The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts: Making and Experiencing Sculpture 9781350122222, 9781350122253, 9781350122239

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1 By the Light of the Body
1 Sight and Touch
2 The Intelligent Hand
3 Motion
4 In the Mind’s Eye and Body
5 Time and Memory
6 E-motion
7 Sensible and Sensitive
Part 2 Body and Art in the World
8 Touching as Seeing
9 Whole-body Seeing
10 Learning the Language
11 The Artist’s Body
12 Please Touch
13 Sense of Connection
14 Seeing as Feeling
15 Reflection
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts

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The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts Making and Experiencing Sculpture

Rosalyn Driscoll

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Rosalyn Driscoll, 2020 Rosalyn Driscoll has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: Emptiness of Fire, Rosalyn Driscoll (2010), (Rawhide, neon, 12 × 41 × 17 in or 30.5 × 104 × 43 cm); Photography © David Stansbury All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-2222-2 ePDF: 978-1-3501-2223-9 eBook: 978-1-3501-2224-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For my favorite artists, Sophia and Emmeline

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Contents List of Figures Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction

viii ix xiv 1

Part 1  By the Light of the Body   1 Sight and Touch   2 The Intelligent Hand  3 Motion   4 In the Mind’s Eye and Body   5 Time and Memory  6 E-motion   7 Sensible and Sensitive

13 37 47 63 79 93 101

Part 2  Body and Art in the World   8 Touching as Seeing   9 Whole-body Seeing 10 Learning the Language 11 The Artist’s Body 12 Please Touch 13 Sense of Connection 14 Seeing as Feeling 15 Reflection

111

Bibliography Index

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117 129 139 155 169 179 191

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Figures 1.1 Elegy 1, 1995, Wood, marble, schist, steel, handmade paper, 53 × 31 × 50 in. 14 1.2 Elegy 5, 1996, Steel, stone, leather, rope, gauze, 52 × 32 × 52 in.

22

1.3 Pandora’s Box 1, 2004, Steel, rawhide, 47 × 22 × 20 in.

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2.1 Natural History, 1998, Wood, stone, steel, 70 × 52 × 44 in.

38

2.2 Rafael, 2001, Alabaster, wood, 7 × 10 × 8 in.

45

3.1 Limen, 2007, Wood, steel, copper, epoxy resin, 20 × 21 × 37 in.

49

3.2 Danae, 2009, Rawhide, copper, 16 × 36 × 14 in.

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4.1 House, 1993, Bronze, wood, leather, handmade paper, 8 × 25 × 17 in.

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4.2 Anatomy, 1998, Wood, copper, leather, 54 × 34 × 58 in.

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5.1 Elegy 5, 1996, Steel, stone, leather, rope, gauze, 52 × 32 × 52 in.

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5.2 Memory 2, 1997, Steel, stone, leather, 24 × 20 × 10 in.

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6.1 Body 2, 1999, Concrete, leather, steel, bamboo, silk, string, 76 × 20 × 20 in.

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6.2 Whether, 2012, Wood, rawhide, 82 × 57 × 19 in.

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7.1 What’s not meant to be opened (may be opened), 2001, Stone, wood,

resin, alabaster, iron, leather, gauze, plaster, copper, 10 × 19 × 14 in.

104

7.2 Molt detail, 2012, Wood, rawhide, 144 × 18 × 25 in.

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8.1 Anatomy, 1998, Wood, copper, leather, 54 × 34 × 58 in.

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9.1 City, 2001, Steel, wood, concrete, rope, 73 × 45 × 45 in.

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9.2 House 4, 2005, Rope, rawhide, steel, bamboo, thread, 63 × 40 × 30 in.

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10.1 Memory, 1993, Steel, wood, 5 × 32 × 25 in.

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10.2 Troy, 2001, Steel, copper, cloth, alabaster, stone, wood, resin, leather, 11.1 11.2 12.1 12.2 13.1 13.2 14.1 15.1

108 × 67 × 44 in. Canyon Body, 2000, Copper, wood, alabaster, bone, resin, stone, leather, 25 × 15 × 15 in. Natural History, 1998, Wood, stone, steel, 70 × 52 × 44 in. Canyon, 1998, Concrete, aluminum, copper, alabaster, schist, 25 × 29 × 19 in. Threshold, 2012, Rawhide, video by Tereza Stehlíková, 16 × 28 × 15 in. Elegy 5, 1996, Steel, stone, leather, rope, gauze, 52 × 32 × 52 in. Natural History, 1998, Wood, stone, steel, 70 × 52 × 44 in. Pandora’s Box 9, 2007, Coppered steel, rawhide, 30 × 26 × 28 in. Lota, 2008, Rawhide, copper, silver, 20 × 13 × 17 in.

136 142 151 161 164 170 173 184 195

Foreword Art galleries and museums are bursting with paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and an endless variety of other works that celebrate flights of imagination and skill undertaken and completed by artists from almost every time and place ever inhabited by humans. Living artists themselves can also be found in these same exhibition spaces, but never in a state of completion. Any true artist, if my own experience is any guide, is a work in progress. A living artist who is complete would be an artist disarmed, if you believe that the search for meaning and greater expressive power is elemental to the practice of art. Skills grow and intentions mature as the physical and mental efforts of creation proceed, but the countless formalities and routines of making are only part of it. The artist seeks and finds direction and nourishment outside the studio too. Artists circulate and communicate. They exchange ideas with students and with each other, with followers and collectors, and often with people outside their professional circles. They visit galleries and museums; they attend workshops, retreats, and conferences; they spend time on the phone and send texts, e-mails, and sometimes even letters to friends, colleagues, or perfect strangers, seeking opinions or advice about what they are doing; they write popular articles and scholarly papers; they take classes; and they teach. Sometimes, they write books. Rosalyn Driscoll, an American artist whose distinctive vision and stunning work have brought her accolades at home and steadily increasing attention in the international art world, had done all these things up to now except write a book, and now she has done even that. As a neurologist interested in the biologic and experiential roots of skilled performance, I came to Rosalyn’s book well aware of her longstanding and singular determination to make her sculptures accessible to the blind. When she told me of her plans to write this book, as a friend and admirer, I wondered how she would make the story of her creations—luminous fusions of visual and tactile form—appealing to a wide range of readers. Having read the book, I can report that she has succeeded spectacularly. This is a wholly original, warm, lively, captivating, and deeply satisfying contribution not just to the written works of artists who write about art making, but to the fast-growing body of

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Foreword

science that informs philosophical and neuropsychological understanding of human perception. Let me pick just two topics Rosalyn addresses in the book that have long been of great interest to me. The first has to do with injury, forced interruptions of work, and the unexpected benefits that can result. When I began seeing artists as patients, most of whom were musicians experiencing a physical problem in one or both hands making it difficult or impossible to play, I saw my job as that of any occupational medicine practitioner. I needed to find a disordered tendon, joint, muscle, or nerve and then apply a remedy to restore it to normal function. This is certainly the rational approach to almost any uncomplicated injury immediately following the event. But a straightforward “best practice” treatment does not always work, and cause and effect are not always so easily linked. As I gained experience over a period of years, fewer and fewer patients came during the period immediately following the injury or the onset of their symptoms, and fewer and fewer could point to a single event, or to any obvious cause at all, that might explain their symptoms. Most had already been seen by one or more practitioners and, despite the care they had received, remained either unimproved or not well enough to resume a normal rehearsal and/or performance routine. After nearly ten years working with musicians—too often failing to solve problems that had not initially seemed out of the ordinary—I began to appreciate how critical a thorough review of the entire training and performance history could be to finding a solution that would lead the patient back to their former work or performing life. Only by examining that history could I understand how powerfully even the smallest details of artistic training in young learners can shape the course of their adult life and work. And only by acknowledging the durability of these early influences could I see how an artist’s unexpected need to recover from an injury can trigger a transformative encounter with long-dormant dreams of artistic identity and expressive virtuosity. Rosalyn uses her own experience with a hand injury to illustrate the potency of a personal psychological journey toward recovery, during which an entirely unexpected sense of freedom can develop, bringing refocused goals and reenergized work. While rafting on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, entering one of the rapids, my boat plunged into a huge wave that broke over the raft, wrenched my hand from a rope, and severely dislocated the third finger of my left hand.

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I finished the trip with my hand wrapped. Once home, surgery restored the torn tendons, ligaments, and joint. When cast and pin were removed weeks later, every finger had its own recovery to effect. The scarring and swelling that immobilized my hand prevented movement and blocked sensation. The numb, scar-bound finger hungered for feeling of any kind, even pain.

In the period that followed surgery, she discovered not only the complex anatomy of finger and hand (previously taken for granted), but also something she alludes to as a hunger for feeling. This introduction to her own hand as a mechanical marvel led her to wonder whether its structure and function might help explain the unusual responses of the blind to her work. Why should handling a sculpture and exploring it methodically by touch arouse emotional and aesthetic responses unlike those aroused by just looking at it? Questions like this and the insights that came with them set in motion a major shift in the direction of her artistic vision and commitment: “I felt like a hermit crab being coaxed to come out of my shell.” A second topic in Rosalyn’s book that intrigues me is time, not only as a protean construct in the world of art, but as it is personally experienced by people in their own lives. Taking on time as an intellectual or artistic challenge will always be an act of bravery because doing so draws one toward an eruptive cauldron of opinions tenaciously held and sharply argued by artists, physicists, psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians, and cosmologists. My own naive steps in that direction have led me to some wonderful books: Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc and Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science Is Redefining Cutting-Edge Art by the British historian Arthur I. Miller; Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art by the Islamic culture and art scholar Laura U. Marks; The Order of Time by the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli; Time Travel: A History by science writer James Gleick; and Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space by physicist Janna Levin. It was Levin’s book—a serious, composed, and refreshingly cool recounting of the search by astrophysicists for a way to detect gravitational waves—that got me out of my chair and into my car earlier this year headed for southeastern Washington state. Accompanied by an artist friend obsessed with rocks and a grandson obsessed with black holes, we set out on a fine spring day for a visit to LIGO,1 where lively scientists seek out and (in their own way) surf gravitational The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory is located in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana.

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Foreword

waves. I went because I am older than I ever thought I would be, and I hoped to learn more about the light side of gravity. Enriching though it was, I need not have made that trip. For one thing, my concerns about aging had already been answered to my satisfaction in Interstellar, a stunning film about human struggles with the quirks and ravages of time. It’s science fiction, of course, but the science part is real, having been vetted and endorsed by Kip Thorne, one of the three physicists jointly awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on gravitational wave detection and on LIGO. The other thing I could have done was read Rosalyn’s account of time as a phenomenon whose nature and effects on perception and consciousness can be appreciated simply by taking an unknown object into the hand and examining it by touch alone. In her chapter on time, Rosalyn illuminates the difference between perceiving and responding to objects and surfaces in the external world by sight versus by touch. She notes that when we first see a painting or a sculpture, we take it all in almost instantaneously. The interaction goes very differently when governed by the mechanics (and the logic) of holding and touching. Before people invented clocks, they noted the movement of stars, moon, and sun, the passage of the seasons, the evolution of a day. The experience of time is notation of change. Paying close attention to change seems to slow the sense of time. A fine-grained awareness notices minute changes, expanding and deepening what we take in. The more closely I watch a child’s growth, the more my sense of time feels continuous. When I see a child rarely and she is suddenly much taller, I wonder where the time has gone. I missed the slow, subtle changes. Tactile perception of artwork can provide a granular attention to details, textures, and changes in form as I move. Sight can work in the same gradual, cumulative way if I take the time. The question is whether I make the effort.

The paradox she introduces here—that time is both speeding up and slowing down for us, depending on what we are doing—is the same paradox Einstein presented when he forced the modern world to renounce its ardently cherished devotion to the principle of an absolute and universal concept of time. In a way that scientists who write about time normally seem unwilling or unable to do, Rosalyn makes the perception and meaning of time as humans experience it clear, meaningful, and moving in a way that feels almost sacramental. Coming to know an artwork at the pace of the body rather than the eyes takes time. Time to trace contours, discern textures, decipher forms, and absorb meanings. Touching in a thoughtful way may even take us out of time.

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There are a great many additional secrets unveiled in this book, as you will find out for yourself. Happily, the greatest achievement of this book may well be the naturalness with which Rosalyn connects ordinary gesture and perception to a small but radiant trove of psychological and philosophical insights. It is all there for you; the question is whether you will take the time. Frank R. Wilson Portland, Oregon

Acknowledgments The writing of this book has taken so many years and is drawn from so many parts of my life that I find great pleasure in finally acknowledging and thanking people who have contributed to the writing and the artwork. Over the decades, I have been sustained by many kinds of bodywork and somatic practices that have entwined with my art practice. I am grateful to Victoria Ahrensdorf, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Wolfe Lowenthal, Doug MacKenzie, Jonathan Klate, Kate Klemer, Ruth Rootberg, Richard Shaw, Ellen Shaw-Smith, Jan Sultan, Sharon Weizenbaum, and especially Tom Arnold, whose skillful healing is described in the book. My art making, as well as my cultivation of body and mind, has been deeply informed by the study and practice of Buddhism as conveyed to me by Ajahn Amaro, Gloria Taraniya Ambrosia, Bikkhu Analayo, Stephen Batchelor, Christina Feldman, S. N. Goenka, Mark Hart, John Peacock, Ajahn Sucitto, and Akincano Weber. My sense of the spirit in the body has also been shaped by three important friendships: with Don Hanlon Johnson, whose writing and teaching explore somatic practices that provide a “source of a spirituality grounded in the flesh of human yearning”; with Janet Adler, who has been instrumental in the development of Authentic Movement, whose movement I drew as she gave expression to subtle, powerful forces moving within her; and with dancerchoreographer Paul Matteson, who has transformed my artwork through our collaborative exploration of art, perception, and Buddhist practice. In the art world, filmmaker Tereza Stehlíková has companioned me in integrating touch and hapticity into our artwork. She founded Sensory Sites, our art collective dedicated to sensory installations and research that has also included Bonnie Kemske, Kay Syrad, Anais Tondeur, and Marcus Weisen. Kate Johnson, art museum education curator, planted the seed for this book by asking me to share my notes as we prepared an exhibition. Innumerable artists have influenced, informed, or collaborated with my work, notably Mary Anderson, Sarah Bliss, Mana Sarabhai Brearley, Nancy Milliken, Meridel Rubenstein, Andrew Rush, Stan Sherer, and Michael Singer. The art critics, curators, and art historians who have supported my work include Francesca Bacci, Carol and Patrick Cardon, Marty Carlock, Peter Dent, Chili Hawes, Terry Rooney, Anette

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Schwarz, Thayer Tolles, Sharyn Udall, Julie Wu, and Zhuping Yan. Robert Devcic of GV Art, pioneer in the dialogue between science and art, has been an important supporter of my work and Sensory Sites. Gareth Evans, writer, curator, presenter, and arts producer extraordinaire, published my early writings on the subject and has always had faith in this project. Much of the artwork itself has taken its particular forms through the skilled, adventurous craftsmanship of my primary fabricator for forty years, Christopher Lenaerts. I was inducted into the exploration of art through touch by Deidre Muccio, who lost her sight after training as an artist. Her sensitive, articulate inquiry into her experiences of touching art opened doors for her, for me, and for all those who will benefit from this work. Colleagues who further expanded the rich territory of disability include Lynn Bridges, Anne Cunningham, Valerie Fletcher, Trish Maunder, Rebecca McGinnis, Andrew Potok, Elly Rubin, Renee Wells, and Marcus Weisen. In the early exhibitions of my tactile sculptures, Jeff Hayward designed and implemented a process to collect and analyze people’s responses to aesthetic touching. His guidance in the art of asking people about their experience created a foundation for my understanding and generated hundreds of comments, many of which appear throughout the book. For several years, I attended conferences wherever people gathered to think about touch, whether through the lens of science, engineering, philosophy, art, or disability. Colleagues in neuroscience, psychology, and engineering who welcomed my artwork, my questions, and my presence include Heinrich Bulthoff, Theresa Cooke, Marc Ernst, Jan van Erp, Tom Froese, Lynette Jones, Kathy Kerr, Susan Lederman, Annie Luciani, Slavko Milekic, Alvaro PascualLeone, Charles Spence, Mandayam Srinivasan, and especially Chris Moore, who made room for me in his lab and challenged me to think like a neuroscientist. In the world of philosophy and consciousness, this work has been supported by Zdravko Radman, Natalie Depraz, Jack Petranker, and Claire Petitmengin, whose micro-phenomenology interview method deeply informs my exploration of the attentional, emotional, and somatic dimensions of the aesthetic experience and the creative process. Miriam Cantwell and Lucy Carroll, my editors at Bloomsbury, made the book possible through their editorial support, enthusiasm for the manuscript, and recognition of the contribution this book could make to several fields. Copy editor Jean Zimmer gave astute comments and clarity to the book. The people who have kindly read and commented on the manuscript at various stages, in part or whole, include Paulette Alden, Harriet Brickman, Joe Cohen, Mazie Cox,

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Claire Daigle, Martha Eddy, Matthew Goodwin, Marcy Hermansaeder, Don Hanlon Johnson, Bruce Lieberman, Dana Liebsohn, Andrea Olsen, Tom Radko, and Chris Rohmann. David Howes, pioneer in sensory anthropology, has encouraged this book for many years. David’s brilliant, passionate writing and speaking about the senses have inspired and informed my thinking and writing. He encouraged me to organize my writing in the form of an auto-ethnography, an exploration of a cultural phenomenon through the sensibility of an individual. He wanted the voice of the artist. I offer a deep bow to Frank Wilson, who generously read and commented on the manuscript and wrote the foreword. Frank has been a mentor and companion in understanding the profundity of the body-mind. I have thoroughly absorbed his writing about the role of the hand in his seminal book The Hand into my manual-neural-spiritual body-mind. Frank grasps what is at stake at this critical time in our social, sensory lives as individuals, as societies, and as a species. And finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Alton Wasson, my husband and lifelong companion in somatic and spiritual inquiry, and to my daughter Sage, both of whom have taught me that the sense of connection and love are expressed and known through the body.

Introduction

What I hear I forget What I see I remember What I do I know

Chinese proverb

It began with digging a hole. Shovel in hand, I walked the land and chose a spot in the upper corner of a gently sloping hayfield bordered by woods. I dug into the grass with the shovel, cutting a circle three feet across. I peeled away the heavy mat of sod and staggered with large chunks of it into the woods nearby to leave the hole clear. What remained was a circle of raw, exposed soil. When I surveyed my handiwork, I realized I was moving too fast. My purpose was not to have the hole I had imagined but to make the hole. I laid down my shovel, found a small blunt stick, and began to excavate the dirt slowly, like an archaeologist, grain by grain. For a few hours every day over a month, I slowly dug down, revealing the delicate roots of the nearby trees that crisscrossed the hole. I removed stones, inching my way into the earth. Each day I drew and photographed the hole as it changed and deepened. The impulse to dig a hole grew out of a recurring image I had of a large, cylindrical hole cut deep into the earth. At the bottom of the hole I pictured a friend’s sculpture made of slender woven strips of wood—uncannily like the roots I eventually unearthed. I decided to enact the image of the hole, without the sculpture, on a small scale one summer when house-sitting in Vermont. I was vaguely aware that this painstaking excavation was an enactment of my desire to dig below the surface of things. I had grown up as an active, athletic child who felt at home in the woods and mountains. But as I passed through my schooling, I underwent the usual splitting of mind and body, human and nature, matter and spirit that our culture inscribes in us. I spent the decade after graduation from college exploring ways to reenter my body and restore a

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reciprocal, sacred relationship with the natural world. I undertook an intensive education of my body, now driven by curiosity rather than competition, now exploring from the inside what had always been perceived from the outside. I attended workshops, classes, and individual sessions in somatic practices, which explore the relationships among body, emotion, thought, and cultural belief and provide opportunities for greater awareness, knowledge, freedom, and integrity. I engaged in processes and techniques such as Sensory Awareness, Alexander Technique, Rolfing, Body-Mind Centering, Gestalt Therapy, Aikido, and Vipassana meditation. I learned how to pay attention to subtle bodily sensations, to develop and refine my body schema and maps, to discern mental states and qualities of attention, and to plumb imagery and sensation for their meanings. Above all, I learned to respect and trust my body’s intelligence. All this brought me to digging a hole in the ground, embodying my relationship with the natural world and with my inner life. That same summer I became intrigued with the figurative drawings of the Italian Renaissance artist Federico Barocci. I was struck by the chalk and ink drawings’ organic growth, like fungus or mold, from the colored, stained paper. Wanting to mimic the fertile ground of the antique paper, I began laying sheets of thick, handmade paper in the shallow waters of a beaver bog. Left for days at a time, weighed down by stones, the papers recorded the cumulative effects of their immersion: brown, orange, rust-colored stains and layers of dirt adhered to the surfaces. I pulled the stained, mud-encrusted papers from the bog and dried them in the sun. Back in the studio I tore, cut, and glued them into collages. I turned from painting, drawing, and collage to hand papermaking as a medium that would allow me to bury the stained fragments of paper in the matrix of pulp rather than glue them onto flat surfaces. Papermaking provided a process that resembled the papers’ sojourn in the mud. It let my hands sink below the surface of the water into the body of the medium, the way I had dug into the hole in the field. I could submerge my hands in the thick slurry of water, pulp, and pigments, build the image from the inside out, and, when it was dry, dig back down through the layers. The imagery of rock-like forms floating in fields of color emerged from my inner experience of my body, such as the sensations of breathing and standing. The pieces I made were thick and large, the surfaces bumpy and textured. They had a tangible, physical presence. People always asked to touch them. Since books are made of paper, it felt natural to make a couple of handmade books, with the help of bookbinder friends, building my handmade paper into the covers. I became interested in the way the contents of books are hidden,

Introduction

3

revealed only through hands opening the covers and turning the pages— digging below the surface. Around this time, a man who was blind attended a talk given by an artist friend of mine. She told me that afterward, he said he wished she had described her drawings so he could have visualized them. This anecdote stunned me. How could anyone who is blind be interested in visual art? This question merged with my observation about having to touch and handle books to know them, and I began to wonder: Could a person who is blind come to know a work of art through touch? Could someone discover meaning in an artwork through touch alone? Could touch be integral to an artwork—to its conception, creation, and appreciation? Could touch be a way of knowing? To explore these questions, I made two small sculptures that functioned like books. They had to be handled, turned over, and opened to be fully known. I took them to Andy Potok, who had been a visual artist until he lost his sight in midlife to an inherited retinal disorder. I was curious to see what he would make of them. He ended up spending hours with the two pieces, making drawings of what he found and enthralled by the opportunity to touch an artwork to his heart’s content. His reaction confirmed my intuition: touch could indeed be a viable way to know a work of art. I decided to make sculptures that would work tactually as well as visually. I would allow people to touch as well as see them. Drawing from my years of bodywork, I would integrate somatic, bodily ways of knowing into their making to create bodily experiences for others. I wanted the artworks to engage people physically and imaginatively. I wanted people to be able to know a work of art from the inside—from their own inside, from inside the body. But to do this, I needed to learn a whole new artistic language. I needed to develop a language of the body. Do you know what your body is doing when you touch this book? Do you hold it with just your hands? Or is your whole body holding it? We tend to think of touch as hands meeting a surface or holding a volume. But touch always includes more than mere contact or grasping. Touching at any scale involves the entire body. It creates effects well below the skin. Even in the slightest touch, the whole body underlies and supports that touch, from surface to depths: skin, where we interface with what we touch; deeper layers of skin, where we feel pressure; muscles, where we sense movement and effort; joints, where we know spatial location and motion; and, deeper still, viscera, where we feel emotions and intuitions. And throughout the body, hormonal, neurochemical processes respond to any touch, whether the sensation comes from outside or inside.

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In touching, the body is engaged in a combination of contact and movement, which is given the umbrella term haptic perception. By including the movement aspect of touch, haptic conveys a broader, more active sense than tactile, though I may use these words more or less interchangeably. Touch receptors are scattered throughout the body and come in distinct types and tasks: mechanoreceptors respond to pressure and vibrations, thermal receptors respond to temperature, kinesthetic receptors track movement, and nociceptors register pain. The term proprioception means sensing the location and movement of the body and body parts, and fitting that information into body schema or maps. Kinesthesia refers to the sensing of motion, primarily felt through the activity of muscles and joints. Exteroception is the sensing of what lies outside the body, and interoception is the perception and integration of all the signals from within our body, including breathing, blood pressure, cardiac signals, temperature, digestion and elimination, thirst and hunger, sexual arousal, affective touch, itches, and pleasure and pain. Interoception contributes to our sense of self, affecting moods, perception, and behavior. All these related sensory modes convey the conditions of the body. They are collectively called the somatic senses, a term that suggests the complex, diffuse, embodied nature of the sensory system. When I use the word touch, the somatic senses are embedded within the word and the action. What the somatic senses have in common is the capacity to sense the conditions of the body-mind, which are affected by the ambient environment as well as by activity within the body. In this role the somatic senses tell us more about the interior conditions of the body and the impact on the body of external events than about the events themselves. The capacity to monitor and alter the conditions of the body-mind—whether generated from without or within—renders the somatic senses fundamental to human survival and well-being. The somatic senses are deeply connective and reciprocal by nature, spanning outer and inner dimensions by their very structure and function, connecting the external and interior worlds, creating dynamic loops of sensing, acting, and being. The many components of somatic sensing communicate seamlessly with each other, fusing our awareness of the world with our innermost sensations and feelings. I discovered that touching art draws from this deep well of sensory experience. It not only conveys impressions of what I am touching but also conveys the conditions within me, the one who is touching. Touch provides connections between the world around me and the world within me. When I reach my arms around a sculpture, such as a figure by Auguste Rodin, I feel the textures of the

Introduction

5

bronze, the temperature of the metal, and the dimensions of the figure. Whether consciously or unconsciously, I also feel the length of my arms, the expansion of my shoulders and back, and the sensations of varying, subtle pressure in my hands. Exploring the qualities of the sculpture, I find information about my own qualities: the hardness reminds me of my softness, the sculpture’s stillness heightens my mobility, and the bumpy surface is different from my smooth skin. These haptic perceptions trigger a spectrum of qualities, emotions, and memories. The shape of the figure suggests a column, the stillness feels chilly, the solidity is reassuring, and the texture is irritating. The shape of my gesture reminds me of hugging someone. Complex and compelling, touching alerts me to the conditions of the environment and the conditions within, forging a unified perception of both. Touch ripples outward and inward, fusing outer and inner realities. By making sculptures that people can touch as well as see, I am developing the concept and practice of aesthetic touch. I use the word aesthetic in its original meaning of sensory perception rather than the effete, critical connotations the word has acquired. Aesthetic touch means touching to explore textures, forms, and spaces for their qualities and effects. Like aesthetic sight, aesthetic touch departs from functional, habitual ways of perceiving. In aesthetic touch, I become interested in sensory qualities rather than practicalities. I notice shape, form, space, and pattern. I make associations. I establish relationships between parts. I discover hidden layers of meaning. I transform the object into alternative structures or concepts in my imagination. An enormous body of writing, thinking, and teaching has been devoted to understanding aesthetic sight, but next to nothing is known about aesthetic touch. Although it resembles aesthetic sight in the ways I just described, aesthetic touch differs in ways we will explore here. I focus on the intelligence and creativity inherent in the sense of touch, especially the touch involved in making, knowing, and understanding works of art, whether through actual touch or through tactile memory and imagination. Active, inquiring, aesthetic touch is integral to most artists’ working process, but it has become a rare phenomenon once the work leaves the artist’s hands. Many artworks are not appropriate to touch; they are too delicate, valuable, large, complicated, or dangerous. Many would reveal little to haptic exploration. Yet, applied to certain artworks, this kind of touch is possible, desirable, and fruitful. Aesthetic touch activates the deep, complex dimensions of all the somatic senses. It creates an intimate bond between a person and an artwork. It enriches and amplifies the meanings of the artwork. It allows us to be touched, both physically and emotionally. It profoundly alters our understanding of an artwork and even

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The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts

of art itself. This kind of touch can be used in combination with sight to augment the power of an artwork. It can heighten and intensify visual perception itself, deepening what we see. It enriches our seeing even if we are not touching. We see with the entire body, not just the eyes. The body provides tactile, kinesthetic, proprioceptive sensations and memories that contribute to the visual experience of an artwork. When we are looking, the contribution of the body occurs at such a subliminal, unconscious level that we assume our experience derives entirely from sight. Yet somatic responses are integral to the depth and breadth of the effects of art. Looking at a smooth, abstracted head by Constantin Brancusi, I know that shape and texture from handling eggs and river stones. Looking at a Jackson Pollack painting, I sense motion in my own body-mind as I trace the tangles of long, looping lines. I feel tension and pressure in the crushed, reassembled auto-body parts of a John Chamberlain sculpture. The subliminal haptic, proprioceptive sensations produced by looking at a work of art closely resemble, trigger, or are continuous with the sensations we call emotions. Sensation and emotion fuse in our experience. Seeing a Lee Bontecou sculpture with its sewn, metal-boned whirlpools, I feel my skin tighten with a sense of unease. Looking at a Wassily Kandinsky painting, I follow jagged, truncated lines and feel unmoored. Circling a thin, gaunt bronze figure by Alberto Giacometti, my core feels like a beleaguered refuge. Gazing at an Agnes Martin painting, the faint grid of hand-drawn lines makes me feel steady, refined, and unruffled. These somatic responses are subtle. We take them for granted. We take them to be visual in origin. Bringing conscious awareness to somatic responses allows us to expand and develop these abilities at their source. Visual comprehension is grounded in what we know through the somatic senses. How and what we see are based on memories of haptic experience gained in the constant, lifelong interactions between seeing, touching, and moving. This process begins in the womb, where the fetus swims in a sea of warm, amniotic fluid, gradually growing into the uterine embrace. The intense massage and unfolding of birth galvanize body systems into action. Grounded in the tactile haven of the mother, infants gradually learn to coordinate what they feel all over with what they are learning to see. Toddlers make sense of their expanding world through constant, polymorphous, whole-body exploration. Young children actively immerse themselves in their environments with as much of their body as possible, integrating information from all their sensory systems. In adolescence, the haptic dimensions of the world have been largely integrated

Introduction

7

and internalized, so the need to touch everything is no longer as compelling. Indeed, society’s rules constrain the use of touch, and young adults, wishing to leave childish ways behind, focus their haptic exploration on the revelations of identity, friendship, mating, and reproduction. As adults we tend to relegate conscious touch to sex and intimate relationships, driving most of our haptic experience underground into an unconscious realm. To apply conscious awareness to my somatic senses and to learn the language of the body in art making and art appreciation, I decided that before I made anything, I needed to learn from those who live by touch. Friends introduced me to Deidre Muccio, a 35-year-old woman who had trained as a visual artist in art school before retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited retinal disorder, gradually claimed her sight. When I asked Deidre to join me in exploring art through touch, she had the courage to accept my invitation and return to the very world on which she had bitterly closed the door years before. We spent a year together visiting art museums, where she explored selected sculptures, describing her discoveries to me as she touched and reflecting on them afterward in writing. I recount those revelatory experiments in the book. When I began to make tactile sculptures, I needed to expand my understanding of what I was doing beyond Deidre’s and my own sensibilities. There was no deep bank of tradition and education to draw upon, as there is in visual perception. I decided to exhibit my first tactile sculptures to gather feedback from a wide range of people: blind and sighted, children and adults, art lovers and people off the street. In the first exhibition, almost as an afterthought, I offered sighted people blindfolds so they could touch without the usual habits of sight. The effects were stunning. Coming to know the artworks entirely through the sense of touch before seeing them produced remarkable perceptions, insights, images, and experiences astonishingly different from those acquired by looking. This special condition—touch without sight—revealed the nature of haptic perception, unmasking the haptic processes lying below the seductions of sight. Wanting to capture these insights for my research, I collaborated with Jeff Hayward, principal of People, Places & Design Research, an audience research and evaluation firm, to help me conduct disciplined, qualitative, evaluative research. We interviewed dozens of visitors in two exhibitions and analyzed people’s responses. During the museum and gallery exhibitions of my tactile sculpture in the years that followed, I spent hundreds of hours observing people touching, took copious notes, and gathered their comments about their experiences, both spoken and written, as records and articulations of tactile, haptic perception.

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The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts

Those who contributed their responses to my inquiry were primarily people accustomed to visiting museums and galleries. They were curious enough to wander into an exhibition of tactile art, brave enough to don a blindfold, bold enough to undertake a journey through a series of artworks without sight, and motivated enough to share their responses afterward, mostly in writing and often with great conviction and precision. My audiences were men and women of all ages, children, and people with disabilities of all kinds. At the time I took their participation for granted, but in retrospect I am amazed by and grateful for their willingness to venture well beyond the usual protocols for art viewing. Articulating their experiences was a useful part of their learning, expressing for themselves, as well as for me, the discoveries they made while touching my artworks. These comments formed the basis of my understanding and gave me the means to generalize beyond my personal experience. Their words reflect the wealth of the tactile encounter, deepen the collective understanding of haptic sensing, and enrich the language of touch and the somatic senses. Many of their succinct, insightful comments appear throughout the book in italics. To speak and write about my findings, I needed a rich verbal language to communicate tactile effects. My audience provided this language. Perception became foreground for people when they touched art in an aesthetic context, such as a museum or gallery, and sharpened their awareness of the range and subtleties of haptic, somatic experience. The relatively limited vocabulary for touch reflects our experience of the tactile dimension: vague, fleeting, undifferentiated, and largely unconscious. One reason touch is so hidden is that the subjectivity and interiority of haptic sensations render our experience more difficult to corroborate or share than the distant sense of sight. We can look at a painting in company with others and come to some consensus on the contents of the painting, but the visceral, somatic responses remain unspoken within each person. We have names for qualities we ascribe to things we touch, such as “smooth,” “sharp,” “empty,” “flexible,” “slick,” or “wavy,” but we assume they apply to the object rather than the subject—ourselves—and they only partially communicate our impressions. This book begins to name the unnamed: the experience of the body-mind in encounter with art. The first half of the book describes in detail what happens when people experience my sculptures through touch. This unusual use of touch yields three insights. First, it reveals the possibilities for a new kind of touch—aesthetic touch—to discover and express meaning. Second, it expands our understanding of the many dimensions of touch and its role in our lives. Third, it allows us to grasp the tactile, haptic, somatic dimensions of visual perception—the inner

Introduction

9

experience of seeing. Because the context for this kind of touch is aesthetic, haptic perception is engaged in the service of meaning. The somatic senses are allowed expressive, emotive possibilities rather than being limited to their usual unconscious, functional use. They gain aesthetic dimensions. They redefine themselves as well as redefine art. To convey the experience of exploring a sculpture through aesthetic touch, I have pieced together a first-person narrative from all the comments and my observations. This sequential narrative, cast in italics to make it distinct from the rest of the text, appears at the beginning of the first six chapters in Part One. Built from many people’s descriptions of their tactile experience of my sculptures (though not necessarily the same sculpture), this constructed narrative offers a subjective account of the moment-by-moment perceptions of a person coming to know a work of art through touch while blindfolded or blind. Each chapter then expands on the principles of touch conveyed in that part of the narrative. Taken as a whole, the narrative reveals the main elements of haptic cognition: the profound differences between sight and touch, the intelligence of hands, the crucial role of movement, the power of imagination and mental imagery, the element of time and memory, and the presence of emotion. The final two chapters in Part One explore the subjectivity and reciprocity of both touch and art. Part Two proposes ways the somatic senses can inform the conception, making, experiencing, exhibiting, critiquing, and understanding of art. It considers the implications of cultivating the somatic senses for artists, educators, and people with visual impairments. It addresses the possibilities for integrating aesthetic touch and the somatic senses into curatorial and educational policy and programming in art museums. Finally, visual perception of art is revealed as grounded in somatic perception. Artworks that are seen but not touched still speak eloquently to the body—through memory, association, identification, empathy, and imagination. When we look at an artwork, we have sensory responses to its presence. We can tap into the sensory experiences of the artist who made it. Tactile, haptic, somatic perception is largely unacknowledged as being integral to the visual appreciation of art. Yet the ability to recognize and draw on somatic experience can be cultivated and can profoundly alter and deepen the encounter with art. The last chapter posits the aesthetic experience as a manifestation of our capacity to be aware of and to reflect on our experience: to sense ourselves and the world and to know that we know. This portrait of aesthetic touch and the sensing body emerges from my work as an artist exploring perceptual processes as well as materials, forms, places, elements, and ideas. It grows from my questions about touch and the body and

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The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts

their role in making sculpture. It derives from my observations of people, both sighted and blind, as they touched my sculptures, and from their striking, cogent responses. It emerges from my efforts to make artworks that speak with authority to the body-mind of others. It draws from extensive readings in the senses, perception, cognition, art, mind, consciousness, body, and disability and from exchanges with artists, scientists, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and engineers. My investigations emerged from the individual and collective sensory deprivation currently cultivated in Western society by forces such as the ubiquitous use of computers and phones; the focus on abstract, rational knowledge in education; the distance many people live from the natural world and their own bodies; and our fascination with and dependence upon technological inventions. To counteract these trends, I join a multidisciplinary movement to rehumanize our senses, our bodies, our minds, and the world we live in. Neuroscientists are discovering the plastic, integrative nature of brain, body, and senses. Psychologists are exploring the senses in interaction rather than isolation. Anthropologists are recognizing the cultural dimensions of the senses and the need to study the sensory systems of cultures. Philosophers are honing a model of consciousness that is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive to counter the Cartesian paradigm of a disembodied, separate mind. Engineers are developing applications for touch that extend our tactile, haptic abilities. Architects and designers are designing more haptically intelligent, sensorially humane environments. Educators are using more interactive, embodied, contextual, collaborative ways of learning. People with disabilities and differences are enriching our understanding of perception and the self by articulating their distinctive realities. Artists are making interactive, multisensory, multidisciplinary, immersive artworks, installations, and environments. In this cultural context, we need a fine-grained understanding of how the somatic senses function in art. We need to develop and refine the somatic depths of our experience, whether as makers or as experiencers. By exploring the somatic senses, I have discovered dimensions of art I would never have otherwise known. This book is not only about the nature of touch and the body but also about the nature of art as revealed through the body. This approach to touch and to art offers an admittedly subjective analysis, but it remains grounded in detailed experiential reports from many people, in my life’s work as an artist, and in the paths I have followed in search of deeper embodiment and deeper understanding. With this book, I extend to you an invitation to enter the mind of the body.

Part One

By the Light of the Body

12

1

Sight and Touch

I’m sitting in front of a sculpture that’s completely unknown to me. I’m going to explore it entirely through touch—blindfolded—which seems difficult if not impossible. Seeing allows me to assess a situation so I know how to meet it, where to be, and what stance to take—defensive, receptive, open, or reserved. With sight, in one instant I have a visual imprint. But in these conditions I can’t anticipate what lies ahead. Before I even touch whatever’s in front of me, I discover an important aspect of touch: I must initiate the contact and reach out. There’s risk in the gesture and control in the choice. Touching is such a risk-taking experience. I’m so excited. Anything could be out there. My fingertips touch a hard, flat surface. I feel the slight shock of meeting something different than what I had imagined. Two feelings come to me when my hands touch the surfaces: one of disappointment and the other of pure joy. Disappointment in the fact that I was expecting something dramatic, maybe even gross. And the joy was that this is not dramatic, it is calm and soothing. I also feel the shock of breaking the taboo against touching art. I feel really guilty touching these sculptures, like some large hand is just waiting to swat. That really intensifies my sense of touch. First comes the strange fear and thrill of breaking the hovering taboo of “Don’t touch the art.” And once broken, a whole new world comes to life.

Seeing and touching are very different sensory modes. But the differences between seeing and touching extend beyond their perceptual roles. Sight and touch are different ways of knowing. We say I see to mean I understand. We say something is touching to mean I am emotionally affected. We link sight to comprehension and touch to emotion: sight to brain, touch to heart. Why do these two sensory modes relate to such different aspects of the body-mind? How do they, and the dimensions they reveal, relate to each other? How do they conflict? What do the experiential differences between sight and touch have to do with the lines we draw between reason and emotion or mind and body?

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The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts

Figure 1.1  The vertical steel box and the horizontal marble slab mirror each other, as do the hands. Hands can also descend through the openings in the marble slab to touch a horizontal slab of rough schist a few inches below. Elegy 1, 1995, Wood, marble, schist, steel, handmade paper, 53 × 31 × 50 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll.

Sight and Touch

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These sculptures make me think about the difference and similarity and overlap of the senses—the way one touches with eyes and looks with fingertips.

To distinguish and highlight the differences between sight and touch, I will simplify and generalize both sensory modes. Both sight and touch will be characterized here as if they were used in isolation from each other, as if sight were operating without touch and as if touch were used without sight. For the moment, they will be cast in opposition in order to heighten their differences. We must remember, however, that the nature of sensory perception proves more complex and variable than speaking of them separately would suggest. In reality, the two senses work in concert and in dialogue. They complement and support one another. Sight always contains haptic information and haptic memory even when we are not touching. Touching triggers visual imagery even if we are not looking. Furthermore, some of the differences between sight and touch lie not so much in kind as in degree, working at different scales of size and time. My descriptions of sight and touch are inevitably shaped by my cultural biases as a middle-class, Midwestern, white, American woman born at the end of the Second World War. The cultural, social dimensions of the senses are beyond the scope of this book, but they underlie all my investigations. Even the use of such concepts as sight and touch remains culturally dependent. Other cultures and other eras have conceived sight, touch, and the senses differently than the culture and time I represent. As a result, they literally perceive differently. In the largest context, all perception is shaped, organized, and informed by a social, cultural environment. Sensory anthropologist David Howes corrects our misconceptions of perception as private, internal, ahistorical, and apolitical: The human sensorium. … never exists in a natural state. Humans are social beings, and just as human nature itself is a product of culture, so is the human sensorium. … Tastes and sounds and touches are imbued with meanings and carefully hierarchized and regulated so as to express and enforce the social and cosmic order … Perception is not just a matter of biology, psychology or personal history but of cultural formation. (Howes, 1991, 3–4)

The project to explore art through touch grew out of my resistance to the dualisms and oppositions that my culture has instilled in my consciousness and that shape my perception. The list is endless and includes: human/nature, man/ woman, white/black, rich/poor, right/wrong, progress/tradition, and so on. In each pair, the first concept traditionally dominates the second. I have learned to question the dominant power in each pair and to explore the minor character, in

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The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts

order to raise its status and honor its possibilities. Ultimately, I hope to achieve a more dynamic balance and to transcend duality altogether. My artwork and this book represent my efforts to forge a more unified field of the dueling pairs that have defined my artistic pursuits: sight/touch, object/environment, outside/ inside, human/nature, and mind/body. Touch has been cast as a minor sense in our culture. Its powers are often unappreciated and misunderstood. Touch is not usually isolated from sight, sight often occurs without touch, and touch usually functions unconsciously. For these reasons, most people remain unaware of the qualities peculiar to the sense of touch. More is implicated in the differences between sight and touch than meets the eye or hand. Sight and touch are not simply the means for gathering sensory information. Each embodies a different way of knowing. Each creates a different version of reality. Our concept of reality determines how and what we perceive. What we perceive further informs the sense of reality, in a cycle of continuing construction. Out of this construct of reality, we create selves, bodies, identities, behaviors, worldviews, arts, laws, religions, wars, and cultures. Which sensory systems we cultivate has profound, far-reaching implications. Unaware of the qualities and effects unique to the sense of touch, and accustomed as they are to visual ways of knowing, people who touch my sculptures blindfolded are often surprised. I remember the sculptures kinesthetically but not so much visually, and I usually have strong visual memory. I remember a deep hole in one, and going down that hole, but it didn’t look that deep. What I remember is the way it felt, not the way it looked. When I looked it felt cold. It felt warm when I touched. You can’t tell how it feels by looking at it.

The visual system is concerned with salience, orientation, arousal, attention, and identification. The haptic system attends to safety, motion, spatial orientation, and self-definition. Yet visual and haptic perceptions usually occur in tandem, fusing to create a unified impression, which we assume to be visual in nature. When impressions from sight and touch conflict, one or the other can dominate or at least modify the other, depending on the situation. We remain unaware of the exact mix of seen and felt. The seemingly objective quality of sight and the importance we bestow on sight make it the measure of reality. We tend to assume that what we see is true, real, and the whole story. We take in so much visually and then think we know it.

Sight and Touch

17

Most of us believe that looking is simply a matter of visual recording. The popular notion of the eye as a camera posits that seeing imprints images on the retina, like light on film, faithfully recording everything within the field of vision. Yet sight is highly selective in what it chooses to see and how it responds to those choices. Like all perception, seeing is driven by our conscious and unconscious desires, interests, and needs. We select what we see depending on what is relevant or important to us. In fact, we see very little. We usually focus only on what matters, what is striking, what is anomalous, or what is familiar. How we interpret and assess what we see is shaped by our personal, social, and cultural histories. While we assume that other people are seeing things the same way we are, the person next to us is most likely seeing quite differently—selecting different things, seeing them in different ways, and giving them different meanings. Yet seeing seems to provide an objective picture. Because the physical activity involved in seeing is so minimal and so subtle, seeing seems to give us the object rather than the activity of seeing. We seem to pass directly to the object as if there were no perceptual process intervening. On the other hand, touching gives us both the object and the actions that form the object. Seeing is a distance sense. We have the ability to see far and globally. We effortlessly traverse an enormous range of visual space, from remote to close, spanning the interval between faraway mountains and the glass at hand within a single glance. We can focus on a particular tree while also taking in the surrounding forest with peripheral sight. To look at some things in their entirety, especially large ones, we must actually maintain a certain distance. If we are too close, we see only part of something, or we see it with distortions. Works of art are usually meant to be seen as a whole and therefore at some distance. Much of the power of Richard Serra’s huge steel sculptures that wrap around or cut through space lies in our inability to see them all at once, especially indoors; we come to know them in motion, over time, with our bodies as much as with our sight. The distancing capacity of sight can remove us from what we see, not only physically but also emotionally and conceptually. Perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim describes the power of sight to remove us from engagement: To be able to go beyond the immediate effect of what acts upon the perceiver and of his own doings enables him to probe the behavior of existing things more objectively. It makes him concerned with what is, rather than merely what is done to him and what he is doing. Vision … is the prototype and perhaps the origin of teoria, meaning detached beholding, contemplation. (Arnheim, 1969, 17)

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The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts

While sight gives us the ability to observe without entanglement, this distance proves a double-edged sword. We think of ourselves as separate from what we see. The seen object remains aloof, independent, beyond us. This physical and psychological distance can breed a feeling of disconnection. And that which is seen can more easily be objectified. Feeling with my eyes open was more distant. My brain was working. The sensory fell away and was less intense. I realize how much I rely on my eyes to define and objectify my world. Sight can actually be a handicap and can distance me from truly experiencing something on a deeper level. In that way sight is similar to language. Words can distance me from an object or an experience in a peculiar way.

