique bicultural identity still drives his desire for knowledge about artworks that he encounters. This is something he has in common with other bicultural visitors I interviewed. Unfortunately, and in common with Joni, Pavlos often finds himself passively excluded, as touching or even close physical proximity to many artworks is prohibited. For Pavlos, this proximity is extremely important as an independent visitor, as it is his only direct perceptual and aesthetic contact with many pieces. For example, Pavlos feels especially frustrated on his visits to Cyprus, as he is unable to touch ancient relics on numerous historical sites. “Which I really don’t get, because some of the antiquities are like 5,000 years old, and they have endured all kinds of weather.” This lack of proximity has made Pavlos adapt his need for physical contact with artworks in many museums, and he now concentrates on histories of artworks. Consequently, as Pavlos became blinder in early adulthood, his visual memories of artworks rarely overlapped with an increasing desire to study their genres, histories, and biographies. Pavlos now largely accepts that the intellectual and historical study of art is the only way he can understand these untouchable objects. This idea represents a further transition between his earlier aesthetic experiences from creating art at school and that of his new reality in adulthood. He also more tacitly finds the intellectual understanding of artwork increasingly fulfilling, accepting his transition to a person who is nonvisual. Pavlos: What is interesting to me is probably historically who the artist is and maybe what circumstances they were in. Simon: So you’re more interested in the context and the background? Pavlos: Yes, than I am in the painting. I mean, academically I’d really like to understand what, you know, cubism is versus pointillism . . . and I don’t understand what the difference is and how they impact on the viewer in that sense.

Pavlos’s intellectual engagement with artworks is therefore increasingly important in museum visits, particularly those visits to modern art museums, which he is increasingly drawn to. Like the previous case stud174

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ies and because of his deteriorating vision, during these visits Pavlos finds that he also wants to learn more about the technical aspects of aesthetics. This study is something he can rationalize without sight and through which he feels a connection with the artworks. It is a conduit to his past visual world and an identity he feels nostalgic about and comfortable with. For me, I think I would be happy if I could understand what the differences in style were. And I sort of think that I can get to have some understanding. I am not sure that I would ever understand it completely, but I do very much understand perspective, and I do kind of remember seeing Cezanne’s Bather [sic]. . . . But I understand the concept of looking at it from a different angle, and I understand the interplay between light and shade and how that connotes depth or dimension or whatever.

However, for Pavlos, lack of sight does not mean giving up perception altogether in the museum, as his use of touch is not just about perceptual information. His transition to a person without sight and his current process of aging also test his need to visit museums and to feel in their presence as a sense of embodiment and of being. This adds to a sense of independence and maintaining a place in the world. Touch also became important for Pavlos as a young man. After accepting his blindness at the age of eighteen, he increasingly relied on touch as his primary interaction with artworks, even when this was only to stimulate his visual imagination. It thus became part of his cultural identity, as much as books, and part of his family heritage. Tactile perception is now also a symbol of inclusion for Pavlos, something that occasionally makes him cynical about imaging tours: Put it this way, if the museum experience consisted of nothing but verbal imaging, then I wouldn’t go. It would be again an experience through a third person, and it would be too much. But if it was going to be mixed, you know, with some tactile stuff, being able to touch things, then I would go. . . . Verbal imaging goes just so far. I find it comes through a third person, which diffuses it, and is not very exciting to me. . . . But, however, sometimes, and I mean a lot of times, I get the composition of the painting we’re looking at because, as I said, I had vision and do understand landscapes and what those vistas are like. 175

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There is also a further, noneducational reason for visiting museums. Pavlos’s pattern of museum attendance continues to evolve as he ages and is confronted by decreasing social contact with friends and coworkers. As a result, he visits museums more often because, he says, he has time on his hands after semiretirement and needs the social participation of his visits more than the educational content. Consequently, despite earlier independent trips to museums with his family, he finds he is now more likely to participate in access tours, to mix with similar, more elderly people. As he explains to me, since these visits are designed for visitors who are blind, they allow him to share common experiences with a new set of peers. As if to illustrate his observation, he points out that our current interview at the Museum of Modern Art is prior to a touch tour with people who are more likely to live alone. Pavlos’s group is also familiar with previous touch tours and each other, and many visitors are often of a similar age. The tour is organized by the museum’s access department, who keep visitors’ contact details in a database, and visitors are told of each tour in advance. It is the interaction with the other people that are here, getting a particular perspective. . . . There’s a social context, and frankly I have more time than I used to have, and it’s a nice way to pass a couple of hours.

