American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
Future Reflections Special Issue on Tactile Fluency REVIEW
More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art
by Georgina Kleege
Reviewed by Deborah Kent Stein
More Than Meets the Eye
What Blindness Brings to Art
by Georgina Kleege
Oxford University Press, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-060435-6
Available in audio format from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) as DB93533
When I tried to sign up for a studio sculpture class during college, the instructor was adamant. "It would be a waste of your time and mine," he insisted. "A blind person can't create or appreciate art. Art is a visual experience."
That instructor's attitude was extreme, but it reflected the thinking about art, vision, and blindness that has prevailed for centuries. Today a host of blind and sighted artists are working to shatter stereotypes and demonstrate that vision is only one channel to meaningful artistic experience. Art museums around the world have launched programs that attempt to make paintings accessible through audio description, and an assortment of touch tours allow blind visitors hands-on exploration of replicas and original pieces.
In More Than Meets the Eye, Georgina Kleege reviews past and current thinking about blindness and art. Her wide-ranging inquiry draws upon literary references, interviews with blind artists, scientific research, and her own impressions of museum access programs. Through all of her explorations she asks probing questions that challenge traditional ideas about blindness. "True access needs to be understood as something more than a one-sided act of generosity or charity," she writes in her introduction. "The presence of those formerly excluded people must be understood to invite a wholesale scrutiny of what the culture takes for granted about itself. The ultimate goal is not merely to explain visual art to blind people in the hope that this cultural access will compensate for the loss of sight. Rather, the hope is that blind people can bring a perspective that has not been articulated before."
Kleege begins by examining beliefs about blindness and perception, based on the writings of René Descartes and other Western philosophers. In 1630 Descartes theorized about the perceptions of a hypothetical man, totally blind from birth, as he maps his environment with the help of a stick. Descartes's notions about this theoretical blind man, whom Kleege playfully refers to as "the Hypothetical," echo through western thought to this day. Descartes understood the sense of touch to be the Hypothetical's substitute for sight. However, he failed to recognize the many facets of tactile experience, and he ignored the other senses that enhance a blind person's understanding of the world.
Kleege goes on to consider artistic representations of blindness and works of art that incorporate Braille. In one salient example, Braille inscriptions are used at the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, but are placed too high on the wall to be reached and read tactually by blind visitors. "Braille is appropriated for sighted purposes," Kleege notes, "leaving blind people at the margins of society, out of sight and out of mind."
Kleege devotes a chapter to the descriptive audio tours offered to blind visitors by many art museums. Some tours provide pre-recorded descriptions through an audio device, while others involve a live docent. Kleege expresses concern that pre-recorded materials often seem rudimentary, as though based upon an assumption that blind visitors have only minimal knowledge of the visual world. Docent-led tours, on the other hand, allow the blind visitor to ask questions and gather desired information.
Another chapter focuses on docent-led touch tours, in which blind visitors are permitted to touch certain selected sculptures. Kleege reflects that the blind visitor is privileged to experience art in a way forbidden to the sighted, and therefore can provide a unique perspective. She recalls a discussion with a docent at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The docent was convinced that touch can only perceive objects sequentially, taking them in bit by bit. Kleege describes how she refuted that idea, "showing my docent how I could wrap my palms and fingers over and around considerable chunks of the form. My point was that my haptic exploration was not merely to trace the form's outline with my fingertips but rather to envelope the three-dimensional volumes with my palms and fingers." Through touch the visitor can discover many aspects of a work that cannot be experienced visually, such as texture and temperature, the grain of the wood or the marks of a chisel. Kleege argues that touch is not an inferior sense, but a richly varied, exciting mode of perception.
More Than Meets the Eye asks us to challenge old ways of thinking about art and the senses, to stretch our expectations and reach toward unimagined possibilities. "If we can abandon the notion that blindness can only diminish, damage, or destroy identity, and adopt instead the idea that the experience of blindness, in all its varieties, can in fact shape and inform other facets of personality and personal history, we will move toward a more genuinely inclusive society," Kleege writes. "The integration of blind perceptions and experiences will change the foundational assumptions of the culture; change how the human condition is defined. And I believe this is the goal worth working toward."
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