Distance is a profound experience in our perceptual and psychological development. As children grow, the distance from the mother, central to their sense of reality and safety, is carefully, experientially measured. At first, the distance is as close as possible, skin to skin. As children learn to move independently, they maintain visual or auditory contact with the mother, making repeated returns to the mother’s body for tactile reassurance, closely assessing the gradually lengthening distance from their mother, learning the spatial, distance senses through the fluctuations of space and distance in this highly charged fundamental relationship. Sight as a distance sense remains colored by this basic movement of independence away from the tactile refuge of the mother. Touch remains colored by the assurance and comfort afforded by the embrace and nourishment of the mother. There are so many emotions attached to the closeness and innocence of touch.

Seeing seems one-sided rather than reciprocal or mutual. Seeing can even give us a sense of power or dominance, as if remaining unaffected by what we see allows us to control it. Sight confers a degree of invincibility, potentially isolating us in the chamber of our thoughts and fantasies. British writer Gabriel Josipovici wrote a literary meditation called Touch in which he describes our habitual way of seeing: [Seeing is] our way of establishing our connection with the world: through viewing, or having views of it. Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self. (Josipovici, 1996, 43)

The words viewer and spectator are commonly used to describe someone looking at art. As Josipovici notes, these words connote sight, distance, and point of view. Because those are the very qualities transformed, by touching, into

Sight and Touch

19

intimacy, proximity, and mobility, I avoid using such terms to describe the people who touch my sculptures. Even for people who perceive artwork visually, haptic perception is subliminally present. Words such as viewer fail to acknowledge the haptic dimension of the aesthetic experience. The word perceiver is a bit awkward and not in common use but closer to the truth. Touch, by definition, brings us into intimate contact with the world. We meet the world and let it in. Sight reinforces the hermetic privacy of separate selves, while touch confirms the palpable existence of a world pressing on us as we press upon it. The boundary between bodies and objects, and self and other, melts. Touch is so immediate and personal. I hear things and smell things that I do not when I only look.

Touching calls for a stronger level of commitment than looking, as Josipovici writes: Sight is free and sight is irresponsible. I can cast my eye to the far horizon and then back to the fingers I hold up before my face, all in a fraction of a second and with no effort at all. … On the other hand, were I to walk to that point on the horizon it would take time and effort. … To look cost me nothing but to go involves both a choice and a cost. (Josipovici, 1996, 9)

The investment made by the walker costs more but also yields more, as he takes in the whole landscape along the route, knows his body moving, and feels the textures of the ground and the changing contours of the land as he walks, climbs, and descends. Such actions, although very different in scale and effort, resemble touching an artwork—the physical resonance with the contours, the way it evolves over time, and the unfolding narrative. Touch engages one in an embodied journey rather than viewing from a distance. The space encompassed by sight can be vast, yet, ironically, the ease of eye movement generates a less defined, less felt sense of space than that known through touch. The space accessible to touch is limited to what we can reach; haptic perception remains bound to the sphere of the body. Spatial knowing through haptic exploration, though more limited in range than sight, is more vivid. It registers in the body. When you look, it’s an object. When you touch, it’s a journey.

The spatial limitation, the commitment, and the vividness of touching art encourage concentration, focus, a deepening of perception. There’s no distance; looking at abstract art can be distancing.

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The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts

Touching may even amplify visual qualities. I had visually explored the sculptures a month ago, and knew what the forms were. Yet going through the exhibition without sight, the forms seem much larger, deeper and wider.

The distance of sight makes for a more global grasp, but usually of lower intensity. Tactile proximity offers an experience that may be higher in intensity and intimacy but lower in comprehension. Hans and Shulamith Kreitler, in Psychology of the Arts, suggest that “vision affords an acquaintance without complete encounter, while tactility provides for an encounter without complete acquaintance” (Kreitler and Kreitler, 1972, 208). Sight and touch pick up different qualities in things. David Katz, pioneer researcher into haptic perception, notes that touch takes us inside the object, revealing properties intrinsic to it, whereas sight remains on the outer surface. Fingers and hands obtain information about the innards of objects: we feel the mass, weight, substance, materials, temperature. Touch gives us a concrete, sensible version of things, playing a larger role than sight in grounding us in the reality of the world. Katz writes, We must give precedence to touch over all the other senses because its perceptions have the most compelling character of reality. Touch plays a far greater role than do the other senses in the development of belief in the reality of the external world. Nothing convinces us as much of the world’s existence, as well as the reality of our own body, as the (often painful) collisions that occur between the body and its environment. What has been touched is the true reality that leads to perception; no reality pertains to the mirrored image, the mirage that applies itself to the eye. (Katz, 1989, 240)

Josipovici recognizes touch as a more intimate, concrete way of knowing. He even considers touch as a metaphor for the process he uses in writing: The notion of feeling one’s way forward, of groping in the dark or semi-darkness, implies a testing of the way with the whole body. And although this method may be painfully slow, it is much less likely to lead me astray than if I relied on sight alone and had open country to cross and a bright sun to go by. In this way I will experience every inch of the way rather than suddenly finding that I have reached my goal with very little sense of the terrain I have passed through. If I can simply walk across the space that lies between me and my goal I may arrive there quickly, but then I will be left wondering whether I have really arrived or only dreamed or imagined it. (Josipovici, 1996, 2)

Sight and Touch

21

Bodily sensations are the very matter of tactile experience. We cannot separate our tactile understanding of an object and the means of acquiring that understanding. My grasp of a sculpture’s roundness and the sensations I feel as I grasp remain fused. Sensations occur not only on the surface of the skin but also within the skin, felt as pressure, temperature, and vibration. Sensations of the body’s movements are felt in muscles, joints, and ligaments. The effects of touch proliferate into the body’s depths. The effects of touch also ramify into the depths of our psyche. Touch remains the primary sense in physical and perceptual development. From early dependence on tactile stimuli, we learn to discern forms and spaces through sight and to draw connections between the two sensory systems. Over time, we internalize haptic perceptions. These tactile memories form the basis for visual impressions and remain embedded in them for the rest of our lives. We are so deeply affected by preverbal contacts that touching in later life resonates unconsciously with these early formative experiences. The ease and frequency of touching and being touched that occurs in childhood diminish as we mature. Conscious, sensuous touch often becomes limited to sexual encounters and is so closely tied to sexuality that touching anything with intention can easily call up such associations. I never considered touching in another atmosphere than the intimate.

Touch, sex, and pleasure have become linked in a triad that can exclude other kinds of tactile exchanges or sensuous pleasures. This narrowing of tactility and pleasure to the sexual realm can reduce sensitivity and openness to other tactile experiences. Fear of sexualizing other contacts and the confusion of any touch with sexuality can lead to rigidity and limit around tactile exploration or communication. Sight is safe, touch is erotic.

The mutuality of sexuality and the connectedness of Eros remain useful for understanding the nature of touch, however. When we touch, we are intimately engaged with whatever we touch. We are touched as well as touching. We cannot remain aloof. Mutuality and reciprocity underlie the psychological dimension of touch. It’s all about relationship. When I touch, I enter into a relationship with what I’m touching. I can’t remain with my superficial ideas of what something is. I’m invited to go deeper.

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The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts

In addition to pleasure, touch can cause pain. We can be hurt. Engagement of the body entails risk. Vulnerability underlies the experience of touch. In making physical contact, we open ourselves to the possibility of negative feelings as well as pleasure. In my exhibitions, I often heard people with visual impairments or people wearing a blindfold worry about danger in touching a sculpture. Does it have any sharp places? Will it bite? It took trust. I had to trust there wouldn’t be anything sharp.

We are also psychologically vulnerable. We open ourselves to being emotionally affected, which may include feelings such as fear or confusion. The depth of the haptic experience stems in part from the intimacy and the vulnerability: Deeply touched and touching. So much to take in, so much experience we miss in the dailiness, so much that lives embodied that I don’t want to verbalize.

Sight can register a situation instantly and immediately. Andy Potok, the painter who lost his sight at midlife, complains that what he misses most is the “all-at-onceness” of sight, the ability to take in a large visual field, such as Franz Kline or Mark Rothko paintings, in a gestalt far swifter than the slow, cumulative process of touching. Sight easily encompasses shifting points of view, changes

Figure 1.2  Hands touch and grasp in different ways in this complex sculpture. Elegy 5, 1996, Steel, stone, leather, rope, gauze, 52 × 32 × 52 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © Ellen Augarten.

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of size, and overlapping and perspectival connections, while maintaining a conceptual grasp of what we are seeing. With sight, we tend to take in the whole scene first and then focus on particulars. When we explore something with touch, we usually begin with parts and details, moving gradually from the particular to the whole, stringing together successive sense impressions to construct a complete image. John Hull, a British theology professor, developed cataracts at age thirteen and became totally blind in his left eye by seventeen. When he was thirty-five, his other eye began deteriorating, and a few years later he became completely blind. In the three years that followed the onset of complete blindness, he dictated a journal that became a brilliant book, On Sight and Insight. He describes with remarkable awareness, precision, and frankness his adaptation to blindness. Here, he speaks of discovering the successive nature of touch: The tangible world sets up only as many points of reality as can be touched by my body, and this seems to be restricted to one problem at a time. I can explore the splinters on the park bench with the tip of my finger, but I cannot, at the same time, concentrate upon exploring the pebbles with my big toe. I can use all ten fingers when I am exploring the shape of something, but it is quite difficult to explore two objects simultaneously one with each hand. (Hull, 1990, 81)

Sight also constructs the whole from a series of stimuli. The eyes move in swift, darting movements called saccades, leaping from one feature to another, stitching the whole picture together from a series of pictures. Through these saccades, we find, relate, compare, contrast, and connect parts, building a whole from successive perceptions. However, the saccades merge into a seamless view, and the time and effort are so minimal that most of us are not usually aware of either. When we touch without sight, our hands move over a sculpture in a continuous way to make connections and construct a sense of the whole. We may return to details or areas, but we cannot leap from part to part as we do with sight since we could easily lose the connections and disrupt the map in our mind. If we touch while looking, we use touch more in the manner we use sight, leaping from one part to another. Haptic researchers at Lund University in Sweden tracked the movements of a person who is visually impaired exploring a person’s face with both hands and juxtaposed this haptic map to the eye-tracking of someone visually scanning a face. The haptic version shows continuous, curving lines flowing over most of the face; the visual version shows short, straight, disconnected lines jumping from highlight to highlight (representing

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the saccades). The two versions graphically display the different qualities of haptic and visual experience: continuous and discontinuous, sensuous tracing and abstract connections, democratic discovery and hierarchical selection. Haptic perception unfolds in time as well as in space. The motion of touching takes time. It cannot be hurried. Moving faster only blurs perception, and we miss things. Touch is slow. The speed of hands determines the rate of perception.

Unlike the incredibly swift accumulations of sight, touching provides a slower, more sequential accumulation of information. Touch is tortoise to the hare of sight. It takes time to touch things. I had to slow down and pay attention.

The haptic experience has duration. However, randomly or methodically, we proceed when we touch without sight, we go over and back over parts, map and measure, discover relationships, establish known territory, strike out into the unknown, find, lose, and find again. We remember, forget, reinforce memories, reinterpret, revisit, and revise. You don’t know where you began. You go out from there and discover, not knowing if you come back to it. I created a base and moved away from it and back again over and over.

The inch-by-inch process of touching requires more time, but it also creates a sense of time that feels inhabited, not glossed over. You really get to know a piece; you know every little nuance and detail, whereas if you looked, you’d see it overall.

People enter an altered sense of time, slower and more expanded than normal time. This was contemplative time, so refreshing from my normal hectic pace.

Many of us try to live in visual time rather than haptic time. We believe events could and should occur with the swiftness of sight rather than the deliberate motion of muscle and bone. The more we invest in technological economies of time and space, the more we hope to reduce and even collapse time. We resent the time it takes for a stoplight to change or a computer to boot up. Ironically, in this quest for speed, we inhabit our experience less fully. We feel we do not have enough time. Haptic time takes us into the realm of lived, felt experience. We slow down, absorb, savor, and appreciate. The slow, successive, cumulative process of

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touching creates an impression very different from the swift movements of looking. I liked the gradual unfolding of each piece through touch. The speed was very different on different textures: the suede was slow, with my whole hand; the metal was faster, just the tip of my finger.

Haptic perception proceeds as an unfolding, often generating a story or a narrative. The imagination builds and elaborates on what we discover through touch. The first side is like being in a factory; the second side seems more like an old house—completely different. The theme seems to be that which is human and that which is not. When the sculpture wasn’t defined by visual experience, I found I could imagine much more. I made up stories about it.

When we look at an artwork in a way that resembles the way we touch— cumulatively, slowly, and over time—we deepen our relationship to it. It was really nice to actually experience the art rather than just observe it.

The objectifying nature of sight creates the illusion that we know something. But this knowledge is often conceptual and symbolic rather than specific and nuanced. Sight separates, distinguishes, and categorizes, creating hierarchies of significance. It tends to remain at the categorical, even stereotypical, level of perception. Categories arrived at by touch are more mobile, mutable. Touching spawns a more investigative, open-ended approach. People reporting their tactile experience often convey a narrative filled with ambiguity, discovery, and contradiction. They allow perceptions and even objects to change, evolve, and unfold. They have less need or ability to identify, categorize, summarize, or conceptualize—to fix the object. In touching, there is more ease with the shifting, evolving nature of perception itself. It produces a fluid, open-ended sense of an artwork. I didn’t conceptualize when I touched; the reality felt more immediate. It’s like the Zen master hitting you to break conceptualization.

Touching also generates a more malleable self-image. As the size of a sculpture changes in the course of touching, so does one’s own scale. With sight we know where we are and what size we and the object are. When touching without sight,

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the imagination has more freedom to assign different sizes and scales to the sculpture and to ourselves. I was surprised to find such pleasure in hard edges, square corners. It emphasized the organic nature of my body. I felt huge in relation to their scale, not human. The scale is fixed with sight. In the imagination it can be very big or very small.

Haptic knowing is fluid, nonhierarchical, and democratic. In these qualities, it reflects more closely the transient nature of reality as well as the multivalent nature of art. We often divide the elements in visual artworks into figure and ground, major and minor elements, or positive and negative spaces, creating hierarchies of salience and meaning. When exploring through touch without sight, we take what comes, as we find it. The usual draw toward the figure in visual figureground relationships is transformed into a more evenhanded exploration of every part. Through touch, we explore major and minor elements with equal interest. This can make us more attentive to details and relationships. Felt completely enclosed, cave-like on the inside. Didn’t realize for a long time that openings in the upper surface went through to the inside until I felt the ceiling. Another shift occurred when I felt underneath and realized it wasn’t solid either.

If we are looking as we touch, elements that were visually subsumed in the whole, perhaps even overlooked, can become more prominent through touch. Because of the sequential nature of haptic perception, figure and ground also have temporal meaning. Figure means whatever lies within the present moment of attention, and ground refers to the areas previously explored or yet to be explored. Whatever I am touching is figure to my inquiring hand; everything I have already touched becomes ground. What is figure and what is ground become interchangeable, mobile, and transient. Hierarchies of perception are considerably delayed or fail to occur. The visual categories of positive and negative are also confounded by touch. Positive object and negative space are not quite so distinct. While artists usually see space as fully as they see objects, this is a learned skill. James Lord recounts in his biography of Alberto Giacometti a moment when the French sculptor perceived space as palpable. Lord writes of Giacometti’s insight: He began to paint once more, but after a few minutes he turned round to where the bust had been, as though to re-examine it, and exclaimed, “Oh, it’s gone! I thought it was still there, but it’s gone!” Although I reminded him that Diego had taken it away, he said, “Yes, but I thought it was there. I looked and suddenly I

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saw emptiness. I saw emptiness. It’s the first time in my life that that’s happened to me.” (Arnheim, 1969, 89)

The vividness of Giacometti’s perception came from his expectation. Space was charged with the unexpected absence of an expected presence. The spaces in and around Giacometti’s sculptures and paintings are charged with such presence. Space often seems to be active, sentient, pressing upon his figures as if devouring them. When touching, space is felt as presence. What you find with your hands are the spaces, while your eyes find the objects.

Moving consciously through space in this way, we sense space itself—its shape, dimensions, qualities, and emotional resonances. Without the overview of sight, our moving bodies remain intensely alert for object and form in order to ground our wandering; we are constantly anticipating an encounter with objects or surroundings. As we move, we become keenly aware of absence as we search for presence. Space becomes charged rather than empty. The air, the space that my hand had to travel from touch to touch became very palpable.

Figure 1.3  Rawhide snakes through the steel frame, turning it on its side. Hands can do the same. Pandora’s Box 1, 2004, Steel, rawhide, 47 × 22 × 20 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

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More importantly, the moving hand and body experience themselves moving, generating kinesthetic sensations even if there is no tactile contact with any object. When space is experienced kinesthetically, the object and the spaces around and within the object become continuous. Solid and space are equally known through movement. Both are suffused with kinesthetic sensation. Information taken in through the fingers was tactile and spatial, but it was a sense of space I have never experienced before, because it was not made finite and given limits by visual measurement. I sensed in a way I have only toyed with before. It was like taking LSD.

As we come to know space through movement, it no longer seems empty. The moving, sensing body inhabits space and charges it with felt presence. I had to give up my ideas of how we order space; this is totally different.

The moving, sensing body is the medium for haptic perception. Movement is needed to feel textures, discern forms, know spaces, and discover relationships, not only bypassing the skin over surfaces but also by gathering information from the speed, position, and shape of the moving body. The eyes work differently. They move from place to place in saccades to acquire visual information and form a sense of the whole, but the moments of actual perception occur only during stillness, when the eyes are at rest, however fleetingly. When the eyes are moving between the moments of focus, the brain suppresses sight so the scene will appear to be still despite the smearing of the moving image on the retina. If the retinal image remains still too long, the sensory nerves adapt and sensory impressions disappear, so the eyes have to keep moving to make sense of a visual scene. In this way, sight resembles touch. At the level of percept, however, sight occurs in stillness. Because haptic perception occurs in time and motion, memory serves a crucial role in haptic cognition. Touch is linear and successive. As we explore new parts of a sculpture, we need to remember what we have already felt, in order to integrate them into a developing sense of the whole. We cannot return as easily to previously observed parts to compare and connect as we can with visual scanning. We may have to repeatedly return to parts previously explored to make sense of the whole. When seeing, we look ahead and around, constantly sizing up the situation and our place within it. When touching without sight, our perceptions extend as far as the tips of our fingers. We have to inhabit the here and now. Each tactile event is unanticipated. We are committed, without knowing to what. Surprise

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is common, stemming from the inability to anticipate as well as from the unexpected qualities produced by touching. Every new thing, every little bump, was a surprise.

This way of approaching things is so different from seeing that it produces a range of reactions, including excitement and fear. I couldn’t quite let go of thinking I needed to be careful. I feel so bombarded on a sensation level. It’s overwhelming to stay with all the changes. I want to go on one surface forever. To be present with the changes I have to be really slow. When I move to a new surface the contrast is so intense I get a little nauseous. With vision I take in the whole picture and can control how much I take in, whereas with touching (without seeing) I have to deal with all the information I’m getting. I can also handle it more easily when I make a visual image in my mind; when I just feel it, it’s much more intense.

Sight is singular and centralized. Situated in the front of the head, the eyes confer a point of view. Artists and architects of the Renaissance observed how the eyes see the world from a single point of view. Using that knowledge, they developed the artistic convention of perspective. Perspective structures artworks so that the visible scene arrays from an individual consciousness. Everything is aligned relative to that point of view: lines that define space, such as tables, walls, and windows, ray outward from that point; bodies are seen from one side; things farther away are depicted as smaller; hills in the distance are softened by the intervening atmosphere. The ubiquitous use of perspective in our imagery conditions how we see, how we organize space, and how we place ourselves within that space. The development of this point of view accompanied the rise of individualism in European culture. We need only to look at imagery from contemporary, pre-Renaissance, or indigenous cultures to realize there are other ways of organizing the world. We all perceived and made imagery in other ways when we were children: size determined by importance; bodies represented frontally, symbolically, and affectively rather than realistically; and things arrayed according to their emotional (rather than spatial) relationships. These ways of representing the perceived world have nothing to do with perspectival sight. They reveal a consciousness that is more affective and haptic. The Renaissance was the time of the invention of visual perspective. This work offers a new kind of perspective.

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Within the eyes themselves, small adjustments of acuity and focus are critical to sight. The fovea, the area of the retina that can focus sharply, is the size of the head of a pin. Acuity falls off precipitously beyond the focal area. We have to move our eyes to bring this minuscule span of focus to different areas of sight. We remain unaware of this motion or effort. The lack of kinesthetic feedback from sight contributes to the disembodied quality of seeing. We maintain focus within a small visual field at a fixed distance for long periods of time while looking at books, television, movies, and computer screens. We can experience this sustained visual focus as extremely tiring without knowing why. Cultivating this aspect of sight, with its relatively fixed locus and narrow focus, feeds into a disembodied feeling. The body kind of disappears.

Touch provides a much broader, more diffuse system for sensory perception. The hands alone are incredibly complex, able to explore in endless ways with their many parts and their capacity to change shape to a remarkable degree. The hands’ “view” is mobile, changing, and adaptive, given our arms’ reach and wide range of motion. The process of gathering sensory information is not limited to a fixed or single point of view. The entire body is receptive to tactile impressions, with a vast number of sensory receptors spread across many square feet and at different levels within the skin, providing different degrees and qualities of sensitivity. The skin is a boundary but a permeable one, allowing the passage in and out of fluids, salves, heat, nutrition, and pheromones. This permeability integrates us into the flow of air, sunlight, and moisture, infusing and fusing our bodies with our surroundings. The skin has a remarkable capability crucial to our tactile abilities. Skin and its underlying tissues are elastic enough to deform and reform, stretching to adapt itself to whatever impinges on it, and then returning to normal. The capacity to form slightly to whatever one touches or is touched by is of subtle but critical importance in discerning shapes and textures, grasping without slipping, making tools an extension of touch and the hand, and activating deeper tactile receptors. Imagine your flesh taut as the skin of a banana; hands would bounce off surfaces rather than yield as they do. The body surface takes things slightly into its embrace, generating more sensation as well as a subtle sense of merging or blending with the things we contact. We are physically, subtly affected by touching. The movement of haptic perception draws still more of the body into the perceptual act. Moving bodies and hands have changing, multiple perspectives

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with which to know a sculpture, including parts of the artwork that cannot be seen. The locus of perception can be parts of the body—one hand, the other hand, both hands, a forearm, a back—or the whole body. We can pay attention to our internal sensations of motion or to the object being touched. Proprioception can range from the pinpoint of a finger to whole-body immersion and spans the surface of the skin to the body’s core. Movement can span from stillness to dance. This range yields a mobile, complex consciousness encompassing the breadth and depth of our being. Sight reinforces the illusion that we are separate, autonomous beings. We see things at a distance, as if in a picture, as if objectively apart from us. Sight makes distinctions. But lest you imagine you are autonomous, just feel the pull of gravity—feel your weight. Notice where you touch the ground, the floor, the chair. Notice the constant slight effort to remain in balance. Feel the air entering your lungs. The sense of touch reveals connection rather than separation. The more you engage through touch, the more the division between the environment and us dissolves.

Although sight and touch are very different, they remain fused. People touching my sculptures often describe their haptic experience in terms of sight—as being different from seeing or better than seeing or as a kind of seeing. In daily perception, sight and touch work together in a dynamic interplay of figure and ground. If visual perception is the dominant figure or focus of attention, then haptic perception becomes the ground or background to sight. Sight is always supported, infused by, and grounded in touch. Haptic perceptions and haptic memories constantly feed information into our visual grasp of things. When we ignore or alienate the body, the connection between visual and haptic senses becomes attenuated. We lose depth and richness. We spend much of our time using focused sight at a fixed distance with a single focal length. In our culture the narrow, focused qualities of sight are more valued than the broader, more diffuse, complex qualities of touch. Touch can, of course, be used in a focused, precise manner, such as when a jeweler cuts a diamond or an acupuncturist feels pulses. Sight can also be used in a broad, inclusive way, as it would be by a hunter in a forest or a teacher in a classroom. We can use either sense in the continuum between focused and field awareness. However, in our culture, in which focused sight is so central to many of our activities and touch is relatively devalued, focused sight is the hero in our perceptual repertoire. Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa has written a compelling manifesto for the individual and social need for haptic consciousness in The Eyes of the Skin. He

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suggests that peripheral sight is an important counterbalance to focused sight, allowing in more and different information. This would be especially true in architectural settings. In the same way, shifting from focused sight to touch can broaden perceptual perspective. Touching can open sight to different ways of seeing. Such a dynamic interplay between sight and touch can mean new ways of conceiving both self and world. One man touching my sculptures found that the differences between tactile and visual perception confirmed his notions of reality: There is no ultimate physical reality. The world is plastic and not concrete, on a psychic level but physically as well. On a tactile level, things exist completely differently than visually. By touching first, I have the opportunity to juxtapose those two realities, to feel them as equal in weight. There’s no one-to-one correspondence between tactile and visual realities. And it’s not as if they complement each other— they don’t.

Some people notice only minor divergences between their haptic and visual images but still find the distinction worth noting. That such differences occur between the images we create through touching and those we create through seeing seems critical for understanding perception. Touch and sight provide considerable overlap in information, which is why touch can stand in for sight and why it might seem redundant to sight. Yet even when there is overlap, the experiential differences color the information. We may know the smooth, ovoid shape of a marble Brancusi head by looking at it and imagining how it would feel to touch, but when we actually touch it, we know it in a different way. We feel coolness, smoothness, and mass. To sight, it might suggest a child’s head, while feeling it might trigger memories of touching a river stone. As artist Magdalena Abakanowicz says, I touch and find out the temperature. I learn about roughness and smoothness of things. Is the object dry or moist? Moist from warmth or from cold? Pulsating or still? Yielding to the finger or protected by its surface? What is it really like? Not having touched, I do not know. (Abakanowicz, 1983, 102)

The experiential differences between the two sensory modes have emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. Touch and sight provide us not only with different ways to perceive, but also with different kinds of consciousness and different ways of being. Touch and sight carry different implications for how we behave in the world and how we conceive who we are. I discovered some of these differences experientially in the course of my meditation practice. I was first taught to meditate by sitting still, closing my eyes, and watching my breath

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as it entered and left my body. I was then taught to internally scan the body by moving my awareness from head to toe and back up again, continuously and carefully observing sensation in all parts. After years of practice, at some point, I realized I was visualizing the scanning, as if I were looking down from my head with my eyes at the rest of my body, even though my eyes were closed. My awareness was like a lighthouse scanning with one beam of light from one fixed point. I wanted to get out of my head and broaden my awareness, so I moved my locus of attention down into my body. I chose to focus my attention on the sensations of breathing in my abdomen. But the head-center was tenacious. A long struggle for dominance ensued between head and belly. Finally, frustrated by the effort, I gave up. What emerged out of this impasse was a haptic awareness of my breathing and my body: a soft, nonspecific sensing of sensation rather than visualization. This tactile, proprioceptive awareness is broader and more diffuse than visual perception, and is not driven by the same need to pinpoint the location of awareness. Reading Stephen Kosslyn’s book on visual perception, Image and Brain, I discovered two complementary systems in visual cognition. The what system within the brain compares what you are seeing with memories of similar objects in order to identify what you are looking at. The where system seeks to locate the object in space. This map of visual perception suggested that when I felt the tension between the two locations in my body, I was engaged in the where system of visual perception. This understanding helped me recognize that my primary mode of perception had been visual, which generated distance, fixity, orientation, and disconnection. Shifting to tactile perception gave me a more direct, immediate, intimate perception of my body and states of being. I could be more fluid, sensitive, and responsive. I could inhabit sensation and emotion rather than observe the body (Kosslyn, 1994). These differences between sight and touch in the subtle realm of inner experience have also been articulated by Ajahn Sucitto, an English Buddhist monk in the Thai Forest tradition. He notes that the words used to describe the processes of meditation are deeply visual—witness, watch, observe, see, insight. These words may be metaphors, since we sit with eyes closed, but they carry signals that plug us into the visual mode. Visual perception, he points out, is excellent for object definition and clarity. (I would add that it also locates as well as identifies.) But, he continues, visual consciousness creates a sense of distance and abstraction. There is no need for feeling. What I see does not necessarily touch or affect me. The affective sense is not necessarily connected to sight. I can even shut down feeling to better function in the world. This can lead to

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abandonment of the heart. Touch, however, is reciprocal—whatever I touch touches me. The body, which is extremely sensitive, instantly registers whether the contact is safe or not; once it determines something is not a matter of danger or survival, it discerns whether there is pleasure and divines the nature of the connection. Tactile consciousness may not be good for object definition, but it does enable qualitative, emotional responses. This may take a sensory form, such as pressure, balance, expansiveness, warmth, relaxation, or constriction—or an emotional one, such as calm, happiness, unease, or fear. Tactile consciousness taps directly into the body’s innate language and intelligence. Although one can reach the affective mode through the visual, it always has to be translated from the visual into the somatic. Sucitto suggests that the pathway from the visual sense to the heart sense is longer than the pathway from the somatic sense to the heart sense, which is immediate and reflexive (Sucitto, 2005). Pallasmaa addresses these differences in the field of architecture. He diagnoses social ills related to visual dominance. He laments how the magnification and alienation of sight have affected architecture, which has “housed the intellect and the eye, but … has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories and dreams, homeless.” He could be speaking of currents in contemporary art when he says it is “often more engaged with the architectural discourse itself and mapping the possible marginal territories of the art, than responding to human existential questions.” He decries such architecture as marked by nihilism and narcissism: The hegemonic eye seeks domination over all fields of cultural production, and it seems to weaken our capacity for empathy, compassion and participation with the world. The narcissistic eye views architecture solely as a means of selfexpression, and as an intellectual-artistic game detached from essential mental and society connections … the nihilistic eye deliberately advances sensory and mental detachment and alienation. (Pallasmaa, 1996, 22)

The Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, who spent years exploring tactile perception and art, would concur: “In modern life, hearing, seeing, and taste have been perverted. Smell has been destroyed. The only pure, virginal sense that remains is touch. It’s also the only one that hasn’t been catered for by the arts. It hasn’t been aestheticized. I see it as an unexplored plain; I believe there is buried treasure there” (Gilbey, 2001). Philosopher David Michael Levin suggests, “The will to power is very strong in vision. There is a strong tendency in vision to grasp and fixate, to reify and totalize: a tendency to dominate, secure, and control” (Levin, 1993, 205). These

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powers arise not just from the nature of sight but also from the extension, amplification, and multiplication of its abilities through technologies such as the printing press, microscope, telescope, X-ray, magnetic resonance imaging, camera, television, and computer. The use of technologies has collapsed time and space. Pallasmaa says, “The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase of speed in the technological world is sight. But the world of the eyes is causing us to live increasingly in a perpetual present … flattened by speed and simultaneity” (Pallasmaa, 1996, 21). We see so many images that remain pictures, rather than felt, fully sensuous experiences, that we have learned to view the world around us as if looking at pictures: flattened, framed, and detachable. We conceive even ourselves as images, as if seen through the lens of the media rather than felt from the inside. In discussing the differences between sight and touch among docents at an art museum, one of the women, who was in her sixties, said she was looking in a full-length mirror after a bath; turning to her husband, she asked him, “What could you possibly still like about this body?” to which he responded, “It feels good.” She had asked the question from the perspective of the visual image, which is subject to standards and stereotypes; he had responded from haptic consciousness, which is more internally driven. Sight tends to contribute to a feeling of exteriority, and touch leads to interiority. Underlying these problems lies alienation from the body. The disembodied quality of sight renders us observers rather than physical, sensory participants. From such a distant, detached point of view, the world we generate will also be distant and detached. When the body is the center of perception, sight is grounded within the full sensory continuum. The haptic sense roots us in the body, drawing us back from the potentially disembodying aspects of sight. Deepening the relationship between sight and touch leads to more flexible, versatile ways of knowing. The two modes balance each other. The speed, range, and acuity of sight work in tandem with the sensuousness, depth, and connection of touch to enrich our perceptions, our world, and our ways of being. The visual and haptic senses fuse to create a unified field with depth and extension. Pallasmaa suggests, “The percept of the body and the image of the world turn into one single continuous existential experience … there is no body separate from its domicile in space, and there is no space unrelated to the unconscious image of the perceiving self ” (Pallasmaa, 1996, 21). The ethereal light by which we see needs the flesh and blood of the body. Separating the senses, as I have done here, and examining sight and touch as if they were disconnected, has served the purpose of discerning the differences

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between them. This same pattern holds for scientific research into the senses, which have historically been studied in isolation. Now we must restore the connections. We must remember that the sensory systems, although often assigned to particular sensory organs, consist of more than those organs. The sensory sites connect through complex pathways to the spinal cord and the brain, and are embedded in the whole body. The deeply reciprocal complexities of sensory interactions, which work in many directions and in many dimensions, offer rich territory for scientists, psychologists, and artists to explore. Touch itself, in its sprawling, multileveled, untidy richness, reminds us that the senses are not discrete, separate functions.

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The Intelligent Hand

I slowly slide my hand over the surface, feeling the mingled sensations of cool and smooth. It never occurred to me before that an artwork could have temperature. I reach further, following the lead of my fingers. I only know what lies under my hands. I come to an edge, then down to another edge, and another: they’re steps! My fingers slide down the steps the way I used to slide down stairs as a child. I wonder what material I’m touching. I make a light fist and knock my knuckle gently on the surface. I hear the resonant tone of wood, suggesting warm chestnut colors and a handmade quality. It feels silky under my fingers. Somebody spent a lot of time working these surfaces to make them so smooth.  For some reason I suddenly remember my other hand, which has not moved from its perch on the ledge above. Only one hand has been moving.  I rest my left hand on the sculpture and move my right. One is home base, the other the explorer. My hands measure the space between them, creating a palpable sense of the sculpture’s size and shape.

Touching art is a novel role for touch and for the hand. Touching is usually forbidden where art is publicly shown, a taboo that has been largely internalized. While most of our normal hand use is functional and unconscious—grazing the surface of the world, manipulating things, and wielding tools—in exploring artworks, hands are liberated from their usual functions and able to be receptive and exploratory. They become conscious and aware. Their intelligence, range, and resourcefulness emerge. The hand is so central to touch that perceptual psychologist David Katz designates the hand as the organ of touch rather than the skin. Sometimes the organ of touch, he suggests, is both hands together, like binocular sight; two hands are able to read the shapes and spaces between them. Katz calls the hand, or hands, the tactile sense organ for many reasons. The hand is versatile, enabling it to make many kinds of grasping movements and take many shapes. The hand is equivalent to the other discrete, unitary sense

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Figure 2.1  Hands travel over layers of smooth wood to explore the many levels, openings, and passages. Natural History, 1998, Wood, stone, steel, 70 × 52 × 44 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © Ellen Augarten.

organs (eyes, ears, tongue, and nose). A close connection exists between tactile activity and mental activity. The hand, in spite of gaps between the fingers, integrates stimuli, so a surface is read as continuous and unified. We form memory images so rich and specific in touching with the hand that we could then tactually recognize the object with other parts of the body that are less sensitive. Finally, he notes that a tactile memory image can be more potent than a visual one (Katz, 1989, 4–5). The hands’ sensitivity, structure, and movement range make them the most versatile and articulate of instruments for expression, manipulation, communication, creation, and sensing. Hands contain infinite possibilities for haptic exploration, with their extraordinary mobility and subtlety of articulation. Ordinarily, fingers work together as a single-touch organ, yet each finger can operate somewhat independently of the others in moving, pressing, lifting, and touching. The length of the fingers produces a range of sensation: running fingertips over stone gives one kind of impression, a different impression occurs with the fingers’ length upon the surface, and a different one again when pressing down so fingers and palm meet the stone as a whole. The first two fingers of the hand beyond the thumb are used for fine manipulation, direction, flexibility, guiding, and searching. They connect

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through the wrist bones to the radius, the bone on the inner side of the forearm. The two smaller fingers function for strength and support and connect to the ulna, the outer bone of the forearm. When the hand rotates on the wrist, the radius rotates around the ulna, so that hand motion includes arm motion. The fingers themselves actually contain no muscles, which would render them too bulky and unwieldy. Muscles in the palm and forearm direct their astonishing strength, speed, and agility. Complex lacings of tendons connect fingers to their distant muscles like marionettes on strings. The hands are global in structure and function, everything curving as if to hold a sphere; to flatten the hand requires effort by muscles on its back. This natural spherical shape makes the hands spatially keen. The many small joints provide a range of mobility, allowing the hand to conform itself to an object to a remarkable degree. The hand can swivel in a full hemisphere at the wrist. Add hinged movement at the elbow, three-dimensional rotation at the shoulder, a floating shoulder blade, and a flexible spine, and we have an extraordinarily versatile means for gathering information and engaging with the world. The complementary use of hands described at the beginning of the chapter— one resting and one active—is related to handedness, the strong preference for the use of the same hand in a variety of tasks. Although our bodies look symmetrical left to right, we have marked differences between left and right sides in coordination of hands, acuity of eyes, flexibility of joints, capacity of lungs, distribution of organs, and dominance of one arm, leg, or eye. Different functions are located in the two hemispheres of the brain, and the opposite hemisphere controls each side of the body; the right hemisphere controls the left hand, and the left hemisphere, the right hand. The asymmetry most familiar to us is the dominance of one hand. Handedness or lateralization is a uniquely human trait. The benefit of handedness is that the more that movements are repeated, the more fluid and precise those movements become, making them faster and more accurate. The French psychologist Yves Guiard conceived of the two hands as a working partnership in a division of labor, interacting and complementing each other’s action. They partner in a dance of cooperation, one tending to finer manipulative skills and the other to larger supportive motions. The dominant hand usually uses smaller, faster movements than the other hand, which moves more slowly in a larger range. The nondominant hand usually frames the movement of the dominant hand, adapting to situations and determining the spatial context in which the skilled movement occurs, even before the action of the other hand. In chopping carrots, one hand works the knife in a small range of swift motions

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while the other feeds the carrot into the blade. In sewing, the nondominant hand positions and orients the fabric for the active hand. In throwing a ball, the other hand and arm counterbalance the active hand and arm (Guiard, 1987). Left and right hands each have their own mind and qualities and extend to the whole left and right sides. My left side has always felt more sensitive and creative, while my right feels more active and down-to-earth. As a left-hander and an artist, I identify more with the qualities of the left. When I was learning left from right as a child, I would imagine myself standing at the intersection of two roads near my rural home. If I turned right, I could see my house on the hill, representing predictability, safety, and familiarity. If I turned left, the road dove into fields and woods—wild, limitless, and mysterious. I was drawn to the left but needed the support of the right, a complementarity that carries through into the actual use of my left and right hands. I draw, write, and do fine work with my left while I carry buckets, wood, and groceries with my right. My left hand is the diamond-cutter, with finer, more precise manipulative abilities. My right hand is the workhorse, stronger and less refined. The sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who worked largely in stone, spoke of her hands in a similar division of labor: My left hand is my thinking hand. The right is only a motor hand. This holds the hammer. The left hand, the thinking hand, must be relaxed, sensitive. The rhythms of thought pass through the fingers and grip of this hand into the stone. It is also a listening hand. It listens for the basic weaknesses or flaws in the stone, for the possibility or immanence of fractures. (Hepworth, 1978, 79)

Hepworth’s description of the touch of her left hand—her thinking, listening hand—is a clue to artists’ and artisans’ haptic connection to their work. Touch can function on a continuum between forceful, willful, and directive and sensitive, relaxed, and responsive. Each mode has its use, and the art lies in knowing how to modulate one’s touch along that continuum. Frank Wilson is a neurologist who has worked with the hands of writers, musicians, and athletes, not just as parts, but integrated into the whole bodymind. His book The Hand examines the evolution and role of the hand in shaping the brain, language, and culture. The relationship between hand and brain, Wilson says, is a two-way evolutionary exchange. He finds it unfortunate that current theories of cognition and behavior find little value in the powers of the hand, whether in the evolution of our species or in the lives of individuals. He laments that the highly trained, creative hand remains almost entirely ignored in neurology.