Tariq Tariq is a coordinator in a school for the blind in Boston but is originally from Turkey. He has been blind from birth, although he does not discuss his specific medical diagnosis in the interview. Unusually for the visitors who participate in these interviews, he has no vision and what he describes as no real visual memory. Although he had a little light perception until the age of around fifty-eight, this was too little to use functionally, and he cannot recall the shape or form of objects or environments. He now only has a memory of light. I just had a little light perception. It slowly disappeared. It was never much anyway. I could never differentiate colors, but I could see lines. Like, I could follow the path by looking at the darker green. I didn’t know it was green, I’d just follow that; and I could see the darkness of a tree or wall 176

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against the light. . . . I had several eye surgeries [in Boston], and each one made it worse. And we had “the best” hospitals in the country.

Tariq is from a middle-class family in the southeast of Turkey, near its border with Syria. Legally, Tariq tells me, he is sixty-three years old, although his true age is unknown. At the time of his birth, there were very few reliable records kept in his region of Turkey. For cultural reasons, his family felt it was undesirable to record births and ages, as he might have been drafted into the army when he reached adulthood. Tariq tells me that at the time, it was also a cultural tradition not to celebrate birthdays in Turkey. Tariq still has fond memories of the area and a strong cultural identity with his community—especially the cuisine: “We do have the best food in the world!” Tariq also still shops in the local Armenian groceries, as they remind him of home. In Turkey, Tariq went to a boarding school for the blind initially and then won a scholarship to an American-run mainstream academy for the rest of his younger years of education. This introduced him to an American-style curriculum. Schools for the blind in those days went through for eight years, and then you had to take an exam of sorts if you wanted to go on further schooling. And I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to an Americanrun academy called Robert Academy. It was quite well known.

Tariq moved to the United States in 1968, where he first attended Perkins School for the Blind for two years, then Brandeis University. He continued his undergraduate and postgraduate education in the Massachusetts area, where he has lived ever since. He enjoys being in educational environments, he tells me. Is Tariq Excluded from Art and Museums? Tariq’s early experiences of art education are unusual as he passed through the unique structure of scholarship available to him in Turkey at the time, as a sighted child might. Although his early influences were from peers who are blind and his family, this changed after he won his scholarship to the Robert Academy, and his social and cultural identity reformed. 177

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This meant he often found himself included in art activities, which led to his passive inclusion in later years. For example, Tariq recalls aesthetic art classes based on touch in his school for the blind at a relatively early age— even though he does not consider these to be a traditional form of fine art lesson—but not in his mainstream classes at the academy. This new institution focused primarily on scientific subjects and mathematics while he was there, and even children with sight did not study art. As he explains, [At the] school for the blind, we had clay modeling, in the Robert College we didn’t, nobody did, because by then it was high school and we were all into science and literature. . . . [The] Turkish mentality to blind education was that they were forced to replicate the exact curriculum of the nation, including [clay] modeling.

Tariq’s visual art practice at school was further confused by his differing drawing practices. For example, he had some experience of drawing during classes, but this was related to highly technical exercises. However, this is something he does not relate to aesthetics or a more deep-seated intellectual understanding of artistic practice. Tariq’s practice became complicated at the academy by his lack of experience using tactile materials for anything other than math classes and Braille. This has come to mean that the form and function of the tactile material he was trained with has become something other than an aesthetic, comparative exercise as Bourdieu (2010) infers. Instead, it has become a technical exercise, providing information for reading, where the creativity in these exercises was their purpose in class. I didn’t draw for art, but I drew for geometry lessons. . . . We were given raised line tracing wheels and rubber mats and Braille paper with rulings and Braille dots. And we had compass and protractor to re-create different geometric theorem. Our teachers were very creative people; they taught us how to draw.

Tariq’s technical understanding of touch is also illustrated in an excerpt from his interview in which he talks about an understanding of graphics as spatial conception. This technical information helps him orient himself in the world in a practical way, through a haptic—that is to say, a sensory, nonvisual—understanding of his environment. 178

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I think that our minds are not necessarily connected to any one sense. I have a graphic mind but I wouldn’t say a visual mind. [For example], when my friends or my wife are driving places, I can give them directions just like that. . . . I have the whole world wrapped up in my head.

