What blind people can teach sighted viewers about art

ABSTRACT

While sight and hearing have been privileged in the philosophical formulation of aesthetics, the significance of touch to the experience of art has not enjoyed much attention at all. In order to displace sight and reinstate touch as a viable mode of engagement for the interpretation of visual art, this article reports on a study in which blind individuals and sighted people who were blindfolded were interviewed about their experiences of artworks. The participants were invited to touch selected sculptures in South African artist, Willem Boshoff’s Blind Alphabet (1990 – ongoing) installation. The main aim of the study was to investigate the nature of the tactile aesthetic experience elicited by these sculptures when they are handled and not seen. Secondly, the study aimed to reach a deeper understanding of how tactile engagement with art enriches the experience, meaning and power of the work for both those who can and cannot see. Through the investigation it was revealed that visual art can forge a bridge between individuals with and without blindness.

KEYWORDS:

• Art museums
• modern aesthetics
• art for the blind
• Blind Alphabet
• aesthetic touch
• haptic confidence

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to Willem Boshoff and Heléne Smuts for their generous support of the study. I wish to thank Willem for the visual and textual material and the permission to use the photographs of his works. I also extend my gratitude to Javett-UP for allowing me to conduct the interviews on days that the museum was not open to the public. Finally, I thank the University of Pretoria for providing financial assistance to carry out the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The category “blind” encompasses an array of relationships to vision and a variety of visual abilities. Blindness does not refer only to people who have no vision at all. Rather it includes people who have some form of mild to severe blurred vision. When going about this research, I did not ask the participants to reveal the nature or degree of their visual impairment. Even so, all the participants spontaneously offered this information and, whether or not they had some residual vision, everyone referred to themselves as “blind.” For this reason, in this article I use “blind,” “visually impaired,” “partially sighted” and “people with low vision” interchangeably to reflect the diverse ways in which the participants in the study described their visual disability.

2. In March 2022, I asked members of the South African Museums Association (SAMA) for information about museum programs in South Africa specifically designed for the visually impaired. SAMA has over 300 members across all nine South African provinces. The response was telling. While plans were underway to produce Braille signage for artworks at the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, and an event for the blind was held at the Johannesburg Holocaust Genocide Centre (JHGC) in 2019, there was no other information forthcoming about attempts to make South African museum collections accessible to blind visitors.

3. Boshoff initially trained blind guides to assist the sighted through the installation (Campbell 2018, 540). In addition, he used to organize tours for blind people who would be transported to the exhibition and be given the opportunity to experience the work. However, Boshoff admits that, because he has to organize these tours himself, with little help from the galleries or museums where the work is displayed, he is no longer able to do so (Boshoff 2021). This situation unfortunately attests to the general lack of interest in the needs of people with visual impairments among South African gallerists and museum coordinators.

4. It should be noted that Boshoff has conducted extensive research on cultural, historical and philosophical conceptions of touch and sight, as well as blindness and vision. His article “Aesthetics of Touch: Notes Towards a Blind Aesthetic” presents an impressive overview of terminology related to blindness, and demonstrates that touch provides a more intimate and rewarding aesthetic experience than sight. Therefore, Boshoff (1997) certainly cannot be accused of suffering from “haptic agnosia”.

5. Gervanne and Matthias Leridon own the 30 sculptures in the letter L series.

6. Ethical approval was obtained from the University of Pretoria’s Faculty of Humanities Ethics Committee: HUM031/0721.

7. There is far more that can be said about the tactile qualities of the sculptures discussed here as well as others that featured in the study, and I have done so elsewhere (see Lauwrens 2022). In this article I pay more attention to the meanings that were elicited by the tactile exploration of these works and on the conversations that emerged between the blind and sighted participants.

8. In the 12 months or so that selections of the installation were exhibited at the Javett-UP, other than the participants in this study and the blind guides at the opening event, I found anecdotal evidence of only one blind visitor to the exhibition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Pretoria.

Notes on contributors

Jenni Lauwrens

Jenni Lauwrens is an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts at the University of Pretoria where she teaches Visual Culture Studies. Her research focuses on people’s multisensory experiences of art and visual culture. In 2022, she published Embodiment and the Arts: Views from South Africa (ed) and is currently co-editor of the journal Image & Text.