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The hand is so widely represented in the brain, the hand’s neurological and biomechanical elements are so prone to spontaneous interaction and reorganization, and the motivations and efforts which give rise to individual use of the hand are so deeply and widely rooted, that we must admit we are trying to explain a basic imperative of human life. (Wilson, 1998, 10)

Wilson aims to inject into theories of brain, mind, language, and human behavior the grounding, driving reality of action by the hand. Ignoring the hand’s contribution to intelligence is dependent upon a wider ignorance of the body and its intelligence. In addition to the story of human evolution, Wilson recounts the life stories of individuals who live by the skills of their hands, such as jeweler, juggler, surgeon, chef, auto mechanic, and crane operator. He traces each person’s development and the role of manual, tactile, kinesthetic dexterity in shaping their careers and their passions. He finds that their stories reveal associations between the use of one’s hands and an emotional connection with one’s inner life. He finds that developing motor skills stimulates development of cognitive skills. He believes we have hardwired instinctual strategies for tactile skills, but it takes years to finely tune these abilities. In the wake of publishing his book on the hand, Wilson heard about odd disabilities showing up in young people now entering the workforce. Although bright and well educated, strange gaps are appearing in their perceptual abilities: engineers who cannot visualize spatial problems, surgeons who lack dexterity, doctors missing the knack for palpating; auto mechanics cannot find young men who tinker with cars. He speculates that as children, they spent much of their time stationed at computers and televisions; they have grown up without the intense sensory education children have always gained by collecting stones or bugs, taking things apart, making puppets, building forts, painting, and carving. Their toys are now fully designed, their pastimes visual, their lives scheduled, their environs indoors, and the computer profoundly shapes their body-minds and their capacity for inquiring, responsive touch. Many artists refine their haptic abilities over the course of many years, just as Wilson describes. They learn to trust and follow the intelligence of their hands. They cultivate fluid connections between the use of their hands and their inner lives. Such skills are learned in the doing, not in the abstract. Given the links between hand and brain, between hand use and cognition, between hand skills and a relationship to one’s inner life, artists embody the wisdom we need to recover our lost haptic abilities. Art making of all kinds for all ages is more

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necessary than ever to teach the intelligence of the hand, which stimulates the intelligence of mind and heart. I came to learn about the hand firsthand and by accident. While rafting on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, entering one of the rapids, my boat plunged into a huge wave that broke over the raft, wrenched my hand from a rope, and severely dislocated the third finger of my left hand. I finished the trip with my hand wrapped. Once home, surgery restored the torn tendons, ligaments, and joint. When cast and pin were removed weeks later, every finger had its own recovery to effect. The scarring and swelling that immobilized my hand prevented movement and blocked sensation. The numb, scar-bound finger hungered for feeling of any kind, even pain. I sought to restore sensation and movement in the recalcitrant joints, degree by degree, balancing the intensely focused, contractive efforts of hand therapy with bodywork that treated the whole body, restoring the connective flow of hand to body. This little finger injury turned into a microcosm through which I could approach the structure and function of the hand, the workings of the body, and the mysteries of the body-mind. In the hand therapy clinic, I saw some of the terrible things that can happen to hands, and I also saw their amazing ability to recover function and structure. Having been so focused on the delicate, sensitive, aesthetic side of hands’ abilities, it was tonic for me to dwell temporarily in disabilities and to recover what I had taken for granted. As I delved further into the structure and function of the hand through sensitive manipulation and interpretation, the imaginative implications of these structures and functions began to unfold. I learned how important sensation is for a feeling of aliveness and ownership, let alone for action. I learned how each finger plays a unique role, contributing to the functioning of the whole hand. I learned how precise, swift, and powerful the fingers’ movements are. I learned that the hand works as a unit, depending upon the cooperative synergy of its many parts, and that an injury to a part is an injury to the whole. The stiff, unyielding finger rendered my hand awkward, unable to do many of the simplest things: dishwashing, opening a jar, hammering. My finger’s woodenness curtailed my ability to feel objects or to use them, compromising both motor and sensory abilities. I learned firsthand the seamless unity of sensing and action. I was impressed by my normal fingers’ ability to swivel, move side to side, inscribe circles, and move independently of each other—seemingly simple actions but now deeply appreciated by their absence. I was amazed that an injury to such a minor finger in the pantheon of the hand could have such a

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profound effect. I had lost ulnar opposition, the ability of the two outer fingers and the outer side of the hand to wrap around things and bed them in the palm. Although less celebrated than the opposable thumb, ulnar opposition proves to be crucial for integrating tools into the hand and allowing them to become extensions of the arm and body. To illustrate: if you wrap your fingers around a pencil lying across your palm, the pencil is at a right angle to your arm; if you wrap your fingers around a pencil embedded in your palm and parallel to your arm, you can feel the pencil as an extension of your arm. I learned that ligaments join and bundle together. Layers of connective tissue allow them to glide past each other rather than clump or fuse. Tendons, connecting bone to muscle, turn out to be sensitive structures, not just tough cables, as I found when the tendon in my hand would rebel at the strain of exercise and refuse to participate. Tendons can run in complex webs. The repaired tendon in my hand runs along the side of the finger and then wraps to the underside of the finger. There it joins a similar tendon from the other side of the finger, forming an X. The two then divide again to continue up the sides of the finger. Underneath their crossing, another tendon extends to the last bone of the finger. These exquisite weavings allow independent movement of each joint and finger as well as unified movement. The combination renders every move synergistic, a team effort, whether one part is holding back or joining in. After my injury, I was forced to use my right hand for unfamiliar actions. A dialogue ensued between my two hands, the left teaching the right how to perform new functions and the right teaching the left how to recover old ones. My nervous system had to forge new connections to direct the right hand in fine motor tasks. I learned how subtle yet global in effect hand movements could be, both for physical mobility and for mental agility. Since my thinking hand had been injured, my thinking was impaired. My entire body image was disrupted. I ran my hand into doorframes, my feet misstepped. My sense of self was wounded. I felt disoriented and depressed. As my hand recovered its lost abilities, I also recovered my sense of definition. When I regained even the tiny ability to bend the outermost joint of the injured finger, I felt more articulate in my movements and even in my self-image. As I slowly regained motion and sensation, I discovered the expressive, qualitative character of the hand and its parts. The fingers of the hand are like a dance company, each member offering different possibilities for choreography. The joints are not so much mechanical hinges as the nexus for subtle forces moving in several directions. The delicate end of the finger is like an antenna,

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the base of the finger like the root of a plant. The palm provides wholeness, integrating the multiplicity of fingers. The hand can envelop, embrace, and surround. It can be receptive like a bowl or a nest. Hands can ward off, push, and strike. They can come together in the abdication of will called prayer; palm to palm, hands cannot strike or grip. The hand can be the tail of an action made by the arm, or it can initiate and lead a gesture. All these and many more minds and qualities operate in the simple touch and movement of a hand. French philosopher Michel Serres describes the poetic capacity of the hand: The hand is no longer a hand when it has taken hold of the hammer, it is the hammer itself, it is no longer a hammer, it flies transparent between the hammer and the nail, it disappears and dissolves, my own hand has long since taken flight in writing…. Our hand … can make itself into a pincer, it can be a fist and hammer, cupped palm and goblet, tentacle and suction cup, claw and soft touch. So what is a hand? It is not an organ, it is a faculty, a capacity for doing, for becoming claw or paw, weapon or compendium. It is a naked faculty. (Serres, 2016, 30, 34–35)

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke describes the complexity of the hand in writing about the sculptured hands of Rodin: Hands are a complicated organism, a delta in which much life from distant sources flows together and is poured into the great stream of action. Hands have a history of their own, they have indeed, their own civilization, their special beauty; we grant them the right to have their own development, their own wishes, feelings, moods and occupations. (Rilke, 2004, 45)

The irony of a haptic sculptor suffering a hand injury was not lost on me. I had always believed my impulse that to make tactile art was an effort to forge a stronger connection between my inner life and the world around me. An inveterate introvert, I sensed this injury provided an opportunity to create a more open passageway between me and the world. I felt like a hermit crab being coaxed to come out of my shell. I became fascinated by the reciprocity of my therapists’ hands working on my hand. Like the Escher image of two hands drawing each other, we worked together in mutual give and take, each of us providing and receiving feedback, creating loops of interaction that spiraled toward wholeness. Entire conversations, arguments, debates, lectures, songs, and stories took place without a word, through the touch of hand on hand. In the beginning, my physical therapist worked gently with my finger to restore ease of motion. One day, he moved my whole hand and arm in an

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Figure 2.2  The hand-carved forms signify different aspects of touch: the sense of touch itself, the act of touching, being touched, the capacity of touch to heal and soothe, and making a sculpture through touch. Rafael, 2001, Alabaster, wood, 7 × 10 × 8 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

exploratory way. As my arm rose and fell, I was suddenly back in the boat on the river, re-experiencing the moment of injury. This small movement altered the entire project. I could see there was more to rehabilitation than mere physical repair and more to it than the hand. For many months, I spent time each week moving alone in my studio, allowing my inner impulses and sensations to lead the movement, just as the therapist had followed my body’s lead. I slowly worked my way from hand and arm into shoulder, back, heart, lungs, pelvis, and legs. I explored the terrain of sensations, images, and blank places in my body, investigated the associations and connections that arose, and wrote poems to articulate my experiences. I would take my discoveries back to him and he would deepen, heal, and extend them. I discovered to my complete surprise that my task was not to move outward, as I had thought, but rather to move deeper into my body, to inhabit it more fully. I first grasped this sense of inhabitation while exploring my visual perception. By letting my vision sink back into my eyes rather than reaching out toward what I see, I realized that I usually extend my consciousness out to the world through my sight, whether in empathy, identification, appreciation, or curiosity. This excursion can leave me feeling stranded, without a sense of home. My

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perceptual habit has been to operate as a disembodied eye. Shifting to a more embodied way of looking, I find myself occupying a solid place in the world rather than floating through it. Everything becomes more palpable and threedimensional. Perception is specific and detailed rather than generalized and abstract. Space becomes tangible. Patterns and connections emerge. By more fully inhabiting and sensing the interior of my body, I gain greater access to the proprioceptive awareness of the spatial dimensions of my body and all its parts. This unconscious spatial acuity is then projected onto the world around me, generating a fuller, more three-dimensional reading of the environment. When I extended this insight into my kinesthetic, proprioceptive perception, I found I focus my awareness in my hands, which serve, like my eyes, as antennae—preceding, initiating, and directing my actions. I use my hands the way I use my eyes, as if disembodied. This disconnection makes me vulnerable to being buffeted by forces like the wave that broke my finger. Operating in my periphery, rather than in my core, distances me from my emotions and from the intuitive wisdom of gut and heart. From my new, inhabited core, my hand turns out not to be peripheral at all. My hands are not the outer reaches of my body. They are channels through which my body sees and acts, a medium that participates in both body and world. Hands form a joint with the world. When I touch something or grasp a tool, I temporarily become joined or hinged to that which I touch, in a relationship of mutual leverage. The incredible range and ingenuity of the hand allow me to adapt to things, interact with them, and use them in complicated, subtle ways. Like joints, hands are sites of interaction and creativity. They can also be sites of vulnerability and disconnection. By experiencing disconnection through injury, I grasped the hand’s desire for connection. As I gained more dimensions in my body-mind, my artwork deepened— physically and emotionally. Distinct layers and planes gave way to intersecting forces. Hidden interiors revealed themselves. Materials multiplied and began to include those with potential for movement, such as rope, string, and cloth. I discovered rawhide as a medium that proved to be visceral, mobile, and alive. A series of sculptures emerged, called Pandora’s Box, which explored the tensions between stasis and movement, inside and outside, flat and multidimensional. I had the intuition that something powerful had been released from the box and would never return.

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I continue exploring the sculpture, now moving both hands down around the outside. This surface feels grittier, rougher than the wood. I especially like touching a different texture with each hand and then reversing hands to see how my sense of smooth and rough shifts. I reach around the sides with both arms and encompass the whole sculpture. It’s rectangular, like a house. The image of a building is taking shape in my mind. The walls are not flat, as expected, but step inward. Suddenly my hand slips through an opening in the wall. A surprise. This is like a doorway. How much expectations live in my fingers, especially about where things will begin and end. At first when I enter a hole, I assume there is nothing beyond. It’s scary to reach further. I move inside the opening, feeling the insides of the walls. They’re softer than the outside, yielding slightly when I press. Outside and inside feel utterly different. I find the soft interior so comforting. The outside is tough, satisfying. As I reach further inside, I find the ceiling has the same soft texture. I discover an opening in another wall (this time from the inside), which leads out again. This place is very mysterious. The openings lead inward, lead outward, lead inward. My hands, one outside and one inside, sense each other through the wall, measuring its thickness. I discover that where the wall is recessed on the outside it pushes into the interior on the inside: they’re two sides of the same shape. Inside and outside are no longer separate realities but two aspects of the same form. My working hypothesis about the sculpture is changing, becoming at once both more complex and more transparent. I’m constructing an image, but it keeps changing with each new discovery. My hand slides along the floor and suddenly drops into another recess, a cavity in the floor. I thought the floor defined the bottom of the piece, but it too yields unexpected dimensions. My movements lead me into discovery after discovery.

Exploring the sculpture with eyes closed and allowing her movements to lead her into discovery after discovery, this woman’s journey was a microcosm of my

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movement explorations during rehabilitation from the hand injury. Following the thread of inquiry through movement proved to be central to my evolving understanding of touch. I was following my body’s lead, not knowing where it would take me. The investigation of the sense of touch was no longer on the skin or at the surface. It deepened into the whole body in motion, a knowing by the entire body. Exploring a sculpture through touch without sight is a journey into the unknown. Movement is the vehicle for the journey. Movement is the very heart of touch. Touch engages a feedback loop of sensation: as we touch, we move, feeling new sensations that lead to new movements and new sensations. As light is the medium for seeing and sound the medium for hearing, movement is the medium for touching. Just as light is essential for us to see, movement is essential to sense through touch. A dancer observes: It becomes a dance because I have to move to touch. I knew this already, but I’m very surprised to feel it so strongly, the partnering of these two.

When we rest our hands motionless on an object, what we feel and know is very limited. Before long, we stop registering any sensations at all. When the hand remains passive while being touched by a moving object, we may sense a bit more, but we have little or no feeling for form. We gather more information, and impressions register more vividly when hands actively move over and around an object. Tactile sensations on the surface of the skin merge with kinesthetic sensations inside the body. Tactile information and kinesthetic information fuse. As our hands move and adapt themselves to the changing surfaces, we feel the shifting positions of fingers, hands, and limbs; through those sensations we feel the form of the object in the shape of our movements. Touching a sculpture translates its shape into a kind of dance. Touching a sculpture translates form into motion. Our motions translate it back into form in the body-mind. Body-mind therapist Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen considers movement the first perception in human development. Within the fetus in the womb, the vestibular nerves, which perceive and help organize movement throughout the body, are early to myelinate, building the protective sheath that allows passage of electrical impulses. This finding, she suggests, indicates that perception of movement is a key function, even before the development of special senses (which have discrete sensory organs) of taste, smell, hearing, and sight. This earliest perception establishes the baseline for all perception and underlies the development of the

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other senses. To the traditional five senses, then, she would add the awareness of moving or being moved: kinesthesia. We know we are moving, where and how we move, whether and how we touch, or how an object is shaped, through the firing of the kinesthetic receptors located in and around the joints and the muscles. Kinesthetic nerves record the spatial trajectory of movements, telling us where body parts are in space as well as communicating the qualities of those movements—such as smooth, hesitant, swift, jerky, slow, or tense. This ability to discern qualities through kinesthesia contributes profoundly to the aesthetic possibilities of haptic perception. Movement not only deciphers form but it also generates meaning. A perceiver plumbs the expressive potential of the simplest movement: I moved my hand all the way across the wooden surface; it felt as if it went on forever, as far as I could reach my arm.

Her hand and arm traverse a space only two feet across, but it feels immense since she cannot see where her hand is going. Every unknown inch is tracked by her moving body rather than instantly mapped by seeing the whole. Meeting no

Figure 3.1  These paired doors, one an antique Indian window, the other sleek steel, can be moved into various combinations of open and closed. Limen, 2007, Wood, steel, copper, epoxy resin, 20 × 21 × 37 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

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barrier, the movement of her hand seems unlimited. By moving, she develops a spatial sense of the sculpture’s dimensions. She knows the sculpture with her muscles, joints, and sinews. She knows the measure, shape, and gesture of the piece from inside herself, which in turn makes her feel as if she is inside the sculpture. An art lover I met, who had lost his sight late in life, would touch artworks whenever possible. He found his previous knowledge of art superficial compared with his new perceptions: Now I know these sculptures in my bones.

Movement produces action in the world, and as such we seem to be outwardly directed and oriented, but movement is also a deeply internal process and perception. At the deepest level, sensations of movement confirm my sense of self. I know I exist. I know some of the terms of my existence by proprioceptive, kinesthetic sensations providing feedback about my state of being, usually below conscious awareness. Bodyworker Dean Juhan writes in Job’s Body, “All movements flood the nervous system with sensations regarding the structures and functions of the body. Movement is the unifying bond between the mind and the body, and sensations the substance of that bond” (Juhan, 1987, xxv). The mind knows itself through sensations generated in the body. In A Leg to Stand On, neurologist Oliver Sacks calls the process by which the body knows and confirms itself the “sixth sense.” This constant, subtle flow of information on which we base our sense of presence and reality is largely a function of motion. Sacks learned firsthand about this sixth sense when he experienced an injury in a hiking accident that severed the major nerve innervating his leg. Following surgery, he was left with no feeling or movement in his injured leg. Worse, he had no sense of connection with his limb. It remained a horrifyingly inert object somehow attached to him. I had a mercifully brief experience of this feeling following surgery on my hand. In postoperative recovery, the anesthetic I had been given in my left shoulder was still in effect; my arm, heavy in its new cast, slipped off the bed, but I was unaware of its errancy until I looked over and saw it dangling. I had to haul it back up with the other arm. Having no sensation of life or motion, it seemed to have nothing to do with me. The lack of neuronal connection prevented not only the ability to move but also the proprioceptive feedback provided by the motion and sensation that normally creates the sense of a connected whole. Because kinesthesia produces sensations deep within the body, movement has the potential to draw attention to the inner dimensions of being.

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I could feel sensations deep inside my body as I touched.

Whether on an unconscious, subliminal level or in the full light of attention, our perception of these sensations continuously operates to provide us with a sense of who we are and how we are at any given moment as well as over time. A large part of our identity derives from our movement habits and patterns. Movements become habitual and patterned for greater efficiency and economy. They stabilize our sense of self. To explore new movements is to possibly disrupt habits and to potentially expand our sense of self. Not only does motion generate a sense of self and a sense of reality but it also reveals the nature of that self and the qualities of that reality. We may feel our breathing as deep or shallow, agitated or calm; feel running as fluid floating or compressive strain; feel the whole body as light, tense, heavy, or graceful. Awareness of our movements gives us some choice in how we move, allowing us to change the ways we move, whether to explore different qualities, accomplish something in a different way, or generate a different sense of self. By paying attention, we may take pleasure in feeling the qualities of our movements and enriching our sense of being. Perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson considered the senses as systems rather than discreet, separate sensory modes or channels. The senses consist of nerve centers at various levels in the body, up to and including the brain. They are interrelated rather than mutually exclusive. They are active rather than passive. The haptic system is a multilayered, multivalent network extending from the surface of the skin deep into the interior of the body, spanning many functions: contact with the surroundings, movements of muscle and bone, balance in gravity, sensing temperature, self-generated sensations of emotions such as the shiver of fear or the pressure of anger, the flow of chemical neurotransmitters linking all the systems, and pain and pleasure. These are the somatic senses, which provide information about the nature, status, and ongoing life of our bodies and ourselves (Gibson, 1966). Science writers Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee assert in The Body Has a Mind of Its Own that the somatic senses are “the mind’s true foundation. All your other senses are merely added on conveniences in comparison.” They describe vision as “a hanger-on, a humble symbiote” within the more fundamental body sense. Movement shapes the maps, the mapping process, and the sensory systems’ ability to decipher incoming information. They write, “If an animal is exposed to high-quality information but only as a passive observer, its brain will never learn what any of that visual information is supposed to mean” (Blakeslee and Blakeslee, 2007).

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Built into the nervous system is the ability to know where a sensation occurs in the body. A map of the body lies in the somatosensory cortex, a strip an inch or so wide behind the center of the brain. Body sensation, including proprioception, pain, and temperature, appears there. The sensory nerves on and within the skin have spatial relationships with each other that are transferred to the somatosensory cortex. The same fiber arrangement holds for the motor nerves, which end in the motor cortex just in front of the sensory cortex. These miniature maps of the body are linked to each other. Parallel circuits link my sensing hand to my moving hand. However, the maps in the cortex do not correspond to the body we see in the mirror. The varied densities and sensitivities of the nerves produce remarkably different maps of the body, with proportionately large areas of the brain devoted to the sensory input of the hands and mouth; hands possess greater sensitivity and produce more subtle and complex sensations that capture more of our attention than do other areas of the body. These maps are malleable and can change according to use. We are continually redrawing maps of the self on our skin, in our bodies, and in our brains. Body maps can expand and contract. We include in our body map the area within arm’s reach, called peripersonal space, to encompass things we are touching or even could potentially touch. Our body maps enlarge to include this surrounding space and even our potential to act in that space. This kind of mapping becomes most vivid for a person with visual limitations who is walking with a cane or a guide dog; one’s body seems to extend to the tip of the dog’s nose. When I approach a sculpture within arm’s reach so that I could touch it, or when I actually touch it, the sculpture temporarily becomes part of my body map, part of me. Movement, then, is a way of knowing. Cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner describes three ways of knowing: iconic, symbolic, and enactive. Iconic knowledge consists of visual images, diagrams, and illustrations. Symbolic knowledge consists of languages, words, and mathematical symbols. Enactive knowledge comes through action, motor skills, and the perceptionaction loop—knowledge acquired by doing, moving, and acting. This kind of knowing is multimodal and interactive. Enaction raises bodily, sensory ways of knowing to a status equal to the more accepted symbolic and iconic ways. Enaction confirms the natural integration of the body into the experience of life and art. Knowing is not a mental construction inside the head. Knowing is embodied. Knowing is embedded in an environment. Knowing extends beyond the skin. Knowing is enacted through action (Bruner, 1967, 44).

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Neurologists have discovered mirror neurons, neurons in the brain that fire for motion when one is not moving but simply watching someone else in motion. These firings occur in patterns that mime the movement being watched, but we “perform” the action only neurologically, not muscularly. We also have the capacity to feel sensations we see someone else undergoing and to feel the emotions visible in others. We can even read intention in motions. One of the discoverers of mirror neurons, Dr. Giacomo Rizolatti, says, “Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.” We do not yet know how these neural systems work in the experience of visual art, but common sense and experience tell us we have the ability to feel into and to empathize in profound ways in the aesthetic experience (Blakeslee, 2006, 1). Perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim proposes in his book Visual Thinking that even thinking is kinesthetic. When we think, he says, mental visual images of varying degrees of abstraction are part of the thinking process. The mental images we use in thinking are not mimetic, detailed representations of things but vague, imprecise hints and flashes, usually below awareness. Mental imagery tends to reduce things or situations to their essential features, emphasizing only what matters. This economy allows the mind to think swiftly in terms of patterns and forces. These abstract, nonmimetic shapes may be difficult to track in the mind. To make them more visible, Arnheim points to the gestures people make in conversation. Gestures are a form of thinking in action. Gestures are usually highly abstract, emphasizing only one or two qualities or dimensions, such as size, force, or direction. One can indicate how fast and which way someone went with a sweep of the arm. The properties of physical objects and actions are effortlessly applied to nonphysical ones: the same gesture one uses to indicate the size of a fish can indicate the degree of surprise, the clash of opinions is expressed as the collision of hands. This spontaneous use of metaphor demonstrates that people are naturally aware of the structural resemblance uniting physical and non-physical objects and events: one must go further and assert that the perceptual qualities of shape and motion are present in the very act of thinking depicted by the gestures and are in fact the medium in which thinking takes place. These perceptual qualities are not necessarily visual or only visual. In gestures the kinesthetic experiences of pushing, pulling, advancing, obstructing are likely to play an important part. (Arnheim, 1969, 118)

We can portray a movement quality through our hand gestures—soar, creep, climb—without any representation of what is moving. This gestural, embodied

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language is part of our natural way of thinking. We are used to expressing our thoughts in highly abstract, kinetic terms through gesture, through simple sketches on a blackboard, or, as Arnheim suggests, through the making of art. This aesthetic element is present in all visual accounts attempted by human beings: such necessary qualities as order, clarity, correspondence of meaning and form, dynamic expression of forces.… The meaning … of form patterns in art resides entirely in the perceptual forces they convey … these forces cannot be represented directly by pictures or other physical objects; they can only be evoked by them … perceptual forces come about in the nervous system, not in the picture as an object of the outer world. [my emphasis] (Arnheim, 1969, 134)

Art is an extension and elaboration of our natural use of these elements of order, clarity, meaning in form, and expression of forces in our thinking processes. Art is a way of thinking. This suggests that abstract art is not a departure from reality as we know it but an extension of what we are already doing all the time. This notion came home to me while playing with my two-year-old granddaughter with a wooden rainbow made of six separate, hemispherical arcs, one for each color, about two inches wide; the arcs could be stacked onto each other to make a rainbow, or they could be played with separately. The child set the largest arc upside down so it rocked like a cradle, then put the smallest arc inside it, also upside down, and pronounced “Mama. Baby.” I was used to relatively abstract forms in children’s drawings, but this was the first time I had seen abstraction in three dimensions—in this case, she was representing the pattern of protection and containment within the mother–child relationship. Her actions made abstraction a natural perceptual act. Arnheim describes how we arrive at understanding through a dynamic process. In his words, we experience the challenge, the productive confusion, the promising leads, the partial solutions, the disturbing contradictions, the flash appearance of a stable solution whose adequacy is self-evident, the structural changes brought about by the pressure of changing total situations, the resemblance discovered among different patterns … and when the solution has been found, there is a sense of dis-tension, of pleasure, of rest. (Arnheim, 1969, 76–77)

His description of the dynamic quality of perception holds true for any of the senses. But haptic perception is so much more accessible to our awareness that we can actually track these processes; people touching my sculptures report encountering such challenges, productive confusions, promising leads, partial

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solutions, contradictions, sudden resolutions, and changing conditions. Haptic perception consists of this dynamic evolution. Haptic investigation of art exploits the kinetic dimensions of our gestural vocabulary and our thinking process. Coming to know a sculpture through touch is embodied thinking. We are asking questions of the object and finding answers. The question “How big is it?” we answer with the reach of arms or hands. “What shape is it?” we know through the movement, formation, and spatial experience of arms and hands. “What textures does it have?” is answered by sensations in fingers, hands, and the speed or ease of their motion. “What does this mean?” we discover by trying different movement patterns. I thought the suede parts were snaky and squiggly, but it was my fingers that went back and forth, making me think what I was touching was snaky.

Watching a basketball game or dance performance, you can feel yourself assisting a shot for the basket or the lift of a dancer, even though you sit still. Neck and back contract while watching a weightlifter strain; bodies tense on seeing a circus performer walk the high wire. The body often responds by slightly miming the movement we watch. Such subliminal muscular activities are concentrated, reduced versions of the larger movements that occur at the level of normal body motions; kinesthetic memory tells us how to replay these motions. This kind of response is more enacted than the neurological miming of mirror neurons, which fire in the patterns of the motions we are watching. Hans and Shulamith Kreitler suggest that these mimetic, empathic responses can occur in response to situations that do not involve actual movement, such as a painting or a sculpture. If people are asked why they like a certain form or line in a work of art, they often describe the quality of movement it suggests. A Mark Rothko painting may evoke quiet presence. The bold slashes of a Franz Kline painting excite or disturb in their sudden change of direction. The lines in Joan Miró’s surreal landscapes feel sinuous and slow, and a fat, fuzzy line seems slower than a thin, wiry one. This empathic animation of art is called dynamization: we project or feel at a subliminal level the kinesthetic sensations associated with the shape, direction, or quality of forms that are depicting movement or that invite the eye and mind to trace their path. Human animation is shared with the so-called inanimate. A dynamized form is felt to be more alive, more active. Dynamization increases sensitivity to the tensions and resolutions in an artwork. It focuses attention on the emotional and personal meanings of a work of art. Dynamization is central to the experience of art.

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William Fagg writes in his book In Search of Meaning in African Art that tribal cultures conceive objects as four-dimensional, the fourth dimension being the life force: “Matter is only the vehicle, or the outward and visible expression, of energy or life force. Thus it is energy and not matter, dynamics and not static being, which is the true nature of things” (Fagg, 1967). In our culture, we live far from this energetic, animate sense of things. Yet we maintain the potential for it in the unconscious practice of dynamization. Touching an artwork and knowing it through movement may give people access to a more dynamic, energized sense of art and, by extension, of the world. As one woman wrote after touching my sculptures, “Inanimate” objects—HA!

Haptic perception builds on and contributes to a dynamized relationship with things. When we look at a sculpture—usually moving around it, looking above, below, and inside—we feel the qualities of movement suggested by the sculpture. In turn, our sense of motion is projected onto the sculpture; as we move, it gains more dimensions, both visually and kinesthetically. When we move our hands around a sculpture to touch it—bending, reaching, stroking—dynamization becomes embodied and magnified. The motions become more conscious and more accessible. Works of art are constellations of forces and vectors; we feel these forces and vectors more vividly through the direction, quality, and force of our motions. As we move our hands, we may imagine the hands’ gestures representing the whole body moving. We can project the whole from a part. When my hand moves down descending levels in a sculpture, I have the impression that my entire being descends, accompanied by all the sensations, associations, emotions, and memories attending that motion. It was like swimming in a lake, not knowing what was on the bottom. I wanted to jump in the water again and again. Stumbling on unexpected openings, I imagined my whole body moving through them.

When a woman’s hand entered a deep hole, her whole body seemed to fall: My hand went in and I was falling, falling, and I wondered, can I stay with this?

Some people feel and imagine their hands as creatures, equating the intelligence, autonomy, and liveliness of hands to those of animals: When my hands accidentally hit each other, it’s like two animals meeting in surprise.

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Inspired by the reptilian motion of her hand, a woman assumed the role of a snake: First I thought it was a labyrinth. Then I was a snake in completely dark, underground, earthen tunnels. Then I found another opening and I was two snakes. My whole body was going through it in snake motion.

People’s hands or bodies may even become transformed into nonhuman, nonanimal elements, such as wind or water: I imagined water had poured over the surface a long time and my hands became water.

Identification in the art experience is one of the ways we temporarily resonate with an artwork. We feel as if its dynamics, forms, and contents occur inside us. We can identify with an entire work of art, parts of it, qualities within it, or images triggered by it. In a sandstone figure of a Cambodian goddess, the simplified forms of the goddess’s body offer unbroken surfaces soothing to the hand, eye, and mind, and we may assume the calming qualities of clarity and balance. Given the nature of the sculpture, identification with these qualities is the point. The message of ease and centeredness communicated by the figure is directed not only to the mind and imagination but also to the body. Identification is closely related to dynamization in its assumption of forces and qualities. These complex responses of body and mind are nothing less than empathy. And empathy is both the seed and the fruit of art. We more easily identify with what resembles ourselves—sculpture that represents the human figure or has shapes and surfaces with biomorphic qualities—but we can also identify with things not human. What Henry Moore says about shapes could be applied to any shapes and volumes: “He [the sculptor] identifies himself with its center of gravity, its mass, its weight.” One of my sculptures contains a soft leather panel suspended horizontally by ropes, like a splayed body. Just above the leather hangs a large, flat, horizontal stone in rope slings. Some people report the heavy stone suspended above the leather feels dangerous, since they identify with the leather and feel threatened by the stone slab above. Identification and dynamization can take place at several scales, both physically and imaginatively, animating us as well as the sculptural forms. At the most subtle level, dynamization occurs as mirror neurons firing in empathetic or imagined motion. At another level, it takes the form of unconscious or subliminal muscular responses. At the level of active touch, our movements can feel as if they

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are resonating with forces or qualities in the sculpture. At another scale, we can feel as if our hands represent the whole body moving through or around it. At yet another scale, our motions may suggest larger forces, such as wind or water. At each scale, the same equation applies; we relate our movements at one scale to movements at another. As Arnheim reminds us, the kinetic forms and patterns are what matter, not the exact size or shape of those forces. In identifying with something, whether it is human or nonhuman, we can take on new or unfamiliar qualities. By engaging empathically, we may temporarily assume those qualities, finding them pleasurable, useful, disturbing, or challenging. We can try on— indeed we are called to try on—unfamiliar qualities, images, or roles in the safety and privacy of the special container that art provides. Patterns of sensorimotor experience play a crucial role in what we think and how we think. Long before I began to explore the differences between sight and touch in my artwork, I became curious about the different feelings generated by horizontal and vertical elements in art. The two orientations have different qualities and produce different feelings. Working in handmade paper at the time, I tacked a thick, eight-foot-long sheet of handmade paper on the wall and then laid another equally long sheet of paper on the floor. I wanted to see how the pair would read together. I perceived the sheet on the wall as a window, as a painting, as a visual space. The one on the floor looked like an object, a tangible, physical thing more than a visual event. I was fascinated by these perceptual differences. To learn more, I led a workshop in which people drew full-body self-portraits. First they drew the upper half of their bodies on paper taped to the wall. Then they lay down and observed how their bodies felt in the horizontal position. Next they sat up and drew the lower half of their bodies on the same paper, now on the floor. When everyone put their drawings up, the differences between the upper and lower halves of the bodies were striking. The drawings of the upper half of the body were more precise, structured, and linear. The drawings of the lower half were more colorful, emotive, amorphous, and flowing. I ascribed these differences to the states of mind evoked by the artists being vertical or horizontal. When I stand, I feel gravity run through my bones, which counteract its pull. I am aware of my structure. I feel all the endless, tiny adjustments required to remain vertical. I can move in any direction. I can defend or extend myself. My eyes can scan the surroundings. Being vertical is distinctly human. Lying down, gravity pulls everywhere equally. I can relax into the floor. Motions occur around a horizontal axis. I cannot see much. I am vulnerable. I am closer to sleep, dreams, and the unconscious. I am closer to animal and to earth. The mind of verticality seems to include structure, orientation, clarity, and extension

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into space—qualities that relate to visuality. Horizontal consciousness seems more inward, intimate, unstructured, and emotional—qualities related to hapticity. When we look at art, every horizontal and vertical element draws on this fundamental somatic knowing, imbuing those elements with qualities we know in our bodies, however unconsciously. Movements we make while exploring a sculpture connect with these basic somatic directions or orientations: horizontal/vertical, up/down, forward/back, left/right, within/without, surface/depth, and diagonal, each direction evoking specific qualities and feelings. Movement of the hands close to the vertical axis gives us a more centered, restrained feeling than the expansive gesture of arms moving in a wide horizontal motion; we sense directional movement of hands and arms in relation to the center of our bodies. If our arms rise or descend, we recognize the meaning of up; if we reach down, below. A tactile sculpture can include several of these spatial patterns, emphasize one, or create contrast or tension between patterns. These directional motions carry metaphoric, psychological, even spiritual meanings. The haptic artist can, to varying degrees, choreograph people’s motions to evoke such qualities and feelings. Surprise is a strong element in haptic perception without sight. When I cannot see the whole or know where I am going, I am more likely to be surprised,

Figure 3.2  Movement is implied in the twisted rawhide, in the figure itself, and in the spiraling copper tubing. Danae, 2009, Rawhide, copper, 16 × 36 × 14 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

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frightened, or delighted by the unexpected. Flat surfaces make the encounter with a curve unexpectedly refreshing. A sharp edge makes me proceed with caution. Some people make a swift survey of the whole so they know the lay of the land before committing to a more detailed, prolonged exploration. One way to approach a sculpture haptically is to pay attention to the sensations rather than attempting to create an image—sensing rather than mapping. Sensing may serve as a welcome respite from efforts to decipher or map the sculpture. At some point it changed from wanting a picture of the whole to just being with it.

A woman went through an exhibition of my sculptures blindfolded, enjoying her sensations rather than creating visual images. When she opened her eyes to look, she realized she had entirely ignored the forms and structures. She went back, with eyes closed, to explore each sculpture again, this time reading the forms. She was delighted to discover she could learn to grasp the shapes at the same time as she enjoyed the sensations. She was able to hold both impressions simultaneously. I have come to realize that movements themselves, rather than the thinking mind, often direct the action of making art. The generative, expressive quality of motion is most visible in painting or drawing, where a gesture leaves its trace on paper or canvas and the perceiver resonates with that motion. Some sculpture reveals the physical, gestural mark of its making, such as the hand’s action in carving wood or stone or in molding clay. In making my sculpture, I use ordinary, functional kinds of movements that are not expressive in themselves, but do determine an artwork’s direction and ultimate effect. Folding, cutting, shaping, hanging, building, hammering, drilling: these motions may not be charged with meaning or imagination, but they are nevertheless driven by the overall intention of curiosity, exploration, and manifestation of internal impulses. I have come to trust my body’s movements as a means of making artistic choices. I believe the heart of the creative process lies in trusting the impulse, the vaguely felt sense, the inchoate desire, or the intuition that impels me to pick up the camera, make a mark, unroll a roll of paper, choose a fabric, screw on a piece of wood, remove a layer—all the myriad actions one takes in making an artwork, with all the myriad degrees of intention. When I find myself stuck, uncertain, or confused, motion itself offers a path forward. As I handle a material, try something out, or move around to see from different perspectives, the sensorimotor feedback loop is set in motion. Curiosity and discovery ensue, and one thing leads to another. Action mobilizes the bodymind, however casually, experimentally, or impulsively. Indeed, often the

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more freely the gesture is made, the more unplanned the action, the more peripheral the intention, the more likely I will slip into unknown territory, circumventing caution, entrenched habit, and unexamined perceptions. Like Arnheim’s description of thinking—“the challenge, the productive confusion, the promising leads, the partial solutions, the disturbing contradictions”— this fitful, generative process is embodied and manifested in movements and choices I make in the studio. We can see and feel movements of the body. Movements of the mind are less visible and less palpable, yet movements of the body and the mind are intimately related. Mind and body work seamlessly with constant feedback and feedforward to make cognitive, haptic, emotional sense of things. Sometimes, we can trace the subtle, invisible movements of the mind by observing the more visible movements of the body. Bonnie Cohen says, Our body moves as our mind moves. The qualities of any movement are a manifestation of how mind is expressing through the body at that moment. Changes in movement qualities indicate that the mind has shifted focus in the body… We find that movement can be a way to observe the expression of mind through the body, and it can also be a way to effect changes in the body-mind relationship. (Cohen, 1993, 1)

She is referring to the therapeutic use of movement to add new information to the body and mind of an individual by introducing new patterns of movement. These new patterns are intended to offer more positive, constructive, economic, powerful, or graceful alternatives to habitual behaviors. Somatic therapies may focus primarily on the bodily aspect (the nervous, musculoskeletal, myofascial, or glandular systems) yet remain committed to the whole body-mind continuum. A practitioner of Feldenkrais, a somatic therapy, said, after touching my sculptures in an exhibition, If I had one of these sculptures in my waiting room, people could really arrive by being tactile and kinesthetic. Half my work would be done before they come into the session. It would bring people into their bodies, into themselves and into the present.

Jacques Lusseyran was a French philosopher who lost his sight as a young boy, but because he was infused with a spirit of inquiry and curiosity rather than self-pity, he discovered profound gifts in blindness. He writes, “I had completely lost the sight of my eyes; I could not see the light of the world any more. Yet the light was still there.” He speaks about his haptic way of knowing as informing the movement of his mind:

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Lusseyran alludes to the movement of the mind that underlies all physical movement—movement that takes the form of attention, interest, curiosity, desire, fear, intention, and intuition. The flow of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, memories, plans, images, observations, and ideas is a profound form of movement, with its own dynamics, laws, patterns, habits, limitations, and potential. This level of movement, as Lusseyran says, precedes and directs the physical motion of seeing and touching (Lusseyran, 1973, 24). Sometimes, when I watched people touch my sculptures blindfolded, I felt as if I were seeing more than I should see, as if I were peering into their minds and personalities, which became so visible in their haptic explorations. Granted, this was a novel, challenging situation—touching art without sight—but the qualities and direction of their physical motions often suggested qualities of mind and heart: curious, bold, exploratory, expansive, hesitant, careful, repetitive, limited, timid, focused, dreamy, or immersed. In an experiment with a group of artists who are also meditators, I asked them to describe the structure and dynamics of their meditation practice (rather than the contents or intention). Then I asked how those conditions relate to their art practice. Each person was surprised to discover that both practices used similar imagery, space, gesture, intention, and style of inquiry. It makes perfect sense that the way one meditates (regardless of the technique or tradition) is similar to the way one makes artwork. How one thinks is how one makes work. How one feels is how one makes work. How one moves is how one makes work. How one inhabits the body is how one makes work.

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I’ve shifted scale in my imagination. I’m no longer a person in a museum looking at a sculpture. I’m moving around inside the world of it. Like Alice in Wonderland, I seem able to change size. My hand embodies my whole being. Walking around on the upper surface or “roof ” of the sculpture feels like walking around a city. Suddenly my hand drops through an opening. How startling. The ground fell away. There is a certain visual field of darkness with the blindfold. Then I find an opening, and as soon as my hand falls in, the visual field suddenly goes much blacker, from charcoal gray to velvet black. My body is just becoming comfortable with the new environment when suddenly my hand falls into a hole. I become scared, like a child in a strange place, lost without a sense of direction. I find myself using all of my senses to get my body out of the dark unknown. A sense of accomplishment comes over me when I reach the surface again. Without the boundaries and the scale established by sight, I’m more responsive to my imagination’s supply of imagery and association. It’s as if I’m on the outside and I find a secret passage, or a trapdoor opens. A labyrinth. The other sculptures weren’t hiding anything, but this one has secrets, hiding things in the deep, dark recesses. It makes me go deeper. I continue moving around the sculpture, now chancing upon places I’ve been before. I remember the smooth wooden steps. This opening on the outside leads into the interior. I realize the doorways in the cityscape are the skylights in the interior. My mental picture, which was fluid and mutable, is becoming more solid. A growing chain of separate landmarks gradually takes shape as a complete image in my mind. Fewer and fewer gaps remain. I investigate each gap to fill it in. I build a tactile image of the whole. The more I touch it the more it takes shape in my head. At first I leave one side and it isn’t there anymore, but as I keep touching, the other side begins to exist when I leave it. The permanence of the object. My mind creates what I am touching. I have, like the artist, created it with my own hands.

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The successive, unfolding nature of haptic perception without sight makes the creation of a coherent mental image a complex process. People using touch alone make sense of a sculpture in different ways. Some people begin by swiftly traversing the entire piece, gathering an impression of the whole before investigating in detail. Some people begin wherever their hands first touch the piece, then move from that spot, gradually building a sense of the whole. Some establish a home base to which they repeatedly return. Some leave one hand in place while the other explores. Some map it in a rigorous, methodical way. Some wander. Sometimes we make assumptions about a sculpture on the basis of feeling a part, projecting the whole from a detail. As we discover new information, we integrate it into the image we are building. The initial image can powerfully shape the following perceptions so they remain congruent with that first image, however procrustean the fit. A woman who is blind had an image of industrial machinery on first touching a sculpture. She interpreted everything she encountered after that in terms of machinery, metal casings, and levers. Another woman exploring the same sculpture had the impression of trees, so

Figure 4.1  This is the sculpture represented in the accounts at the beginning of the first six chapters. Exterior bronze walls and wooden roof step inward to invite tactile exploration of the interior, made of contrasting soft leather and paper. House, 1993, Bronze, wood, leather, handmade paper, 8 × 25 × 17 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

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all the sensory information that followed yielded imagery of a forest: moss, tree trunks, and limbs. If new information conflicts with the image with which we began, we have to revise that image or create a new one. We may generate several successive images, each one distinct in memory even as they evolve. A man exploring House believed it to be a solid cube; when he discovered the openings and hollow interior, he had to shift his understanding and create a different image with different qualities. Yet he still had vivid recall of the earlier image. He had created two different sculptures, both of which he could hold in memory. I had lots of very different pictures in my hands, more than with my eyes.

Some people allow the images that arise to remain fluid, morphing as new dimensions appear. Even after the formation of a complete image, some people are open to a different image triggered by someone’s comments or that appear later in their mind’s eye. The ambiguous, multivalent nature of art allows the layering of imagery in these complex ways. That tactile images generated without sight are strikingly different from what people see with their eyes led me to wonder about the nature of the mental visual images we generate while touching without sight. Are they different from visual images, and, if so, in what ways? How do we create mental images through touch? First, I had to learn how we create visual images through sight. We tend to think of haptic perception as providing a direct experience of the thing itself. The nerves receive stimuli such as the heat of a pan, the weight of a stone, the sharpness of a knife, which we assume give us a direct experience of the thing itself. But perception is far more subjective and inventive than we imagine. When scientists probed into the brain, they found that the signals from the world were surprisingly few compared to those we supply ourselves. Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande writes about this theory of perception: But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture.… The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture and meaning.… Perception is inference. (Gawande, 2008, 63)

This finding has profound implications for our understanding of all perception, but especially perception of art, which invites us to supply subjectivity and meaning.

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We create mental images all the time. According to research described by Stephen Kosslyn, mental visual images may be formed in several ways: we can recall a previously seen object or event, combine familiar objects or parts of objects in new ways, or create mental images we have never seen. Visual imaging is an integral part of imagining, remembering, and sensing. In each case, Kosslyn maintains, the same processes are involved as in visual perception. High-level visual perception and visual imaging use the same pathways in the brain. Kosslyn describes what occurs during visual perception. Stimuli are filtered through various systems in the brain that read objects and spatial relations. They then come together in associative memory, where new information is compared with stored information to find a match between what we are seeing and what we have seen in the past. If one of these representations is powerful enough, other representations are suppressed. This process repeats until the object is recognized. During normal perception, this process lies below awareness (Kosslyn, 1994). Sometimes what we see fails to provide enough information or is degraded or partial. It may be seen out of the corner of the eye, seen quickly, or seen in an altered state such as panic or euphoria. In an attempt to determine what we saw, an image is summoned from associative memory that may not match what was actually there. That conjured image may then seem to be what we saw, contributing something other than the reality. This misperception is notoriously implicated in crime scenes, where a hand is mistaken for a gun. Arnheim discovered from his perceptual studies that “memory images serve to identify, interpret, and supplement perception. No neat borderline separates a purely perceptual image—if such there is—from one completed by memory or one not directly perceived at all but supplied entirely from memory residues” (Arnheim, 1969, 84). We may not know whether something is actually seen or is an image supplied by memory. Once the pattern of activity in the brain is triggered, it is processed in the same way whether that pattern comes from what we see or from memory. However, mental imagery does differ from perception: mental images fade rapidly, while percepts last as long as we look; mental images are malleable, fluid, transformable—we can control and alter images by rotating, expanding, distorting, and changing them—but we cannot do that to what we see in the world; and, finally, the contents of imagery are not limited to what we know of the world. We have other ways to tell the differences between perception and image. Perception involves fast, automatic processes, while imagery uses slower, more controlled processes. During perception, we shift our attention to focus

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on different aspects of something, but moving attention to different parts of an image is not automatic. And the more difficult the imaging task, the more aware we are of controlling the process. People report a wide range of vividness and clarity in their mental images, from nonexistent to movie-like. Recent research explains this range and some of the experiential differences between visual perception and visual imaging. It also confirms the multisensory nature of visual perception. During visual perception, the rest of the sensory continuum interacts with and shapes the resulting visual experience. During mental imaging, the frontal cortex suppresses incoming stimuli from the other senses, allowing visual imaging to flower without distraction. The reduction of competing stimuli may be effective to varying degrees; fuller reduction allows a stronger visual image, while less reduction creates more sensory noise, competing with and obscuring the visual image (Kosslyn, 1994, 74). The representations in associative memory can be accessed by all the sensory systems. The images we create during haptic exploration of an object derive from haptic sensory stimuli. We draw on associative memory to match our haptic percept for identification, just as we do in visual perception. But touch reads forms, textures, and spaces differently than sight. Seeing is more concerned with identification, categorizing, and naming. Touch is less skillful and less concerned with that task. Most of us are not as proficient at identifying objects through touch, especially unfamiliar objects, as we are through sight since there is usually little need for this ability unless we are visually impaired. We generate images through touch that may not look exactly like what we see. Perceptions may well be partial or ambiguous. The perceptual input may not be clear enough to find an easy match in memory, so the images we draw from memory contribute considerably more than what we take in. But because we spend time and effort to generate these mental images of what we touch and because they seem concrete in nature, these images remain vivid and robust even when they blatantly contradict what our eyes tell us. Another theory that may explain the differences between haptic and visual perception is based on how we visualize movement. We create traces or records of our motions as we make them, which we can compare with an image of the intended motion or with previous motion, allowing us to correct errors in movement. These records remain separate from the activity of moving and from the sensory information generated by the movement. Sensations of movements update and correct this central representation. What this means for haptic perception is that we have a very sophisticated system in place for reading haptic

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information. As we touch, we move, and, as we move, we generate representations of our movements that allow us to track, decipher, and discriminate spatial shapes with great acuity. The images we create of an object as we touch it fuse with and are informed by the images we generate of our motions. When engaging with art, we are free to play with the processes of perception. Rather than suppressing associated memories that fail to fit perfectly, we let them flower into conscious awareness. Rather than settling on a single summative identification, we allow multiple meanings and interpretations and let those interpretations guide what we discover. Rather than fixing on an image, we delight in letting it assume many roles: a line that borders a field of color may be seen as a boundary defining that field, or as the boundary for a neighboring field, or as an independent line. By playing with these perceptual processes, we learn how much we contribute to perception. We become more flexible perceivers. We deepen our perceptual abilities. The haptic images created by people who live with visual limitations seem to be different from the haptic images created by people who are sighted. The degree, length, and nature of the blindness and the intentions of the person determine the quality of those images. My colleague Deidre, having been blind for years, insists she no longer has visual imagery in the way she used to and that her tactile imagery is kinesthetic. Oliver Sacks discovered that the range of visual imaging in people with visual impairments could vary dramatically, from no imagery, as John Hull reports, to highly detailed, vivid imagery. Sighted people also bring to the haptic encounter of sculpture (while blindfolded) a range of visualizing abilities and intentions. The clarity and completeness of mental images vary enormously. Some people are content with a vague sense of shape, size, and position, while others work assiduously to construct a detailed picture, trying to relate parts to the whole, locate transitions, identify materials, or memorize relationships. Some images are partial or emphasize one area, quality, or material. The images may be confused, jumbled, or contradictory. The images may shift, change, and transform. Yet the visual images generated by touching while blindfolded seem objective and real to the person touching. My colleagues and I were sometimes able to observe people using primarily one of two kinds of intention while touching, which we call mapping and sensing. Usually, people would use a blend of the two. Mapping creates a mental picture of the sculpture by deciphering forms, relations, and structures without paying much attention to the sensations. Sensing is feeling sensations for their own sake, without regard for form or image. Mapping turns one’s concentration to deciphering the object at hand, while sensing attends to one’s internal experience. Sometimes

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it was evident to us when someone was sensing, such as when a woman stood touching a patch of leather for several minutes, clearly absorbed in her sensations. Going more slowly across a surface gives a much different feeling.