Like the other case studies in this book, Tariq’s notions of his cultural identity are also predicated on attending the museum rather than regarding it as a place for holding artworks. For example, in his interview Tariq emphasizes that the experience of hearing about artworks at the museum rather than at home is important to him. He also has interesting social experiences while listening to discussions on artworks in situ, which often gives a new meaning to learning. It provides a different dimension and an alternative ambience to the artwork. For one thing, while you’re walking around you hear other people walking. Sometimes you hear somebody passing by stops, whether they say something or not, there must be something there really interesting they want to see. Or sometimes you hear someone whisper to one another, “Look at this work here.” You know, it’s just like why do blind people want to go to a football match. They might as well hear it on the radio, it’s much better. But there’s the atmosphere. You know, and you pick up information perchance from other people. You go to a café afterwards and you hear what people say. It’s fun!

Consequently, like other visitors who are early blind, such as Charles, Camilla, and Glen, Tariq emphasizes the importance of the backstory of artworks rather than his aesthetic tastes. For instance, during Tariq’s earliest experiences of visiting museums as a child in Turkey, he became fascinated with being able to touch Roman Christian artworks from his region. These objects represent a challenge to what was allowed at the time in his Islamic culture, where the Christian faith was not widely discussed—despite the secular nature of Turkey. Now Tariq describes being enthralled by what the Christian pieces represent to him culturally and intellectually rather than by the more intrinsic meaning of their physical forms. In my hometown, when I was in probably third grade, we had a little Hittite museum, all types of Hittite and Roman [pieces]. They were very 179

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nice, and there was no worry about it. I remember touching some Roman women, small statues. It was probably made of clay. A crucifix, too. It was a statue of a crucifix, but it was, like, showing Christ on a cross, which was very, very [interesting]. It was the first time that I’d heard that had happened, because the Muslim tradition denies crucifixion because they think he just disappeared into heaven. So, it was just very, very fascinating.

In his description of paintings, Tariq’s cultural identity also is not based on aesthetic tastes or through a normal interpretation of artworks, as Bourdieu and Gombrich feel it is. This is largely because Tariq does not have the opportunity to access tactile artworks when visiting the museum independently, which is his preferred way of visiting. Consequently, he suggests a longing for inclusion in an intellectual and cultural world of discussing artworks as historically important objects, one in which he was brought up: I haven’t really developed much clarity of, or taste of, artists. . . . You know, if someone was allowing you to touch, or giving you good information in a good way, then I would enjoy it. I would know how it relates, that the artwork relates to a time in history, his life or lifestyle, or how it might relate to the current situation. But I would need some extra [academic] information.

Passive inclusion, Tariq finds, can also have its advantages. Sometimes a perceived ignorance of his capacity to understand art by people in museums has led to overcompensation of access and extra support. Perhaps more significantly, and unlike Joni, in previous visits these experiences have occasionally made Tariq less of a threat to the security of artworks. He tells me that this has often allowed him access and proximity to exhibits that many visitors and students with sight would not normally have contact with. One such instance happened at the Met, and another happened in a Turkish palace. I just asked, I turned up to [the Met], you know I was the only blind person, and I think you were less threatening, so he said, “OK.” The same as some of the palaces in Istanbul I went with some French students, one of the latest palaces, and the guard was just a soldier, [he didn’t seem to care], he just wanted to make sure nobody stole anything. So we were walking around, and my wife was saying, “Oh, these doors are so beautifully carved,” and the guy said, “No, it’s not allowed to 180

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touch.” And I said, “You know, if I don’t touch, I’ll never know I’ve been here.” I said, “It’s up to you, but I don’t think it’ll be much harm.” And he said, “OK, you can touch here.” And when we were there a little longer, he said, “And you can touch here too, and you can touch here, too.” And by the time we came to the Sultan’s bedroom, he lifted the rope and said, “You can go in there and touch everything.” . . . In some ways, you can bring up the accessibility thing and force people to cooperate, but it’s never enjoyable. If you use a sense of humor and goodwill, sometimes people cooperate much better.

Although, like Pavlos, Tariq sees his visits to the museum as having a social purpose, he does not want to be associated with groups designed especially for other visitors who are blind. Instead, he finds that he wants to identify with a more mainstream and educated identity in the museum, where he is not seen as impaired and with a need beyond that of others. For Tariq, the occasion of a museum visit is more of an opportunity to connect with his family and like-minded friends, whether they are blind or sighted. As if to illustrate this point, although he identifies himself as a blind man, he has recently shunned touch tours in his local museum, as he feels it defeats the point of his visit. For me, I’d rather be part of the family. If there’s an access to me, I’d like to go with my wife or a friend. I don’t want a room just for the blind that I could go see. I don’t enjoy that as much. I probably would if the artifacts were really good, but typically I don’t like to be isolated. I want to get whatever I can get within a normal setting. If there’s a description or if there’s a way while I’m walking, you know, “Would you like to see this statue, it’s OK if you touch with a glove,” then I would really enjoy it, but I don’t want to make an appointment three weeks ahead. You know, “We’re going to have twelve blind people, if you’d like to come?” I’d probably just say, “No.”