Sometimes it was clear when someone was mapping by the way he moved back and forth between parts in the apparent attempt to make them connect. We were curious about the nature of mental images and image-making in haptic perception. People reported two kinds of mental images. The first is images of the sculptures themselves, formed in the mind by touching. When their eyes are closed, most people create mental images of the sculptures that can be quite vivid. They take these images to be faithful renditions of the object itself. When these touch-produced images prove to be different from the images created when they open their eyes, the mental visual image does not necessarily overpower the touch-formed image because the haptic image is fully formed first, without the input of sight. The two images exist as simultaneous and distinct. The second kind of mental imagery consists of associations, metaphors, and memories sparked by contact with the sculpture. People bring to the haptic encounter a lifetime of imagery stored in their memories. In the case of one of my sculptures, people had such varied associations as Labyrinth, theater, maze. Landscape, my hands wandering over streams, ground, hills. Canyons, mesas, arroyos, buttes, escarpments.

If a sculpture has an identifiable content, such as a human figure or animal, sometimes people who cannot see (whether visually impaired or blindfolded) are content to identify, name, and then cease exploring. The specific meaning created by the artwork may be lost within the abstract concept that overrides the particular expression. This happens in visual perception of art as well; identification of the objects depicted truncates further exploration of material and formal arrangements that give the artwork its unique meaning. When the perceptual habit of identifying and labeling occurs during an art experience, whether visual or tactile, we may fail to attend to specific conditions and miss the richness of multiple interpretations. When I first set out to make haptic art, I wanted to create as close a correspondence as possible between what people feel by touch and what they see by eye. I soon learned that such congruence is difficult, if not impossible: people are too varied in their individual responses for me to predict what they will find

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through touch. We do not yet collectively possess knowledge of haptic perception equal to the sophistication of our knowledge of how sight functions in art. The striking differences people often find between their visual and tactile experiences disrupt the monolithic feeling of reality. What we know with our hands comes to have an unsettled relationship to what we see. I moved from seeking correspondence to interest in cultivating the disjuncture between sight and touch. This gap offers a way to open up perception, to question sight, and to undermine certainty about the nature of things. During the summer of 2006, I was invited to present at the Eurohaptics conference in Paris, a gathering of people researching the mechanisms and applications of touch. It was there that Annie Luciani, research engineer of Ministry of Culture and Head of ICA Laboratory in Grenoble, let me try out a virtual haptic mechanism. By moving a ball-like joystick, I maneuvered virtual balls depicted on a computer screen. The sensory experience was one of elusiveness. I was holding a ball and feeling the contours of the other balls through its feedback mechanism; but being balls, they rolled away upon my virtual contact with them. This elusiveness extended to the balls themselves since there were no physical balls, just images on a screen and forces felt in my hand. In our conversation, Annie asked a rhetorical question that has remained with me: “What is an object?” I felt the same elusiveness when I engaged in two virtual simulations at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, where they conduct basic research into sight, touch, and perception. The first was an experiment designed by Marc Ernst that researches the integration of visual and haptic perception. My fingers were connected to a mechanism feeding forces to them that simulated the sensation of touching rectangular bars. I had the sensory experience of touching something with my hand that was not there. The second was a virtual experience now commonly available: wearing glasses with tiny screens that provided entire visual environments, I moved through a virtual room and a courtyard and crossed a plank over a deep pit. My queasy stomach and narrow steps showed how powerful the bodily response can be, even knowing that I was moving through an empty room. My work is an effort to bring people more in touch with the real world rather than the virtual one. Yet we can learn about perception from both forms of “reality.” Knowledge of an object is inextricably fused with our perception of it. I visited the Musée Quai Branly in Paris, an extraordinary collection of indigenous art from Oceania, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, which featured an exhibit titled Qu’est-ce qu’un corps? (What is a body?). Objects and sculptures

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from four different cultures (West Africa, New Guinea, Amazon, Christian/ secular West) revealed body images radically different from one another. The anthropologists who developed the exhibit wrote, There is no society where the body is treated as an individual, private thing. It is a communal thing on which one exercises a bit of sovereignty. The body is never seen as a closed entity, brute fact or finished organism. The body is constructed according to principles exterior to it that surround it. It is a social fabrication realized in establishing a relation with another. (Musée Quai Branly, 2006)

This exhibition asked the same question as “What is an object?” and found the same elusiveness and plasticity as an answer. The two questions merged in my mind. It may be easy to acknowledge the subjectivity involved in my awareness of my body, but it remains harder to acknowledge the subjectivity in my relationship with objects. I take objects to be independently existing, self-contained, and coherent. Yet I have learned that things are different when known through the sense of touch rather than sight. The mode of perception shapes the sense of how and what something is. Object independence and permanence are a perceptual feat. The world is elusive, shifting, and plastic. How can I say what an object is when different people have such different perceptions (not just interpretations) of it: when it seems different to my touch than when I look; when my own perceptions of it alter, change, and grow, even using one sensory system; when I cannot tell where my body ends and the object begins; or when an object feels alive and responsive? In considering this question, I found useful the idea of emergent phenomena, which describes how things can arise from the spontaneous self-organization of smaller things, such as ant colonies made of ants, ants made of cells, cells made of organelles, and so on. The perceptual implication is that although something might look like an object at one scale (an ant colony, an ant, a human being), at another scale it dissolves into smaller parts. This notion can be applied, at least metaphorically, to haptic perception: objects arise from the spontaneously selforganizing elements of perception—forces acting upon skin and body, nerves in skin and muscles, activity in the brain. Looking closely at haptic experience, it dissolves into its constituent elements—which allows development of the mechanisms of virtual touch. In the long span of history, artists have explored the nature of matter as intensely as physicists. The object has been reified, deified, dematerialized, deconstructed, reconstructed, abstracted, transformed, set in motion, allegorized, digitized, and virtualized. The body and the object are not what they

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seem to ordinary, functional perception. People touching my sculptures tell me that the object is not a solid, unitary thing. The nature of touch—slow, intimate, reciprocal, subjective, fusing figure and ground, occurring sequentially over time, at a scale we can follow—allows us to track our perceptual construction of the artwork. This same perceptual process can also lead to the dissolution of the object’s apparent solidity. What can be built can be unbuilt. Aesthetic touch gives us not only the object in a new way but also the very processes by which we create an object. Paradoxically, the sense that provides us with the greatest degree of connection with concrete reality also provides us with the means to deconstruct that reality—and to reconstruct it. Deconstruction, reconstruction, and reinvention—as well as construction, invention, and creativity—are the province of the imagination. Theories of imagination reflect the culture that spawns them. Philosopher Richard Kearney traces the history of various models of the imagination, from Hebraic, Hellenic, and medieval through transcendental, existentialist, and postmodernist, in The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture. He describes the modern imagination as valorizing individual creativity, but laments that postmodernism has led to the demise and denigration of the imagination. He sees the imagination today as lost in the dead end of parodic play and empty consumerist replication of images no longer grounded in sensuous reality. The current crisis of imagination is amplified by the uncertainty of truth in a climate where a plethora of media confuse facts and fiction in a fog of disinformation that leads people to distrust reality as well as, ironically, the imagination. The failure to honor the imagination’s rightful role in our lives causes the multiple dimensions of reality to flatten. Meaning disappears. He suggests that the next form of imagination to emerge will be more collective, relational, and inclusive of the other (Kearney, 1988). This is already happening in science, art, economics, psychology, and more, now spurred by the increasingly dire impacts of climate change, overpopulation, water scarcity, and species loss, forcing us to think and imagine in more ecological, global, and planetary terms. Touch, with its relational, mutual, reciprocal nature, could serve as a model or metaphor for the new emergent imagination. The root of the word imagination is image, suggesting that imagination is primarily the capacity to visualize, but we imagine and create images in every sensory mode. An image can be a passage of music, a muscular sensation, a whiff of spice, a gut feeling. The imagination is integral to sensory perception; it organizes and synthesizes what we perceive, often generating new linkages and new forms in the process. The very activity of perception is imaginative, creating connections where there were none. The perceptual act Kosslyn describes in

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visual perception—comparing new information to stored information—could be considered imaginative, even in ordinary perception. This process of linking new and old patterns potentially allows creative, imaginative connections. The imagination fuses the senses into a meaningful unity, both in what they perceive and in the way they are used. And when we imagine without sensory input, our senses are still active; the brain is processing sensorially. Imagination is a mode of thinking, a source of creativity, and a way to enrich sensuous reality, both to perceive it more fully and to create new possibilities. Touch, like the other senses, offers a way of imagining. The Czech surrealist artist and filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, in response to Communist censoring of his films, decided to turn in a radically different direction and spent seven years exploring the sense of touch during the 1970s. He set out to prove the existence of tactile memory and tactile imagination. He saw visual perception as being impoverished, drowning in the flood of commercial visual communications, and believed rich opportunities lay in the unsullied sense of touch: Firstly our touch, dulled by manual work, had to be dragged away from utilitarianism and returned to imaginative childhood experiences, to the discoveries of the original world … if, in today’s world, “art” has any purpose it is to liberate us … from the principle of reality … the sense of touch can play an important part, as so far it has not been discredited in “artistic endeavors.”

Švankmajer’s tactile experiments, tactile sculptures, and writing in Touching and Imagining highlight the potential of touch for aesthetic experience when freed from mundane use. He champions childhood experiences as sources of creativity, the erotic dimensions of touch, and the power of touch to reinvent and reinvigorate art perception and art making (Švankmajer, 2014). Writer David Abram invites his readers to return to the sensuous engagement that indigenous people enjoy: to explore the imagination as a means to connect with things beyond their appearances yet remaining embedded in the senses. He sees imagination as moving from the known to the unknown. He notes, in The Spell of the Sensuous, That which we call imagination is from the first an attribute of the senses themselves; imagination is not a separate mental faculty (as we so often assume) but is rather given, in order to make contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible. (Abram, 1996, 58)

Whether playing with the senses or discovering hidden dimensions through them, the imagination is a way of knowing that both informs and transforms

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our perceptions. This is the way of art. Works of art are highly concentrated acts of perception and imagination that reveal to us, among other things, the sheer power of the imagination to delight, disturb, and inform. Artworks show us ways to employ the imagination. They push the boundaries of what we know and even what we dare to explore. This holds true for haptic perception due to the subjectivity embedded in touch. When touching, especially without sight, we are released from literalism. The imagination is allowed to roam. Lacking the visual view to direct or limit, fewer boundaries circumscribe the freedom of the imagination. I imagined a never-ending maze of steps and boxes, and when I opened my eyes, I was truly surprised. My visual senses seemed to dilute my imagination. Although the object was pleasing to the eye, I was no longer free to let my mind wander and somehow create what was in front of me.

As her hands move along a groove, not knowing where or how it will end, it seems endless—the way an unfamiliar road seems longer than when it becomes familiar and no longer noticed. The imagination leaps into the space-time of not knowing, ready to elaborate, associate, and even invent scenarios. I felt isolated on a flat, cold plain that went on forever. As I slid my hands along it, they ran into things that seemed to rise up to frustrate me. The wooden inside was like heat trapped in this cold place. It made me so sad that it couldn’t go anywhere when it was turned over, closed in. This sculpture is the hardest to love, but the one that needs it the most.

Not only did this woman imagine herself as a character in a landscape with animate things, but she also had a strong emotional response to the situation she had just created and projected her feelings onto the sculpture itself. The creative nature of touch is clearly evident in this response. As David Katz observes, this creativity begins even at the perceptual level: Every ongoing tactile activity represents a production, a creation in the true sense of the word. When we touch we move our sensory areas voluntarily, we must move them … if the tactual properties of the objects are to remain available to us …. The tactual properties of our surroundings do not chatter at us like their colors; they remain mute until we make them speak. By our muscular activities we produce such properties as roughness and smoothness, and hardness and softness. We are truly the creators of these qualities. (Katz, 1989, 242)

People seem to understand this when they touch sculptures. They consider themselves as partners in the creative act.

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It’s more real because I made it. It’s mine. Seeing, we each think we see the same thing, but you cannot compare your experiences of touching.

Some people are clear that their exploratory perceptual process determines the nature of the object for them and that the primary locus of the encounter is in their experience, not in the sculpture. The dependency on seeing gave way to touch—and to inner creativity.

In a very real sense, each person creates the artwork in his or her own image. If several people were to describe accurately what they see or feel in an artwork, the images would be different from person to person. Everyone would notice different parts, make different connections, organize it into different configurations of form and meaning. Each person brings her personal, perceptual, and cultural history to bear on the encounter. In a dynamic interplay of object and self, we make our own sense of a thing by selecting what interests us and then integrating it with everything we already know. This is an act of perception and imagination. Memories underlie and shine through all the senses. People see, hear, and feel according to their character, past, and passions. All artworks are projective fields. Projection is the tendency to move feelings, desires, and fears outside of oneself and assign them to other people, the environment, or works of art. The commonest kind of projection is “attributed” projection: ascribing to others feelings and characteristics within oneself, like one who hates assuming that others hate him. “Complementary” projection is thinking others feel, think, or behave the same way we do. The traits given to the other person explain one’s own. Projection is a fundamental human activity but can cause untold problems, such as when we project qualities we lack or desire onto our partners and are disappointed when they fail to live them out. Projection can also be creative, as we project qualities into a story, materials, a landscape, or a work of art. Artworks are complex and multileveled, providing ample room for projections. They call for multiple ways of perceiving and understanding. Because much is implied rather than explicit in a good work of art, we must supplement the available information by using our experience to understand it, making us co-creators with the artist. The open-endedness of art allows us to project into the artwork, alerting us to qualities or feelings we may not discern in the normal flow of experience. Art allows us to project deeply into a domain that stands apart from daily interactions. We are not bound by the normal, the expected, or the known. We are free to explore ideas, feelings, and images not

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Figure 4.2  A vertical gate wrapped in suede leather sits at hand height, offering hands a place to explore and to rest. Anatomy, 1998, Wood, copper, leather, 54 × 34 × 58 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © Ellen Augarten.

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usually entertained. We can see ourselves reflected in art in ways we have never experienced before, in ways that give us back to ourselves enlarged and nuanced. People realize vividly that they have projected an image from their experience onto a sculpture when their haptic version differs from the visual. The act of projection becomes more evident when unmasked by these differences. Clears your mind of any binding preconceptions. Gets you in the mood for free expression. Removes pre-conceived notions of space and texture. The mind creates what you are touching. I projected all kinds of images.

The multileveled nature of art allows us to grasp an artwork with different orders of organization and meaning, orders that can be interconnected, autonomous, or even contradictory. These orders can complement, resonate, or fuse. We can shift points of view, exchange one frame of reference for another, and replace one kind of organization with another. We can hold an artwork on several levels simultaneously, perhaps trying to integrate them, perhaps not. We continually discover new relations and combine elements in new ways. The capacity of both artwork and perceiver to work on several levels at once and over time helps explain why haptic experience of an artwork can be different from or contradictory to the visual experience and yet contribute to a sense of the whole and to the transcendence of the perceiver. A visual work of art is a condensation or translation of experiences in other sensory modes. The whole sensory continuum informs the conception, making, and perception of a visual artwork. While looking at a work of art, we use sensory memories from the nonvisual senses. The ability to draw on haptic experience is especially critical to visual appreciation of art, since sight and movement are so thoroughly entwined in our sensory systems. When sight and touch are used together, under ordinary circumstances, sight dominates and touch supports. The objectivity and dominance of sight have convinced us there is a singular reality. However, when people separate the two senses by touching without seeing, they generate two distinctly different images of a sculpture, first by touching and then by looking. This disjuncture of impressions created by the two senses undermines the usual picture of reality, fragmenting its monolithic nature. Seeing never has the same authority after we realize that touching produces a different, equally interesting and valid sense of the object. Which is the “real” version? Both may be real and compelling, suggesting that reality is multiple and mutable and that it is, to a larger extent than we may have realized, a function of our mode of perception and of our personal

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consciousness. People grasp in a concrete way the inventive, imaginative nature of perception. They realize that reality is a function of the imagination. The imagination generates the capacity for identification with an artwork. We can imaginatively identify with a figure, with an element, or with qualities perceived in an artwork. For example, we might feel ourselves as tall and thin when touching a tall, thin sculpture, or spacious inside while exploring an interior space, or balanced when finding a symmetrical pattern. This sculpture makes me feel more organized, more coherent.

We can dynamize, projecting movement onto a sculpture that seems to have the potential for movement. Our sensory history underlies the experience of an artwork. A vast part of this sensory history is tactile, haptic, and kinesthetic. The somatic senses fuse what we know of our inner experience with what we find outside. They confirm and maintain a sense of ourselves. They make us aware of what is hidden from sight. The capacity of touch to connect inner and outer conditions, mind and body, self and world underlies our ability to make imaginative connections. Touch is the sensory system that, by its very nature, infuses—and fuses—multiple dimensions of our experience. The sense of touch is dynamic and subjective. To the eye, sculptures appear to be solid, static, and composed, but the person touching them supplies movement, vulnerability, and subjectivity. The words Rainer Maria Rilke used to describe Japanese poetry could also apply to the haptic experience: Le visible est pris d’une main sure, il est cueilli comme un fruit mur, mais il ne pese point, car a peine pose, il se voit force de signifier l’invisible. (The visible is taken by a sure hand, picked like a ripe fruit, but it weighs nothing because, as soon as taken, it is forced to signify the invisible.) (Winkelvoss, 2004, 211)

When we touch something, our sensations, impulses, intentions, associations, memories, and imagination fuse with our experience of the object, complicating and enriching it, drawing multiple dimensions of ourselves into one gesture. Touch is not only the most physical and corporeal of the senses, but it is also a gateway to the intangible and the invisible. You touch and it opens a new world, then you touch something else and there’s yet another world.

5

Time and Memory

Without the global gestalt of seeing to guide my progress, I’m surprised by each new bump, ridge or opening as I nose my way along. There is a strange immediacy to this experience, a complete focus on the world at my fingertips, a world that reveals itself only as my hands move. This gradual discovery of the sculpture is more like listening to a piece of music or watching a dance performance or movie. It unfolds in time and cannot be hurried or slid over. My body moves at its own pace. I relax into a more contemplative sense of time and a more aesthetic frame of mind. I realize I am taking a lot of time with the piece, more time than I spend with the average work of art. Not only that, but the piece takes on certain characteristics: depth, a sense of vastness, and as the unknown becomes known, I feel a sense of oneness with the piece.

Coming to know an artwork at the pace of the body rather than the eyes takes time—time to trace contours, discern textures, decipher forms, and absorb meanings. Touching in a thoughtful way may even take us out of time. Art critic Michael Brenson describes this dimension of aesthetic touch as the kind of touch that is only possible when the hand is unpressured; when it is free to move about and settle where it wants; when the authority of clock time stops and time as it is lived by body and matter take over. When the sculptural mass speaks to the hand and the hand listens to the mass, the current of communication between hand and sculpture can establish a connection so basic that it lives in that hand forever. (Brenson, 1995, 30)

Consider the time you spend looking at a painting. We usually encompass the whole in a swift glance, often in passing. The degree of engagement depends on our interest, knowledge, and the ability to enter its world. Time plays a larger role in haptic perception of art (especially when touching without sight) by necessity. One can pass a hand over a sculpture just as one’s glance can slide across a painting. But if invited to explore it haptically without sight, people usually become engaged and take far more time than usual. Muscular motion

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sets the pace. Time is needed to decipher, identify, explore, and make sense of it all. Time becomes palpable as one travels the surfaces, traces the contours, and discovers its nuances and secrets. First impressions yield to deeper probing. Reactions follow one another. Forces resolve. Questions are answered. An understanding of the whole arises. It takes time to organize and integrate haptic information and discern its meanings. Since perceptions are gathered successively, comprehension of the whole is built slowly and cumulatively. Most of us are not facile with touch as a means to know something as complex as a work of art; we need time for this way of perceiving. Yet taking time can bear fruit and allow integration. The amount of time required for this gradual unfolding of image and meaning calls for patience and persistence. The movement of hands and body around an object renders the equation of time and space concrete. Movement through space-time creates an experience that has depth and length. Just as one knows a stretch of road more intimately when walking than driving, touching expands both time and space beyond the swift compass of sight. As someone said after touching without sight: I never realized that one function of vision is to condense time and space.

Before people invented clocks, they noted the movement of stars, moon, and sun, the passage of the seasons, the evolution of a day. The experience of time is notation of change. Paying close attention to change seems to slow the sense of time. A fine-grained awareness notices minute changes, expanding and deepening what we take in. The more closely I watch a child’s growth, the more my sense of time feels continuous. When I see a child rarely and she is suddenly much taller, I wonder where the time has gone. I missed the slow, subtle changes. Tactile perception of artwork can provide a granular attention to details, textures, and changes in form as I move. Sight can work in the same gradual, cumulative way if I take the time. The question is whether I make the effort. Many people live in time and space as defined by computers, phones, and airplanes, all of which compress space and time. The advantages of such timeand-space-savers are considerable, but the costs remain high and hidden. Moving swiftly usually means ignoring sensory richness and internal responses. Cramming ever more tasks into ever-smaller units of time, we miss the whole passing show on the way to the airport. As the media, schools, business, and technology pressure us to move at a faster pace, our sense of time is further compromised by a shrinking attention span. We are trained to glean information from ever-shorter visual flashes. Ironically, as the speed of our lives increases, we feel we have less time.

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By slowing down, time expands, yielding a more spacious experience. Time  opens rather than constricts. Touching my sculpture without sight, people  perceive more slowly by virtue of the time needed to explore it. Touching  calls for a kind of attention often more meticulous and careful than  we use when looking. Touching can be absorbing in its intensity, complexity, and novelty, altering perception not only of the sculpture, but also of time. I liked the gradual unfolding of each piece through touch; even after fifteen minutes I was still discovering new things.

A slower pace can be refreshing for people, especially in contrast to their normal speed. Very meditative and soothing. I found my mind to be very quiet, not thinking or interpreting what I felt. Feeling this artwork helps the busy-ness drop away. Time opens.

Figure 5.1  The multiple layers of the sculpture invite people to take time to explore underneath and inside. Elegy 5, 1996, Steel, stone, leather, rope, gauze, 52 × 32 × 52 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © Ellen Augarten.

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Perception of art has always been a function of time. Music, theater, dance, film, and story unfold in a precise structuring of time. Visual artworks can be appreciated in a time of one’s own making. Yet the quality and nature of the aesthetic experience are often closely related to the length of time spent with the artwork. The more time I spend, the more rewards I reap. Time is not just an objective reality, like the march of seconds on a clock or the parade of days or years on a calendar. Time is also a subjective experience, with varied and changeable qualities. One way to see inside this aspect of time most clearly is to hear people describe the different kinds of time by which different people live. Time is experienced in a particular way by people who are visually impaired, as it often is by people who live with other kinds of disabilities. It takes so much more time for people with certain disabilities to accomplish things that time itself seems different, not just in quantity but in nature. John Hull, who wrote about his initiation into blindness, describes his new experience of time as a blind man: Sighted people can bend time. You force time to your will …. For me, as a blind person, time is simply the medium of my activities …. I am simply unable to hurry … perhaps all severe disabilities lead to a decrease in space and an increase in time.… Time against which you have previously fought becomes simply the stream of consciousness within which you act. Modern technology seeks to expand human space and compress human time.… The disabled person finds that space is contracted and time is expanded. It is because of the spacetime coordinates within which the blind person lives that his life becomes gradually different from the lives of sighted people, particularly in a time of high technology. (Hull, 1997, 78)

This notion of time as a medium proves tremendously useful. Like any medium, it can lead us toward something or serve as an impediment or barrier. Like any medium, its nature shapes our experience of its content. We usually assume that the importance of an activity lies in its content, but the quality of time involved deeply influences the meaning. Compare a quick bath to a lengthy one. The ability to alter the sense of time is a function of our state of mind. Although we often feel at the mercy of clock and calendar time and struggle against its constraints, we have some control over the way we experience time. We know too well time’s propensity to drag or to speed up, depending on circumstances and our state of being. Time does fly when you are having fun and expand when you concentrate. Time is malleable. One of the pleasures of art is the way the quality and shape of time may be altered by the encounter. As in any highly absorbing experience, time can seem suspended, enlarged, or opened. The rest of the world falls away. Normal functions retreat. Different aspects of our being emerge that are not subjugated

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by the ordinary passage of time. One of the profound pleasures of art is this suspension of the normal sense of time, allowing different qualities of time to emerge. Another pleasure is the collateral knowledge that we can shape time. The music of time is rhythm. As polyrhythmic creatures, our bodies respond naturally to rhythm. We live within the self-generated rhythms of walking, running, dancing, speaking, chewing, breathing, blood pulse, craniosacral pulse, peristalsis, brain waves, and many more. The body’s rhythms seep into the experience of touch. Some people move their hands or bodies rhythmically when touching sculpture. Different parts of the sculptures call for different haptic rhythms. People’s movements often use repetition, alternation, and pattern—the elements of rhythm. I never thought about rhythm in art. I got a sense of rhythm, moving my hands in time.

In the body, time is marked by the rhythms of tension and ease, excitation and relaxation. Tension and relief comprise a deep biological pattern: heartbeat, breathing, muscle contraction and release, activity and rest. Hans and Shulamith Kreitler suggest that works of art activate tension and relief. People approach a work of art carrying their own internal tensions, whether specific or diffuse. The tensions in the composition, content, and materials of the artwork trigger these specific or residual tensions, then absorb and combine with them. As the tensions in the artwork are resolved within the artwork, relief can also occur for one’s diffuse, preexisting tensions, or sometimes for specific conflicts related to those in the artworks. Much of the power of art lies in the resolution of forces and tensions within the artwork as well as the resolution of those tensions we carry within us, whether conscious or unconscious, temporary or enduring (Kreitler and Kreitler, 1972, 21). Tensions in an artwork may affect us physically as well as psychologically. In the haptic experience of art, tension and relief are felt and expressed in the body, not only through empathy with the tensions in the artwork, but also through kinesthetic sensations. The movement of hands on a surface could be conceived as tension, and the simultaneous sensation as relief. Tension is transformed into relief when my hands move into the unknown and find something interesting, when I feel a familiar sensation, when I travel along a passage and come to an end, when I cannot decipher a shape and finally make sense of it, when random elements suddenly connect with each other. The process of understanding a sculpture through touch produces a considerably delayed resolution because it takes time to create a unified sense of the whole. If we look while we touch, or look after

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touching, tension may lie in the differences between what we see and what we feel. Relief or resolution occurs when we integrate the haptic sensations and the visual image or when we come to terms with the differences between them, thus resolving or transcending the conflict. Artworks should be complex enough to evoke tensions in many people. If the tensions are too narrow, too simple, or too little, the experience is less engaging. Pleasure may be enhanced by a delay between tension and relief. The more complex and demanding the artwork, the more time is needed to resolve its tensions and the more rewarding the relief of resolution. Sculptures often offer the paradox of a moment in time forever frozen, creating tremendous tension between an image of change and the impossibility of change. In Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble Apollo and Daphne, he carved Daphne at the instant when, in terrified flight from Apollo, she turns into a tree mid-stride. Bernini’s sculpture represents dynamics and qualities we feel in our bodies. We activate the sense of time through the extended, embedded, timerich experience of our bodies, which are somatic and erotic, conveying by their very nature an experience of change, transmutation, and growth, along with the accompanying shadows of decay and death. The element of time is integral to another dimension of art: the process of making. A work of art is the result of an artist’s intense, physical interactions with materials, processes, and tools; exposure to other works of art, images, history, culture, and ideas; and interactions with personal images, feelings, memories, sensations, and intuitions. The interactions can be filled with struggle, longing, confusion, ambition, fear, joy, and passion. This unruly, complex, and often extended process of making becomes compressed in the end into a singular, completed artwork. An artwork is a time capsule, embodying and reflecting the time absorbed in its making. It contains everything that took place during that time, visible or not, conscious or not. Just as it takes time for an artist to create an artwork, the perceiver needs time to unravel and integrate its complexities and ambiguities in another act of creation. The time-dependent haptic experience echoes, however faintly or abbreviated, the lengthy process the artist underwent. People who touch sculpture often comment that they feel like the artist as they slowly recreate the sculpture for themselves. This is like being the artist.

Some artists intentionally play with the element of time, referring to the passage of time or the effects of time in the very nature, content, or process of their work. By making artworks that have a clearly finite life, that change with time, or that

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play out a narrative in time, artists explore notions of mortality, change, time, and memory. In his sculptural paintings, artist Mark Bradford builds deep layers of found posters, billboards, beauty stylist endpapers, rope, cloth, wood, paint, and cardboard, resembling the accumulation of time, memory, and detritus, which he then excavates, cuts, sands, peels, and polishes, revealing the layering, evoking his sensuous and tactile process, and offering concrete evidence of time passing and time past. From Jean Tinguely’s early experiments with mechanized sculptures that selfdestruct, to Marcel Duchamp’s pleasure with the accidentally broken glass of his The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, to sculptures that incorporate rusting steel, melting ice, growing grass, or decaying meat, many artists have intentionally played with fast or slow changes in the artwork itself. Some changes mean the demise of the artwork. Some changes, as in a garden, lead to the fruition of the artist’s vision. Haptic art raises questions about art’s permanence and inviolability. When making art to be touched by many hands, the artist must be willing to embrace the element of change—the face of time. The normal effects wrought by years of light, humidity, chemistry, and handling are speeded up and amplified in haptic art. The touch of hands erodes surfaces, deposits oils, and corrodes materials. These changes may actually be intentional and welcome, projected and planned. A photographer made images of Cambodian women’s faces intentionally pale and faint, wanting the touch of people’s hands to darken them over time, bringing them into being. Materials may be chosen that make visible the impress of hands and the effects of touching, such as clay, wax, or plaster. The patina that develops from wear and the passage of time can be pleasing in this day of indestructible, impermeable surfaces and throwaway things. Intimations of vulnerability and mortality lurk in the seasonings of wear. The Japanese have a deep cultural appreciation for things that have aged visibly, an appreciation embedded in the complex aesthetic, spiritual, and philosophical concept of impermanence and imperfection called wabi-sabi. The closest parallel in the West is the legacy of romanticism, which finds beauty in ruins, fragments, and the processes of nature. The sense of time passing, of decay and its intimations of mortality, is evoked by eroded, worn, softened surfaces. In the way they use materials, many artworks made today play with notions of age and time passing: aged or weathered wood, corroded metals, or traces of paint that suggest the effects of wear. It would be fun to experience these artworks after years on exhibit, worn like medieval cathedral steps. So I thought of time and aging as I touched these sculptures.

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If this effect is deliberately sought, the results of prolonged touching and wear should be considered in terms of the overall meaning of the artwork. A marble river god residing in the Minnesota State Capitol building reclines with his legs sprawled before him toward the passers-by. Many people in passing have affectionately touched the foot extended in their direction, polishing the surface until it glows. The rest of the statue loses its intended impact in the shadow of this prominent polished foot, a case of tactile effects contradicting the artist’s intention. Another solution to the changes wrought by extensive touching is to make parts that can be replaced when worn or damaged. We now take replaceability for granted; after all, even many human body parts are replaceable. To subvert the preciousness of art, Duchamp played with the notion of replaceability, which has become another means at an artist’s disposal. Multiples, copies, and appropriations are common. Assemblages, which include items made for other purposes, have also become commonplace. Replacement of parts as an aesthetic strategy has possibilities and implications yet to be explored. What happens when parts of clearly different ages coexist within an artwork? What about replacing a part not with an exact copy of the first, but with a different version? What would it mean for an artwork to evolve in this way? These questions are central and compelling to the evolution of architectural artworks. Conservators of contemporary art face unprecedented challenges in preserving artworks made of ephemeral materials such as cardboard and latex, which age naturally and destructively. The very goal of preservation reveals a fraught relationship with time. Wear and tear on objects has had a primarily negative connotation in the Western art world. The whole industry of art conservation has developed in an effort to minimize, reduce, or reverse as much as possible the effects of time. Museums are dedicated to the preservation and conservation of objects, and seek to remove them from the flux and contingencies of life as well as to exhibit them without jeopardizing their condition. Environments that control temperature, light, and humidity maintain surrounding conditions to be as stable and unobtrusive as possible. The museum mandate to conserve artworks has created notions of the artwork itself as inviolate, untouchable—purely visual. The allusions to wear and the passage of time evident in many artworks today are in part a reaction to this inviolability. Many artworks are made deliberately to reveal the degrading effects of season, weather, and time. Andy Goldsworthy creates delicate, ephemeral works in the landscape from fragile materials such as leaves, ice, petals, twigs, and wool that melt, topple, decay, and vanish. A wall in a gallery was covered with porcelain

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clay that gradually dried, shrank, cracked, crumbled, and peeled off the wall over the weeks of the exhibition. Another attitude is represented by the nkisi figures in the historical Kingdom of Kongo. These were containers for medicines and houses for spirits that treat illness, protect health, hunt down witches, do harm, and seal agreements. Medicine bundles are tied to these figures, which are often caked with dirt and blood. People drive nails and blades into them to arouse the forces within to action. The nails become traces of the forceful impact and evidence of the powerful contract between figure and user. The figures are animated by spirits from the dead. People have ongoing, intense interactions with them that cross psychic realms, physical space, and time. Memory creates a vivid sense of time by generating a unified flow of experience as each moment is related to the previous moment and to past experiences. Memories of past experiences form a foundation for the way we perceive, think, and analyze. According to memory researcher Daniel Schacter in Searching for Memory, memories are not fixed patterns but a creative process. A stored memory is not an image but a pattern of brain activity, which may be activated by a cue in the present that resembles a pattern from the past. Information from the present is combined with patterns stored from the past, and the resulting mixture of the two is what we remember. Each time we remember something, such as a favorite painting, it becomes colored by the cue and the circumstances of recall, so the next time we remember that painting it has become slightly different. Remembering it may be triggered by many things, such as an object; another painting; a color, pattern, or shape; a feeling, sensation, or movement; a smell, sound, or taste. The remembered painting has now been subtly affected by the cue. It is also affected by the surrounding conditions in which we remember—whether in a museum, on a beach, in a restaurant, or in bed. When we see the actual painting again, we have unconsciously altered it in memory since the last time we saw it. Each act of memory is a creative act, an ongoing transformation of the past (Schacter, 1996). Arnheim notes that “memory is a much more fluid medium than perception because it is further removed from the checks of reality” (Arnheim, 1969, 84). A work of art elicits several kinds of memories: specific episodes, incidents, or images from the past; past experiences that have become unconscious or implicit; and conceptual, factual knowledge. Memories of specific episodes usually include many kinds of information—visual, auditory, spatial, verbal, and tactile—stored in convergence zones in the brain that bind together the fragments of perceptual experience. A sensory perception from present experience, such as

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smelling metal or touching a woodcarving, could be the cue that triggers the memory of an event in personal history. Past experiences, now unconscious, may be elicited by a cue in an artwork without one even realizing that a memory has been retrieved; it may seem to be an intrinsic part of the artwork. The experience is one of “knowing” without being aware of the source of knowing. Another kind of memory, procedural memory, is used for skills and habits, such as riding a bicycle or cooking. This kind of memory is more likely to be called into play by physical exploration of a sculpture than by visual exploration. The motions of touching a sculpture may resemble certain familiar movement patterns or physical habits. The movement memory may be unconscious or may become conscious in the act of moving. Some people associate their experience of my sculptures with playing musical instruments or with intimate physical touching. People who have touched my sculptures speak of moving in ways that remind them of their impatience, their ability to concentrate, their pleasure in being lost in exploration, or their fear of the unknown. If memories remain dormant until the right cues come along to trigger them, then it follows that the more cues provided, the more likely that memories will emerge. Haptic art has the advantage of providing more cues—and sometimes more vivid cues—than a strictly visual artwork. The rich combination of tactile, auditory, olfactory, kinesthetic, and visual cues encountered in the experience of a haptic sculpture offers an abundance of stimuli to unlock memories of past experiences and associations. Marcel Proust makes a distinction between “conscious memory,” a deliberate act of recalling the past, and the retrieval of past reality that flows unexpectedly from “sensation revived.” In the well-known eruption of his childhood memories of life in Combray, triggered by the taste of madeleines, he provides an electrifying example of the kind of spontaneous emergence of memory from a sensation in the present reviving a sensation in the past. Arnheim notes two different perceptual forces acting on memory. First is the tendency toward simplification—to arrive at the simplest structure, symmetry, or regularity in order to reduce the tension of complexity. Second is the countertendency to sharpen distinctive features, even to exaggerate them: things are remembered as larger, faster, or uglier than they were, for example. Both tendencies can be operating at the same time in varying degrees and ratios. The two tendencies work together to clarify, intensify, streamline, and characterize. These two tendencies are central to the making of art: to simplify and to exaggerate. Together, they intensify, clarify, and transform life into art (Arnheim, 1969, 83).

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Memory is essential for piecing together an image of the whole when using touch without sight. The necessity for a span of time and the conscious efforts of memory become more pronounced in haptic perception. This work focuses memory and experience.

Many people have difficulty remembering haptic impressions as they explore without sight or when they try to recall the sculpture after touching without sight. I learned that my touch memory isn’t that developed.

Most of us are unused to deciphering something through touch, and few of us have deliberately developed our capacity for haptic memory. Yet some people feel more confident in memories acquired through touch, because of the intimacy of the contact, the concreteness of the encounter, the involvement of the body, and the time it takes. I realized I could know a work of art better through touch, that it would be easier to memorize a work of art.

For some people, feeling and remembering textures prove easier than detecting and recalling spatial relationships. For others, spatial memories come more easily. Some people naturally incline to a kinesthetic intelligence and are comfortable exploring through physical movement and touch, and others are not. Our histories, memories, and associations shape our perceptions of the artwork. We see according to the past that lives within us. Such associations can take the form of images that merge and blend with the images we are observing. Our understanding of an artwork can change as we peruse it; as we see different parts, perceptions change, and new memories and associations arise. A poet wrote about my sculpture Memory in this way: I loved that it has a hinge, can be pivoted. In mythology, memory (Mnemosyne) is the mother of the muses, a mother of creation. You really get at some of the power of memory, that it can shift, surprise, and occupy a kind of hinge in us. Memory is not static.

We accumulate images and experiences that form and inform new images, building a structure of meaning growing ever more complex and enriching with each new encounter. Memory and time are essential to the development of aesthetic pleasure and appreciation. In Abigail Housen’s stage theory of aesthetic development, accruing the skills and experience to look at art deeply

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Figure 5.2  A matrix of steel boxes embodies the operations of memory, the stones suggesting how memories and associations produce nodes of recognition. Memory 2, 1997, Steel, stone, leather, 24 × 20 × 10 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

and thoughtfully takes time measured in years. She describes someone in the last stage of this four-stage developmental process as having a long personal history of viewing and reflecting on art. For the longtime viewer, a familiar painting is like an old friend known intimately but still surprising and still in need of

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attention. As in all friendships, time is a critical ingredient, involving the history of the work and our own history with it. Memory infuses the artwork with traces of our selves. As we change, grow, age, develop sensory and intellectual acumen, and undergo the vicissitudes and joys of life, we return to a particular artwork—a different person—each time. Memory is the hinge on which the doors of perception swing open (Housen, 1999). Art makes sense of what each of us knows, integrating it into our experience, transforming it, and carrying it forward into the rest of our lives. In a similar way, art also serves as the collective sense-making and memory of a people, society, or culture. Art is a way to preserve both memory and culture. In our communal lives, art provides shared memories, creating bonds that join us together to make sense of the past and to provide new possibilities for the future. More than ever in our global world, we need the bonds of art to counterbalance the forces that push us apart. We also need the kind of perception of art that brings mind and body into a unified field. Brenson calls for the touch of sculpture, describing the peculiar power of the haptic experience of art as the “memory of the hand.” What I am asking for here, most of all, is respect for the memory of the hand. A sculpture that has been a resting place for the hand is remembered differently than a work that has only been seen and analyzed. The first time I fully grasped the power of sculpture was in the chapter room in the Cathedral of Autun, in which Romanesque reliefs are still available for observation and touch. I moved my hands over the seated figure of Joseph and the pie-crust blanket of the three sleeping magi, in whose dream they are actually touched by the hand of the angel of God. For several minutes, I cupped my hand over the small female head enmeshed in foliage, whose terror-struck eyes and mouth seem to have caught the devil at work. Although their original placement on columns indicates they were made for the eye, Romanesque spirituality is immensely, inescapably physical, and these reliefs seemed to me, by their size, articulation and emotional directness, to ask to be touched. Touching them seemed taboo yet natural. Their memory is in my hands still. Because of this, my recollection of them is always more than that of an image or sensation. Since the recollection is in my hands as well as my eyes and mind, years are compressed whenever I recall them. Past and present merge with shocking suddenness. This never occurs when I remember a painting, even when the encounter with it is also a landmark in my life. Whenever I recall those stones, I feel them in my hands, and I am in that room again for the first time, in July 1964. I am there and I am here. When the seat of memory is in my hands, I inhabit the moment in which the encounter took

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The artist making the work also taps into the power of somatic memories, which are often profound sources for an artist’s creative process. Childhood memories are especially vivid and multisensory, imbued with all the specific, contingent conditions of the moment—smelling, seeing, moving, touching, and tasting. Albert Camus’s well-known quotation conveys this power succinctly: “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened” (Thody, 1970). Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz describes a memory of such a moment in her childhood that had a lasting impact on her developing sensibility: I was a small child, crouching over a swampy pond, watching tadpoles. Enormous, soon to become frogs, they swarmed around the bank. Through the thin membrane covering their distended bellies, the tangle of intestines was clearly visible. Heavy with the process of transformation, sluggish, they provoked one to reach for them. Pulled out onto shore with a stick, touched carelessly, the swollen bellies burst. The contents leaked out in a confusion of knots. Soon they were beset by flies. I sat there, my heart beating fast, shaken by what had happened. The destruction of soft life and the boundless mystery of the content of softness. … The never fully explored mystery of the interior, soft and perishable. Many years later, that which was soft with a complex tissue became the material of my work. It gives me a feeling of closeness to and affinity with the world that I do not wish to explore other than by touching, feeling, and connecting with that part of myself which lies deepest. (Abakanowicz, 1983, 102–103)

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Now that I’ve explored the sculpture to my satisfaction, I’m very curious to see how it looks. When I open my eyes, I feel an odd mixture of surprise and disappointment. It seems smaller, even shrunken, and not as vividly colored as I had imagined. The journey my hands made was much more interesting than what my eyes take in after the blindfold is off. The dull grays are unemotional and boring. When I was blindfolded, I sensed more color. My experience touching the artwork was more fulfilling than seeing it. I’m having difficulty connecting the sculpture I’m looking at with the one I just explored. When I look at the sculpture it’s as if I’m seeing a different work of art. Even though I just spent fifteen minutes with the piece, I don’t recognize it. I’ve been experiencing it in a completely different manner. Strangely, it feels so impersonal to stare at it. I felt a oneness, a sense of connection with the art while I was touching it. Now I’m not nearly so interested by it, and I feel betrayed. When I see, it’s as if the richness of the tactile experience has disappeared. I don’t want to interfere with what just happened. I feel sad. I feel the loss of that experience. I feel taken over by my eyes. It’s like the eyes dominate and muffle. The shock, the upset, the emotion! It’s like leaving your childhood, like growing up! There was such a sense of freedom: no barriers, no age, no survival, just bliss. Permission! Being a kid! Atavistic. A return to childhood. I’m not sure if I want to put the experience of viewing the piece together with the actual touching and feeling of the piece. I’m not sure if I should take them as a whole, or as two separate identities. My eyes are so attached to my mind. I wonder if I could form a partnership between my hands and my eyes. I wonder if I could touch and see so my hands would dominate and my eyes would follow my hands. What about letting my eyes be like my fingers? That’s where the joining, the fusing, the healing might come in.

The differences—and in this case, the conflicts—people discover between sight and touch can be striking. The woman who recounted this experience, named Ann, tries to resolve the conflict by locating a point of view that could include both sensory modes, lifting her to a wider sense of perception itself. The tension

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she feels between seeing and touching reveals more than the difference between the two perceptual modes. She is experiencing firsthand the dichotomy of mind and body we have built into our intellects, perceptions, and bodies. She identifies eye with mind, and hand with body. By exploring the sculptures blindfolded and allowing hand and body to generate a reality different from the usual sightgenerated version, she realizes the degree to which eye and mind dominate her sensorium. She recognizes the incredible price of this division and dominion: intimacy with nature, the freedom of child-consciousness, and the possibility of empathic union with what surrounds us. A year later Ann told me she keeps discovering things when she recalls that day in the museum. I keep thinking of the loss, that I lose my touch when my eyes are open. I’m separate from the artworks. When I was touching they were the whole world. I was inside the experience. My eyes are from the outside. Maybe it’s like the two faces of Janus: turn the eye over to find the finger, turn the finger over, there’s the eye. They’re one organism. Then they can deepen each other.