Conclusion Although passive exclusion of the visitors in this chapter exists in the art world, passive inclusion is also pervasive. This is particularly so when the visitors are younger and more mobile. 181

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More important, the independent visitors I interviewed face only a few barriers while visiting museums independently, apart from proximity. This was an example of either ignorance on the part of museums’ oversensitivity over the value of the works or a slavish following of standard rules to the detriment of accessibility. Alternatively, this also shows the cultural value of proximity in the museum—the museum as the guardian of its objects and the visitor as one who wants to experience their value. For example, Joni found visiting museums rewarding despite her guide dog being unwelcome in a smaller institution and being warned when she got close to the paintings to see effectively. Similarly, Pavlos gained a great deal from visiting historic sites but was not allowed to touch ancient artifacts when he visited historical monuments in Cyprus. As this exclusion occurred in small, specialist institutions, it is most likely the result of lack of training, as resources in these institutions are often limited. Furthermore, when proximity is not seen as a threat to the value of an object or the cultural privilege of the museum, the experience of proximity significantly increases the value of visits. This finding is reinforced by Tariq’s recollection of a Turkish guard. When this guard thought Tariq was sighted and trying to touch, he was denied close contact with pieces in the palace he was visiting, but when the guard realized Tariq was blind, he was allowed a proximity to the objects that sighted people would not be afforded. The issue of inclusion through proximity to an artwork also raises the important issue of the social power of museums. Subsequently, the denial of proximity is almost a denial of access for many visitors who are blind. For Tariq, it was only his perceived lack of power in such circumstances that made him less of a social threat to physical damage, theft, or privilege than his sighted counterpart might be. Consequently, there is a broader, underlying issue at stake in the denial of proximity, which is one of access to what Carmen describes as an ambience and an enhancement of the vision that remains. Power was also noticeable in the social class of visitors to the museum. A significant observation from the three visitor case studies is that the only independent visitors I managed to identify were all highly educated—to the postgraduate level in all three cases—middle-class visitors. These visitors’ level of education invites a deeper intellectual level of understanding of artworks that partially negated their impairment, 182

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although, admittedly, this sample was unscientific, as the number and composition of independent visitors who are blind is still unknown. Listening to the description of teachers too, however, the independent visitors are typical of their experiences and are almost privileged in this form of education. The nonsensory understanding of artworks and museums is something we rarely discuss in literature on exclusion. This is only apparent in this chapter because, in part, Joni’s, Pavlos’s, and Tariq’s lack of sight provided an opportunity to interact with artworks on a deeper level. Such opportunities provide a greater opportunity for deep-seated relationships to be formed with the artworks and for a sense of cultural ownership of an object that deep knowledge can bring. For example, although Pavlos lamented his inability to engage with visual genres of paintings, he managed to develop a sophisticated academic understanding of their context through biographies. Tariq also enjoyed the historical representation of objects. He regarded his visit to the museum as an opportunity to develop his cultural knowledge through sighted third parties, analyzing their conversations and the patterns of their footsteps. Similarly, Tariq’s passive inclusion allowed him to realize that his childhood visit to a museum in Turkey provided an insight into alternative ways of believing. This was rarely present in mainstream education and later encouraged a conceptualization of art beyond physical appearance, as well as a more direct relationship with the artifact as a symbol of cultural identity. Furthermore, and in common with my observations in the previous chapter, all three case studies identified the practice of attending museums as a symbolic acquisition of cultural identity. This identity went beyond what we refer to in mainstream education and reinforced a sense of inclusion in a community they felt comfortable in. For Tariq and Pavlos, this sense of connecting with their community was especially important, as they had both left what they considered their homelands as children. Subsequently, attending museums and contacting the objects of their culture reinforced their sense of well-being and a permanence of identity. It is true that many aspects of Joni’s, Pavlos’s, and Tariq’s museum visits agreed with Bourdieu’s notion of museum-visiting practice reproduced by friends and peers. However, this is where the similarity to Bourdieu’s writing ends. 183

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As Joni and Pavlos had sight when younger and learned about art through visual memories as children, the test to their identity is always in part about losing their sight and what it represents. This loss causes a schism of self as they grow older and their sight further deteriorates. Consequently, Joni and Pavlos must constantly complete a transition to a blind identity and then to one who is aging. Although Joni and Pavlos can no longer see the artworks they stand in front of clearly, they still have a desire to interact with them through what can be interpreted as visual practices. This internal conflict leads to adaptations in museum practice. For instance, while trying to hold on to her visually creative identity, Joni adapts ever more creative strategies by employing the help of local shop assistants to stimulate her visual memory and manipulation of color. In common with the observations of the teachers, Pavlos’s and Joni’s experiences contrast with those of Tariq, who, being early blind, has no meaningful visual memory. Although Tariq had relatively normal art classes as a very young child through an unusually inclusive education, he only interacts with his surrounding visual culture as an intellectual exercise. Perceptually, Tariq’s relationship with art continues to rely on his sense of touch for technical information and a stable relationship with artworks, which does not have to undergo transition. Consequently, his only transition is one of aging. Now Tariq’s understanding relies on intellectual symbols and knowledge types rather than aesthetics, as it always has done. Most important, these case studies teach us that the development of identity through a relationship with art is more about a personal cultural journey, identity, and self-esteem than blindness. The relationship that the visitors develop with the museum and its artworks is more sophisticated, deep-seated, and personal than simply a person visiting a museum for pleasure or habit. It is more about seeing the objects and the institution beyond their original purpose; it is one in which this original purpose is all but a subplot.

Note 1.  The interviews in New York and California took place in August 2011; the interview in Boston took place in October 2011.

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THE TWO QUESTIONS

In the preface to this book, I included two questions as the focus of my research. In this conclusion, I answer these questions. Given the guiding principle of visual art being understood only by sight, what do people understand when sight is diminished or not present? The first and most important answer to this question is that visual art is potentially understandable both virtually and perceptually to all people who are blind. On this point, Hume was wrong. We also now have evidence to support this criticism. As Esref, Michael, Charles, and Glen show, people who are blind to some or all visual concepts—such as color, visual depth, and so on—create or creatively understand visual artworks. Even if only one artist shows that this is possible, it opens the possibility to others and demonstrates the need for new thinking by museums, philosophers, artists, and art educators. This notion also challenges the theories of Ernst Gombrich and Pierre Bourdieu—who seemed to work on Hume’s premise—about the purpose and understanding of artworks as objects in and of themselves. The precise mechanisms through which these case studies understand and create artworks using visual concepts is not yet known. This is beyond the scope of this book, but it is hoped that this will be a starting point for further work. 185

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However, clues about understanding such mechanisms do exist. Perceptual mechanisms of nonvisual understanding are more contemporarily discussed by psychologists, such as John Kennedy, Richard Gregory, Oliver Sacks, and Charles Spence. These authors propose that the nature of understanding even visual concepts through cross-modal perception is possible. This obviously needs further investigation in the context of art education. But I would also argue that this is not the complete story of engagement with art. For Esref and Michael, the further dimension of discussion on this subject also seems fundamentally important. For Esref, discussions with family members about what they saw was important, as is his current symbolic practice of art—a form of discussion with the self. For Michael, Charles, and Glen, discussions with both parents and teachers enabled them to conceptualize colors and depth in images. This also allowed all these people to symbolize the visual elements of objects that they could not see. The second answer to this question provides a further element that is rarely discussed regarding art—that is, the social and cultural value of artworks as historically valuable objects. This point, it seems, is missed by a great many theorists of art and education. Museum visitors who are blind can understand artworks through discussion on the cultural nature of the objects they stand in front of. This discourse can come through an imaging of the object. It can also come through clues provided by other visitors, such as quick footsteps, a lingering presence, a discussion between other visitors, or others’ conversations in the museum coffee shop. The nature of discourse for visitors who are completely blind to certain visual concepts is particularly revealing. These visitors often regard artworks as an entry point into a historical and cultural world, much like the hole that Alice dove through while chasing the white rabbit. In this hole, there is another realm of human biographies, queens and kings, and the smoking caterpillars of surreal worlds that we inhabit. In this parallel world, art becomes much more than a painting or sculpture. It is an object that symbolizes a civilization. For this reason, experiences of visitors who are blind can teach those with sight about the importance of the exhibit, as the narrator and as a repository of our subconscious human evolution. 186