She has learned that she thinks of seeing as going “out-there” from “in-here.” She has found that seeing is often an act of pushing or pulling to accomplish something or to acquire something. She thinks of eyes as a surface, with a “behind” and an “in front of ” and that hands are not like that at all, being more inclusive and mobile. She told me she now occasionally practices using her eyes as if they were fingers. While her reactions remain unique in their depth and clarity, they reflect what many people have intimated in their comments: that the differences between the two modes are striking, and that the ensuing tension drives them to an overarching awareness of perception itself: Contradiction between geometrical, formal, visual awareness and unlabelable sensual awareness. Comparing what I saw with what I felt, the different kinds of information were impressive.

Ann passed through a remarkable range of emotional responses, triggered by the process of touching and amplified by trust in her responses. Her senses and body-mind were open not only to perceptual discovery, but also to the cascade of emotions unleashed by exploring an artwork through the somatic senses. Her reactions were far more than sensory, blooming into a whole psychological drama: disappointment, disconnection, a mounting sense of loss

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and betrayal; a return to the lost paradise of animal-consciousness, freedom, bliss, and childhood; admission of the need to grow up; the dawning possibility of reconciling the conflict; and, finally, resolving it by embracing the differences with curiosity. Ann’s account of her journey is a condensed, articulate version of my own journey through the territories claimed by these two senses: from the sense of discovery and wonder in haptic, somatic knowing, to the accompanying disillusionment and rejection of sight, to a resolution of the conflict into a larger, more transcendent embrace. Once again, we see that touch and sight are not simply sensory modes. Touching produces sensations, and sometimes the sensations lead to emotions. So swiftly do these shifts occur that touching and emotion seem to arise simultaneously. So closely do haptic and emotional sensations entwine that haptic sensation is often experienced as emotion—one of the reasons touching can be so compelling. We experience emotions as a kind of movement: emotion means “to move out.” We recognize emotions through their expression in physical activity. We know upset by the clenching of jaw, quickening of breath, or tightening of gut. Emotions are called “feelings” because we actually feel them in our bodies. Emotions are muscular, hormonal, visceral responses that have evolutionarily evolved to produce specific automatic reactions to situations. In The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio Damasio writes about the biological function of emotions as providing automatic responses that enhance survival. They may maintain homeostasis or may remove us from danger, producing reactions such as running, freezing, fighting, or engaging in pleasurable behavior. They also serve to regulate our internal affairs so we can be prepared to enact the reaction, by sending increased blood flow to the legs in order to run or changing heart and breathing rates in order to freeze. What we label “fear” or “anger” or “longing” is physical sensations happening in specific places within the body. The body is responding to something, whether real, imagined, remembered, or unconsciously remembered. Damasio makes a distinction between emotions, which are bodily responses, and feelings, which are the impact of those responses on the brain and body. We can know we have feelings; this, he asserts, is where consciousness comes in. It is this third level, sensing and knowing the feelings, that allows a range of ways to adapt or to relate to the emotions. Emotions feel like more than sensations when I find myself entangled in the story or circumstances that cause the emotions or when I am engulfed in the history I have formed in relation to those emotions. Any emotion is layered with

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Figure 6.1  This abstract analogue of the human body contains metaphoric organs, diaphragms, and bones. Body 2, 1999, Concrete, leather, steel, bamboo, silk, string, 76 × 20 × 20 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

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memories, associations, and habits. Emotions can induce such powerful events in the body that they can seem overwhelming. Nevertheless, when I look closely at the topography of emotions, I can trace them within my body. I discover that each has its own predictable location, path, or trajectory. By tracking how emotions work in the body, their patterns become more evident, more predictable, and more familiar. When emotions are felt as sensations and explored with curiosity, without the cognitive content, they seem less overwhelming. Experiencing emotions as sensations offers the potential to break up their monolithic quality, disrupt habitual responses, and diffuse the power they hold over responsiveness and behavior. Movement may clarify, provoke, or release an emotion. We can invite emotions by taking postures or gestures associated with certain feelings, such as jutting the jaw forward to evoke stubbornness or spreading the arms wide in a gesture of openness. Although we may at first be merely acting, the emotion associated with that attitude or activity may arise out of habitual patterns and associations. The motion generates the emotion. This principle is used by a range of therapeutic techniques, which generate psychological material for exploration and integration by encouraging people to move in various ways within the therapeutic context. Dance and movement therapy, drama therapy, bioenergetics, Alexander Technique, and play therapy are some of the practices that work in various ways to link movement with emotion and emotional patterns. These techniques share in common a belief in the possibility to effect positive change through movement. Movement opens new sensory and motor pathways. Emotional histories stored in the tissues are accessed and released. These therapies trust the body and its truths, which reveal themselves through movements that bypass habits and inhibitions. Sometimes a particular movement or gesture can trigger memories related to that motion. The movement itself serves as the cue for a memory, and the memory triggers an emotion. Just as a visual cue may summon a visual memory (the way a person seen on the street reminds us of a friend), a haptic cue can summon a haptic memory. Gripping a round object may remind me of holding a baseball, or while fingering stepped surfaces I may remember playing the piano. Associations and memories raised by the haptic experience of a sculpture can also carry emotions: I had a moment of rest, like touching a woman’s body, a sense of peace and ease. I realized kinesthetic stillness is more real to me than visual.

A young Cambodian said of touching a sculpture: It reminded me of the house I grew up in and I got homesick.

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Simply being allowed to touch an artwork can be moving. I’m so thrilled to have crossed the fourth wall in art—by touching it!

Or not being allowed to touch: I hate being able to look and not touch. It leaves me feeling so lonely on the inside. And gravity! My stomach and guts got involved. When I touched the cloth wrapping something vertical, I felt nausea.

Yet the emotions triggered by artworks have a special status. We are not expected to act on those emotions but only to feel their effects. An aesthetic experience provides a safe, contemplative place to explore such feelings. I went through an exhibit on the Holocaust and felt very disturbed. Then I went into the exhibit of tactile sculptures. I pressed my breastbone against the vertical box, and it was very calming.

The encounter with art provides an opportunity to feel and explore emotions in an aesthetic context. Touching artworks grounds emotions in sensation, giving them an immediacy and reality that render them more accessible. A steel passage feels hard and cold, making me uneasy; a wooden surface feels warm, so I relax; a leather hammock feels reassuring; a tight fit generates panic; a sharp edge worries me. The Kreitlers note the paradox of hard, immobile materials representing the dynamism of life, as in the writhing bronze bodies in Rodin’s Gates of Hell. This strange combination of life and lifelessness is unique to art and fraught with creative tensions: The organic and the inorganic, the warmth, sensitivity, vibration of life and the petrified, stiff bluntness of death, the moving and the motionless, the changing and the lasting—all these produce a matrix of dilemmas, conflicts, and contrasts. (Kreitler and Kreitler, 1972, 211)

The paradox of motion in stillness highlights our aliveness and mobility and also reminds us of our mortality and death. Knowing a sculpture through touch provides an embodied experience of the changing, mobile nature of reality itself. Not only do I myself move and change as I explore an artwork, but my experience and conception of the artwork change as I move. There is no moment of completion. I wanted to know the sculpture’s dimensions. At first I expected it to be small, but when I reached across it, my arm kept going on and on and it seemed huge. Then I walked around it and it seemed smaller.

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Figure 6.2  Human construction and the forces of nature meet each other in contrasting forms, materials, and textures. Whether, 2012, Wood, rawhide, 82 × 57 × 19 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

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Michael Brenson describes this process: The life inside the mass has the thrust of endless movement. Even in the most immobile pharaonic figures, the same animation within the stone that reinforces the authority of the kingly presence also suggests the inevitability of change … a sense of movement within that image that argues for the inevitability of transformation. To touch sculpture that welcomes the hand can be to feel one is touching what was, what is and what will be. It can be like touching growth. (Brenson, 1995, 35)

It can feel like touching growth and decay. The forces that drive life forward into expansion and growth are accompanied by those that press life into contraction and dissolution. To feel the pulse of vitality is to know the inevitability of mortal stillness. Sculpture, as a strange hybrid of animation and stasis, carries that message to our searching hands. Knowing artworks through touch, the body imbues both the object and the self with motion and transformation, which become integral to the process of knowing. Each time we see or touch a sculpture we have met before, it is transformed by memory, the flow of our lives, and the current moment. This perception of mutability in things reflects the underlying truth of reality, which consists of impermanent, ever-changing processes rather than immutable forms. Touching brings us closer to this truth.

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Sensible and Sensitive

The most remarkable aspect of the haptic sense is that when I touch I am also touched. This reciprocity raises the stakes in our interchange with the world around us. I am engaged and not separate, impacted, and not aloof. When I meet a sculpture with my hand, the sculpture meets me with its mass, substance, and weight. I give and receive. I affect it and am affected by it. Mandayam Srinivasan, founder of the Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics at MIT, known as the Touch Lab, describes this reciprocity in the language of physics, as the interaction of two forces. Touching brings me by definition into direct contact with other bodies, objects, or environments, creating a connection that flows in both directions regardless of who or what initiates the contact. It may seem as if I am active and the object is inert, but two forces are in play: my force and the force of the object I am touching. When I touch a table, the table also touches me. If my force is greater than the table’s, I make it move. If the table’s force is greater than mine, it remains where it is. If my force is greater than the coherence of sand, I draw a line in it. If I press hard on concrete, my skin yields. However the forces resolve, they remain in dynamic reciprocity. David Katz examines this reciprocity in psychophysical terms. He distributes each sense on a continuum between subjective and objective poles. His understanding of the two terms is quite specific. By subjective, he means that our impressions of the object are infused with sensations we feel in the act of perceiving; objective means that the object seems independent of our perceptual processes because we have few or no sensations. Sight hovers near the objective pole. The bodily sensations involved in seeing are so subtle, swift, and effortless that we rarely feel them. What we see is projected as existing outside ourselves and beyond the moment of conscious perception. Moving along the continuum, hearing is not quite as objective as sight; sounds seem to emanate from their source, but we can sometimes feel sounds in our bodies, especially loud ones. Taste and smell remain closer to the subjective pole, though they can move either way depending on the context; everyone has had the experience of smell

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triggering a memory, which is a completely subjective response. Taste allows us to identify what we are eating and also produces sensations such as sweet, sour, bitter, salty, or hot. Touch alone can operate anywhere on the continuum between subjective and objective impressions. Touching generates sensations we can easily feel on the skin or within the body (subjective). These sensations inform our impression of the object (objective). Touch is a blend of subjective and objective impressions— impressions flowing from the object and from our sensations. We can focus our attention anywhere along this continuum. We can attend to the object or to our sensations or to some mixture of the two (Katz, 1989, 40–42). When I choose a pear in the market, I feel the firmness of the surface to gauge its ripeness. As I peel and eat it, I may shift to the subjective mode, feeling the pear slide in my fingers, my hands wet with juice, the softness in my mouth. I can attend in varying degrees to the pear and to my sensations. The shift to subjective impressions can be unplanned or it can be intentional, the way a furniture maker strokes a board after sanding to assess the smoothness. It can be triggered by an unexpected sensation, such as grasping someone’s cold hand. Subjective impressions tend to dominate if touch occurs at a place on the body not normally used for touching, such as the back of the hand. Moving slowly increases awareness of subjective impressions, since we have time to notice the sensations. Energetic, fast movement tends to create a more objective quality. Although we normally attend to the objective pole in haptic perception, the subjective—subliminal and unconscious—is always present to some degree. We can choose to bring the subjective aspect to the fore with a shift in intention and attention. The point of art is to invite both subjective and objective responses. When someone touches a sculpture, the full continuum of tactile subjectivity and objectivity is available. We can explore the shapes and spaces and we can explore our sensations and responses. This is aesthetic touch, which includes and explores both aspects of touch. The subjective-objective polarity becomes vividly evident when someone’s hands touch each other unexpectedly while exploring a sculpture. When my hands meet each other from either side of the box, I can’t tell it’s my own hand. It feels like something else.

Because this woman had been exploring the sculpture in the objective mode, when her right hand touched her left, it felt like something other than her own hand. Yet her sensations told her she had been touched.

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The so-called objectivity of perception is a learned perceptual skill. If we touch a sculpture, we become aware of its solidity, mass, and material, which we assume to exist whether we touch it or not. We take this perceptual persistence for granted. Yet for an infant, when the mother leaves the room, she seems no longer to exist. Gradually, the child builds an awareness of the mother’s reality even when she is absent. John Hull describes the eerie feeling he had after he lost his sight: that people or things moving beyond the range of his hand or his hearing simply disappeared. He had to relearn how to project their existence beyond his sensory reach. Touch plays another important, completely subjective role. More than any of the other senses, touching confirms and maintains the reality and nature of my individual existence. Touching provides me with a sense of myself, assures me that I exist, and defines the terms of that existence. I am defined through my interactions with the world. This definition is crucial to well-being but largely hidden from awareness. The constant, unconscious interplay between body and environment produces the internal conviction that I am alive. It generates a felt sense of who, what, where, and how I am. This self-image or body schema is constructed not once and for all, but continuously and provisionally. Bodyworker Deane Juhan writes, Tactile experience tells me as much about myself as it tells me about anything that I contact. I am constantly using the world to explore my reactions just as much as I am using my reactions to assess the world. My sense of my own surface is very vague until I touch; the moment of contact, two simultaneous streams of information begin to flow: information about the object … and information about my body.… We could even say that this role of the tactile senses in establishing a fuller and fuller sense of self is their primary function. (Juhan, 1987, 34)

The sense of self, he suggests, emerges where the two streams converge. The provisional nature of the self and its image means we never outgrow our need for touch. We depend on haptic, kinesthetic stimuli to confirm our existence and to convey the nature of that existence until the moment of death. Increasing the range and quality of haptic stimuli enriches the sense of the world as well as the sense of self. The subjective-objective continuum that describes touch can be expanded to describe the experience of art. Art reveals the “objective” worlds around us as well as the “subjective” worlds within us. At the objective pole, artworks allow us to explore different periods, cultures, and sensibilities. Through art, we can learn about Benin ritual, Apache hunting, or the French Revolution. Artworks

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Figure 7.1  A woman lifts the plaster hands from the interior of the sculpture to touch them to her face. What’s not meant to be opened (may be opened), 2001, Stone, wood, resin, alabaster, iron, leather, gauze, plaster, copper, 10 × 19 × 14 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

tell stories that may be Christian, Hindu, Egyptian, or Inuit; that are myth, allegory, tale, or history; that can be individual, collective, or universal. Artworks convey different ways to build structure, organize space, create order, define relationships, convey rhythm, combine colors, and initiate movement. They explore the laws of nature and how those laws might be applied, manipulated, or turned upside down. They enlighten us about the vast complexity of the world and its multitudinous forms. At the subjective pole, artworks give us our inner lives. They evoke and give form to feelings, images, qualities, and memories that lie unnoticed or inchoate. They give shape to ideas, attitudes, and forces within us that would otherwise remain inarticulate and mute, helping us understand those ideas and manage those forces. Artworks introduce parts of ourselves to each other, integrating what was ignored, split off, or buried. They reveal the contours of the unconscious, the underworld, the dream world, the spirit world. Artworks challenge our habitual perceptions and preconceptions. They teach us what draws, drives, and defines us. They call for new ways of perceiving, even new ways of being. Art scandalizes by challenging current modes of perception. Artworks emerge from the artist’s subjectivity and invite us to plumb our own.

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By allowing ourselves to be affected by works of art, we discover new ways to feel, perceive, think, imagine, and be. The most affecting encounters with art take us in both directions, clarifying and enlarging our understanding of the world around us as well as our sense of who we are. When the encounter with art is augmented by the use of touch— which also encompasses both world and self—art and touch magnify each other’s power. Touching leads us into the sensuous reality of a sculpture and a stronger feeling for our own sensuousness. Touching enlivens a sculpture as well as mobilizes the body-mind. Touching gives people confidence in their perceptions, which provides greater access to the meaning of the artwork. As one person said, First I was afraid—how could I know? Then upon first touch, joy, a different way of knowing.

Touching an artwork kindles memories, associations, and images different than those derived from seeing, thereby enriching the experience. Touching a sculpture provides different sensory information and expands what is perceptually possible. Michael Brenson writes about the reciprocity of touch: One of the gifts that sculpture alone can offer is an experience of connectedness and immanence mediated by the hand. It is initiated by the hand of the artist. It is received by the hand of the visitor. It is an encounter by touch. Not careless or distracted touch but the kind of contact between sculpture and hand that enables the person touching to be touched. (Brenson, 1995, 30)

Rudolf Arnheim distinguishes three possible attitudes toward any object. The first two are the practical and the scientific, which are reductive—subtracting variations to find the invariance. These approaches are useful for definition, classification, and learning, but they miss the real, the particular, and the contextual. The third attitude is aesthetic, which allows the influence of context, the multiplicity of appearances, and the fullness of information. This attitude, claims Arnheim, produces just as strong a sense of permanence and identity for the object as the practical and scientific, but it generates a different relationship to the object and even a different worldview (Arnheim, 1969, 43–45). A cursory glance tells me about a chair’s use, which may be all I need for practical purposes. This functional attitude toward the chair can leave me unengaged with the concrete uniqueness of this individual chair. This kind of perception feels vaguely unsatisfying, even disconnected. By attending to the particulars, I feed an unconscious hunger for sensuous reality. A detailed, sensory knowing strengthens my impression of the chair’s nature and reality. Attention to the specific qualities rather than the abstract concept—the flow of

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the back into the arms, the complex texture of the woven seat, the delicacy of the tapered legs, the warmth of the finish—lifts me out of a functional, perfunctory impression of the chair to appreciate the chair in all its sensuous details. Touching can give us this particularity because of its immediacy and directness, its close contact with the thing itself, and its cumulative way of knowing. Aesthetic touch invites us to savor the sensuous, specific qualities of things rather than settling for a normative identification. The gift of touch is not identification or categorization but rather the full spectrum of subjectiveobjective knowing. Haptic perception can be inexhaustible, refreshing, and absorbing. Conscious touching gives us the object itself rather than an idea of the object. As two viewers noticed, First the jump of the mind: identify! Second, quieter, feeling the contrast. Third, lingering on the leather for comfort. You’re giving people the opportunity to explore what something really is rather than what they think it is.

For some people, abstract images not easily identified fail to engage them; they do not know how to read or connect with them. The concrete nature of touch can bridge this gap. Although the object may not look or feel familiar, to the hand it remains real and concrete, with shapes and textures that generate their own meanings and associations. A certain curve may be satisfying to touch regardless of what we think it represents or what it means. Meaning emerges from rhythm, movement, and sensation. Touching artwork draws us closer to meanings that draw on our memories and our own authority rather than depending on information from labels, docents, teachers, or books. People trust their responses. They have fewer expectations about what they should know about art. If I just looked at these, it would look like other things; I’d be making associations. When I look after touching blindfolded, I have my own perceptual experiences to draw on.

This is a profound observation. She noticed the difference between making associations and her “own perceptual experiences.” What is the difference? How we perceive can run the gamut from simple categorical notation—“this is a chair”—to associations with that chair—“this is like the chair I grew up with”—to opinions about that chair—“it seems badly made”—or to being receptive to the presence, qualities, and nature of that chair. In Buddhist psychology, perception is the function of the mind that organizes sensory

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Figure 7.2  Rawhide climbs a wooden ladder in a sculpture inspired by cicadas, which emerge from the earth, climb a plant stalk, and shed their exoskeleton. Molt detail, 2012, Wood, rawhide, 144 × 18 × 25 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © Ellen Augarten.

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input to make sense of it: names, labels, categories, associations, views, biases, opinions, memories, and imagination. These perceptions are necessary for understanding the world. They shape, color, and define our experience. They are often so deeply embedded in our language and concepts that we assume they are descriptions of reality, but they remain approximations and signs. These perceptions can prevent us from perceiving things in their fullness. They can be obstacles and barriers to grasping the nature of something. We perceive “chair” rather than a particular chair. We think of someone as Chinese rather than as an individual. And when turned inward, perceptions can be applied to oneself in ways that limit possibilities and bind choices. I thought of myself as a visual artist, which prevented me from acknowledging the importance of touch. When turned outward to others, perceptions in the form of biases, prejudices, and opinions can generate misunderstanding, misrepresentation, fear, and hatred. Life experiences, families, and cultures shape perceptions. Questioning such perceptions can open up creative possibilities. Artists are professional questioners of perception. They explore the sensory understanding of perception as well as question the perceptions that create barriers: categories, opinions, and stereotypes. Artists inquire into the very names and labels we apply to things, let alone the opinions, views, and biases. Sculptor Eva Hesse questioned the traditional materials and structures of sculpture by working with latex, wax, fiberglass, and cheesecloth, and creating open, suspended tangles. Artists explore associations and memories, past and future—their own and society’s. Artists dwell in imagination, feeling their way into the unknown. Gerhard Richter often paints realistically, using photographs as a source, but deliberately blurs the image, suggesting the way memory degrades. He changes a familiar stock image into a surprising, original permutation. My move from sight to touch proved to be an investigation into perception in both meanings of the word: perception as sensory input and perception as sense-making. I have discovered deep structures in both kinds of perception as well as in both sensory modes of sight and touch. I have learned that not knowing, or not assuming that I know, yields unexpected bounty. I am curious about the world and about the way I perceive the world. The world and my senses touch me in turn, opening new creative possibilities. This is the purpose of aesthetic touch: to raise the chances of reciprocity in the encounter with art; to ride into knowing on the beautiful horse of the body. This is what art is for: to touch the world and be touched by it.

Part Two

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8

Touching as Seeing

As described in the Introduction, I turned to papermaking as a way to enter into the medium and the body of an artwork. The papermaking led to making books, which suggested new possibilities for the sculptural form. At the same time, I began to wonder what the experience of art might be for people who are blind or visually impaired. This curiosity led to wondering whether touch could be integral to the conception, creation, and appreciation of an artwork. These questions signified a profound shift from thinking of touch as manipulation to thinking of touch as a way of knowing. I knew little about tactile perception, let alone tactile perception of art, and could find nothing useful written on the subject. So I searched for someone who is blind to consult. I had the good fortune to find Deidre Muccio, an artist who lost her sight after attending art school. She was willing to venture with me into exploring haptic perception of art, which she had never done before. I found in Deidre the rare combination of tactile expertise, familiarity with the language and history of art, and a remarkable ability to observe and articulate her experience. Deidre writes of this journey with great feeling: After art school, I had plunged into a world of half-deciphered shadows. As the visual realm slipped away, so did the excitement and pleasure I had always taken in the world around me, perceived and interpreted through my eyes and endlessly transformed in my mind into images of my own creation. The balance between beauty and horror tipped to the dark side, leading me to mistrust my remaining senses and judgment. After a difficult fifteen years of adapting to this cultural and psychological deprivation, a gateway to the old fascination opened as I once more started to think about the function of art and my place within that world.

Because I wanted to make my work accessible to people who could not see, I needed to know how a work of art is read by touch. I was curious about the effect of different materials, the impact of size, how connections are made from one part to another, whether abstract art can be meaningful, how meaning is

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formed, if and how mental images are constructed from touching, and how tactile information relates to visual information. Deidre and I traveled to art museums together for a year to explore a wide variety of sculptures and different kinds of museum experiences. In each case, we called ahead and were provided with a docent as our guide. Each museum had different policies on touch: some allowed it on a case-by-case basis; some had fully developed programs for people with disabilities; some had specific works of art preselected by the curators for touching; some had never had anyone ask to touch. Some required her to use gloves; others allowed free touching. Taken together, the museums offered a range of possibilities, from wandering through galleries to handling sessions in quiet, private rooms. Deidre found she preferred moving among the other visitors in the light, space, and sounds of the galleries. She would touch the sculptures, usually wearing cotton gloves, and report her perceptions and responses as I took notes. She was extremely insightful, detailed, and candid in describing what effects different sculptures and parts of sculptures had on her and what associations, images, and questions arose. She touched all kinds of sculptures, such as plaster casts of classical sculpture; Baroque portrait heads in marble; bronze figures by Rodin, Degas, and Giacometti; abstract marble sculpture by Arp; Inuit stone animals; Kiki Smith body parts in plaster and bronze; and Indian, Intuit, and Egyptian figurines. Afterward, she wrote detailed notes about our sessions and we discussed our findings. Sometimes I was allowed to touch too, and we would compare impressions. In the beginning, I was astonished by the differences between tactile and visual experiences. I came to learn to trust this new sense to provide its own meanings, sometimes quite different from the visual meanings. The first sculpture I ever touched in this conscious way was one of David Smith’s Cubi. The vertical stack of large brushed aluminum cubes, set at odd angles to each other, stood taller than me. The forms remained cool, hard, and metallic to my eye. To my hand, the faces of the cubes were surprisingly warm, sensuous, and even soft. The delicately brushed surfaces, which to my eye shimmered as I moved, were tangible to my fingers following their curved patterns. What proved most compelling to touch were the triangular spaces between the cubes. The visually negative spaces left by the tipped, stacked cubes were riveting when my hands entered them. They turned into caves, nooks, and crannies. Before I touched them, the metal sides of the cubes had belonged to and defined the cubes. Now, they bounded and defined the tent-like spaces around my hands, directing my attention toward the spaces rather than

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Figure 8.1  Multiple layers invite people to move down and through the sculpture to feel the layers and the relationships between them. Anatomy, 1998, Wood, copper, leather, 54 × 34 × 58 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © Ellen Augarten.

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toward the cubes. What had been background, negative space became figure or foreground. There was a bodily pleasure in the sense of containment I felt in these crannies. Even though only my hands were involved, I felt as if my whole body had climbed inside, evoking memories of the small places inside closets and under tables where I had played as a child, and the cavities and caves I still climb into when I hike in canyon country. To the eye, these spaces were interesting but not places with their own atmosphere, associations, and imaginative possibilities—places to inhabit. Also striking in retrospect was the degree to which the tactile information (the softness of the cubes’ surfaces and the triangular spaces between the cubes) and the experience of that information fused in my mind. I could not separate the visual fact of the brushed surfaces from my hands’ memory of the soft, curving lines under my fingers. The spaces between the cubes now possessed dimensions measured by my hands and invested with memories of play and discovery. The distance between the sculpture and me was eliminated, both physically and imaginatively. The sculpture served, and continues to serve in memory, as a dwelling place for my hands and my imagination. This discovery was the gift not of sight but of touch. The sensations in my hands and body—indeed, the desire for this experience—led me to explore those areas. The exploration called up bodily memories, but bodily memories also led me to investigate those places. The crucial point is that neither the memories nor the exploration would have occurred if I had not touched. Also surprising was the degree to which my hand could stand in for my entire body. My whole self could imaginatively inhabit what I felt with my hands. This intensely felt knowing in my body would not have been activated by sight alone. Deidre had her own challenges in making sense of what she felt: I was often frustrated in trying to understand what was under my hands. A Picasso head had ears, mouth, eyes and hair that were anything but in proportion and hardly decipherable to my touch. A large classical figure was too big to make sense of the whole. I had to trace the shapes from some recognizable reference point, like a foot. I noticed my impressions would often change from moment to moment. First a surface felt convex, then immediately concave. Sometimes the same surface felt silky and then rough and dry. The lack of fixity alarmed and perplexed me. How does one “know” what something is? I hear artists say this is the nature of experience. I remember that I once felt this way, and now must again become used to this flux, only this time as experienced through touch.

Although Deidre was enormously capable and practiced in her tactile, haptic grasp of the world, I was surprised to realize that in some ways she was coming

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to artworks with as much tactile innocence as I was. She had to learn how to touch art, just as I did. She found touching a work of art complex and demanding, in part because she remembered her visual grasp of art and was still trying to “see” the artworks in the same ways she once had. She had to learn to perceive and think in terms of touch, as I did. We discovered that the process of learning to read a work of art through touch could be likened to the process of learning to look at a work of art, a skill that has many layers and takes time to develop, however sophisticated or educated one may be. It was a privilege to watch her learn. We tried to track the process of her learning in the very moments of perception. Exactly how does she come to understand the object? Do different kinds of information come from different ways of touching? How much of her experience is sheer pleasure in the sensations and how much is figuring out the forms and relationships? She learned to take time, to move through frustration, to keep exploring even after identifying something, to let herself be directed by the piece, to open to unexpected aspects: I began to develop a method of exploring the works, especially the larger sculptures whose parts were harder to make out. I learned to go beyond identification of parts to a feeling for the aesthetic possibilities and meaning. Touching an Indian sculpture in sandstone evoked the smell of desert sands and delicate spices; the figure made me think of a living woman, not an inanimate object. I learned that the more time I gave to a piece the easier it was to let it grow on me and even get under my skin. After casual exploration of a smooth abstract bronze, I was ready to leave it, but on being encouraged to persist, I gave it all I could, soon falling into a rhythm with the flow of its lines, taking a roller coaster ride. Sometimes after leaving a museum following two hours of touching, I felt intoxicated, compelled to touch everything around me. I would hold these sculptures in memory like a storehouse of interesting objects I could continue to turn over in my mind.

In my studio, Deidre touched pieces I had made before our investigations. As I developed models for new sculptures, she would feel them to let me know what was unpleasant, confusing, or overly complex. Her responses gave me clarity about how to proceed and new ideas for solutions to problems. I gave her feedback on what made sense, what was interesting, and even what was disagreeable. The pieces that were not made with tactile perception in mind were difficult for me. In one sculpture my hands couldn’t travel for long without running into metal slabs. It was aggravating to encounter the blockage and made me want to remove my hands from the whole piece.

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I had been considering the object and its qualities. Now I had to acknowledge the importance of movement to her sense of an artwork. She was processing not only the shapes and textures of the sculpture, but also the qualities and sensations of her own motions. Information about the sculpture fused with information from her moving body. Her understanding of the sculpture was a function of her kinesthetic experience. We learned to distinguish her personal taste in form, texture, and movement from more general perceptual responses. A certain texture of paper, for example, disturbed her because it reminded her of dead skin. She found that she preferred long, smooth, flowing gestures, which I was not supplying her with my architectonic, rectilinear structures. I surmised that the tactile qualities of the human body—biomorphic, smooth, flowing shapes, and textures—determine to a great degree what we consider pleasurable in tactile sculpture. I had to admit I was not interested in using such forms or creating such pleasurable experiences but rather in generating a range of feelings, some of which might be considered difficult or unpleasant. I had to come to terms with deliberately producing sensations that might put people off. I realized that touch can evoke powerful reactions and emotions. I also had to acknowledge that the pieces I was making might not be considered tactile because they do not evoke the human form and may not immediately call for touch. Although I was accustomed to this situation in the visual realm, I had to learn it all over again in the tactile. Deidre brought people with various visual limitations to touch my work; they gave me different impressions and feedback to draw upon. We talked with docents, curators, and educators; with people who work with individuals with special needs; with mobility instructors for people who are blind or visually impaired; and with each other. We were deeply moved both by the shared experience and by the distance we had each traveled in our learning. I was ready to build my first fully tactile sculpture. Deidre found a new home in a world she had assumed was forever closed to her: I have come to feel that sculpture, as tactually experienced, is an exciting medium for transmitting the kinds of ideas I had always believed only a visual image could contain. I no longer feel at a loss to live life fully, with the artistic world once more returned to me through tactile perception and all its potential for exploring new forms, and for triggering rediscovery of all the forgotten and neglected forms common to our experience of art and of life itself.

9

Whole-body Seeing

Before I undertook this haptic journey, I had imagined blindness as the hidden shadow of my love affair with light and sight. My unacknowledged fear of the loss of sight would easily be stirred by contact, however fleeting, with people who were blind. When I began my research with Deidre Muccio, I stepped gingerly into what I imagined as a murky world, the antithesis of everything I depend upon for my work, mobility, and pleasure. I could not fathom living without the play of light, without being able to read the subtle messages in people’s faces and bodies, without the intense, constant pleasure of looking at the world aesthetically. I could not imagine life without art. I saw blindness as perceptual and experiential poverty. I wondered what drew me to explore this condition and hoped I was not being prescient, preparing myself for the loss of sight. My fears melted away when I discovered the world perceived through the other senses could be as rich and coherent as any developed through sight. The people I met who live with visual limitations corrected my many misconceptions about blindness: I believed that being blind is to see complete darkness; that all people who are blind experience the world and blindness in the same way; and that being blind is simply lacking the full complement of sight. None of these are true. I learned that blindness is a term without nuance, whereas people have many different kinds of visual impairments, ranging from blurriness to cloudiness to patchy, partial sight; and that even when there is no sight at all, variations of light and dark may occur according to shifting psychological states. I learned that each individual deals with visual limitations in his or her own way. Congenital blindness, being born without sight, produces conditions different from adventitious blindness, losing one’s sight later in life. When someone is born without sight, the necessary adjustments occur within a developing life. When sight changes any time after birth, the age and the manner in which it changes affect the quality and length of transition and adaptation. People with either condition, but especially those with congenital blindness, are profoundly affected by the attitudes of the surrounding people and culture.

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Constance Classen recounts some of the history of the ignorance surrounding blindness in her cultural history of the senses The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination. People who are blind have been marginalized in many ways but especially in their capacity for aesthetic appreciation. It was widely assumed that people who could not see would have no basis for any aesthetic sense, given the standard of sight. In a similar fashion, I made the assumption they would not be interested in visual art. Given the dominance of visual sensing, Classen proposes that a model of aesthetics not dominated by sight could be found in the experiences of people who are blind. This is the very path I took, beginning my exploration of the sense of touch in the company of people who are blind, most intensively with Deidre. As Classen suggests—and I discovered—by exploring the sensory lives of the blind, we may gain access to “a hidden world of nonvisual sensations and representations, as well as inspire the creation of aesthetic forms based on senses other than sight” (Classen, 1998, 138–160). Classen’s prescription has two parts: not only to gain access to nonvisual perception but also to gain inspiration for nonvisual art making. To make nonvisual art, I needed to do more than extend or extrapolate from my visual worldview and way of art making. I needed to discover and develop a radically different perceptual ground from which to create nonvisual art. The Futurist artist F. T. Marinetti discovered this principle, writing a manifesto of tactilism in 1921 and announcing the invention of tactile art. He insisted that tactile art requires an entirely new aesthetic approach and that tactile art should not be made by persons trained in the visual arts because they would subordinate tactile values to visual values. He said it would be “necessary to bypass visual rationality and concentrate on the ‘force-thoughtsentiment’ which takes place in the encounter between hand and matter” (Classen, 1998, 157). Rod Michalko, who is visually impaired, writes in The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness that blindness is often misunderstood as a “problem of knowing.” We assume that knowledge springs from sense perception, which in our culture today largely means the sense of sight. Therefore, he says, people believe that “the less we see, the less we know” (Michalko, 1998, 5–6). Another common assumption about blindness is that people who cannot see compensate by increased sensitivity of the other senses. While this is true, there is disagreement as to where the change actually occurs and the nature of the change. People who live with severe visual limitations may develop the faculty to discern spaces and objects beyond their personal kinesphere through what is

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called “facial vision,” which feels like tactile sensations on the face, and which turns out to be auditory sensitivity to echoes and resonances of sounds. In his foreword to John Hull’s book On Sight and Insight: A Journey into the World of Blindness, neurologist Oliver Sacks describes the differences between blindness caused by damage to the eyes themselves and damage to the visual cortex in the brain. If damage occurs to the visual cortex, the result may be not only loss of visual imagery and memory, but also even perhaps loss of all visual concepts, visual thinking, and visual identity. He suggests that Hull’s blindness, while not cortical, resembles it as a kind of ideational blindness. Because the visual cortex receives no incoming information from the eyes, it can no longer sustain the activity of generating images. He quotes Hull to make his point: I find that I am trying to recall old photographs of myself, just to remember what I look like. I discover with a shock that I cannot remember. Must I become a blank on the wall of my own gallery? To what extent is the loss of the image of the face connected with the loss of the image of the self? Is this one of the reasons why I often feel I am a mere spirit, a ghost, a memory? Other people have become disembodied voices, speaking out of nowhere, going into nowhere. Am I not like this too, now that I have lost my body? (Hull, 1990, 19)

At this stage in Hull’s adjustment, he thinks he must see his body in order to believe in its existence. Because he cannot see it, it does not exist. Later, he recovers the sense of his body, but known from the inside, as a somatic, kinesthetic reality. Jacques Lusseyran, in The Blind in Society, describes blindness as a gift and a call to attention. He believes that blindness reveals potential we all possess. A person who is blind hears, feels, and tastes better, but the condition that leads to this widening of the senses is not blindness as such, or a change in the acuteness of the senses themselves, but simple attention. He takes this principle even further than awareness of sensory stimuli: A really attentive person could understand everything. For this understanding he would need nothing that is tied to the senses. Neither light nor sound nor the shape peculiar to every object would exist for him, but every object would reveal itself to him in all its possible facets. In other words, he would enter completely into its inner world … from just this total attention the seeing are constantly diverted. So are the blind, but not to the same degree. For them remaining attentive is a practical necessity. … All our senses, I believe, join into one. They are successive stages of a single perception, and that perception is always one of touch. … What the blind person experiences in the presence of an object is pressure. Perception, then, would mean entering into an equilibrium of pressure, into a force field. As soon as we pay attention to this phenomenon the

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world comes to life in a surprisingly different manner. No single object, no single being remains neutral. The oneness of the world is experienced as a physical event. (Lusseyran, 1973, 29–31)

Reading these authors and working with Deidre, I learned that not having sight, or having limited sight, means much more than limitations in a perceptual skill. Disabilities of sight, especially radical losses, call for the creation of inner and outer worlds that prove to be different from the worlds known through sight. Lack of sight or profound impairment of sight alters a person’s sense of identity, body, time, space, boundaries, relationships, environment, movement, imagery, and perception—nothing less than the sense of self and the sense of the world. Michalko writes, “Blindness is not a shadow of sight but is, like sight itself, cast in the mystery of the eye destined for the development of an imaginative relation to perception, to making and remaking something of the world and to making and remaking its place in it.” He would move blindness from the place given it by those with sight—within the shadow of sight—to its own estate, a move that leads to questions about both sight and blindness (Michalko, 1998, 152). Hull describes the early stages of his journey into blindness as totally encompassing: Blindness is like a huge vacuum cleaner which comes down upon your life, sucking almost everything away. Your past memories, your interests, your perception of time and how you will spend it, place itself, even the world, everything is sucked out. Your consciousness is evacuated, and you are left to reconstruct it, including a new sense of time, a new realization of the body in space.

In short, he says, “One must recreate one’s life or be destroyed” (Hull, 1997, 155). He describes in exquisite detail his growing understanding of his new life. With the blind, he says, the “sense of being in a place is less pronounced” (Hull, 1990, 86). Space is reduced to one’s own body, and the position of the body is known not by what objects have passed by but how long it has been in motion. Position is  thus measured by time. … For the blind, people are not there unless they speak. … People are in motion, they are temporal, they come and they go. They come out of nothing; they disappear. (Hull, 1990, 87)

When limited to tactile perception, the only constant reference point is one’s own body. Everything is perceived in relation to it. He writes, “The body itself has become the organ of sense. Apart from the white cane and the sounds from the environment, the body’s knowledge of its surroundings does not exceed its own dimensions” (Hull, 1990, 138).

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Many factors in Hull’s life conspired to render him uncomfortable in his body. He suffered severe eczema and asthma from an early age. A deeply spiritual man, he worked as an academic, teaching and writing about religious education. His eventual total blindness required him to experience his body more deeply than he ever had before. Hull wrote the bulk of his book during the time when he felt most acutely the limitations imposed by his loss of sight. Toward the end of the book, he describes the dawning possibilities catalyzed by using his whole body to explore the huge stone altar in the abbey on the island of Iona: Finding one corner, I ran my fingers along the edge, only to find that I could not reach the other end. I worked my way along the front and was amazed at its size. The front was carved with hard, cold letters. They stood out boldly, but I could not be bothered reading them. The top was smooth as silk, but how far back did it go? I stretched my arms out over it but could not reach the back. This was incredible. It must have a back somewhere. Pushing myself up on to it, my feet hanging out over the front, I could reach the back. I did this again and again, measuring it with my body, till at last I began to have some idea of its proportions. It was bigger than me and much older. (Hull, 1990, 196)

His body learns to take the place of his eyes in gathering sensory information— in this instance, through the stretch of sinew, the pressure of stone on flesh and bone, the sensitivity of his whole body. He begins to realize the powers and pleasures of this newfound skill. It is many months since I began to appreciate the illumination and sense of real knowledge which comes through touch … [and] also the pleasure of it. I am developing the art of gazing with my hands. I like to hold and rehold and go on holding a beautiful object, absorbing every aspect of it … weight, texture and shape, temperature and the sounds things make, these are what I look for now. (Hull, 1990, 153)

By the end of his account in the first edition of his book Touching the Rock, Hull has undergone a transformation into a radically new sense of body and self: I do not think of myself so much as a blind person, which would define me with reference to sighted people and as lacking something, but simply as a whole-body-seer. … A blind person is simply someone in whom the specialist function of sight is now devolved upon the whole body, no longer specialized in a particular organ. … Being a WBS is to be in one of the concentrated human conditions. It is a state, like the state of being young, or of being old, of being male or female; it is one of the orders of human being. (Hull, 1990, 217)

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Figure 9.1  Forces of nature meet human structures, and hands become the inhabitants. City, 2001, Steel, wood, concrete, rope, 73 × 45 × 45 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

Although the senses have evolved to gather different kinds of information from the environments within and without the body, considerable overlap remains in what we gather from each sense. The senses work collaboratively to confirm, amend, and expand the information gathered by each other, the

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better to ensure survival. The overlap in sensory information continues to play a crucial role in sustaining one’s sense of reality and magnifying the richness of the perceived world. Sight and touch especially overlap and corroborate each other. We see the shapes of things with our eyes, but we are also able to perceive many things with our hands and bodies. Just by touching, we can discern forms, sense weight, measure dimensions, and feel textures, details, and materials. With our sense of touch, we can also feel elements without tangible form, such as the sun’s location and intensity, the fall of a shadow, the force of the wind. We can tell how far we have walked from our door or measure the span of a room. The shared ability of sight and touch to give form, substance, and measure to things and to spaces allows one to move through life without visual cues if sight is limited. The powers of touch also enable people with sight to confirm, correct, and amplify information gathered through looking. We hug a friend on greeting to feel her physical presence; we touch velvet to enjoy tactile as well as visual texture; we squeeze a melon in the market to discern ripeness; we run fingers over a plate to assess its cleanness; we lay a hand on a child’s forehead to detect fever; we touch a sculpture to fully grasp its meaning. Touching the sculptures gave a more complete experience: the visual was affirmed and acknowledged by the tactile.

Some properties are detectable through both sight and touch but are better known by one or the other. Shapes register more easily visually than haptically. Texture and temperature—a knife’s sharpness, a coffee cup’s heat—are better felt than seen. The haptic and auditory impressions of people with sight are often dominated and obscured by visual perceptions. The result of these differences is that properties that make an object distinctive to someone with visual impairments might be different from those useful to someone who has sight. The shape of an object is more salient to someone with sight, while an object’s material, hardness, texture, weight, and mass may be more relevant to someone with a visual impairment. For example, silverware might be more defined by its weight than by its pattern. The way the eye grasps an object in an all-at-once fashion, while the hand uses a step-by-step approach, may explain why form is more salient for people with sight; form detection by the hands is the integration of a series of successive impressions requiring the use of time and memory. The subtleties of surfaces and textures can be felt by touch, especially when using the sensitive fingers, with a degree of acuity that often surpasses sight. This ability is dependent on the nature and scale of detail relative to the size of fingers and hands. If I touch a wood carving with indentations so small my fingers

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ride over them, I may miss the textural effects. If I touch the grainy surface of a rock, with its tiny protuberances, I feel it as roughness. Evolutionary biologist Geerat Vermeij, blind since the age of three, has investigated the evolutionary life of mollusks by feeling their life history in the nuances of shell structure and damage. He has built a theory of evolution on the tiny changes in shell structure wrought over time in response to attacking claws and protective shells. A colleague describes watching him study a fossil bed in Florida: He stood there for maybe 45 minutes feeling it and then proceeded to tell me everything there was to know about it—the fighting conchs, the percent covered with barnacles, a layer of oysters. Now if I took you there and said, “Look right here. See the layer?” you still wouldn’t see it. … He can do things with his hands that most of us can’t do with our eyes.