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Given the experience of blindness, what are the effects of vision loss or no vision on a cultural identity in art? If this book has done nothing more, it is hoped that it illustrates the need for equal cultural engagement for all people and the importance of forming inclusive cultural identities. This book also demonstrates how passive exclusion—the seemingly benign belief that some things cannot be taught to certain types of people—can be almost as pernicious as active exclusion to cultural identity. Whether blind or sighted, we can only understand ourselves as per our past eras. Even though we experience a series of present moments, we can only recognize ourselves in relation to the past, either through our own subjective experiences or through handed-down knowledge, which can include everything from our names, nationalities, families, tribes, cultural artifacts, rituals, recipes, genders, ethnicities, and scientific proofs. This is perhaps why conditions such as blindness can be problematic and so confusing for those who are not born blind but lose their sight. These people must redevelop an understanding of their world through impairment. It is this transitional rupture of perceptual past and present that causes conscious tensions that confuse and conflict with psychological reality. This can lead to a pain from the death to the rebirth of identity for those who must undertake such a journey. We can predict the future with varying degrees of success, but these predictions can only be based on past information, knowledge, and experiences. This information and knowledge is encoded in symbols that code the past, such as language, data, formulae, power, and tangible objects. Subsequently, the future has no physical presence, only an imaginative one, as only the past can be as real as it is known. We can only walk through life looking, touching, hearing, smelling, tasting, and knowing facing backward. It is this past that we must turn to when we try to make transitions easier for people who are newly blinded. Our inability to experience anything but the past also makes museums, galleries, monuments, and public art important in positioning ourselves as per our culture—and others in relation to theirs. The cultural objects that museums collect and buy are important, but their monetary value is almost immaterial compared to their abstract cultural value. They are reference points in our cultural education. 187

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Consequently, museums are also very powerful institutions, since, like the media and religion, they have the power to create narratives that are thought to be truthful. They curate our cultural psychologies through their exhibits and tell the stories of artists, nations, tribes, and whole periods of history through objects and the design of exhibitions. Sometimes this connection is a direct one. For example, if you want to learn about the life of Vincent van Gogh, you head to the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. If you want to understand Pablo Picasso’s artistic development, you head to the Picasso Museum, Barcelona, or the museum of his home-in-exile, Aix-en-Provence, South of France. If you want to know about the origins of the tenements or the Jewish, Chinese, or Hispanic communities of New York, you visit the city’s tenement, Jewish, Chinese, or Hispanic museums. This is perhaps why museums are starting to formalize their offerings, to reflect this pursuit of identity. The Met works with New York’s education department (this is now common practice in most cities with major museums). Museums also run their own formal undergraduate and postgraduate courses with major universities or courses with academic accreditation. Museums are experimenting with technologies to make this happen. Museums create our cultural epistemologies and ontologies; museums develop paradigms and even propaganda that last for generations; museums can come to define the cities and nations that grow up around them. They can make art important by their patronage and make art unimportant by ignoring it. Subsequently, their acquisitions are quite correctly continually under scrutiny. Many museums have also evolved to become cultural objects themselves. In this book, I have shown that the Met is one of these museums, and it can serve as a symbol of inclusion to visitors who are blind. Their buildings and wings become famous works of art in themselves—as famous as the art inside, if not more so. Consider the buildings of the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao, Spain; the Hermitage defining the riverside of St. Petersburg, Russia; the Louvre Pyramid in Paris; or the Sackler Wing in New York. Therefore, museums must now realize their power and assume the responsibilities that go with it. If they are to fulfill this promise, they must 188

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engage with active and passive inclusion—that is, the inclusion of all people, not just visitors who are blind—on the basis that all visitors are equal. More important, museums must make this form of inclusion central to the roles of their curators, their educators, and their directors, not simply the responsibility of one or two officers. Without this inclusion and the human and conscious dimensions that they represent, their buildings and artworks are simply glass, albumen, oil, bronze, stone, and clay.

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INDEX

access programs, 107–8, 113 active exclusion, xv–xviii, xxiii, xxiv, 15, 79, 113, 157, 187 aesthetic(s), xi, 21–22, 24, 33, 37, 132, 146, 154, 163, 173, 175, 178, 184 American Action Fund, 77 Anderson, L. W., 6, 20 Annis, T., 48 Argyropoulos, V., 49 Armagan, Esref, xix, 5, 6–12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 24, 186 art by people who are blind, 3, 6–21 Art Education for the Blind (AEB), 47 art education of students who are blind, 12–19, 45–80, 150–62 Asbury, H., 88–89 asylums, 50–65, 67 AUXie, 48 Axel, E., 47 Bartlett, J. E., 46 Baxandall, M., 26 Benson, K. R., 21–22