Vermeij concedes that his tactile abilities allow him access to aspects of life hidden to sight: “When I look at shells I look at them tactilely. I know that I see characteristics differently than other people …. Feeling them does predispose one to noticing some things that other people would be less aware of.” Vermeij generates an encyclopedia of images, memories, and associations through touch, just as people gather an encyclopedia of knowledge through sight (Vermeij, 1997). Vermeij’s unusual abilities, developed in response to blindness, illustrate the remarkable malleability and resourcefulness of the sensory systems, especially of sight and touch, so intimately related and yet so radically different. Those of us who depend on sight are prone to interpret blindness as an absence of sight, when it can mean instead a presence of other kinds of perception and therefore other kinds of realities. The perceptual abilities of people with visual impairments extend the possibilities of the powers of touch. Robert Amendola, a creative teacher of rehabilitation for the blind, used his techniques as a sculptor to help the blind gain a surer feeling for spatial relationships. He describes the loss of sight as leading to two fundamental losses: loss of the sheer pleasure of seeing for its own sake and loss of orientation in the world. While he sought to address in his teaching the loss of orientation, he allows that the loss of seeing as a source of aesthetic pleasure is the most painful change, not usually directly handled in rehabilitation. Aesthetic touch and appreciation of tactile artwork may help some people suffering from this deprivation, providing an alternative and perhaps eventually an equivalent pleasure, as it did for Deidre. Another woman who had lost most of her sight was so excited by her first tactile experience of artwork in a gallery that the sculptor,

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who was watching, invited her to come to his studio to try her hand at sculpting. She began to carve wood and has since completed several sculptures. This new creative turn in her life occurred because she had visual limitations. Her tactile aesthetic skills had remained dormant until she experienced art through touch rather than sight. The goals of sensory training in rehabilitation following loss of sight are multiple. They teach one to recognize the realistic potential and limits of nonvisual information and to organize nonvisual information into coherent, usable form. They aim to develop an awareness that responds spontaneously and accurately to new inputs. They seek to develop an awareness of the environment in order to combat isolation and depression. Touching artwork would seem a useful way to approach these goals, since issues of survival and coping are not at stake in the experience of art. Exploring aesthetic touch can teach anyone, whether visually impaired or sighted, the possibilities of haptic perception, opening new realms of sensory, aesthetic, cultural exploration and pleasure. People can learn how to organize their perceptions into a coherent image by exploring works of art, which are usually coherent and organized. Aesthetic touch can nourish haptic skills that heighten responsiveness in other situations. It can stimulate the imagination. It can forge a sense of connection to the cultural mainstream and to the larger stream of life. If someone has had sight, learning how to shift from reliance on visual information to reliance on nonvisual cues initiates a process that closely resembles the creative process: translating from one sensory mode to another, moving from vague feeling to crystallized image, and transforming an image into concrete form. Creatively engaging with art through touch can enhance one’s ability to make the transition from visual to nonvisual thinking and worldmaking. Individuals who lose their sight, at least in the early stages, may experience confusion between the perceived and the imagined, a condition that Deidre described. Without visual information to confirm their impressions, they may be unable to distinguish between a situation’s given elements and how they imagine it. (We should note that people with sight also experience this confusion, which is another story.) People dealing with sight loss can make the imagination an ally by learning to distinguish nonvisual sensory information from associations in memory and by learning how to confirm perceptions through other sensory information. Because art plays with the boundaries between reality and imagination, experiencing artwork can be a useful way for someone who is struggling with those distinctions to become more fluid with

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Figure 9.2  This version of a house, made while I was building my house, offers haptic images of each level of habitation. House 4, 2005, Rope, rawhide, steel, bamboo, thread, 63 × 40 × 30 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

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them. Rather than banishing the imagined, it can be more effective—and more stimulating—to familiarize oneself with the ways of the imagination and to learn to trust its powers. People with limitations of sight may need more, rather than less, stimulation to their imaginations. Sight loss reduces the physical, spatial parameters of the world; some people describe the need to expand their imaginative, spiritual dimensions in response. Engagement with art is one way to develop such inner resources. By exploring a complex, meaningful object, by meeting the creative life of the artist as embodied in the artwork, and by stimulating memories, feelings, and ideas, everyone’s inner and outer worlds are magnified. For people who become adventitiously blind, the ability to visualize usually weakens over time, but it may be maintained to varying degrees through practice. The age at which sight is lost makes a difference in the maintenance of this ability, as well as the desire to maintain it. An artist who suddenly lost her sight in midlife intentionally stimulates and sharpens her powers of visualization by attending movies and art exhibitions with friends who can vividly describe to her what they see. She knows she must practice visualizing to keep those skills alive—and to keep her spirit alive. Georgina Kleege, who has been legally blind since childhood, teaches writing and disabilities studies and has been engaged with art all her life, having had artist parents. She writes about blindness and visual art, how blindness is represented in art, how blindness affects the lives of visual artists, and how museums can make art accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired. She gently counters the many myths, stereotypes, and attitudes about blindness, thoughtfully describing her lived realities. She notes researchers’ use of blindness for their own purposes rather than helping people who are blind, and she also notes that touch tours are often treated as exclusive, personal experiences and as protocols to meet baseline access obligations. She is interested in developing a richer tactile language to heighten tactile perception and suggests that people who are blind or visually impaired be valued for their contributions to public cultural discourse. Indeed, she recently served as the curator of an exhibition of tactile sculpture, selecting the artworks based on verbal descriptions of them. When I was learning about the tactile experience of art, I was fascinated by the adaptations and the responses of people with varying degrees of sight and haptic skill. I was often moved by the creative applications of touch, especially by people with disabilities. One man touched his lips to one of my sculptures in a gesture of sensitive inquiry. A woman who had no arms (due to her mother’s use of thalidomide when she was pregnant) touched my sculpture with her face.

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“I would have used my feet if I weren’t in a gallery,” she told me. Another woman with arthritic hands touched the sculptures with her forearms, awakening her tactile sense in an unexpected site. These creative means of coming to know the sculptures altered my sense of the sculptures themselves as well as their meaning. They also irrevocably altered my understanding of perception, capacity, and resilience.

10

Learning the Language

Guided by what I had learned from Deidre and the handling sessions in museums, I set out to make my first fully tactile sculpture, based on my early tactile experiment with the panel that could be picked up and turned over to see the two different sides. I chose to translate the fragile materials in that piece into wood and steel for the next one. Built in such durable materials, the two-sided panel was too heavy to lift easily, so I set hinges along one side and attached it to a wooden platform. Still thinking of the structure of books, the panel could now be turned like the page of a book, albeit a thick, heavy page. I decided to build it into a table so that people could sit as they engaged with the piece and so a person in a wheelchair could easily reach it. I had learned in our museum visits that understanding and appreciation through touch consume more time than looking. I wanted people to feel comfortable, supported, and encouraged to devote time to exploring the artwork. The way the panel turned over presented a new perceptual problem. In my work with Deidre, I was struck by her difficulty in remembering forms she had perceived haptically. When she turned the panel over, she couldn’t remember the face of the panel that was now turned under. I wanted people to be able to observe the differences and the correspondences between the two sides, so I built a version of each face into the table, allowing the exposed face of the panel to be felt alongside a facsimile of the hidden face. Because I had also noticed that memory tends to reduce things to their essential elements, I simplified the version of each face set into the table. I called the piece Memory since its structure explores how we remember. This sculpture proved to be not only an object, but also a situation. Hands need to lift and move the panel to see both sides and to feel all the surfaces and structures. Hands are called upon to manipulate the object as well as to perceive it. We are so accustomed to handling things without paying attention to the sensory information that I was concerned people might only engage

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Figure 10.1  As described in the text, this sculpture has a hinged panel that can be lifted and turned over, like the page of a book. Memory, 1993, Steel, wood, 5 × 32 × 25 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © Ellen Augarten.

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with turning it over and not notice the textures, structures, and materials of the piece. Because I wanted people to focus attention on their perceptual, sensory experience, I decided to eliminate any moving parts in my next sculptures. In the early stages of working this way, I was slow in learning to perceive through my sense of touch. My hands felt clumsy and awkward, not in their manipulative abilities, but in their perceptual skills. They couldn’t “see” color; they couldn’t remember and connect the different parts. I felt hampered by my dependence on visual perception. My reflexes remained so strongly visual that I had to struggle against them, which seemed counterintuitive. I felt keenly the boundaries I had set for myself. I soon realized my frustration came partly from trying to translate visual phenomena into tactile language. I began to investigate my sense of touch on its own terms rather than trying to overlay a tactile dimension onto visual effects. In this new way of working, my hands and my body were doing more than simply making the sculptures. They were also investigating how shapes and surfaces feel to touch and how we know forms and spaces through touching. I was asking questions different than those I would ask if I were aiming for visual effects. What does it mean for hands to move from a rough texture to a smooth one? What materials might give a sense of both hardness and warmth? How can I create a kinesthetic experience of emptiness? Is it possible to establish a sense of physical safety for people and yet invite emotional risk? These questions looked to the sensing body for their answers. No longer was sight the only means for determining form, space, and meaning in my artwork. My hands and my body became full participants in aesthetic questions and decisions. I explored various ways of touching: with fingertips, palm, and full hand. I observed the effects of different kinds of movement: careful, brisk, delicate, and broad. I measured the scale of fingers and hands. I noticed how different sizes, shapes, and spaces of objects affect the movements of fingers and hands. I explored the range of movements, the flexion and extension of fingers, the curve of hand, the rotation of wrist, elbow, and shoulder. I felt the sensations of reaching and moving in different directions: up, down, horizontally, and diagonally. I noted the feelings that attend different kinds of grasps or gestures: open-handed, gripping, complex moves, or long, uninterrupted reaches. I noticed what drew me tactually and kinesthetically: which textures, forms, and spaces provoked sensations that intrigued me and which motions opened new emotional territory. I worked sometimes with my eyes closed and sometimes open. I needed to learn not only how things feel but also how they look. I needed to discern

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how touch and sight relate to and differ from each other. I was interested in the dialogue between the two sensory modes. I wondered how my understanding of visual phenomena would be transformed by this intense engagement with the tactile. I could not pretend to be a nonvisual artist, nor was I willing to abdicate my responsibility to the visual integrity of my sculptures and the visual challenges of making sculpture. I was learning a new language but wanted to speak both languages at the same time. The biomorphic shapes I had been using in my collages to explore breathing, movement, and gravity, as felt in my body, now yielded to more structural, rectilinear forms, a kind of primitive architectural imagery. It was as if I had been living in organs and muscles and began to inhabit bones, the architecture of the body. I became fascinated with the tensions between the permanence and solidity of human-built structures (houses and barns) and the transitory nature of the life (people and animals) that moves through them. I was interested in the tensions between solid and mobile, manufactured and organic, concrete and ephemeral. I soon realized that the sculptures themselves, which are hard and rectilinear, could be conceived as the structural elements, while people’s hands and bodies moving around and through the sculptures contribute the more ephemeral, organic elements of body, breath, and movement. People touching the sculptures became integral to the meaning of the sculptures. I conceived the next piece, called House, to have an interior. I wanted hands to be able to go inside it, and to go where sight could not. I designed a rectangular, hollow form with indented walls and a roof that steps downward toward the interior. I made openings in the top and two sides to allow hands to enter and explore the interior. To ensure congruence between the meanings of both visual and tactile experiences, I sought to make tactile and visual phenomena correspond closely. I made tactile choices that I thought would allow a person without sight to have an experience or a mental image resembling what someone could see. For example, I wanted the outside hard and cool and the inside soft and warm, in order to create a contrast between outside and inside, so I chose materials that would enhance that contrast: cast bronze for the outer walls, suede pigskin over felt lining for the inner walls. The grainy, mottled, sand-colored surface of the bronze also felt grainy and sandy. The pigskin and wood surfaces both felt and looked smooth and warm. I knew my own perceptions were too limited and biased to predict accurately what other people’s responses might be. I had to learn how other people touching the sculptures perceived them. I arranged to exhibit the two sculptures for a period of three days in a nearby art gallery, invited friends, artists, educators,

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curators, and children, and asked for feedback about their experiences. Deidre and I worked closely during this exhibit with Renee Wells, a gifted educator with years of experience working with people of all ages with disabilities and as an advocate for disability access. We needed to answer some very basic questions. Could people have as full and complex an aesthetic experience through touch as with sight? Could people tactually understand and enjoy the sculptures even though they were abstract? Would sighted people be as interested in touching as people with limited sight? Would children enjoy them? To gather information from our visitors, I worked with museum evaluator Jeff Hayward, principal of People, Places and Design, to develop a questionnaire and to interview people after their time spent with the artworks. As an experiment, we offered the use of blindfolds as an option for people who wished to experience the sculptures by touch before looking. Most sighted people chose to use the blindfolds, allowing them to focus on touch without the usual habits and expectations of sight. We had not foreseen the efficacy and power of touch in this context. Touching without sight calls up different references and associations than seeing. Experience seems to be organized differently. Different parts of the nervous system seem to be engaged, producing a different range of responses. People with visual limitations have already made many of these adjustments, so the effect proves more striking in people unfamiliar with haptic perception. In watching and listening to many people, we saw clearly that this work was primarily about touch. Whether someone is sighted or visually impaired proved secondary. Touch is the common language shared by all. Touching these artworks was new for everyone, each in his or her own way. The range and depth of responses by people who could look at the artworks after they touched them especially surprised us. People were stimulated, moved, and sometimes startled by their sensations. They had insights into perceptual processes and, in some cases, how they live their lives. I learned from our visitors that touch and sight often yield quite different information and that tactile and visual experiences might not necessarily correspond. I discovered I could neither predict nor program people’s experiences on the basis of my own perceptions. Tactile perceptions prove as varied, complex, and personal as visual perceptions. Everyone approaches an artwork with different histories, personal associations, and attitudes toward touching. However, I did begin to discern patterns in people’s perceptions that were confirmed and refined as I continued to gather responses. These responses

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became central to my growing understanding of the implications of making haptic sculpture. This active, reciprocal relationship with my audience proved to be novel, useful, and very moving. By asking for feedback, I developed a sense of connection with the people who touch my sculptures and a deep respect for their intelligence and curiosity. Most artists have little or no relationship with the people who experience their artwork, a gap that can create for the artist an impression of working in a vacuum. For the people perceiving an artwork, this lack of connection can breed confusion or unwillingness to understand the artist’s intentions. Touching not only connects people to the sculptures and to me as artist, but it also connects me to the people who touch my artwork. The next sculpture I made grew out of an observation Deidre and I had made during one of our museum visits. Deidre felt great satisfaction as she held between her hands the symmetrical haunches of a deer, Resting Stag by Elie Nadelman. Part of the pleasure was the fit of the smooth, bulbous forms in the palms of her hands, but part of it, we realized, was the particular relationship of her hands to each other, facing one another and close together. I also noticed that when people lifted the panel of Memory to turn it over, they would often pause to feel both sides of the panel balanced between their hands. I made the next piece specifically to explore this hand-to-hand communication. For this sculpture, called Body, I made a vertical slab about two inches thick with different but related structures on both sides. In response to some people’s complaints about the lack of curves in my other sculptures, I decided to offer a few places on the piece that were relatively soft, yielding, and curved in contrast to the flat, hard, rectilinear surfaces and forms I had made so far. Within the flat steel surface of one side, I inserted soft, suede-covered mounds to correspond to rectangular blocks on the other side that had hard but undulating surfaces. I learned that people holding the piece between both hands do generate a strong sense of the space between their hands—the closer together, the stronger the sensation. The two hands communicate with each other, measuring the space between them with great acuity, based on the position of both hands in relation to one another. Because the two sides of Body are related but not identical, this piece also lets people explore how left and right hands gather different information and with different degrees of sensitivity. Having completed the three sculptures, I decided it was time to assemble a formal exhibition to learn from a wider audience. Three sculptures may seem too few for a visual art exhibition, but full haptic exploration takes so much longer than visual, and I wanted people to feel they had ample time. I created

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a system of wooden railings to guide people through the gallery. I wrote and recorded an audio tour that included suggestions for ways to touch and verbal descriptions of the room and the sculptures for people with visual limitations. Jeff Hayward and I designed a new questionnaire and interviewed seventy people in the course of the exhibition’s first venue at the Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts. We had four questions in mind: whether people learned anything about touch, what kind of mental images they generated, whether they were aware of their perceptual process, and whether they had an aesthetic experience. We did not ask those question directly but, rather, asked people what touching meant to them; whether any images came to mind as they explored the sculptures; and which sculpture appealed to them, and why. From a detailed analysis of their responses, we drew the answers to our larger questions. We learned that our visitors came with a range of tactile facility. Most people had no specific tactile skills, a few had well-developed skills, and nobody had touched a work of art in depth. Even artists, who intimately and extensively handle the objects they make, admitted they had not consciously attended to this dimension of their work. There were people who missed large parts of the sculptures and people who had vivid, complex experiences. What we were looking for was not the degree of skill, but evidence of their awareness of tactile phenomena and tactile learning. Of this, we found plenty. Many responses noted varieties of texture, temperature, and materials. Many observed how tactile perception works. Things felt more: smooth surfaces smoother, levels higher and deeper than they looked. Touch is linear, like reading. You’re in the details right away.

People were often inventive and inquiring with their touch, translating their haptic experiments into deeper understanding of the artwork. I used both hands, outside hand trying to make sense in relation to the inside hand. There was pleasure in finding and joining hands.

Some felt an increased awareness of the potential for touch in their lives. This reminded me of all the touching I do without really feeling what I’m touching. I’ll begin to feel what I touch.

We tried to discern whether any people became aware of their perceptual processes as they moved through the exhibition. We considered this awareness

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Figure 10.2  A ladder up one side of this tall sculpture allows people to reach the upper levels to see and to touch. Troy, 2001, Steel, copper, cloth, alabaster, stone, wood, resin, leather, 108 × 67 × 44 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © Ellen Augarten.

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to be occurring whenever they stepped outside the ordinary, unconscious use of perception and observed perception itself; when they noticed something about perception; when they compared two senses (usually touch and sight); or when they expressed gratitude or appreciation for their senses. Such responses move beyond appreciation of the artwork itself to observe the very ways one comes to know and understand the work of art. The vivid nature of touch, its novelty, and its separation from visual experience through blindfolds generated insights into perception itself. The senses come together to give you an impression. It’s nice to take them one by one, to add one at a time.

Many comments note differences between tactile and visual images. Sometimes your eyes miss something that touch doesn’t.

Many describe differences between how it feels to see and to touch. The movement my hands made and the way my hands touched the piece were very different than looking at it. With our eyes we have to imagine the smoothness or sharpness of a curve.

Some noticed differences in the perception of size and quality. The sculptures seemed bigger, more complex, more engaging to touch than to sight, or, in some cases, more beautiful to sight than to touch. Without sight they seem bigger, less constrained, I don’t know the boundaries.

People’s responses revealed insight into meanings, appreciation for the qualities of the artwork, or awareness of being affected by the encounter. Many describe entering a different world or other dimensions; feelings of surprise, pleasure, and peace; use of the other senses; the imagination being engaged; and heightened sensitivity. The world became magic for an hour. It was an invitation not to take the senses for granted.

At a certain stage in their developing relationship to art, many people tend to discount their perceptions or feelings, believing they lack adequate knowledge about art or about what they are looking at; they lack confidence in their own experience. The intimate nature of touch seems to melt that distrust and to disarm inhibitions that people bring to their encounter with art. Touching is so direct, concrete, and immediate that people are better able to sense and to trust their own perceptions. Other than the general taboo against touching, people are not burdened with prejudices about how or how not to touch art.

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I had read that abstraction is difficult for people with visual limitations to understand—as it often is for people with sight. I found, however, that the concrete nature of the haptic encounter grounds people’s experience in sensuous reality, even if the forms are abstract, unfamiliar, or unidentifiable. To the sense of touch, these forms need not stand for something else, nor are they necessarily a reduction of something to its essential elements. To the touching hand, they are concrete. The intimate contact with the artwork is perceptually satisfying. Meaning is embodied in the qualities felt by fingers and in the movement of limbs and hands. Education or previous knowledge of art proves irrelevant to people’s abilities to engage meaningfully with the sculptures this way. More important are curiosity and the willingness to explore, both of which are stimulated by permission to touch.

11

The Artist’s Body

My career as a visual artist began not with art making but with an education in seeing. My first formal training in visual perception was an intensive study of art history in college, which at that time emphasized visual analysis of form, composition, color, line, mass, and texture (through reproductions and, to a much lesser extent, direct experience). I learned to develop my visual memory and to discern art from different regions, periods, styles, and artists. One summer, I attended a seminar in Florence, Italy, where I beheld the paintings and sculptures I had studied in reproduction, but now embedded in their native architecture, landscape, and culture. This experience revised my notions about the nature of art, its purpose, and meaning. These artworks told stories, revealed artists’ obsessions, taught religious principles, and reflected cultural upheavals, political intrigue, and social values. They connected the Florentines to their place, their past, their civic identity, and their vision of the sacred. By contrast, I realized how much art in our time has become separated from our daily, symbolic, religious, sensuous, and communal lives. After college, I moved into curatorial work in the Asian department of a university art museum, where I began to have a physical relationship to objects, handling artworks on a daily basis and living intimately with superb works of art, many of which were made to be touched and handled. I opened silk boxes within silk boxes to lift out Chinese paintings on rolls of silk and paper that were then viewed by unrolling them on a table. I unpacked the heavy scents and rich textures of Turkish brocades and Persian rugs, cleaned ancient grit from the crevices of Chinese jade carvings, handled delicate Arabic glass bowls, and cradled the myriad beautiful pots with their thick, smooth glazes, fine-grained clay, and swelling bulbous forms. These sensuous memories live in my hands and in my body, continuing to this day to speak to me about the sense of touch. The next phase of my visual education was in art school, which coincided with the experiments of the seventies, when art came off the walls and broke

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boundaries of time, space, and convention. In an art gallery, we moved through shapes formed by blades of light projected into a room filled with smoke. A Claus Oldenburg sculpture of a lipstick tube on tank treads rolled onto the university plaza. Lippincott, the company that fabricated many of these dramatic, large-scale sculptures, operated nearby, and there we would wander among monumental artworks by Barnett Newman and Tony Smith. Pulsa, a local group of artists who lived communally, worked collaboratively, and explored art and technology, created an installation of large strobe lights placed randomly across a golf course. As I strolled at night amidst the vast field of pinging, flickering lights in a darkness that rendered ground and sky indistinguishable, I knew my kinesthetic, auditory, and visual worlds would never be the same. During those years, I painted and drew the human figure from live models. I tried to grasp the subtle complexities of the visible human body by looking intently and drawing. Over time, my curiosity moved from the surface of the body to the interior, to the anatomical structures below the skin. I studied anatomy and dissected a cadaver, painting figures with transparent skin that revealed the bones, muscles, and organs under the surface. Gradually, my interest moved away from the objective reality of muscle and bone toward the subjective experience of my body. The source of my imagery became the body I could know only through my own internal sensing. I searched for ways to visualize and represent in my paintings such subtle sensations as the shifting from inhale to exhale, the weight of my head on the spine, the pulsing of blood. The move to hand papermaking continued this exploration, but now through a medium that allowed my hands to immerse themselves in the body of the image I was making and in the materials I was using. I was gradually moving toward allowing the medium, the process, and the artwork to embody rather than represent the content. Soon, I was expanding the tactile, haptic immersion of my paper works into making sculptures that others could also interact with through their senses of touch and movement. When I undertook the investigation into touch and the body in my art making, I had to rewire and reorganize my perceptual systems. To heighten my sensitivity to haptic and somatic phenomena, I shifted my perceptual priorities through a range of investigations. I engaged with people who are blind and visually impaired. I explored blindness through reading, symposia, and individual encounters. I designed systems for nonvisual experience of art, using guiding rails, audio tours, Braille signage, and training docents in museums to accommodate people who could not see. I closed my eyes while making work. I offered people blindfolds. I discovered what sight could and could not do,

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compared with touch. I came to question the powers of sight and its hegemony and to appreciate the virtues of connection, embodiment, and intimacy in touch. Touching a sculpture is a dialogue, an intimate conversation between bodies—human and nonhuman. As I touch the artwork, it touches me in return. It presses on me, however gently, as much as I press on it; it speaks to me just as I speak to it. What does it say to me? How does it say it? This kind of exchange has implications for our standing in the world. Each of us is embedded in a nonhuman world, which is often shaped by us and certainly shapes us in turn. We find that objects have their own intentions, limits, and possibilities, which have a felt impact on our own intentions, limits, and possibilities. This contact can be humbling as well as reassuring. As new technologies take us into increasingly malleable, illusory realities, we need more than ever the haptic interface with concrete conditions and real forces to remind us where the ground lies. We know how to find significance in visual events: a line of red suggests blood; the repetition of shapes creates order; a pool of light focuses attention. We can also discern qualities and interpret meaning in an artwork through the sense of touch. The arc of a curve feels inclusive; a smooth stone suggests the wear of time; a long, rolling surface evokes travel through a landscape. Sliding my hand into a narrow cavity, I feel a sense of confinement. A surface that looks blank to my eye feels warm, gritty, and nuanced to my hand. The meanings we garner by touch carry peculiar power because the body experiences them as well as the eye and mind. I know a shape by the shape of my arms, a texture by the sensations in my hand, spatial depth through my reach. Meanings find expression in my motions. I feel physically as well as emotionally engaged; I move closer than when I stand back to look. By drawing more of my senses, more of my body, and more of my feelings and memories into the encounter, I enrich my understanding of the artwork and deepen my experience. This experience takes me into another dimension or world or universe. It resembles a memory I have of being lost in a dream. This experience is very fundamental, basic, primitive. It’s different than more intellectual experiences or even emotional ones. It’s more direct and therefore stronger.

Some artists intuitively know the power of touch. The sensations they feel as a sculpture develops under their hands shape the making and the intention as surely as its appearance. Tactile intelligence and desires direct their decisions. They are sensitive to the shape of a gesture, the power of scale, the expressiveness of materials. Consider the burgeoning forms and active surfaces of Henry Moore’s bronze figures; the rich, sensuous swags and folds of El Anatsui’s huge tapestries

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made of hundreds of sewn bottle caps; or the rough, chain-sawed surfaces of a wooden sphere by David Nash. These sculptures invite people to respond to their inherent sensuousness with open senses. Their materials possess depth and power in their nature. Surfaces scintillate with movement. Forms pulse with internal pressure. The natural response to this intensity of life is to move toward it with our own somatic intelligence. The artist physically interacts with materials, exploring the visual possibilities but also the haptic, tactile qualities, generating forms to explore those qualities and forging new ways to use them. The artist works through her somatic history, habits, and desires—how she played as a child, the landscapes she knows, how she likes to move. These memories and intentions express themselves in the way she works: large or small, wielding heavy machinery or delicate tools, climbing ladders or digging in the ground, using malleable clay or obdurate steel. The person who touches a sculpture taps into the life of the artist, distilled and concentrated in the artwork. Every part of the sculpture expresses the attention, intention, and intensity with which the artist made it: the choice of materials,

Figure 11.1  The two sides of the central panel relate and contrast with each other in materials, shapes, and textures. Both sides can be felt at the same time by left and right hands. The whole piece can also be turned to sit on any face of the coppered steel frame, providing different tactile and visual configurations. Canyon Body, 2000, Copper, wood, alabaster, bone, resin, stone, leather, 25 × 15 × 15 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

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the forms, the surfaces, and the transitions between parts. A man who is visually impaired came to a lecture I gave in connection with a museum exhibition of my sculptures. He came to confirm his impressions of me, gathered earlier in the day by touching my sculptures. He felt he knew me through my work, in the attention to detail, the careful making, and the quality of listening to the senses. A sculpture is a meeting ground for three elements: the artwork, the artist, and ourselves. When we touch, we learn about the way we touch; the sensations we feel; the gestures we use; the feelings that arise; the memories, associations, and ideas that emerge; and the desires that guide our exploration. We discover aspects of ourselves that are familiar, long forgotten, deeply known, or newly found. Meeting an artwork in this way creates a nexus of connections to the artwork, to the artist, and to our inner world. We touch the life of the sculpture, the life of the artist, and our own life, forging a unified field of all three. Michael Brenson poses basic questions to ask about a sculpture: Does it want to be touched? Does it call for touch? How? The criteria differ from those for merely visual art. He describes the kind of sculpture he considers appealing to touch: The sculpture I am concerned with seeks a communion with the hand and holds out the promise of an encounter between it and the hand that will release something essential yet hidden in both. … The kind of sculpture that offers a communion with the hand tends to be monolithic. It is usually hard. It is not pictorial. It cannot be kinetic. It must be in place. (Brenson, 1995, 30)

Nor is sculpture necessarily appealing if it bears heavy textures such as deeply chiseled wood or if it uses materials inherently textured, such as fabric or stone, even though these may visually stimulate the sense of touch. These surfaces may or may not be tactually informative or enlightening, he says: Even sculpture that seems to be a hymn to touch may not be responsive to actually being known by the hand. Willem de Kooning’s taffylike figures have everything to do with expressive gesture but they do not elicit a desire to touch them, and if you do you will learn nothing more than you learned with your eyes. The imposing wood figures and heads by George Baselitz are filled with incident, but the anonymous markings help create the impression that they are so detached that they are totally indifferent, if not immune, to touch. (Brenson, 1995, 31)

My colleague Deidre had the same response in touching a Rodin bronze head; the complex surface texture obscured the overall form. Such artworks may be visually stimulating, but the sensing hand may feel out of place, in the wrong

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scale, lost in a field of texture or unbounded space, put off by roughness, or confused by complexity. Touching a sculpture with smooth, flowing forms and sensuous materials that would seem haptically appealing may not add another dimension to visual impressions. What makes a sculpture tactile is more than flowing, voluptuous forms, sensuous surfaces, or figurative allusions. According to Brenson, sculpture that appeals to touch has a vitality of mass that suggests life within: In sculpture that welcomes the hand, the integrity and conviction of the surface is an expression of the life inside it. When the surface of a sculpture appeals to the hand, something within the mass seems to be emanating, extending itself, moving in our direction. That something seems intent on making itself desirable, and it seeks to desire contact with us. … When the sculptural interior is alive, the life inside the mass seems part of it and yet outside it, part of the identity of that sculpture and yet beyond ownership. It seems to have chosen to dwell in that particular sculptural form even as it remains so general that it clearly belongs to no one and nowhere. … (Brenson, 1995, 30)

Henry Moore speaks of his sculpture in such terms: One of the things I would like to think my sculpture has is a force … a strength, a life, a vitality from inside it, so that you have a sense the form is pressing from inside trying to burst … rather than having something which is just shaped from outside and stopped. It’s as though you have something trying to make itself come to a shape from inside … and so the knee, the shoulder, the skull, the forehead, … where … you get a sense of pressure of the bone outwards—these are for me the key points. (Kuh, 1990)

We feel an impulse to meet the life inside a sculpture, which is essentially an embodiment of the artist’s vitality. As we do, we feel our own aliveness. The life in the sculpture speaks directly to the life in our bodies, bypassing the intellect. Brenson describes other qualities that arouse the desire to touch a sculpture: an integrity and conviction of surface that stem from a deep understanding of the logic of the material from which it is made: It is born of the sculptor’s ability to connect with the material to the point where it seems animate, forever moving, not only alive in the present but an expression of something that has always been and yet that remains forever in the process of becoming. It depends upon a belief that the viewer’s tactile connection to the life in the material is as important to the work’s content as any overt statement it might make would be. The material is usually traditional—wood, bronze, clay, plaster, glass or stone. (Brenson, 1995, 31)

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The choice of materials determines aesthetic possibilities as well as ways of moving and interacting. Folding paper is a very different experience from carving stone. The artist’s choice of whether to use the whole body or small motions of the hand, to wrestle with huge beams or sew silk, is as much somatic as it is aesthetic, and it remains central to the nature of the ensuing artwork. Josef Albers, whose work seems totally without concern for haptic issues, speaks about his materials: “I always paint on board because it has the resistance of a wall. I can’t stand canvas; it runs away from the touch—an unpleasant feeling for me. It’s too evasive” (Kuh, 1990). The choice and use of materials are immensely enriched by haptic considerations. We know materials only partially through sight; we must touch to know them thoroughly. Many qualities are not fully accessible to sight: weight, temperature, textures, hardness, resilience, fragility, resistance, and flexibility. Intellectually I know metal and stone are colder, but this made it evident to my fingertips. We deal with so many artificial textures these days you never know if what you see is going to feel like it looks. These are different materials than you normally touch—fine woods, metals, richly textured things.

The first indication of an artist’s intentions for meaning lies in the choice of materials. Each material has its own qualities, sources, processes, possibilities, limitations, resonances, and associations. The meanings we find in materials are usually grounded in their haptic qualities, whether we are looking or touching. Rawhide is hard, but is warm to the touch. The forms it takes are mobile and irregular. The wet, pliable skin dries tough and translucent. Touching it, I know, at some level, the live animal, the rancher’s hands, and my own skin. Steel is cool and hard. It can be thin, sharp, and flexible, or thick and unyielding. It suggests heat and machinery. When I touch steel, I know the millworker’s hands, the strength of metal, and heavy industry. Materials provide meaning to the body as well as to the eye. Made me realize how much I love textures and odors of materials—how comforting is leather, how unpleasant concrete. Metal is the odor of hard.

Touching creates more vivid distinctions between materials. We find that wood is warmer than bronze, that cloth is compatible with plaster, or that rawhide is harder than leather. If several materials are combined in a sculpture, the relationships among them become more complex and compelling when known through the tactile senses—more qualities are revealed, and the contrasts

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are amplified. Steel is steelier next to glass. Cloth is softer and more ephemeral beside bronze. Leather is more malleable than stone. The worked aluminum surface felt softer than paper. Copper felt softer than wood, more impressionable. Astonishing that such a hard surface could feel so soft, seeming softer than my skin. The lid [which is covered in suede leather] looks like stone, so when I touched it, I felt as if I’d been shocked. I was so surprised I pulled my hands away. And the shadow actually was stone!

Tactile, haptic art is not simply art that one is allowed to touch. It is art imbued with tactile intelligence. It exudes haptic awareness. Art that calls for the sense of touch embodies a particular kind of consciousness: one that knows body, earth, gravity, weight, and pressure; one that is aware of time, memory, and mortality; one that feels at home with nature’s laws and ways; one that embraces both the material world and the spirit world. Giuseppe Penone, Antony Gormley, Magdalena Abakanowicz, and Ursula von Rydingsvard are artists who were brought up, or been immersed at some point, in peasant cultures, which are rooted in body and nature: All make sculpture that lays bare basic links between the human body, human existence and nature. To run one’s hands over the embryonic trees asleep within Penone’s beams is to feel the skeletal structure inside animal and vegetal bodies. It is also to feel the child within the body of man. When touching Gormley’s lead figures I feel I am holding pressure. I seem to have within my hands a force of air and movement so uncontainable that it makes me believe human beings hold within their bodies both the gravity and the revolution of the earth. … The naked surfaces of [Abakanowicz’s] War Games are so sensual, the inner vitalities of their bodies so irrepressible, that … to touch them is to feel a human bond with all of nature. (Brenson, 1995, 33)

Abakanowicz says, Between myself and the material with which I create, no tool intervenes. I select it with my hands. I shape it with my hands. My hands transmit my energy to it. In translating idea into form, they always pass on to it something that eludes conceptualization. They reveal the unconscious. (Abakanowicz, 1983, 102)

For sculpture to speak to the somatic senses of the perceiver, the artist must be in tune with her own somatic senses. The sensitivity of the artist to her body and its ways deepens the capacity to translate that awareness into sculpture. The more fully an artist inhabits her body, the more choices and resources she has

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to call on for making art. Some artists are naturally engaged with their somatic intelligence because of their innate character, where they grew up, and their life experiences. Henry Moore speaks of his working process in this prescription for a sculptor: He must strive continually to think of, and use form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape … inside his head—he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complex form from all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its center of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realizes its volume, and the space that the shape displaces in the air. (Abakanowicz, 1983, 102)

A keen awareness of the body emerges for the artist making haptic sculpture. In my own work, knowing that the arm is rooted in the back, I offer situations that call for a long reach. Noticing that the hand naturally curves inward around its center, I consider shapes that cup and cradle. I make structures that acknowledge people’s height and size, that make room for feet, that allow entry to the hand or the whole body. My sculpture serves as a kind of research into questions about the body and about sensory play. I ask my body (and other people’s) what they are able to do, what they are interested in doing, and how their actions translate into sensations and meaning. This has implications for the artwork as it is made and for the hands and bodies that will feel it. Standing and sitting are very different; standing is more active, my whole body is engaged; there’s more of a spatial sense, more grounded. When I was in the chair, my body dropped away. I had to teach myself to do this. I had to develop strategies for knowing through touch. Each surface yields to another surface, then turns a corner. Very complicated. My notions about symmetry had to dissolve to be with it the way it is. I was surprised to find such pleasure in hard edges, square corners; it emphasized the organic nature of my body. I’m interested in secrets in our bodies, in our selves; I like finding secrets inside.

While some artists instinctively know and act through their bodies, others cultivate that awareness. There are many ways to develop haptic sensitivity that can feed directly or indirectly into the art making process. These may include physical practices such as dance, aikido, or kayaking; receiving bodywork such as massage therapy, Rolfing, or Body-Mind Centering; somatic practices such as Alexander technique, Authentic Movement, or Feldenkrais—whatever deepens

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awareness and knowledge of the body’s powers, weaknesses, habits, abilities, and capacity to change. These practices develop a different kind of consciousness and intelligence, based more in the body-mind than in the brain. For some artists, greater somatic awareness emerges from illness, injury, or disability. Forced to face physical limitations, whether from birth or later in life, one develops a profound relationship with the body and its ways. In these circumstances, art making can be a dialogue with the body and its conditions. The images or processes involved may illuminate feelings, which in turn stimulate artistic investigation. An artist friend whose work was mainly coloredpencil drawings descended into years of limited mobility, resulting from a rare nerve disease that caused numbness in her extremities. She could not hold a pencil. Nevertheless, she kept drawing by taping pencils to her hand, as a way to track her changing abilities. Like visual art making, haptic art making raises personal questions. How do I feel as I make this motion or touch this surface? Does my body move naturally in that direction, or is it forced? Is my body confused or unsupported by these shapes? Does this size or shape take me into an unfamiliar movement? Is the movement too familiar? Does the movement or texture or shape carry associations compatible with the meaning of the piece? What does the movement mean? What does the texture mean? What do these shapes mean to the hand and is that different from what they mean to the eye? Does this form suggest more than one meaning to the hand? The haptic choices an artist makes are guided by her intentions. Creating tactile sensations for their own sake misses the point. Work that offers tactile stimuli without inherent meaning, imagery, or narrative would be analogous to purely optical exercises. To honor and plumb the emotive power of touch, tactile phenomena must be integrated into the fabric of the structure, meaning, and narrative of the artwork. A tactile choice must follow the same stringent process as a visual choice. As one perceiver astutely pointed out, There are two kinds of “friendly”: the surface that is pleasing to touch and the order in the forms.

Art made for the hands acknowledges the way hands come to know things through continuous, cumulative exploration. Such work must provide continuity, allowing the hand to move across the landscape of the artwork without gaps. The surfaces flow into one another; forms lead to each other; and materials relate and lead to each other. Discontinuity may be part of the haptic experience, but only if that is the artist’s intention.

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People sense different subjective qualities in different uses of the hand. An open hand creates a feeling different from that of a hand that bends or curves, grasps or flattens. Hands can pinch, grip, or knock. Touch that differentiates fingers, using each finger in a slightly different way, can generate a feeling of discernment and subtlety, which is different from touch that uses the whole hand as a unit. My hand was forced to go flat on the surface by the narrowness of the space, a way of feeling I had never done before, very different than fingertips.

Qualities evoked by the use of the hand carry emotional, psychological associations, which differ from person to person. The interpretation of sensation is a function of the mind. The wide range of possible interpretations poses challenges for the haptic artist. Not enough is known about how touch creates meaning, and tactile perception remains incredibly complex. For example, some people find the steel lines that frame some of my sculptures helpful for orientation to the piece (especially with visual limitation or with eyes closed), while others find the frames inhibit easy access to the tactually appealing elements within. I use them for both purposes, wanting to reflect the orienting yet limiting framework of the structures and concepts we live inside. What matters in the end is that the gesture of a touch embodies meaning and creates a perceptual, psychological impact, whatever the content or intent. Breaking habits, however gently, can stimulate new neural connections. Actively touching with parts of the body not usually used for touching heightens the subjective aspect of touch, making one acutely aware of sensations and the quality of touch. Touching with the hands, which are used all the time for handling and contact, can feel less intimate than touching with the torso, which feels closer to one’s core and evokes more internal, visceral qualities. Aesthetic touch, which is driven by curiosity and interest more than function and purpose, invites exploration with less-used parts of hand and body. Actually moving can deepen an artist’s understanding of a developing artwork. By physically exploring the movements it evokes, by dancing or miming them, we can feel what those forms and shapes are doing and better sense their meaning. As art history students, my friends and I would take the positions of bodies in paintings and sculptures as a way not only to remember them, but also to enter the image with greater empathy. How does Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s David feel as he winds up to fling the fatal stone at Goliath? Or Edgar Degas’s woman kneeling in the bathtub? Or Marc Chagall’s figures floating above their villages?

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One of an artist’s challenges is to make the spaces in the artwork as alive and charged with presence as the solids. Haptic perception can provide, more fully than sight, an experience of space and the way it interpenetrates forms. Since the physical exploration of space calls our spatial sense into play, it can generate a stronger feeling for spaces, their dimensions, and their qualities. The more ways an artist can bodily explore the spaces she is representing in a painting or forming in a sculpture, the more cogent and potent those spaces will be, whether abstract or realistic. This exploration may take the form of pacing a room, walking a mountain, curling inside a closet, or lying down. An artist may also consider the cognitive, emotional, expressive possibilities in the perceiver’s movements. The artist can create the potential for people to move in such a way as to induce particular effects. A sculpture is a loose score for movement. Movement is a loose score for feeling. An example would be the Japanese teahouse—a kind of sculpture—in which the doorway is so low that someone entering must bend over, evoking a sense of humility while approaching the ritual of the tea ceremony. The bowing motion effects a transition into another reality, a passage from the ordinary world into a special realm. The action of bending over or bowing invokes a brief liminal state: one gives up the customary vertical relationship to gravity, to sight, and to others. Such movements have emotional, qualitative dimensions. Hands’ movements can trigger feelings, but even more so can the whole body moving. Most of us spend our time within a narrow range of motion. Sculpture can lead the perceiver from unconscious movement into a fresh awareness of motion. Reaching to explore something overhead, squatting to feel something low, leaning over to reach inside the aesthetic context can stimulate new sensitivity to the sensations and implications of such ordinary motions. Not everyone touching a sculpture will follow the same path or use her hands or body in the same way. Yet it remains possible to create the conditions for certain kinds and directions of movement. Certain textures and surfaces, certain forms and structures, call for certain qualities of movement. Complex, detailed surfaces invite small, complicated motions. Large, smooth surfaces allow large, sweeping motions. A man touching one of my sculptures experimented with different ways of moving: I kept bumping into things at every turn, then discovered that a very light touch allowed my hands to flow over the surfaces and dive into the openings.

The degree of control an artist exerts over these possibilities can vary from specific and highly choreographed to more open and improvisational. These

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Figure 11.2  Haptic play and exploration create access to parts of the sculpture one can only imagine visually. Natural History, 1998, Wood, stone, steel, 70 × 52 × 44 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © Ellen Augarten.

choreographic choices become clearer when the whole body is involved. A Bruce Nauman installation, Changing Light Corridor with Rooms, consists of a narrow passage between two high walls that forces one to move only in two directions within that narrow slot; as the walls press in, one suddenly becomes aware of movement being limited to two dimensions rather than three. Christo and Jeanne Claude’s Gates in Central Park invited people to walk through 7,503 gates under saffron-colored fabric attached along the top of the gate, with the rest allowed to respond to the wind. People could follow the serpentine path through the undulations of the landscape and experience thousands of times the meaning of gate, entry, exit, and passage. In the early stages of my haptic work, after making a couple of pieces that had moving parts, I decided to stabilize my sculptures so they could neither move nor be moved; I wanted people to focus on their perceptual experience. I later included slight mobility in suspended hammocks, stones, and boats; this use of motion has a different intention and creates an effect different from manipulation; it invites an exploration of gravity, suspension, and the slight movement of things hanging. I felt differences in the movement of the copper and of the leather, different sensations of movement.

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The artist who works haptically or somatically also works with emotions. Somatic sensations may resemble the sensations of emotions. Somatic sensations can trigger emotions as well as evoke memories and associations that trigger emotions. Emotions may be precipitated by the textures, forms, and spaces themselves or by our movements. Even before feeling emotions, we have reactions of pleasure or displeasure, attraction or withdrawal, desire or repulsion. Since these reflexes of attraction and withdrawal frequently function unconsciously, the haptic artist could consider them consciously and make them work for her purposes. Tactile sensations include those we consider negative or unpleasant— sensations that are as important to explore as those we consider appealing. Rough textures, bewildering spaces, and cold surfaces expand the range of expressive qualities in the same way that visual imagery can be disturbing yet expansive. Such a response may actually be easier to accomplish through tactile means than visual, given the capacity of touch to elicit visceral responses. Such qualities may stand on their own or be juxtaposed for contrast with smooth surfaces, organic shapes, or warm materials, which appeal to most people. I really got to know my own senses. I understand a lot more now the way the body reacts. When you feel something new it’s very sensual.

The intimacy of artist, artwork, and perceiver within the domain of touch offers endless opportunities to investigate conditions such as boundaries, barriers, restraint, fear, withdrawal, sublimation, seduction, mutuality, trust, innocence, openness, and pleasure. Actual touching moves these conditions into a more accessible, embodied mode. The membrane of aesthetic distance is crossed. The tactile work of art is able to enter territory that strictly visual work cannot. Because touch is so central to our early development, haptic experiences may cue emotions, memories, and attitudes of childhood. By touching with the curiosity of a child and the awareness of an adult, we may restore some of the richness of childhood sensuousness and dynamism to our jaded, habitual senses. Becoming more conscious of tactile, kinesthetic qualities while touching may reopen some of the closed channels that were wide open when we were young. As adults, we are able to apply a greater range of experience and understanding to exploring these sensations and how they translate—or fail to translate—into what we see. Since an artist’s task is to combine the playful, open investigation of the child with the discerning discrimination of the adult, touch is a useful way to tap into that blend of freedom and awareness. Finally, a deep exploration of haptic and kinesthetic awareness generates a way of working based more on the somatic senses than on visual imagery.