Berkeley, G., 21, 35–36, 37–38, 39 Blacklock, T., 52–53, 57, 69, 73 Bloom, B. S., 5–6, 20 Boston Asylum, 74–75 Bourdieu, P., ix–xi, xxiii, 121, 122, 131, 133, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146–47, 167, 172, 173, 178, 180, 183, 185 Bowen, J., 48 Boyle, R., 27–29, 35 Braille, 46, 49, 70, 109, 119, 164, 170, 171, 178 Bristol Asylum (a.k.a. Bristol School of Industry for the Blind), 58, 59, 60, 61–63, 65 Brittain, W. L., 24 Bülbül, M., 48 Carmichael, L., 42 Celani, G., 47–48 cognition, 23, 25, 26, 29, 40, 68 Cohen, R., 5, 10 color blindness, xxi, 12–19, 135–36, 164 computer programming, blind, 4 203

INDEX

cross-modal: perception, 186; transfer, 38 cultural capital, x, 21, 122, 146 Darke, P., xvii databases: art, 101, 102–3, 104, 106; visitors, 176 da Vinci, L., 26–27, 62, 96 Davis, J., 49 deaf-blind, 40, 74 De Coster, K., 49 Demodocus. See Blacklock, T. de Oliveira, M., 47–48 Descartes, R., 27–28, 31, 35, 73 Diderot, D., 25, 29–31, 32, 33, 35, 52 Dobson, J., 38 Dodds, A., 38–39 Eardley, A. F., 42 early blindness, 36–37, 145, 179, 184 Edinburgh Asylum, 58–59 Edinburgh Magazine and Review, 52, 69 Education Department (Edep), Metropolitan Museum of Art, 99–100, 106, 107, 108 Enlightenment, 25–31, 69 epistemological model of disability, xxiv experimental studies on blindness and art, 23–24, 34–43. See also psychology of blindness Fisher, D., 74, 75 Foucault, M., 28 Foulke, E., 39, 41 Freeberg, E., 74 Gabias, P., 21 Garip, B., 48

Geertz, C., xiii geometry, 73, 178 Ginley, B., 47 Gombrich, E., xi, x, xxiii, 122, 131, 133, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 151, 163, 173, 180, 185 Gregory, R. L., 37–38, 39, 186 Guarini, B., 49 Guillié, S., 68, 70 haptic perception, 37, 40, 41 Harris, R. W., 41 Hatlen, P. H., 39 Haüy, V., 67–71, 72, 73 Hearn, K., 48 Hehir, T., xvi history of access to museums, 45–47, 106–7 history of US education for the blind, 64–67, 74–80 Hogan, H. P., 42 Hopkins, R., 34, 43 Hoving, T., 95–96, 97 Howe, S. G., 74–75, 76–77 Howe Richards, L. E., 76–77 Hull, J. M., 21, 22 Hume, D., 28–30, 32, 50, 52, 62 imaging. See verbal imaging inclusion, xi–xii, xiv, xix, xxiii, 15, 46–50, 51, 67, 73–80, 100, 106–9, 141, 158, 162–63, 165, 167, 169, 175, 180, 182–83, 188–89, 203. See also active exclusion; passive exclusion Institute for Blind Youth, Paris, 64, 67–70 Internet, 100, 102, 106, 123, 133, 144, 147. See also web access to cultural heritage/museum websites

204

INDEX

Jay, J., 91 Jay, M., xvii, 4, 30, 64 Juricevic, I., 24 Kanari, H., 49 Katz, D., 36, 41 Keller, H., 21 Kennedy, J. M., 24, 43, 186 Kleege, G., 21 Klein, J. W., 71–72, 80n5 Krantz, G., 47 Krathwohl, D. R., 6, 20 Levent, N., 47 Lisney, E., 48 Liverpool Asylum (a.k.a. Liverpool School for the Blind), 58, 59, 60, 80n4 Locke, J., 28–29, 31, 35, 73 Loots, G., 49 Lopes da Silva, J., 47–48 Louis XVI, 70 Lowenfeld, B., 40, 155 Lowenfeld, V., 24, 40–41 Magee, B., 32–33, 41 Mann, H., 76 McNeice, W. C., 21–22 Merkas, C., 43 Merleau-Ponty, M., 31–32 metaphors, 11, 42, 43, 64, 155 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, xiii–xv, xix, xx, xxi–xxii, 85–112 Milligan, M., 32–33 mobility, 101, 104, 105, 118, 123, 124, 127, 164, 170 Molyneux, W., 28, 30, 31, 35, 36 museum education, 46–50, 99–101, 150–63

Museum of Natural History (American), New York, 45, 86, 173 museum programming, 85–86, 93, 99–101, 106–9 Nagel, T., 32, 41 National Museum of China, Beijing, 97 Nazis, 98 New York, history and geography, 45, 47, 57, 65, 85–96 ocularcentricity, 4, 30 open access to images, 103–4 Pablasek, M., 78 painting(s), 6–19, 25–27, 33, 34, 43, 92, 104, 108, 114, 121, 126–27, 128, 129–30, 131, 132, 133, 142, 151–52, 154, 158, 159, 186 Paris Institute. See Institute for Blind Youth, Paris passive exclusion, xvii–xviii, xxiv, 4, 15, 50, 74, 79, 109, 112, 113–14, 122, 131, 143, 145, 162, 169, 172, 181, 187 Paulson, W. R., xvii, 25, 64, 68, 69–70 Perkins Institute/School for the Blind, 65–67, 75, 76, 177 Pfeiffer, D., xvi phenomenology, 23, 28, 31–32, 36, 43, 44 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 47 philosophy of blindness, 25–35 Pring, L., 42 Protestants (ethics and morality), 52–54, 56, 62, 64, 72, 75 psychology of blindness, 23–24, 36– 43, 71. See also experimental studies on blindness and art 205

INDEX

Publishing Department (Pudep), Metropolitan Museum of Art, 100 The Question (multi-modal installation), 48 Reid, T., 29 Révész, G., 36–37, 38, 40, 71 Roman Catholicism (ethics and morality), 52, 56, 64, 68, 71–72, 75, 76, 179 Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB), 46 Sacks, O., 22, 38, 186 San Francisco, xxi, 65 Saunderson, N., 52, 73 Schiff, W., 41 sculpture, 26, 34, 40, 103, 109, 125, 127, 143, 186 social model of disability, xxi–xvii, 23 Spence, C., 21, 43, 186 stolen art, 98, 111 Strechay, J., 48 Stringer, K., 47 syphilis, 54, 56, 57 tactile objects (images, pictures, and technologies), 5, 6–12, 21, 24, 31, 33–34, 42, 43, 48, 128, 145–46, 153, 166, 170, 175, 178, 180 Tammany Society, 91 Taylor, W., 73–74

technology, 39, 101–2, 133–34, 143 Thoma, S., 47 Torey, Z., 22 touch, 6–12, 27, 28, 30–32, 35–44, 46–50, 50–62, 67–78, 79, 104, 107, 108, 109, 111, 128, 138, 141, 145, 155, 157, 159, 160, 161, 166, 167, 168–69, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180–81, 182, 184 touching colors (experiment), 27 Valeo, A., xvi verbal imaging, xiii, xiv, 99, 107, 108, 113–47, 150–64 Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), London, 47 virtual museum tour, xi, 103, 106, 123, 185 vision loss, xix, 187 von Senden, M., 36, 37, 38 Vygotsky, L. S., 30 Wallace, J., 37–38, 39 Walter, A. A., 42 Warren, D. H., xvii web access to cultural heritage/ museum websites, xi, xiv–xv, xx– xxi, 48, 96, 99, 101–4, 106, 108–9, 123, 133–34, 143–44, 147 Weber, M., 53–55, 56–57 Zattera, V., 47–48 Zedda, M., 48 Ziebarth, B., 48

206

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Simon Hayhoe is lecturer in education at the University of Bath and center research associate in the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural & Social Science, London School of Economics. He has previously taught in secondary and primary schools; led Canterbury Christ Church University’s MA in special needs and inclusion and EdD in special educational needs; and was a member of the faculty at Sharjah Women’s College, United Arab Emirates. In the intervening years, Hayhoe has also been a researcher at London University and Toronto University. Hayhoe received his PhD from Birmingham University and his MEd from Leicester University. Both his postgraduate degrees were funded by university scholarships. He has also won a number of other awards, including a Fulbright All-Disciplines Scholar Award and fellowships of the British Computer Society, Royal Society of Arts, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hayhoe is currently working as part of a research team investigating and developing museum apps for people with disabilities in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Austria. This project is funded by a €3.8 million Horizon 2020 grant from the European Union. Hayhoe’s work on blindness and disability is recognized internationally, and he has delivered guest lectures at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, University College London, MIT, Berkeley,

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Toronto University, and the Free University, Brussels, among others. In addition, his writing has been the topic of discussion on BBC Radio 4 in the United Kingdom and syndicated Internet radio in the United States, and his first book became a theme for a theatrical installation project in London by Extant.

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