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One way to make art is to develop and refine an image in the mind, whether remembered or invented, and then make something that reflects that image to some degree. Another way is to work without images, responding to inner feelings and pressures. Images are created in the process, but they are images that emerge from the body and from felt sensing rather than from mental or visual pictures. I believe images emerge and crystallize from sensations in the first place, so bypassing the image to focus on the sensation, feeling, or impulse may prove fruitful, providing more freedom and range of response. It can refresh forms and the choice of medium and materials. Proprioceptive working processes may stimulate responses in the perceiver that are also sourced in the body and in proprioception. The dynamic relationship between image and sensation and between mental processes and somatic processes is well worth exploring. The making of art we consider primarily visual also benefits from somatic sensitivity and exploration by the artist. The more an artist is engaged with the sensuous reality of what is being depicted, the more that knowledge will carry into the image. When drawing a flower, the more one has touched each petal, leaf, and stem, the more the final image will be informed by an understanding of the structure, textures, and qualities of the flower. In making abstract work, sensitivity to the weight, pressure, movement, texture, mass, and temperature of shapes and colors will increase their nuance and power. How would the shapes feel to the touch? How much do they weigh? How warm are they? Are they prickly or smooth? Hollow or massive? Rigid or flexible? Sculpture that calls for touch has emerged from the body of the maker and speaks to the body of the person who encounters it. A sculpture is a body like my own. How natural to meet this other presence with my own. Haptic sculpture silently draws the body into conversation. It invites a sense of participation and fullness of being that can come only from physical involvement. This kind of art knows heat and cold, inside and outside, mass and space, the play of forces and materials, the interaction of psyche and matter. By embodying such consciousness, haptic artwork models a different way of perceiving and even a different way of being. It recognizes the reciprocity of self and object and, by implication, self and other. It supports the bonds that bind us in spite of differences of culture, language, and point of view. We are touching not so much the object itself but the sensibility that shines through it. The core of the aesthetic experience is contact with another person’s sensibility, communicated through the artwork and felt by the body. Touching is a medium for the flow of energy that runs through it all.

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The tensions between sight and touch become compellingly vivid in art museums, where pristine glass vitrines contain objects such as a Tlingit mask or a Tibetan vajra that were once embedded in ceremonies, imbued with drama by costume, given movement by dance, pulse by firelight, fragrance by smoke, rhythm by drumbeat, voice by chant, meaning by tradition, and significance by the community, evoking forces both sensory and transcendent. These artworks emerged from entire sensoria that differ radically from the modern Western sensorium. As David Howes and Constance Classen describe in their many books, the history and anthropology of the senses and the body reveal that other cultures, in both time and place, live by different sensory organization. They experience the world and themselves differently than most contemporary Westerners do. Another example is given by Kathryn Geurts, an anthropologist who explores questions of perception among the Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana. She found no category or word for the Western fivefold understanding of the senses— hearing, taste, smell, sight, and touch—which she calls a “folk ideology,” with no basis in fact. She found among the Anlo Ewe the complicated term seselelame, which she translates as feel-feel-at-flesh-inside, or feeling in the body. While our culture makes clear distinctions between external senses (the classic five), internal senses (kinesthesia, proprioception, balance), and emotions (anger, happiness, love, disgust, surprise), the Anlo-Ewe seem to have a domain of bodily experience that encompasses and unites all these states. Seselelame includes physical sensations such as the symptoms of impending illness, sexual arousal, heartache, or passion. In other contexts, it includes inspiration to sing, dance, or speak and, in still others, a kind of intuition. More broadly, it refers to a generalized feeling in or through the body, which seems to include what we would call cognition, affect, intuition, imagination, perception, and sensation. Seselelame transcends the division of mental and physical. As one

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Anlo-Ewe person explained it, “You can feel happiness in your body, you can feel sorrow, and you can feel other things, like cold.” Although they may also use different words to distinguish certain phases of experience, such as sensation, imagination, or cognition, the connections among them are valued, and seselelame is used for most of these inner states of being. The Anlo-Ewe speaker must analyze and imagine what the “messages” (which we might call sensations, emotions, and intuitions) create within other people, indicating the intersubjectivity and collectivity of seselelame. Geurts describes the Anlo-Ewe sensorium as oriented toward interoception: monitoring and stabilizing the internal environment through balance, movement, and seselelame. The Euro-American sensorium is the opposite, oriented primarily to exteroception—gathering information from the external world. Our popular understanding of the senses fails to include the internal, somatic, proprioceptive sensory systems. Geurts sees the Anlo-Ewe sensorium as providing a sense of unity that transcends Western divisions between the senses and between mind and body, self and other (Geurts, 2003). Not only do other cultures live with different sensoria. Constance Classen has combed through European history to uncover evidence of different ways of perceiving and conceiving the world. In the medieval scholastic tradition, the life of the body lays not in physiology as we now know it, but with invisible, animating spirits. God made everything for a divine purpose, including human bodies. Cosmological, spiritual, and physical truths were fused. In the multisensory cosmic order described by medieval theologians, the fall of Adam and Eve meant a fall of the senses, while Christ’s resurrection provided the possibility for redemption of the senses. In practice, this entailed a firm control of sensory impulses and an acknowledgment of the cosmic, sacred dimensions of sensory perception. During the Renaissance, the body was envisioned as a microcosm of God’s universe. Correspondences between the human body and the cosmic body related vision to fire and light, hearing to air, smell to vapor, taste to water, and touch to earth. These correspondences justified empirical observation of the body as a way to know the divine universe. But over time, physical investigations, descriptions, and explanations of the body’s operations began to replace theological ones. Rationality and cognition began their rise to dominance during the Enlightenment, along with the associated sense of sight. The codification of scientific observation, the making of charts and maps, and the invention of optical tools such as the telescope and microscope all gave new power to the eye, revealing astonishing new dimensions of reality that could never be touched. The “lower” senses—taste, smell, and touch—came to be

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linked with intuition, emotion, and sensuality and were seen as obstacles to the establishment of the scientific, rationalist worldview, which relegated women, the body, and the closely associated sense of touch to culturally minor roles. The age of sensory division and hierarchy is now slowly yielding place to new fusions of the senses and a richer concept of sensory integration. Here is a worthy challenge for curators: to communicate the ways that an artwork made in the context of a different sensorium reveals that sensorium. This perspective requires an awareness of our own sensorium, which creates another challenge: to curate and communicate about artworks in a way that engages more of our senses, seeking to enrich our sensorium and our experience as well as to evoke resonance with other cultures’ sensoria. Art history (an academic discipline that began in the nineteenth century) has had a bias to visual perception, which affects the way art is understood and displayed in museums, a bias that emerged from the Enlightenment. But this visual dominance has not always reigned. Beginning in the sixteenth century, it became fashionable to collect and display together in “cabinets of curiosity” interesting, unusual objects that ignored today’s boundaries of natural history, ethnology, archaeology, biology, geology, art, history, and antiquities. Nineteenth-century collections allowed and encouraged visitors to handle the objects, which drew people closer to the worlds the objects came from. As museums evolved to become avenues for public education, they instituted restrained modes of behavior that forbade touching. Museums today operate under a mandate to protect objects in their care for future generations, which supports the prohibition against touching. Touching can damage artwork through slow, subtle changes induced by chemical interactions or erosive wear or by dramatic effects such as breaking or tearing. Much artwork is not made to touch and has not been built to withstand the impact of even occasional gentle touching, let alone the caresses of thousands of hands, as the modern museum has come to attract. Museum visitors have internalized the prohibitions around touch, and guards and alarms remind us when we come too close. Yet many people still surreptitiously touch when they can, for many of the same reasons their predecessors touched in nineteenth-century cabinets of wonder: to convince themselves of its reality; to satisfy natural curiosity about the form, material, or texture; and to connect with the object, the artist, the culture, the past, the creative process, and themselves (Classen, 2012). Just looking has never been enough. To be able to touch something and dig out its real meaning is a wonderful experience. It has given me a totally different view of the world.

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Indeed, Michael Brenson reminds us, For ideological as well as practical reasons, it continues to be very difficult for institutions to do justice to one of sculpture’s essential and magical languages of communication … I am urging people to consider the contradiction within many museums, which strive to make people more responsive to the world around them while quarantining those audiences from a kind of sculpture that can help them feel more physically and spiritually grounded and therefore more connected to others and to themselves. … How is it that the need to make sculpture that wants to be touched by a viewer’s hand, and the viewer’s wish to respond, continue to be largely dismissed in museums? Should the knowledge of the eye and mind be considered intrinsically superior to the knowledge of the hand? Is it really possible for cultural institutions to encourage respect and response without respecting the insight that comes with touching? (Brenson, 1995, 30)

One of the reasons why touching has become taboo, Brenson suggests, is the possessiveness implicit in touch, which is “a transgression against private property. For the most part, we are allowed to touch only what we own. Touching sculpture in galleries and museums may generate a sense of emotional and psychological ownership of objects that are institutional assets” (Brenson, 1995, 35). Touching art is like owning and for a moment possessing a thing of beauty.

This sense of possession can work both ways. While it encourages the feeling of ownership that might somehow threaten institutional rights or the safety of the artwork, it may also strengthen people’s ties with the artwork and inculcate a sense of responsibility to it, to the museum that owns it, and to the ongoing life of that institution. I always complain how I want to become part of a painting or any piece of art— what better way than through touch. I almost feel as though I’ve taken something away with me.

Brenson pursues the powers of touching into still-larger dimensions: Touching may also actually encourage people to feel the weight and particularity of human beings, nature and works of art, and how then could they so easily assume it is natural to approach the world as something to exploit? In short, sculpture’s inherent potential to break down the barriers between our intellectual selves and the ‘other’ may be as radical now as the overt social and political statements so many contemporary artists have been making. (Brenson, 1995, 33)

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He reminds us of the radical nature of touch. Rooted in the body, touch connects us to the authentic depths of life and to the common ground we all share. The barrier he describes “between our intellectual selves and the ‘other’” can even include the barrier between our intellectual selves and our grounding in the body. The rich heritage represented in museums can be bewildering to the visitor with little perceptual training or knowledge of the worldviews embedded in the artworks. The resemblance of museum displays to high-end commercial retail displays further obscures the radically different motives underlying artworks from different cultures. Many contemporary artists invent their own cultures, languages, and rules that may bewilder the museum visitor. The sheer multiplicity of old and new aesthetic languages poses challenges to people’s abilities to appreciate art. The decline in art education in schools has left many people without the tools or training in perceptual exploration that art making and appreciation provides. If an artwork proves too difficult to discern or understand, it remains inaccessible. Each failure to understand confirms the belief in one’s inability to connect to art. Visitors may have native ways of learning that prevent ease of access. People whose intelligence is “bodily-kinesthetic” may be less able to make sense of things presented visually. People come to museums for many reasons: to encounter the unknown and the new; to refresh their relationship to the well-known and familiar; to engage with real artworks and the ineffable, subtle qualities lost in reproduction; to be in the physical, energetic presence of works of art and, by extension, the artists who made them; to experience the artworks’ actual size and scale; to feel the three-dimensional, spatial qualities; to learn other points of view; to gain the understanding revealed by relationships among artworks; to enjoy the social pleasures of sharing such experiences; to enter the stream of history and culture; and to enjoy the evocative spaces, unusual architecture, and grand scale of many galleries and museums. Multiple tensions are embedded in art museums as we now conceive them: tensions between visual and verbal, seeing and touching, access and protection, education and conservation, collection and display, scholarship and personal experience, art making and art history, past and present, public and private, mainstream and margins, privilege and poverty, social values and aesthetic values, contemplation and entertainment, and ideas and perception. Most of these tensions reflect larger social issues, rendering the museum, one of our major cultural institutions, a nexus of powerful forces. As museums seek to expand and diversify their audiences, these challenges deepen for both visitors and staff.

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Yet there is wisdom in the creation of a special place conducive to the encounter with art. The climate of that environment has a profound effect on visitors’ experiences. The context and the expectations are critical in determining the nature and quality of the art experience. People are more likely to be emotionally invested in and involved with a work of art when presented under conditions they regard as proper for appreciation of art. Museums are spaces set apart for such experiences and seek to create optimal conditions for them. For these reasons, art museums are effective places for the introduction of aesthetic touch. The respectful, thoughtful attention seasoned museum visitors confer on the objects they encounter carries over into the use of touch. People usually approach touching art with the same potential for receptivity, aesthetic distance, and personal involvement they use in looking. The museum context helps people focus their attention on the aesthetic aspects of touch rather than the manipulative and functional, which is found more often in science and children’s museums. For people new to museums, the invitation to touch puts them at ease, gives them direct experience of the art, and satisfies the natural impulse to know through touch. This is much more comfortable. I feel wrong in museums. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do or feel.

Touching can provide people with a beginning place, grounding their experience in personal knowledge, a knowing by the body of something real. Touching provides sensations, insights, and certainty that form a baseline and a set of references for further encounters with art, whether tactile or visual. After all, this is the way we learned to see in the first place. As children, we forged connections between how things felt and how they looked, learning to translate touch into sight. When we approach a work of art, we may well meet forms we have never seen before, or materials we rarely encounter, or spaces we cannot fathom, or meanings foreign to us. Our deeply ingrained, natural habit of touching to learn about something rises to the surface. We touch in order to know. We seek to confirm and augment what our eyes tell us. We naturally want to physically touch what touches us emotionally. We touch to meet the intense presence of an artwork. We touch to bring ourselves in relationship to another time, place, or sensibility. We touch to give ourselves pleasure. We touch to feed our inborn tactile hunger. We touch because we are touching every moment of every day. Touching is so integral to life that touching a work of art folds it into the realm of ordinary experience.

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You just get to be. There are no expectations. You get to be and feel and there’s no right or wrong in that place.

Touching would seem to bring us dangerously close (in terms of museum values) to action, to manipulating the object. However, aesthetic distance is built into the encounter with art, especially in museums. Aesthetic distance provides a safe, contemplative place to explore the feelings that arise. Art invites perceptual

Figure 12.1  The two concrete monoliths contain layers and depths that invite the hand in. Canyon, 1998, Concrete, aluminum, copper, alabaster, schist, 25 × 29 × 19 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © Ellen Augarten.

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and emotional responses, but action is expected to be sublimated. With aesthetic distance, the perceiver need not act, be committed, take a stand, choose between alternatives, harmonize responses, or be logical and consistent. Aesthetic touch provides a powerful model for responses to the vicissitudes of life by closely resembling normal activity yet remaining in the aesthetic, sensory sphere. We tend to think we have two choices in response to our feelings: to suppress them or to express them. Art, and even more so, tactile art, provides the direct experience of a third choice: fully feeling the emotions but without acting or reacting. This process of learning restraint in the grip of deep feeling is one of the crucial, if hidden, gifts of art. The interactive, personalized nature of cyberspace intensifies pressures on museums to offer more interactive experiences. Based on their engagement with the internet, visitors come to expect more democratic, accessible, fluid interactions. The virtual, visual, illusory space of the online world also leads, paradoxically, to an increasing hunger for the concrete and the real. A good work of art makes me yearn to reach out and touch it to see if the life, the textures, are real or illusion.

Allowing and encouraging inquiring, respectful tactile exploration of selected artworks would go a long way toward engaging visitors and enabling them to feel at home. In touching, we achieve immediate, concrete knowledge, cutting through psychological and sensory barriers. Touching amplifies the emotional power of art. It catalyzes our perceptual history and personal memories. It reduces or eliminates the distance between us and the artwork, the artist, other times and places, and other sensory possibilities. Museums face the challenge of how to provide full access to works of art for people with disabilities of sight. Various means have been generated: touch tours that invite touching of selected artworks, copies of originals, raised-line drawings, multisensory interpretations, and verbal description. Taking this mandate seriously by including more opportunities for touching for people with visual impairments could open up the tactile dimension of experience to typical museumgoers, just as the application of design guidelines for disabilities, such as larger type, easier physical access, and multiple ways of learning, has made access easier for everyone. Tactile experiences could introduce or be woven into visual exhibitions, providing visitors with a grounding in their senses that would inform the visual reading of the rest of the exhibition and the collection. Because haptic memory deeply underlies visual perception, actual haptic experiences appropriate to the

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content of an exhibit can bring these memories to the surface, where they remain accessible to visitors moving through a visual exhibition. Exhibition design incorporates haptic, kinesthetic experiences to support full-bodied perception of artwork—strategies such as curved rather than straight lines, no glass between visitors and objects, and life-sized videos to immerse visitors in the world represented. The use of sound, lighting, and odors can stimulate multisensory responses that deepen visitors’ grasp of what they are seeing. The rise of installation and environmental art expresses the collective desire for immersive experience. The traditional Western separation of the senses no longer holds—scientifically, aesthetically, or museologically. Museums are challenged to reflect and provide access to both old and new sensoria. The qualities of touch could serve as guiding concepts for designing everything in the museum: architecture, exhibitions, programming, and education. The qualities of touch inspire the kinds of engagements visitors desire and many museums are offering. The old model of expert, privileged, optical, art historical knowledge is being replaced by visitor-centered, active, engaged, haptic exploration and investigation. This shift could be cast in terms of sight and touch. As we have seen, sight and touch are not only modes of perception, but also metaphors for ways of knowing. Sight is distant, objectifying, disembodied, encompassing, swift, and centralized. It involves a point of view, salience, orientation, power, and identification. Touch is intimate, proximal, embodied, affective, diffuse, slow, nonhierarchical, and reciprocal. Touch involves motion, spatial orientation, vulnerability, self-definition, and connection. We link sight to comprehension and touch to emotion. These qualities could inform museum and exhibition design. The most important qualities of touch that could guide design are reciprocity and mutuality. As I touch, I am also touched. I am in relationship. I am affected and affecting. I have a sense of connection. In the museum context, this is the key to engaging people and keeping them engaged: creating a relationship of mutuality. This means tracking who they are, what they are interested in, and what draws them in. It means being responsive to their needs and interests. In this reciprocal relationship, what I touch teaches me about that which I touch but also about myself. Touching conveys not only the qualities of the object, but also my own qualities. If an object is hard, I am aware of my own softness; if it is rough, my smoothness; if large, how big or small I am. The contact gives me feedback and helps define me, however subliminally or subtly. Whatever I touch gives me itself but also myself. This principle is already practiced in exhibition design and education. Many museums recognize that information alone is not

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enough. They invite self-reflection and self-understanding. People want to know how something connects to them and how they are reflected in, through, or against what they learn or engage with. Another guiding principle of touch is movement. Touch requires movement in the same way that sight requires light. The movement integral to the sense of touch generates a dynamic, fluid, improvisational experience of the object, the situation, and even the sense of self. The movement of touch reflects the dynamic nature of knowing and being. The principle of movement can be embedded in every aspect of the museum experience: the organization of spaces, visitors’ movements and interactions, exhibition design, changing themes, seasonal responses, and the environment inside and outside the museum. All these sites offer opportunities to reflect and explore the mutable, changing, impermanent nature of life. Movement draws the body into any experience, stimulating the deepest layers of anatomy and sensing. As a somatic sense, touch directly engages the body of a visitor, from surface to depths. Touching has a direct route to the heart and to the viscera, where emotions occur. Sight triggers emotion in a more roundabout route, which must go through the somatic senses. If we have an

Figure 12.2  Video projections animate this translucent body within a body, casting flickering light and images into the layers of skin. Threshold, 2012, Rawhide, video by Tereza Stehlíková, 16 × 28 × 15 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll.

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emotional response to an artwork, we tend to assume the trigger is visual, but it is also somatic. This has implications for designing museum visitors’ experience: conscious integration of somatic and emotional ways of knowing. Time is another kind of movement. The tactile experience is slow, linear, and muscular, functioning in a bodily time frame different from that of the swift, electric, nervous system of sight. This embodied sense of time could be a conscious element in museum planning for visitors: how long it takes to simply walk through an exhibition, let alone take it in; where to provide sites of rest and stations of reflection; or ways to intentionally slow people down. If an exhibition is chronological, how does it convey the time span depicted? How does it display artworks embedded in a culture that lives with a different sense of time? How does it invite people to reflect on their own sense of time? The diffuse, global nature of touch conveys a strong sense of space and spatial relationships. We not only see space, but we also feel and sense it with the whole body, which lives in three dimensions and has depths within. The museum visitor moves through space and has a body containing space. These manifestations and meanings of space provide opportunities for museums. The sense of space is deeply personal, which suggests inclusion of a range of spatial experiences for visitors. The sense of space is also cultural, suggesting the need to convey different cultures through different spatial arrangements. As two-dimensional screens absorb and flatten our attention and our sense of self, we need more than ever to cultivate tangible understanding and experience of space. Museums can explore and educate spatial intelligence through architecture as well as through exhibition design and content. Installation art increasingly engages visitors in physical explorations such as climbing, changing levels, and moving through, under, over, and around things. Dance performance, with all its spatial acuity, has a place in art museums. Many people are intimidated by the museum culture. Believing they do not know enough, they fail to access their perceptual powers and intelligence. Touching does not carry such baggage. Most people have no prescriptions or sense of inability around touching. So integral to everyday life and to the body, touch feels natural and easy. People who have touched my artwork in a museum report feeling empowered, included, and respected. They feel that they, like the artist, are creating the work. They arrive at their experience and their learning on their own, in their own terms, for their own needs. No docent or text has told them what and how to perceive. This is not an overlay of information from the outside. This kind of learning can be cultivated, refined, and deepened, extending people’s innate sensory capacity and power.

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Since touch is more unconscious than conscious and is implicated in our every moment, there is no end to the possibilities for tactile, haptic engagement in the museum. Tactile activities such as cooking, sewing, writing, drawing, or flower arranging may be integrated into exhibitions and programs to process and amplify the experience of artworks. The greater the range and kind of tactile, bodily engagement, the more opportunities people have to make connections between sight and touch, object and environment, art and nature, and museum and life. Everything in a museum has an enhancing or suppressing effect on sensory responses. No element is too small or ordinary to treat according to tactile, haptic principles. Every choice is an opportunity to build toward visitors’ sensory enrichment: doors and handles, railings, floor coverings, partitions, wall colors and textures, labels, tables, desks, and catalogues. The question to ask in each instance is: does this design, exhibition, project, artwork, artist, performance, or space intrigue, engage, and stimulate the senses? What haptic qualities are invoked or applied? Another solution is to offer visitors the experience of touching original works of art designed for touch. Museums could commission tactile artworks, stimulating artists to bring serious attention to this dimension of art making and to the development of haptic work. Such an initiative would generate precedents, standards, and criteria for haptic art. However, given that aesthetic touch is little understood or practiced and that curators lack haptic awareness, there is a real danger that artists’ attempts at making haptic art will be misguided and superficial and that visitors and critics will fail to take haptic work seriously. The situation needs to be addressed at all levels: artists, curators, museums, educators, critics, funding, and audiences. Hapticity is a language and a facility different from sight. It needs to be developed and built into a collective body of knowledge. Artists could take the initiative to create tactile sculpture. Art schools could integrate haptic perception into their curricula. Museums could provide artists with experiences of touching art. Curators could research and develop guidelines for exhibitions that lead people through the development and refinement of their sense of touch. Visitors could provide feedback to artists and museums. Grants and fellowships could stimulate the creation of haptic art. Critics could articulate criteria for effective haptic art, as Brenson has begun to do. Museums are major cultural institutions caught in the powerful political, social, economic forces pulsing through the world. The needs and desires of museum visitors have multiplied. Many museums are responding with inventive, experimental solutions, expanding their mandate and their reach.

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Technology has distanced us from our bodies and our senses, but the losses and the needs run deeper and broader. The decline in communal, religious experience has led to a hunger for other kinds of complex, immersive, meaningful experiences, which often leads to art. Museums may not have set out to address such needs, but they now have the opportunity and the responsibility to respond to them.

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Sense of Connection

The essential nature of touch is connection. Touching an artwork, we know it with an intimacy and intensity similar to that of the artist. We feel connected to the person who made it. We become familiar with the materials, textures, and shapes the artist or fabricator has cut, bent, turned, carved, welded, or built. Our motions mime those of the maker, giving us an embodied sense of the gestures, movements, and methods with which it was made. We can more closely know or imagine the choices made: whether the surface was carefully finished or left rough; how the materials were torn or poured or molded; how casual, bold, or delicate the gestures of making. We can feel the softness, hardness, malleability, or rigidity of the materials and the kind of effort needed to work them. We can feel the imprint of the artist’s hand. Touching makes everyone a participant in the creative act. When I touch, I come to know, understand, and find meaning in the artwork through the intelligence of my body. I approach the artist’s process by embodying the creative process. I recreate the artwork through my actions, bringing it into being for myself. Every touch is a small creative act that draws what I touch through my past experience. In touching an artwork, I construct a unique version of it through many small creative acts. Touching builds an experience of the sculpture, inspired and directed by the object but ultimately the fruit of my own actions. It hit me on a personal level, one which I’ve never experienced in a work of art before. That feeling is very close to the feeling of creating art.

Touching connects the artist to the person who encounters her work. Before I began making haptic art, the people who experienced my work were not included in my working process in any conscious way. We know so much about visual perception that I could assume the operations of other people’s perceptions. But so little is known about touch, especially aesthetic touch, that I had to learn from the people who touch my sculptures, which created an unexpected collaboration. I provided them with haptic experiences, and they taught me how touch works.

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Working in this way, I take into closer consideration the people who experience my sculptures, both as I make them and as I exhibit them. Because I began by making work for people with disabilities, I had to rethink the simple act of encountering an artwork. I am mindful of how and why people will interact with the sculpture and how to support that interaction. I consider what it might be like for someone who is disabled, whether physically, mentally, or sensorially, to engage with the sculpture. I consider people’s height, the scale of body parts, the ability or propensity to reach and move in various directions, and the abilities and limitations of hands and bodies. I have to make the sculptures substantial enough to accommodate the touch of many hands. I need to think about where it will be exhibited or reside, how many people will be touching it, and how much touching it will be able to absorb. This complex, constant consideration of the perceiver’s presence and performance has generated a different attitude toward the people on the other side of the artwork. They serve as collaborators, as the ones who complete the artwork. The artwork itself becomes a meeting place, a nexus of feelings, stories, questions, and answers, for me and for the person who touches it. Touching is an act that bridges the gap between private and public. Touching moves the interior dimensions of the art experience into the open. By reaching

Figure 13.1  A conversation takes place between people as well as with the sculpture. Elegy 5, 1996, Steel, stone, leather, rope, gauze, 52 × 32 × 52 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © Ellen Augarten.

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out to touch a sculpture, I break out of the privacy of standing and looking. I move out of my own small kinesphere to inhabit a more public space. I reveal to others my curiosity and interests, my direction of inquiry, my way of relating and moving. My actions invite others to reach out and touch. I participate in, share with, and sometimes even influence somebody else’s encounter with a sculpture. Through touching, I may wordlessly share my experience of an artwork with other people as we explore together in a common space. This is what art is for: transformation, communication across seemingly impenetrable barriers.

As we become increasingly global in our awareness and our actions, art proves to be a crucial means of communicating our differences and commonalities. Touching is an act and a metaphor that connects people through the body, which we all share in spite of differences and conflicts. Meaning can pass from artist to perceiver through touch alone, bypassing the conscious mind, traveling directly from the body of the artist into the body of the sculpture and into the body of the perceiver. Touching ushers the body, both private and public, into the encounter with art. To include the body in the experience of art returns us to the root of our experience—our senses. Touching is a kind of joining. When I touch something or someone, when I grasp a tool, or even when I step on the ground, I temporarily become joined or hinged to that which I am touching, in a relationship of mutual leverage and exchange of forces. The different kinds of joints in the human body can serve as metaphors for different kinds of touch. Touching can be like the sutures in the skull, which have very subtle, deeply affecting movements. Touch can move along a single axis, as in the finger joints, or it can swivel in many directions, as in the shoulder, wrist, or hip joint. When an arm swings from a shoulder joint, the rest of the body stabilizes and counteracts the motion of the arm, as in pitching a baseball. The interaction is always simultaneous and levers in both directions. Writer Lewis Hyde tells us in Trickster Makes This World, a meditation on the trickster figure in various mythologies, that the Latin word for a joint in the body is artus. From this root, we derive the word “articulate,” meaning the joining together of bones as well as carefully jointed speech. We also receive the word “artisan,” which is a joiner or maker of things. The joint is where the archetype of the trickster operates, Hyde tells us, either to disjoint the old order or to rejoin things in a new way. The joint between bones (as in carving up a sacrificed animal to apportion to the gods), the joint between materials (as in a house where wood meets ground), the joint between order and disorder (as in

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rules about behavior), and the joint between the gods and humans (as in ritual) are sites where change can occur, where the boundaries are subject to alteration and reordering. The joint is the site of motion, interaction, and creativity. It is also a place of vulnerability, disconnection, and disruption (Hyde, 1998). Touching is such a joint. It is the moment and the place where vulnerability and openness meet; where two forces leverage each other; where action, interaction, and reaction convene. The responses of people who touch my art suggest there is often a reordering of the relationship, a redrawing of the boundaries to include more of themselves and more of the sculpture on both sides of the joint. Art too is a joint, an artus, an artifact standing between an artist and her unconscious, between an artist and perceiver, between a perceiver and the world, and between a perceiver and his unconscious. A work of art is a place where the poles of reality meet: order and disorder, form and formlessness, physicality and imagination, old and new, meaning and chaos. A work of art is a site where motion occurs. The ensuing motion may strengthen the bond between both sides or may strain or break the bonds. Traditional arts work with deep, subtle movements like those in the sutures of the skull. In the most traditional arts, objects are made in highly prescribed ways to maintain a sacred contract with the gods. Yet even in powerful traditions such as the representation of the Buddha, in which the forms are fully prescribed and bear the weight of time and sacred authority, small changes creep in through the hands of their makers and shifts in the culture. In the modern Western art tradition, we have made a virtue of highly mobile joints such as the shoulder joint, which allows the arms to move in many directions. We value the flamboyant flinging of arms. We play with the disruptive breaking of barriers, the forging into unexplored territory, and the shifting of boundaries. Like the shoulder joint, this way of working is more vulnerable to dislocation and disconnection. Connections made by the artist and the perceiver establish joints between the known and the unknown. When touching—a kind of joint—is included in the encounter with art, which is also a joint, their combined power to bridge, connect, and create a new kind of motion is profound. Touching joins another person’s subjectivity to our own. Our inner tensions join the tensions within the artwork. Connection bridges disconnection. When touching an artwork, we experience the possibility of transcending divisions and estrangements. Disconnection, distance, and abstraction are overcome. Imagination and reality fuse. Dualism melts in the warmth of touch.

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Figure 13.2  Touching creates a connection with the sculpture, with its qualities, with the artist who made it, and with oneself. Natural History, 1998, Wood, stone, steel, 70 × 52 × 44 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © Ellen Augarten.

Touch is the embodiment of connection, which is Eros. We assign the realm of Eros, son of the goddess of love, Aphrodite, to the sexual dimension of life. Yet Eros fundamentally means connection. It represents all kinds of love and all kinds of connections. We may establish connections of the most intimate and affecting kind, whether with other humans or with the nonhuman realm, through body-to-body exchange. When I touch something, I join my fate to it, however briefly. Touching links my core with the person, the plant, the rock, and the sculpture that I contact. In this sense, any touch is erotic. Today, two fundamental human needs are in jeopardy: the need for connection—Eros—and the need for meaning—Logos. The need for connection runs through all levels of our fragmented society, from mind and body to spirit and politics. The need for meaning is equally desperate and closely related to the sense of connection. Both connection and meaning are fundamental gifts of the arts. Artworks are concentrated manifestations of symbolic, formal, emotional meanings. The perceptual act of engaging with a work of art creates multiple tensions that find resolution in recognizing similarities, discerning differences, integrating contrasts, and creating meaning. Meanings in artworks are not singular, monolithic, or objective. The multiple, ambiguous, referential nature

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of art ensures that the meanings embedded in an artwork remain open-ended enough to allow people to find their own meanings. Meanings are catalyzed by the maker, embodied by the artwork, and discovered by the perceiver. At a societal level, artworks can generate symbolic and imaginative glue that binds and defines a culture. Consider the symbolic role of Michelangelo’s David for Florence, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica for Spain, or Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate for Chicago. By combining touch and art, Eros and Logos, we magnify the power of connection and meaning. The synergy affects people’s experience in transformative ways. When I immerse myself in a work of art, I may enjoy an elusive memory, a transcendent feeling, or an insight about life. Touching can intensify and complicate that experience. Meanings arise not only from the forms, spaces, and textures, but also from my gestures, from my body’s responses, from my memories, associations, dreams, and beliefs. Standing on the ground of this palpable connection, I am able to explore beyond my selfdefined boundaries, both outward and inward. The deepest Eros of touch is not sexual intercourse but the constant, subliminal, energetic connections flowing between me and the world. By its very nature—and there is nothing esoteric here, nothing to do—the somatic senses operate at all levels of the body at all times, fusing surface and depths and world in a seamless communion that transcends boundaries and categories. Ultimately, this most physical and grounded of senses can stimulate a spiritual connection to the source of meaning. Brenson says: When hands do pay attention they open up a process of exchange and also of healing. Placing hands on someone delicately, gently, is a way of tending, of taking a pulse, of relieving unease. But in responding to a sculpture’s silent call, it is not the sculpture that is healed, but oneself. One hears one’s own silence more clearly. (Brenson, 1995, 30)

Through the somatic senses we may create stepping-stones toward a felt unity of perception and memory, reality and imagination, self and other, body and spirit. The scholar Stella Kramrisch says, about touching icons in India, “the rite of touching evokes the presence, at the spot touched, of the essence that informs the shape.” In the practice of tai chi chuan, the press of feet on the ground allows connection with the powers of the earth, opening the practitioner to the Tao, the way of truth. That kind of touching suggests the possibility for the kind of connection that leads into ever-larger fields of awareness. Whether touching is a ritual act or simply a conscious appreciation, we become larger than our own small circle of body and mind.

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What happens if we draw the boundaries differently? Renee Weber considers the question in Touch: The Foundation of Experience. Weber extrapolates from philosophical writings three models to describe three different uses of touch: the physical-sensory model, the psychological-humanistic model, and the field model. The physical-sensory model focuses on direct, physical contact. Intention is irrelevant. Scientific explanations of touch and perception fit here. While there is much to be learned from this approach about the mechanisms of sensory perception, it provides no place for meaning or value. The psychologicalhumanistic model includes the purposive interactions of people and the feelings involved. Social exchange and communication are seen as basic facts of life. Meaning is as fundamental to this way of conceiving touch as sense impressions are for the physical-sensory model. The field model encompasses the other two and goes further, proposing that people and things are interconnected, local concentrations of the dynamic, universal energy that permeates all matter. People affect each other through thought and emotion as well as direct touching. Intention is the key to human interactions. This intent is a force with direction and magnitude. Weber sees an example of the field model of touch in the image of God giving life to Adam in Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel. God reaches out to pass the spark of life to Adam. In Michelangelo’s conception, touch is a creative principle inherent in nature, represented by God. Touch is the animating force that brings life to the fully formed but lifeless, passive Adam. God’s full force reaches toward Adam’s hand, but the two hands do not actually meet. Far more powerfully, the force flows from cosmic hand to human hand in an intuitive example of the field notion of touch. God’s energy flows into the receptive emptiness of Adam’s potential. Touch as an energetic interaction between elements within a universal field generates a much larger picture of what occurs in the sensory exchange. Subject and object, person and thing, person and person are seen not as separate elements that must meet and touch in order to overcome their separateness. They are understood as already communicating. The tactile meeting visibly and palpably seals the relationship, flexes the joint, and creates a stronger impression of a union that already exists. Touching is an expression and a confirmation of connection (Weber in Brazelton, 1990). Collectively, we live in a culture that emphasizes the physical-sensory notion of interaction. Many of us also believe that meaning and feeling define being human. The field model takes us into a realm of possibility that can transform our vision of ourselves and of what happens in the haptic encounter. This way of

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understanding shifts our awareness from self and object to the larger field that encompasses both. In this context, self and object become energetic fields rather than bounded entities. As my field approaches another field, we are touching before we actually touch. The reciprocity of touching means a flow of energy in both directions. Reading the surface of a sculpture through touch is to give detailed form to an energetic phenomenon. The information that flows back and forth in the tactile exchange is sensory, emotional, intuitive, imaginative, and energetic. Most of us acknowledge that touching means an exchange of sensory information, that touch can evoke emotional responses, and that intuition and imagination are sparked by the encounter. Most of us are willing to acknowledge that an energetic interaction occurs during interpersonal touching. Yet we are more reluctant to extend that kind of energetic exchange to the nonhuman, “non-sentient” elements in our environment, such as tables and stones. A sculpture is such an “inanimate” object, yet is the work of human hands, alive with intention, gesture, and haptic intelligence. Touching a work of art may connect us to an experience of the energy and sentience inherent in all things. I have been advocating greater consciousness of touch and deeper awareness of the role of the body. Yet touch resists being known. It evades scientific scrutiny. Elusive and inexhaustible, it reveals watery, half-lit worlds within: sensations, feelings, memories, and meanings. Touch is Hermes the messenger, weaving together the conditions of body, world, and self. I felt a strong stirring in my soul for some sense I’d long hidden.

I made haptic sculpture because I wanted to make art for people who could not see. I wanted to reduce the alienation people feel from art. I wanted to make art museums more sensuous and welcoming. I wanted to reenchant the world. I sought to give rightful place to the body in the art experience, to understand and expand the body’s ways of knowing, to awaken people’s bodies to their native sensory authority. I needed to melt the boundaries that separated me from the world and to eliminate the physical, emotional, and aesthetic distance I felt between inside and outside. I found that touch gives me access to extraordinary abilities by extending my ordinary abilities. It balances and deepens perception. It humanizes the attitudes flowing from my sensorium. Touch was the missing link in my art education. Plumbing the somatic senses has transformed for me the methods, meaning, and purpose of art. I now know that art is made and experienced by hand, body, and heart as well as by eye and mind. A rich, silent dialogue between body-mind

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and artwork informs every instant of the aesthetic experience. Both touch and art unify mind and matter. They merge surface and depths. They fuse concrete, palpable reality and ineffable, spiritual dimensions. They marry new ways of knowing and ancient, innate wisdom. My journey started with the outermost skin, where I meet the world. Digging below the surface, I followed the trail of hapticity into the interior of the body, into the lineaments of movement and deep proprioceptive sensations. By diving deeper and seeing the continuity, the boundaries paradoxically dissolved between surface and depths, between inner and outer, between subjective and objective, between self and world. Touch, by its very nature, creates a continuum of experience that transcends the mental divisions separating me from my depths and from the world around me. I found my place in the world by touching it.

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During the years I spent exploring haptic perception, I worked hard to make touch and movement more conscious in my daily perception, in making my work, in the artwork itself, in the exhibitions of the work, and in the minds and bodies of the people who touched it. After some years, a scientist pointed out in a gathering of scientists and engineers that information from touch and the body is largely and naturally unconscious. They were interested in how to take advantage of that. Experimental psychologist Charles Spence discovered that an alarm system alerting drivers to danger ahead generates a much faster reaction as tactile vibrations in the driver’s back than flashing lights on the dashboard. Stimulus to the body triggers the body’s reaction. The observation about touch being unconscious struck me at the time and gradually grew into an admission that all the rich somatic information that comes in through touch, whether from the world or from our inner workings, lies in the background of our consciousness. We can function more efficiently if it does, and it likely affects us more swiftly and effectively by remaining below the level of awareness. My attempts to bring conscious awareness to touch remain an island in a sea of natural unconsciousness. Another reason touch serves as background rather than foreground is its constancy. We tend to notice phenomena that are striking, anomalous, or changing. Since we are in continuous touch with something at all times, whether standing, sitting, or moving, and because our bodies never cease monitoring internal workings and responses, the somatic senses remain more or less a field of constant input. This is a ground we can and do depend on. I also had to recognize that when sight and touch are used together—when people touch with their eyes open—sight usually dominates. In this use, touch may seem superfluous or trivial, even though it may be quietly contributing considerable information about the object and about oneself. For my purposes, and for most people who participated in the blindfolded experiments, removing

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sight from the encounter with art was revelatory, opening up fascinating new perceptual territory. But I did not know how to extend people’s initial revelations into a more sustained exploration of the sense of touch. I did not know how to integrate tactile impressions into the visual field in a conscious way. On a practical level, the use of blindfolds and the necessary infrastructure—railings, guides, and audio support—were not sustainable for me as an artist. The experiment was worthy but not one I could continue. As these thoughts sank in, my attention to visual perception slowly ascended,  like a counterweight, back into prominence. During my journey through the world of hapticity, I never left sight behind. I continued to seek visual integrity in my work and to align visual and haptic values. But having recognized the problems associated with sight, I now had to reconcile the two sensory modes. I had to find a new balance that would reflect the journey as well as free me from the rules I had assigned myself to focus on haptic experience. The boundaries I had created and worked within were considerable for a visual artist. In order to ensure the work would be as accessible to people who could not see (whether blind or blindfolded) as to those who could, and to respond to the physical realities I felt were implicit in tactile work, I had chosen to make my work heavy enough and my materials substantial enough to withstand the touch of many hands and bodies. I had decided to eschew optical effects such as light, shadow, reflection, translucency, transparency, and color as central elements in a piece. I kept the size within the span of arms’ reach. I took into account the limitations and possibilities of the body’s structures and ways of moving. I made artworks that included places that were not visible to sight and rewarded haptic inquiry. Now I wanted to work without these constraints. I needed to make work larger, lighter, more ephemeral, mobile, touched by light, and not bound by the body’s physical limitations. The question became how to integrate somatic knowing into my visual perception and into the visual dimensions of my artwork. I was curious to see whether I could make sculptures and installations that would speak to the body without being touched. I wanted to bring hapticity and sensory memory into making artworks that people would only see. I gradually swung back to working primarily visually, but now deeply informed by my immersion in the somatic senses. I shifted from exploration of palpable, physical touch and movement to more internalized sensing and motion. My attention turned toward understanding the role of the somatic senses as an unconscious influence on visual art making. I wanted to discern the presence of the somatic senses in how we see art.

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The fact is that most visual art cannot be touched or would reveal little to the hand. That would be true for most two-dimensional works and for works too large, small, fragile, valuable, complex, or distant to touch. The larger truth is that all artworks speak, one way or the other, to the felt, remembered, and imagined somatic senses. Whether through sculptural concreteness, dynamic gesture, sensuous materials, or painterly illusion, they speak to the body through their use of form, weight, texture, temperature, pressure, depth, balance, movement, stillness, hardness, softness, malleability, and stability. These are qualities and dynamics our bodies are finely tuned to recognize and answer to. We take them into our bodies and respond accordingly. And our bodies project their own patterns, preferences, and responses onto what we see. Visual art is a simple term, but it covers many phenomena: painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, books, film, video, sculpture, installation (indoor and outdoor), site-specific, performance, happenings, ecological art, architecture, interior design, graphic design, landscape design, and more. Sight is also integral to most artistic encounters not specifically termed visual art, such as dance, theater, musical performance, and literature. Visual is a relative term, a mere signpost, not a sealed container. And sight is obviously not exclusive to visual art. Less obvious is that visual art is not exclusively visual. We tend to think of sight as separate from the other senses and from the body’s operations. So little sensation or sensory feedback occurs when looking that we are usually unaware of the eyes’ movements. The eyes perceive so much and with such minimal effort they seem independent of the body. We may also be so absorbed in the visual experience that somatic awareness diminishes or disappears. As a result, the division between mind and body places sight on the mind side of the divide. We fail to recognize how large a role the rest of the body plays in visual perception. The body is constantly monitoring information from both external and internal environments, unconsciously informing what we presume to be an entirely visual experience. Looking at a painting, watching a dance performance, or reading a book, we forget the body in our fascination with the visual phenomena of movement, color, light, form, and meaning. Nevertheless, as we gaze at a painting, focusing on what we see, the body may be quiet, but it does not shut down. It supports, augments, and contributes to our visual perception, whether we recognize it or not. We respond to the painting with subtle muscular sensations and tensions. We have emotions and gut feelings. We sense space and depth. We mirror, reflect, empathize, dynamize, identify, and resonate with it. We draw on memories, remember similar objects or situations, and search

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for associations to make sense of what lies before us. We project and imagine ourselves into the worlds portrayed in the painting. We experience this work of art with the whole body, not just with the eyes. Simultaneously, and to fluctuating degrees of awareness, we respond somatically to the surroundings in which we and the painting are embedded: the shape, size, structure, and color of the room; the temperature and humidity; the quality, force, and direction of light; the presence of other people to move around or with; the sounds and the silence; the texture and materials of the floor underfoot; and all the countless perceptual negotiations we do to take in a painting and make sense of its mysteries. Alexander Technique teacher Peter Grunwald has discovered very specific connections between eye and body. We tend to think of the eyes as functioning independently of the body, but through sensitive awareness of both eye and body, he noticed that specific parts of the eyes correspond to specific parts of the body. Tensions and relaxations in different parts of the eyes manifest as tensions and relaxations in the corresponding body parts. Each anatomical feature of the eye is directly connected to a body region: the eyeball is associated with the torso; eyelids and conjunctiva are associated with the head and neck area; the sclera and the outer sheath of the optic nerves with hands and arms; optic nerves with upper and lower legs, and visual cortex with feet. The eyes and the process of seeing are a microcosm of the body, completely interrelated. These maps of eyes and bodies also relate to maps in the brain, where seeing actually occurs. One of his easily accessible recommendations is to counterbalance the detail and clarity of focused sight, so valued in our culture, by using peripheral sight to take in a larger, more three-dimensional view (which Juhani Pallasmaa also recommends). His intriguing discoveries confirm a unity of eyes, body, and brain and could lead to new ways of seeing, knowing, and understanding them all (Grunwald, 2014). Not only do we conceive seeing and the eyes as disembodied, but we also believe the brain is disembodied, independent, and self-contained, an information-processing machine that can be understood apart from the rest of the body. Yet brain and body are profoundly interactive. The brain could be said to serve the body rather than the other way around. As a corollary, we conceive thinking itself is disembodied and independent of bodily functions and actions. Yet, like seeing, thinking is a physical activity. By paying close attention to my thinking process and to my body, I have come to discern all manner of tensions, micro-movements, sensations, emotions, and reactions coursing through my body when I think, remember, and imagine. These forces are so subtle and habitual, I usually fail to perceive them.

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To counter these divisions and to reflect new scientific discoveries in mind-body integration and multisensory communications, contemporary philosophers have developed the theory of embodied cognition, maintaining that minds are embedded in bodies, in environments, and in actions. Actual physical processes in the body and in body-world interactions participate in cognition as a whole. Body, world, and brain form an integrated system. This model describes cognition as embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive. Embedded means we live and learn in environments, societies, and cultures, not in isolation. Extended means we engage and interact with the world through tools, not bounded by our skin. Enactive means we learn and know through action and doing, not just thinking. This theory makes perfect sense to me, especially applied to the kind of knowing integral to making art. Cognition occurs in and through the whole body. This is how I work as an artist. I learn, discover, know, and make things with my hands, body, bodily patterns, bodily preferences, habits, memory, and intuitions. I work according to my size, strength, agility, and coordination— which I discover are changing with age, leading to constant changes in my working process, materials, and scale. My work depends on my physical skills, expertise, methods, and techniques, which also change as I need new imagery or materials. These somatic elements shape what materials and processes I choose and how I use them. We relate to completed artworks with and through the body. Touching sculpture makes this relationship more visible and palpable, yet we also respond somatically, if subliminally, in the visual encounter. Subliminal does not mean negligible. The somatic dimension does not just shape our response; it is our response. Memory, emotion, and thought are known in the body. Embedded cognition proposes that one always works in a context, whether geographic, social, or political. I work in a studio or on a site, within the context of my home, land, family, community, culture, history, country, and planet. I constantly adapt my work to larger forces as they manifest in the work and priorities of fellow artists and colleagues, in grants and funding, in art exhibitions and arts writing. There is no end to the flow of influences from economics, politics, law, history, religion, and philosophy. Each artist is born into and cultivates his or her own context. Artworks themselves are encountered in a context, whether museum, gallery, home, street, or wilderness, as well as within the historical, social, cultural, political milieu that reflects the values and concerns of the time and place of their making and of the encounter. When I studied art history, we barely acknowledged the historic, economic, and social aspects of artworks’

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Figure 14.1  A ribbon of rawhide snakes through a coppered steel box, creating contrasts of material, shape, texture, movement, and space. Pandora’s Box 9, 2007, Coppered steel, rawhide, 30 × 26 × 28 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

manufacture and legacy. Since then, art history has embraced these contextual dimensions of art and art making, recognizing that environment, culture, and time profoundly shape both making and experiencing art. Extended cognition expands the understanding of the body-mind to include tools, instruments, and other objects that can, under certain conditions, act as

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extensions of our bodies and minds. The reach of the mind does not end at the boundaries of skin but continuously moves in and out, in various proximal engagements with things and with the world. As an artist, I work with many tools and materials, learning how to adapt them to my purpose and process. In turn, I learn how to adapt my purpose and process to their potentialities and affordances. I feel, direct, and respond to their range of qualities and what they make possible. I use drills and scissors, brushes and hammers, rope and pencils, tape measures and lights. Charcoal is an extension of my sensory touch. The camera an extension of my vision. The computer is an extension of my memory and my imagining. The materials I choose to work with are extensions of my body-mind. At one time, I used mostly paper; at another time, steel and wood; and now, rawhide and cloth. These materials and their qualities manifest my evolving state of mind, satisfy my changing needs, and stimulate my curiosity. The materials are integral to who I am and how I relate to the world. A finished artwork is an extension of my consciousness. A tactile sculpture is an extension of my sense of touch and, when shared, an extension of other people’s touch. Artworks are extensions of our minds and bodies, storing and offering up rich worlds of meaning, culture, and history. Enactive cognition describes the way we learn, understand, and make decisions through action and interaction. I observe the intense inquiry my young grandchildren engage in through their interactions with everyday things. They are constantly learning by doing: folding, dropping, breaking, stirring, crushing, stacking, throwing, squeezing, opening, closing, covering, uncovering, blowing, pouring, filling, emptying, measuring, comparing, organizing, balancing, burning, wetting, drying. They are asking: What happens when I do this? How does it work? In my art making, I do the same thing. I want to know: What happens when I fold copper, drape cloth, knot rope, or pick up a knife? Enaction is especially vivid in the haptic experience of art, where the artwork is known through bodily action and where meanings emerge from movement and touch. Whether looking at or moving around or inside artworks, we know them through our interactions with them. We know them through our perceptual histories and all the investigations we have conducted over our lifetime. Philosopher Mark Johnson affirms the bodily aspect of cognition by analyzing the ways we make meaning, based on ordinary bodily experience. At the experiential level, we learn and develop the logic of image schemas, or metaphors. Image schemas derive from sensory, perceptual experience. They are created, learned, and internalized naturally through interactions with the environment. An example of an image schema is the container. We all know a container holds

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things that can move in and out of it. The concrete, spatial concept of container is derived from the body’s experience of using containers as well as being a container. It can apply across many different kinds and scales of objects, such as cups, boxes, refrigerators, cars, and buildings. We can extend the experience of container into metaphor by recruiting the concrete, spatial meaning to generate conceptual, abstract thought. The container image applies to abstract concepts such as categories, contracts, theories, psyches, and nations. Such image schemas form structures that serve as the basis for our understanding of meaning. Johnson and his co-author George Lakoff think of metaphor as a sense: It is as though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense, like seeing or touching or hearing, with metaphors providing the only ways to perceive and experience much of our world. Metaphor is as much a part of our functioning as our sense of touch, and as precious. (Johnson and Lakoff, 1980, 239)

Johnson and Lakoff are interested in the way language reveals the many bodybased metaphors we live by. I would extend his linguistic metaphors to the visual metaphors in artworks, which provide image schemas and metaphors that we understand through our common experience of these structures and situations. For example, the metaphor of container can be applied to many artworks in different ways and scales. A frame is a container for a painting. A still life contains an assembly of lemons, melons, and fish. A James Turrell skyspace contains light. Artworks can, in turn, contain our bodies: Richard Serra’s massive steel spirals contain our movement into and out of their canyon-like environments; Marina Abramovic’s performance in the museum The Artist Is Present offered visitors the container of a chair to sit facing her, contained in her gaze and in the encounter. These metaphors operate at different scales, in different materials, with different intentions, and to different effects, yet the principle holds across all varieties of artistic invention. Artworks, especially sculptures and installations, take us even closer than verbal language to the bodily basis of knowing and organizing experience. As bodies themselves, artworks act according to the same physical laws and principles as we embodied beings. We understand metaphors and meanings embedded in artworks through our basic somatic experience. Is it bigger than me? Can I reach my arms around it? How does that make me feel? Does it threaten, soothe, uplift, or embrace me? The meaning lies in bodily experience as well as in intellectual understanding. This approach gives me a way into the meaning of artworks I might not otherwise make sense of. Rather than ask what it means, ask how it affects me. How does it affect my body? How does my body

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relate to it? How does my body feel in its presence? What does it ask of my body? Does it call up familiar bodily associations, structures, or dynamics? Tapping into our inner bodily experience can provide deep insights into our actions and reactions. These resources can be accessed far more readily than we may think possible. Claire Petitmengin, a French philosopher, is developing and refining, along with others, a method to gain access to the seemingly inaccessible, subtle, inner experience happening below the level of awareness. Called micro-phenomenology, this process enables exploration in remarkable detail of lived, felt experience that lies unnoticed and unacknowledged. In the interview method used to plumb such experience, the focus is on what one knows and how one knows, rather than on explanations, theories, goals, intentions, or evaluations. This method can be used to explore ordinary experiences we overlook or to understand elusive aspects of consciousness that evade measurable scientific scrutiny, such as intuition, perception, sensory experience, mind states, memory, and imagination. The kinds of experiences the interview questions address are subtle and complex. What precisely is happening when we have an insight? When a memory arises? When we look at a painting or touch a sculpture? When we imagine? The micro-phenomena these questions address may be difficult to describe and may be considered too subtle, too subjective, or too idiosyncratic to take seriously or even to articulate. But research by micro-phenomenologists shows we can learn to access and describe this level of inner experience accurately and reliably, and that patterns can be discerned across unique, personal ways of knowing (Petitmengin, 2009). I can attest to the extraordinary depth and accuracy one taps into surprisingly quickly and easily. Petitmengin interviewed me for her study on creative insight, asking me to choose a moment when I discovered a new solution to a problem. I chose the moment when I realized I could suspend things in space as a structural option for my sculptures rather than compressive stacking. Through her questioning, I remembered the sensation of lightness and spaciousness I felt when I discovered this solution. I remembered, in response to her questions, that the insight had arrived through sketches. I later went back through my old notebooks from years before and found the very drawings I had recalled: I had made a sketch of a large, flat stone suspended in space from a steel frame, supported underneath by rigid steel bands. In the next sketch, I drew the stone supported by ropes rather than steel bands. This new solution—arrived at by drawing—would allow slight movement when touched and would look much more alive, responsive, and contingent. I was impressed that the interview method enabled me to access such old memories.

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Here at last is a means to trace the precise contours of aesthetic experience. Critics, arts writers, curators, and artists make assumptions about people’s experiences in the encounter with art, often projecting their personal beliefs. But micro-phenomenology enables research into the aesthetic encounter that respects unique individual experience and detects larger structures. Petitmengin has engaged in a long-term collaboration with my art collective, Sensory Sites, by conducting extensive, in-depth interviews with people who visit our exhibitions. She asks individuals to select a few minutes or moments from the flow of their time in the exhibition and then to revisit that event in memory as she helps them to inquire into the experience. She records their speech in video and audio and then transcribes and analyzes it. Assembling and analyzing the results from a number of interviews, we artists gain a sense of how our artworks have affected people, both uniquely and generally, providing a deeply sophisticated kind of feedback. We then integrate these findings into our next exhibition, generating an ongoing cycle of inquiry and creativity. The most moving discovery I made through this method is that such subtle, detailed, rich inner experiencing and remembering are going on all the time. Each and every moment is deep with complex computations, perceptions, emotions, and memories. We remain unconscious of most of it. An important key to accessing these inner experiences lies in the body. Petitmengin’s gentle questioning repeatedly directed my attention to bodily sensations and to their exact location, nature, and quality. I could discern and distinguish fine sensations and elusive emotions and trace the contours and qualities of both. Where do you feel this quality of lightness? How do you know you feel it? How large is it? Where does it end? Does it come and go, or is it steady? Micro-phenomenology reveals movements, structures, and patterns within experience. It confirms my belief in the bodily dimensions of the aesthetic experience. These bodily dimensions include not just the phenomena we can notice, but also the activities lying below the threshold of awareness. Interoceptive signals coming from breathing, blood pressure, heart, temperature, digestion, elimination, thirst, hunger, sexual arousal, affective touch, itches, pleasure, and pain are increasingly recognized to have a pervasive impact on cognition. They influence attention and perception, guide decision-making, and shape memory and emotion processing (Arikha, 2019). Fascinating research is being done on the energetic power of the heart and its communications with the brain. Scientific focus has been primarily centered on the brain, but research shows the heart produces the body’s most powerful rhythmic electromagnetic field, which changes as we feel different emotions. The signals the heart sends to the brain

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can influence perception, emotional processing, and higher cognitive functions (Childre, 2000). Researchers are also now exploring the intelligence of the gut. The enteric nervous system contains some hundred million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system, leading researchers to call it the “second brain” (Gershon, 1998). This system communicates with and affects the brain; in fact, about 90 percent of the fibers in the primary visceral nerve, the vagus, carry information from the gut to the brain, not the other way around (Porges, 2017). While recent scientific physiological discoveries capture our attention, the wisdom of the body, heart, and gut has been integrated and applied for centuries in many cultures and by many artists. Over my studio door, I post these lines from Rainer Maria Rilke: For there is a boundary to looking. And the world that is looked at so deeply wants to flourish in love. Work of the eyes is done, now go and do heart-work on all the images imprisoned within you; for you overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them. (Rilke, 2004, 135)

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Reflection

To understand what happens in the perception of art, I look to spontaneous aesthetic experience in daily life. On many occasions throughout the day, I notice a slight shift from ordinary, functional activity and awareness to attend, however fleetingly, to sensory, perceptual dimensions of a situation. For example, the utilitarian perception of a table as a useful surface on which to place things can yield to a sense-based relationship with the table. I notice (and perhaps feel) the taper of the legs, the soft edges of the tabletop, and the grain in the wooden surface. This tiny shift in attention pulls me out of my thoughts about putting dinner on the table. I leave my self- and goal-oriented stance and take in the available integrity and beauty. This small attentional shift always makes me feel refreshed and appreciative of the world around me. The qualities I detect enrich my knowledge and appreciation of the table. Such aesthetic, sensory qualities are not irrelevant to the table’s purpose, nor is my response to them. They enhance and dignify my use of the table as a place to sit, eat, work, and gather. This appreciation can linger and resonate beyond the actual moment, informing my aesthetic experience of other objects and deepening my capacity for aesthetic experience. Gradually and incrementally, I build a personal aesthetic repertoire through these sensory moments. I become more sensitive and discerning. Aesthetic qualities are not “merely” aesthetic, as is so often said, but rather enrich life in unfathomable ways, one of which is the capacity to lift us out of ordinary, habitual consciousness into a timeless, appreciative mode. I remember sitting in a church pew in Mexico in my twenties, observing the scarf of the woman in the pew ahead of me and marveling at the colors, textures, and folds. I was aware that my culture had taught me to denigrate as cheap and tacky the material and style of the scarf I was enjoying. I knew that shifting into a mode of aesthetic appreciation would change everything, not just my assessment of the scarf. Responding to the norms and practices of a culture different than my own, I was no longer trapped in my acquired, conventional standards of beauty and

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quality. Liberated from my critical stance, I could let go of cultural perceptions that cut me off from so much. I became free to find beauty and interest anywhere and in anything. A similar dynamic takes place when I approach an artwork, but on a different scale. Engaging with an artwork is a vastly expanded version of the small shifts in attention from utilitarian to aesthetic that I make in daily life. As I enter the world of a sculpture, painting, play, film, or book, I undergo a change in my attitude and awareness. I become conscious of moving into an alternative reality. Enthralled by a play in a darkened theater on a rainy afternoon, my pragmatic consciousness yields to aesthetic, imaginative consciousness. Habitual perceptions drop away. Possibilities multiply. Some artists intentionally play along the edges of this perceptual shift. They make (or find) situations or objects that seem ordinary but are transformed by the artist’s intention and thus the perceiver’s perception. They invite people to reframe these offerings through their subjective response. Marcel Duchamp submitted a manufactured porcelain urinal to an exhibition, signed it “R. Mutt,” and called it Fountain, forcing people to reckon with this familiar object within the context and meaning of art. At the time, it was rejected by the committee for the exhibition and caused a controversy. Nowadays replicas lie in museums. John Cage’s famous piece for piano, 4'33", offered listeners four and a half minutes of silence as the pianist sat there, opening and closing the keyboard lid. It asked listeners to attend to the silence and the ambient sounds. Since these and many other provocative artistic gestures, artists have explored the vast territories between ordinary consciousness and subjective, aesthetic perception—territories made accessible by our capacity to shift perceptual states. This capacity, to move from one kind of attention to another (and back again), makes art possible and potent. We engage with an artwork while knowing the world it portrays is an invention, a creation. I immerse myself in the artwork, believing and investing in it, and at the same time recognize it as fiction. I make an artwork with all my heart, intelligence, and skill, and it remains a fabrication of steel, cloth, and rawhide. This kind of encompassing awareness is fundamental to the power—and the necessity—of art. The ability to reflect on our experience—to know that we know and to know how we know—is a fundamental human capacity. We feel immersed in an artwork as well as feel distinct from it. Awareness is fluid and capacious enough to hold such seemingly disparate elements within the span of attention. We can flicker back and forth between immersion and reflection, sometimes so fast

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the two modes seem simultaneous. To embrace the alternation of immersion and reflection is to create a more spacious mind-state. We are less bound by the limits and excesses of both modes: neither absorbed in identification nor adrift in dissociation. We are free to move lightly between them and to connect them through awareness. One of the ways to practice this multivalent awareness when perceiving art is to attend to the fabrication of the artwork. An artwork may capture me with a story or image—with its contents—but I am also able to shift my attention to the art and craft of its making—to the medium, method, or process by which it was made. I move from emotional appreciation of the content of an image to aesthetic, sensory appreciation of the process of its making. This aesthetic dimension is crucial to the effect an artwork has on us. A story may be told in many ways, but the way of telling it will determine its efficacy and power. In a painting by Francisco de Zurburan, Saint Serapion, the upper body of the crucified saint faces me, filling the frame. But the main character in this quiet, restrained drama is the saint’s beautiful cream-colored robes. Their deep folds, shadows, and warm highlights ground the saint’s death in sensuous, felt reality, lifting it into apotheosis. The clay in Alberto Giacometti’s figures has been relentlessly gouged, pinched, and removed, making the gaunt, bronze bodies feel ravaged and reduced to an essential core. Goya’s series of prints Disasters of War show people killed and dismembered, but his mastery of ink, mark, and paper, his striking compositions, and his trenchant lines mediate the horror. I gain distance from the unspeakable at the same time as I confront it. Being aware of both content and process enables this doubling. I participate fully in the subject and yet remain aware of the artwork as a creative interpretation. I recognize it is not the tragedy but a reflection on the tragedy. Italo Calvino writes of this necessary reflection in Six Memos for the Next Millennium when he describes how the Greek hero Perseus managed to cut off the head of the Medusa—whose face turned into stone whoever gazed upon her—by watching her reflection in his bronze shield. Furthermore, Perseus carries the bloody, severed head with him, hidden in a sack, to pull out as a last defense when in danger of defeat, turning his enemies into “statues of themselves.” Perseus masters that terrible face by keeping it hidden, just as he had earlier defeated it by looking at its reflection. In each case, his power derives from refusing to look directly while not denying the reality of the world of monsters in which he must live, a reality he carries with him and bears as his personal burden. (Calvino, 2016, 6)

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We may gain reflective distance through the kinds of interactions suggested throughout this book: through the sensing body. I may be immersed in a film, mesmerized by an installation, or entranced by a painting, and at the same time be aware of my body in time and space. I feel my bodily reactions, sensations, emotions, tensions, or simple presence. I am both here in my body and there in the artwork, and I know they are different. The importance of this distinction is made palpable by its absence. In Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art, Jill Bennett describes the experience of one of her students who had no surface skin sensation. This woman found her condition entirely inadequate for perceiving art: “You need to feel to see images, and in particular, you need to feel to know that what is visibly occurring before you is not actually happening in your own body.” She found that when she sees other bodies in pain, she finds herself more connected to them because she cannot readily dissociate herself from their pain. She said that feeling one’s own body “is an act of distancing the sensual experience being depicted.” She discovered she could generate bodily sensation by the physical act of squirming, which gave her a way to not only “feel the image but also maintain a tension between self and image … it is this function that enables one to see feeling as the property of another and simultaneously to feel it—or at least to know it as felt.” Awareness of one’s body—whether through sensation, motion, emotion, or a subtle shift of attention—provides a means to distinguish between oneself and the artwork. Bennett draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze, who makes a distinction between thoughts and sensations. In encountering a work of art, we are tempted to ask what it means, which suggests objective, intellectual, or ideational answers, but the critical locus of meaning lies in the inner experience of the perceiver. The question to ask of an artwork, then, according to Deleuze, is not “What does it mean?” but rather “How does it work?” What kind of effect does it produce in me, and how does that happen? (Bennett, 2005, 42–45). We may also achieve distance by reflecting on the activities of the mind triggered by a work of art: emotions, memories, associations, moods, thoughts, and mind-states that naturally arise in response to artworks. Indeed, we approach artworks intentionally seeking such emotional and intellectual stimulus. Undergoing these reactions, we know them to be provisional. They may be genuinely affecting, but they do not call us to act or respond as we might in ordinary life. We recognize these reactions as aesthetic responses, which allow us to be both engaged and removed. We are free to reflect, examine, explore, and perhaps even savor them rather than drown in them.

Reflection

Figure 15.1  Vessels and tubes wind through the interior of a body conceived as a vessel. Lota, 2008, Rawhide, copper, silver, 20 × 13 × 17 in. Copyright © 2020, Rosalyn Driscoll. Photo © David Stansbury Photography.

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As a maker of art, I project my inner life onto materials and forms that have their own laws, intentions, and qualities. The new forms and reconfigured materials I create may be considered mine, since I made the forms and worked the materials, but at the same time they are not mine, since they necessarily have their own lives through and beyond me. Materials have their own imaginations. I must imagine my way into their ways of imagining. They transform my intention—whether it be conscious or unconscious—by their inherent qualities. I have to work within their limits and possibilities. In this wrestling with the actual qualities of materials—whether steel or words—I gain distance from my impulses, desires, and dreams, which are now expressed in something outside myself, different from me, and transformed in the process. The children born of these efforts may or may not resemble me, but they usually reveal elements that have been hidden, unfamiliar, or unknown to me. Through my works, my life becomes no longer limited to the versions available on the surface, in the family, through the culture, or by convention. The alchemy of art turns ordinary, unconscious lead into the gold of reflection. The desire for reflection is what allows me—even drives me—to make art. As a maker, my curiosity about my life and the world moves me to create new forms. In making a sculpture, I see myself reflected in it, but not as in a mirror, nor how I conventionally perceive myself. The creative process allows me to know the world and myself from another perspective, in another medium, in another form. I can imagine myself and the world in a different way than I previously thought possible. This generates new options for conceiving, organizing, and living that life. I need this reflection in an ongoing way, not just occasionally. When not working, I feel myself skating on the surface, out of touch, even a bit lost. Making work connects me with the substrata of memories, emotions, and sensations underlying my daily life. It reveals the lineaments of my particular, specific ways of being. Over time, each new work builds on past works, creating a layered history of visible, tangible evidence of my interests and my inquiry. My works gradually accumulate as a nuanced portrait of what I care and wonder about. Working conveys to me how I understand and integrate the worlds within me as well as the worlds around me. At the same time, aesthetic distance provides me a way to dis-identify with my artworks. Rather than imagining my creations as extensions of me, I value the capacity to hold what I make at a remove from myself. Although I made it, the artwork now has a life of its own, beyond me and my role in its creation and evolution. This distinction is crucial to my ability to not be limited or defined by

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what I have made. This distance lifts me out of my usual ways of perceiving and creating. It frees me to move on to make new work. It enables me to frame rejection or acceptance of the artwork not as acceptance or rejection of me. I am not my art. The oscillation between immersing and reflecting is built into the creative process and continues throughout the creation of an artwork. When I am immersed in the challenge of shaping rawhide, choosing a color, or simply not knowing how to proceed, I often step back, perhaps literally but certainly imaginatively, to reflect: to open the space for contemplation, to grasp and understand what I have done, to ask what interests me in it, to calibrate how well it accords with my purposes, to consider the possibilities, and to sense what the next move might be. This period of reflection is crucial for assessing whether or how the work aligns with my questions, concerns, and desires. In asking myself, “Does this weight, this curve, this material, this direction ‘feel right’?” I am searching for clues for how the work-in-progress furthers my investigation. I inquire whether it evokes the precise feeling I pursue, if it opens new avenues of exploration, or if it resolves my uncertainty. This assessment is essential to the creative process. The ability to move between the two poles of immersing and reflecting is a skill I can learn, practice, and refine: when to step back, when to dive in, how far or how long to step back, how far or long to dive in. The stepping back can last for milliseconds or years. It can be intentional or unconscious. It can vary in intensity and degree. And in the end, to finish a work is to remain at a distance. Yet even when “finished,” an artwork still lives within the creative process, continuing to offer new reflections and to feed into self-understanding. In considering the need for reflective distance, I hear echoes of the distance I have described in visual perception, which can sometimes generate a feeling of separation and disconnection. But that kind of disconnection, which feels more like a cutting off, is not the same as the reflective distance I consider here. Because this kind of distance occurs within the dynamics of the creative process, it remains fully engaged. It lies within the continuum between immersion and contemplation, not outside the continuum. Aesthetic distance can be deeply felt and sensorially experienced. Seeing can be immersive, reciprocal, responsive, intimate, mutable, and connective. Arthur Koestler describes the creative process in The Act of Creation as having two phases. We turn our conscious attention to a problem and bear down on it with all our might. The effort drives the inquiry into an unconscious domain. Then we shift our attention away from the problem, perhaps taking a walk or even a vacation. While our conscious body-mind

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is otherwise occupied, free from the problem, work is being done at the unconscious level where new connections may arise. This deliberate distance is a way to allow unconscious processes to unfold without interference from the conscious mind. But intense, conscious effort is necessary to mobilize the effortless, unconscious processes. Other ways of gaining distance are perceiving my work in different contexts or through other people’s sensibilities. When I am in the presence of my work in a place other than my studio, the disruption of perception generated by the new space invites reflections on what I have made. Other people’s presence, whether in the studio or elsewhere, invites reflection, even if they say nothing. I recently took part in a performance where I felt bathed in the rapt attention of the audience. In that heightened experience, I realized the role of the audience was not only to undergo their own experience and to witness mine, but also to invite me to become aware of myself and my actions. Their presence ushered me into reflection. This insight led me to understand the usefulness of audiences for my visual work. These audiences are more dispersed, intermittent, and diffuse than a performance audience; I may not ever see or meet them, but imagining, sensing, or projecting their presence enables me to reflect on my work in useful ways. Receiving people’s non-verbal, verbal, or written responses proves more complicated. Their comments may offer useful information, generate new reflection, and deepen understanding. The resulting distance, and my reaction to their comments, may also shade into doubt or aggrandizement. I continue to learn how to modulate the distance I need for receiving others’ responses: where, when, how, and to whom I show my work, and how I frame that experience for them and for myself. As artists, we have more control over that process than we tend to think we do—not only in the external conditions of the exchange, but also in the degree of self-awareness and dis-identification. Having others see my work is intimately linked to the profound psychological need to be seen—or not to be seen. While many people long to be seen and to have their artwork be seen, I speak for the introvert’s desire not to be seen, an attitude that carries into my work. I recognize the paradox of a visual artist not wanting their work to be seen. Living with the ambivalent desires for my work to be seen and not be seen makes my own reflections all the more potent and necessary. As someone who perceives art as well as creates it, aesthetic experience often mystifies me. Why do I come away from a harrowing movie, art exhibition, or play feeling curiously uplifted? Why do I feel magnified upon seeing Picasso’s Guernica, from which I can almost hear the shrieks and groans of its war-torn figures? Or Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, with its encyclopedia of suffering?

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And Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that ends with everybody we care about dead? What do these great works of art do to my consciousness? How do they alter my body? I feel broader and deeper. I am more cognizant of who I am, who I am not, and who I might be. I leave my habits and personal concerns behind. I move from a narrow sense of self to a larger scale of being. When I encounter artworks that reveal the magnitude and depths of human splendor and depravity, I have to acknowledge the full range of the human condition and of my own possibilities. The artist’s willingness to grapple with such demanding realities inspires my capacity to do so. I face suffering and feel it more fully. The artist’s ability to transform life’s challenges into compelling imagery enables me to perceive freshly and in a different way. This reinvention of perception and reality is not only refreshing, it becomes critical for meeting new individual and collective challenges. As we find ourselves facing historically unprecedented conditions, we need artists to invent new languages, perspectives, and tools for transformation. I think of Anselm Keifer’s huge paintings of the post-Holocaust landscape, such as Bohemia Lies by the Sea, where blasted, desolate plowed fields contain hints of fertility in their deep, gouged, sculptural furrows. Or Janet Echelman’s ethereal, colored nets, such as As if It Were Already Here, which floated three hundred feet above Boston’s traffic and buildings, revealing the movement of wind and light and offering a different vision of the city’s relationship to nature. Artworks are reflections of life, but life heightened, magnified, intensified, dramatized, abstracted, and refined. Artworks highlight the essential and pare away the inessential. Their intensity captures my attention. Their magnitude is capacious enough to reflect my life and the life of many. Their drama elicits my emotions. I feel my earthen roots in Ursula von Rydingsvard’s massive, sawcut cedar sculptures; my depths in Anish Kapoor’s piles of intensely saturated pigments; my spirit in Michael Singer’s wood, stone, and metal constructions that evoke sacred spaces and rituals. The ability to sink into the narrative or content of an artwork while remaining aware of our aesthetic, perceptual, sensory, emotional, psychological, somatic responses is a gift of human consciousness. The cultivation of this capacity may be the deepest purpose of art. It may be the most profound, perennial effect art has on our well-being. Underneath art’s perceptual feats, revolutionary ideas, compelling stories, communal bonding, startling representations, power of communication, capacity for wonder, and stunning beauty lies the invitation to practice this reflective awareness. Making and perceiving art provide training grounds for the native ability to reflect on and transcend our limited situations and the usual contents of our body-minds. Engaging with art develops the capacity to allow perceptions to change and mutate; to move nimbly between perceptual

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frames; to question reactions and assumptions; to slip inside another’s skin; to rewrite and recreate history; to appease appetites, gods, and forces beyond our control; to envision new, unimagined possibilities; to shift perceptions, drop beliefs, and change identities; to step outside a limited, narrow, inherited, or prescribed sense of self; to empathize, resonate, and relate; to learn a larger, more compassionate, responsive way of being. We may in turn apply this reflective, expansive skill to the rest of our lives. The capacity to embrace multiple ways of being and doing helps us move more fluidly through the difficulties and joys of life, to deeply engage with them yet not be defined, bound, or limited by them. We open to the moment in all its plenitude and mystery. Inhabitation of the present grounds us in the body, where we have always been and always will be, revealing the truth of a situation rather than ideas about it. This kind of knowing is not intellectual, nor is it sense-specific. The metaphor of reflection and mirroring may be a visual trope, but I perceive and know through many senses and through sensing that crosses and fuses  multiple sensory modes. Sensory systems are not discrete. They interact  with and influence each other, weaving experience into a knowing that could be described as crossmodal or even transmodal: a variable blend of visual-spatial-haptic-kinesthetic-proprioceptive-interoceptive-olfactoryauditory-emotional modes. The words may suggest boundaries, but the senses do not live within them. The task of the artist—and we who take in art—is to sensitize and tune our bodies to our perceptions, insights, feelings, and questions; to welcome novel, counterintuitive possibilities; to find our way into elusive, half-felt, halfformed images, ideas, memories, or feelings, however surprising. By turning our attention to these seemingly unbidden visitors lurking in the shadows, we may shine light on their potential, amplify their dimensions, endow them with a degree of reality, and begin to form the formless. As artists, we welcome these guests, wash their feet, and feed them. Some continue on their way, and some move in. It can be difficult to acknowledge and welcome challenging emotions and ideas—to allow such currents to flow through our bodies and not be burned by them. We must find ways to integrate the unmanageable, unacceptable, and unwanted as well as the sublime, beautiful, and transcendent. We can learn to open and respond to these demands, however subtle or outrageous—to be the water that tumbles over rocks, the bird that rides the wind. To tolerate and even embrace powerful emotions, impulses, memories, and ideas is not easy. The way of the artist is to translate, transform, and transmute these forces into a physical

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form that we can absorb, digest, and share. To let these currents of feeling and knowing flow unimpeded, and to transform them through expression and reflection: these are tasks of the body-mind. And what is a body-mind? I have focused on expanding what we can know of our somatic selves, but below the conscious knowing lies all the seething, swarming, buzzing, flowing, growing, dying, decaying, regenerating life, as well as all the ways we are penetrated by air, water, plants, insects, animals, soil, weather, atmosphere, gravity, the cosmos, and each other. The vast powers of the earth and our bodies move within us, deep and fathomless.

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Index Abakanowicz, Magdalena 32, 92, 146–7 Abram, David 73 Abramovic, Marina 186 abstraction 54, 133, 138 aesthetic touch by blind people 124–5 Brenson’s description 79 concept and practice 5, 8 concrete reality 72 definition 5–6 haptic awareness 166, 169 powerful model of responses 162 reciprocity 108 of sculpture 9 specific qualities 106 subjective and objective responses 102, 149, 160 Albers, Josef 145 Alexander Technique 2, 97, 147, 182 Amendola, Robert 124 Anatsui, El 141–2 Anlo-Ewe people 155–6 architecture 10, 34, 29, 163 Arnheim, Rudolf on attitude towards objects 105 on memory 87–8 on power of sight 17 thinking as kinesthetic 53–4, 58, 61 artist 108 as body 139–53 challenges 150, 200–1 domain of touch 152 haptic choices 148–52 art museums 7, 9, 35, 155, 158–67 artworks. See also sculptures aesthetic touch 3–10 dynamization 55–8 ephemeral materials 86 kinds of memories 87–8 multitudinous forms 103–4 notion of time 82–5, 91 processes of perception 68, 72

projective fields 75–7 reflections of life 199–200 replaceability 86 seeing 180–1 social aspects 183–5 somatic responses 6, 78, 186 tactile effects 86 touching 133, 155, 157, 159, 162, 165 translation of experiences 77–8 viewing protocols 7–10, 89–91 visual perception 6–9, 16 associative memory 66–7 Barocci, Federico 2 behavior 4, 16–17, 40–1, 95, 97, 157, 172. See also cognition Bennet, Jill 194 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 84, 149 blind or visually impaired persons 3, 7, 9, 50, 61, 68, 76. See also Hull, John; Kleege, Georgina; Lusseyran, Jacques; Michalko, Rod; Muccio, Deidre; Vermeij, Geerat blindness actions and reactions 186–8, 194 bodily sensations 4, 21, 60–1, 132, 148 common assumptions 118–19 contact and movement 4 effects of touch 21 emotions 95 goals of sensory training in rehabilitation 125 internal and external 155–6, 183, 185 kinds of 117 nervous system 52 perceptual abilities of people with 124–7 somatic responses 3–10, 34, 51, 201 tactile experience 21 tactile images 65, 68 tactile information 114 time elements 83–4 time frame 165

Index body artists’ attunement to 200 artwork as 186–7 awareness of 147, 194 in making tactile sculpture 140–2 map 52 as organ of sense 120–1 peripersonal space 52 systems 188–9 body-mind 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 201 Body-Mind Centering 2, 48–9, 147 extended cognition 184–5 haptic abilities 41–2, 94–5 perception of movement 48–9, 61 somatic awareness 147–8, 201 unconscious vs. conscious 198–9 Bontecou, Lee 6 Bradford, Mark 85 brain 10, 13, 182 Brancusi, Constantin 6, 32 Brenson, Michael 100, 105, 143–4, 146, 158, 166, 174 on aesthetic touch of sculpture 79, 91–2 Bruner, Jerome 52 Calvino, Italo 193 Chagall, Marc 149 Chamberlain, John 6 childhood 6–7, 18, 54, 152 Classen, Constance 118, 155–7 cognition 52 embodied/enactive 183–9 current theories 40 definition 155–6 hand, use in 41 haptic 9–10, 28 reflective 192–5 visual 33 Cohen, Bonnie Bainbridge 48, 61 consciousness 10, 15, 29, 31–5 creative process 60, 87, 92, 125, 157, 169, 196–7 creativity 72–5, 98, 125–7, 169, 172, 196–8 Cubi (Smith) 112 Damasio, Antonio 95 David (Bernini) 149 David (Michelangelo) 174

Degas, Edgar 149 Deleuze, Gilles 194 disabilities 10, 120, 127–8, 162, 170 dominance 18, 33–4 Duchamp, Marcel 85–6, 192 dynamization 55–8, 78 Echelman, Janet 199 emotions 3, 5–6, 13 aesthetic context 98 felt as sensations 95–7 managing 200 movements 95, 97, 152 response to touching 94–7 thought 175 of touch 163 enaction 52, 183 Enlightenment, The 156–7 Ernst, Marc 70 Eros and Logos 173–4 exhibitions haptic perceptions 179–80, 183, 188 tactile engagement 166 visual and tactile 127, 162–3 experiential differences 13, 32, 67 exteroception 4, 156 eyes 6, 23, 27–35 saccades 23 fingers 19–20, 23, 25, 28, 31–2. See also hands Gates (Claude, Christo and Jeanne) 151 Gawande, Atul, theory of perception 65 Geurts, Kathryn 155–6 Giacometti, Alberto 6 Gibson, James J. 51 Goldsworthy, Andy 86 Grunwald, Peter 182 Guernica (Picasso) 174 Guiard, Yves 39–40 habits, breaking 149, 157, 172 hands complementary use 39–40 contribution to intelligence 40–7 different uses 131, 148–9 dominant vs. nondominant 39–40

211

212 fingers’ role 42–4 first two fingers, uses 38–9 haptic abilities 38–9, 41, 45–7 (see also Wilson, Frank) Hepworth’s description 40 intelligence of 2–3, 5, 9, 13–14 left and right 39–40 organ of touch 37 perception rate 20, 22, 23–4, 27, 30–1 poetic capacity 44 structure and function 37–9 haptic perception 5, 7, 9, 16, 19–21, 24–6, 28, 30–1 aesthetic possibilities 49 Arnheim’s description 54 conscious vs. unconsciousness 179–80 constituent elements 71 critical criteria 166 definition 4 dynamic quality 54–6 physical practices 147–8 self-organizing elements 71–2 spatial sense 150 subjective and objective responses 101–2, 106 tactile perception vs. 111 time, role in 79–80 visual perception vs. 67–70, 93–4 without sight 59–60, 64–5, 89, 125, 133 Hayward, Jeff 7, 133, 135 Hesse, Eva 108 House, (Driscoll) 132 Housen, Abigail, stage theory of aesthetic development 89–91 Howes, David 15, 155 Hull, John 23, 68, 82, 103, 119–21 human/nature 15–16 Hyde, Lewis 171–2 image. See also mental images mind’s eye 65 visual 35, 67, 69, 84, 116 imagination 72–8, 125–7 artists’ 108, 114 art’s relationship with 137 internal environment 156, 187 intuition and 176 mind and 57, 60 physicality and 172

Index power of 9 tactile memory and 5 touch and 25, 174 interoception 4, 156 intimacy 19–20, 22 Johnson, Mark 185–6 Josipovici, Gabriel 18–20 Juhan, Deane 103 Kandinsky, Wassily 6 Kapoor, Anish 174, 199 Katz, David 20, 37–8, 74, 101–2 Kearney, Richard 72 Keifer, Anselm 199 kinesthetic body motions 49–50, 55 effects of art 6 emptiness, experience 131 hands, use of 41, 46, 48–9, 56, 83 haptic sculpture 88, 116 movement 4, 28, 50, 89, 162–3 from sight 30 somatic senses 78, 152 subjective–objective continuum 103, 140 thinking process 53 visual limitations 68 Kleege, Georgina 127 Kline, Franz 22, 55 knowledge 2, 10, 25, 29 Koestler, Arthur 197 Kosslyn, Stephen 33, 66–7, 72 Kramrisch, Stella 174 Kuh, Katharine 144 Lakoff, George 185–6 Levin, Michael 34 Luciani, Annie 70 Lusseyran, Jacques 61–2, 119–20 Marinetti, F. T. 118 Martin, Agnes 6 meditation 32–3 Memory (Driscoll) 129–31, 134 memory 66–7, 79–92, 97, 162–3 mental images associations 69 blind people 65, 132 haptic perception 64, 69, 135

Index power of imagination 9 thinking and 53 through touching 65, 112 visual perception vs. 66–9 Michalko, Rod 118–19 Michelangelo 174, 198 micro-phenomenology 187–8 mirror neurons 53 Moore, Henry 141, 144 motion 3–4, 6, 16–17, 28, 30–1, 50–6, 60. See also movements firings 53 functions 50–1 quality 60 sense of 56 movements. See also motion artmaking 60–1 bodily sensations 4, 21, 60–1, 132, 148 dynamization 55 emotions as 95, 97, 152 of hands 37–9, 42–6, 53, 80, 137–8 haptic information 67–8, 83 human development 48–50 Japanese teahouse 150 kinesthetic receptors 49–50 mapping 23–4, 51–3, 68–9 micro-phenomenology 182, 188 of mind 61–2 museums, in 155 object and space 28 patterns 51, 55, 59, 61, 88, 131 perceiver’s 150–1 saccades 23 sight 31, 77–8, 181 subjective and objective responses 102, 104 therapy 97 through space-time 80 time 87, 165 touch 4–5, 28, 47–52, 54–8, 61–2 visual metaphors 181–2, 186 way of knowing 52 Muccio, Deidre 7, 111–18, 120, 124–5, 129, 133–4, 143 multimodal 52, 200 muscles 3–4, 21, 24 Nadelman, Elie 134 Nash, David 142 Newman, Barnett 140

213

nkisi figures 87 nonvisual senses 77, 118, 125, 132, 140 objects 17–21, 25–8, 31–3 museum visitors 157–8, 191–2 physical 53–4 Oldenburg, Claus 140 Pallasmaa, Juhani 31, 34–5 papermaking 2, 111, 140 perception malleability 124 sense-making 106–8 subjective and objective 102–4 Petitmengin, Claire 187–8 Picasso, Pablo 174, 198 Pollack, Jackson 6 Potok, Andy 3, 22 procedural memory 88 proprioception 4, 31, 52, 153, 155 reciprocity 4, 34, 134, 176 encounter with art 108 in museum 163 of forces 101 self and object 153 Renaissance, The 2, 29, 139, 156 Resting Stag (Nadelman) 134 Richter, Gerhard 108 Rilke, Rainer Maria 44, 78, 189 Rizolatti, Dr. Giacomo 53 Rodin, Auguste 4, 143 romanticism 85 Rothko, Mark 22, 55 Schacter, Daniel 87 sculpture 3, 7–10, 16–17, 19–20, 27, 31–2. See also haptic perception; sight; touch aesthetic touch 5, 8–9 artists’ vitality 100, 144 artwork elements 143 as body 153 haptic models 153 materials 46, 145–6, 196 mental image 63–4 movement qualities 55–65 new possibilities 111 shapes and textures 116 tactile perception 127–35, 166, 185 touching 88, 169–74

214

Index

sensations 2–6, 8, 21, 28–31, 33. See also bodily sensations body 52, 121, 146, 153 hands 38 sensory information/modes/systems artworks 75–7 blindness 125 cultural dimension 10 emotion 95 experiential differences 32, 93, 180 Gibson 51 malleability 64–5 mental images 67 reciprocal complexities 36 sight and touch 13–15, 32, 34–6, 132 (See also sight; touch) somatic senses 4 touch and sight 16, 21, 30, 67–8 Serra, Richard 17, 186 Serres, Michel 44 sexuality, effect of touch 21 sight. See also visual perception conceptual grasp 23 differences in individuals’ perceptions 9, 13, 15–16, 31–3, 35 different than touch 13–16 disabilities 120 disembodied 35, 182 distancing 17–20, 197–8 focused 31–2 objectifying nature 25 quality 30 saccades 23–4 shared ability with touch 123 use of technologies 35 Singer, Michael 199 skin 3, 6, 18, 21, 28, 30–1, 140 smell 19, 34 Smith, David 112 Smith, Tony 140 somatic senses aesthetic touch 5, 9, 94–5, 164, 174, 176 artist’s attunement 140, 142, 145–8, 152 bodily aspects 51, 59, 61, 179–83 conscious awareness 6–7, 148, 199, 201 definition 4 intelligence 147 movements 164–5 visual imagery 152–3, 180–1

space awareness of 147 distance 18–20 figure and ground 26 kinesthetic sense 28 memories of 89 in museums 165 peripersonal 52 positive and negative 26 sensing 27, 165 sensing through touch 150 Spence, Charles 179 Srinivasan, Mandayam 101 Sucitto, Ajahn 33–4 Švankmajer, Jan 34, 73 tactile abilities 4, 6–10, 30, 32–3 tactile perception 33, 80, 111, 115–16, 120, 133, 149 intelligence 146 phenomena 135, 148 qualities 116, 142 technology, impact of 10, 24, 35, 41, 80, 162, 167 temperature 4–5, 20–1, 32 Thai Forest tradition 33 thinking Arnheim’s description 53, 61 art 54 gestures 53, 55 imagination 73 kinesthetic 53 nonvisual 125 as physical activity 182 projective fields 75 of touch 111 visual 119 time 79–87, 165 body’s rhythm 83 dimensions of art 84–8 functions 81–2 haptic 24–5 Tinguely, Jean 85 touch. See also movements aesthetic 5, 8–9 categories 25 complex and compelling 5 definition 19 different uses of 175

Index learning and reading, work of art 115 mapping and sensing 68–9 negative feelings, pain 22 psychological dimension 21–2 radical nature 159 reciprocity 101–9, 141 sense of connection 169–77 sense of possession 158 sense of time 24 as sexual dimension of life 173 shared ability with sight 123 subjective and objective response 101–6 taboo in art 137, 158 various ways 131 visual categories 26 without sight 7, 9, 13, 16, 23–4, 26, 28, 48, 89, 133, 137, 179–80 Turrell, James 186 Vermeij, Geerat 124 visual art aesthetic experience 53 haptic art vs. 148 touching 143, 180–1 visual sensing 118 without sight/blindness 3, 127 visual images with blindfolded 60 haptic senses 32, 35, 68, 84 iconic knowledge 52 tactile 65, 137 visual perception vs. 67 visual impairments 9, 22, 68, 117, 123–4, 162. See also blindness; visual limitations

215

visual limitations aesthetic skills 125 body maps 52 haptic images 68, 133 misconceptions 116–18 perceptual process 135, 138 visual perception aesthetic touch 169 artwork 6–9, 69 distancing 17–18, 197–198 education of 139, 157 external and internal environment 180–1 focused sight 31 haptic memory and 67–8, 162, 180 location of awareness 33 mental images 65–7 reflective distance 197 sensory inputs 73, 118, 123 tactile experiences vs. 131, 133 visual imaging vs. 67 von Rydingsvard, Ursula 199 wabi-sabi, Japanese concept 85 Weber, Renee 175 Wells, Renee 133 Wilson, Frank 39–41 haptic perception of art 59, 62, 64, 111–12 tactile images 65 without sight, touch haptic experience 24, 28, 59, 74, 79–81, 89 physical motion 62, 64 sculpture 20, 23, 26, 48, 133 whole-body seeing 117–28

216