422 World of Museums

The Future of Audio-tactile Approaches to Works of Art

With funding from the European Commission Tourism Unit, the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) has since 1993 led a consortium, under the banner of ‘European Cities Within Reach’, which is dedicated to drawing attention to the barriers to tourism faced by visually impaired people and to the development of small-scale pilot projects intended to demonstrate the merits of potential improvements. Project partners include, in London, the British Museum, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum, and in Paris, the Action Culturelle des Mu&es de la Ville de Paris, Cite des Sciences de l’Industrie, Jardin du Luxembourg and Mu&e Zadkine amongst others, while in Turin the Museo Egizio and the University have been particularly active. The Association Valentin Haiiy (centre in Paris for professional training for the support of visually impaired people) and the Unione Italiana Ciechi (Italian organisation for the blind) are also project partners, and similar projects are being set up in Stockholm and, outside the European Union, in Tokyo. The long-term goal of the European Cities Within Reach project is to make travel and culture as available as possible to the six million or so blind and partially sighted people in the European Union, and Marcus Weisen, of the RNIB, has been responsible for coordinating the initiative and the publication of the first three city guides.

For London, Paris and Turin/Venice, and each in English, French and Italian, these are published in formats accessible to visually impaired people: braille, audio tape and large print, as well as standard print. The five major London museums and art galleries which are partners now offer guided or taped ‘touch’ tours to visually impaired visitors, and a range of raised images, relief outlines and flocked, raised-line outline drawings have been developed by them to improve access to works of art, particularly for those with limited vision rather than total blindness. The Italian partners have developed sophisticated hybrids of raised screen-printed images which are accessible to both visually impaired people and those with normal sight, at the same time, thereby facilitating shared experiences. Future projects include adapting this hybrid format for the production of postcards accessible to both the fully sighted and visually impaired people. Meanwhile new partners joining in 1995 include English Heritage, and the European Commission Tourism Unit is convinced that the project has important implications for mass tourism as well as for the more specific needs of cultural tourism.

However, the introduction of the new service for visually impaired visitors to the National Gallery, London, also serves to focus attention on more fundamental problems. This package comprises a specially-written descriptive audio-guide used in conjunction with the flocked, raised-line diagrams, noted above, which map out the main features of the paintings being described. A series of three tours are planned, and the first of these-available from the beginning of February 1996-features four paintings, by Uccello (St. George and the Dragon), Jan van Eyck (The Arnolfini Portrait), Botticelli (Venus and Mars) and Raphael (The Crucifixion). These have been “selected for the

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424 World of Museums

clarity of their design, their brightness, their location in the Gallery and the fact that they are famous enough to be familiar to visitors who have lost their sight”. Furthermore, “The detailed descriptions have been written to convey a sense of the visual elements such as the scale of the painting, the range and vibrancy of the colours used and the texture of the paint”, and, available in French and Italian as well as in English, the service is provided free of charge.

Not unreasonably, the new service effectively sets out to build on existing foundations, adding richness and specificity to the limited visual experience available to the visitor with impaired vision, rather than one suffering total blindness. Nevertheless, it could be argued that the audio-tactile experience being made available for a totally blind visitor might be enhanced by the range of other environmental sensations, often subliminal, to be gained from that audio-tactile experience being enjoyed within a specific display gallery, as against the audio- tactile experience enjoyed in any other venue, such as in the home. The National Gallery service recognises implicitly that although an audio-tactile experience can revive memories of an earlier visual experience it cannot be a surrogate for it, and access to paintings for those who have never experienced sight can never be substantial.

Similarly, the fundamental question arises with regard to the ‘touch’ tours increasingly offered to visually impaired people, and the extent to which an audio-tactile exploration of all or part of the surface of a three-dimensional object can be reconciled with its creation as an object intended to be seen, at least on occasion, in its entirety rather than felt piecemeal. For small objects, including much sculpture, the process of audio-tactile exploration can permit the visitor with impaired vision to construct a good impression of the three-dimensionality of the object in space and its surface texture(s), but not to differentiate between the tactile sensations stemming from the intervention of the artist/craftsman (original surface working) and those due to subsequent alterations (wear and other forms of surface degradation). The wearing of gloves, in order to limit the wear and tear to which a handled object is unavoidably exposed, negates most of the small-scale tactile sensations and limits the visually impaired visitor to the overall forms of the object. Indeed, reconciling the need to preserve, for the benefit of generations to come, the surfaces of objects unaltered, with growing demands for tactile access by today’s visually impaired visitors, is difficult, if not impossible, when all must be treated equally and there is a potential demand for tactile access from six million of today’s citizens of the European Union alone.

Total blindness from birth is a great misfortune for the individual which can only be compensated in part by greater refinement and use of the other faculties, not least when a specific work of art has been created above all for visual appreciation. In the realm of sculpture, certain small Renaissance bronzes are amongst the rare examples intended to be handled and appre- ciated in part through their tactile qualities, but in general it is in their interaction with light that sculptures come alive and the rich variety of the surface textures of a marble by Gianlorenzo Bernini, for example, is to be explored in visual terms, not tactile. The former, guided by the vision of the sculptor, leads to an enjoyment and understanding of the object as a work of art, while the latter rarely permits the visitor to comprehend it as anything

World of Museums 425

more than an artefact or scientific specimen. One of the persistent fallacies embodied in current museum educational programmes is based on the notion that provision of information concerning the processes used to create a work of art somehow ‘explains ’ it. That arts-technology approach, while valuable and rewarding in itself, and essential for the conservation of works of art, offers little towards their understanding, and the tactile examination of the surface of a work of art intended to be approached visually suffers from the same limitations.

On the other hand there is no good reason why a work of art should not be created in which the intended interaction with the visitor would be primarily tactile rather than visual. After all, gardens planted for the benefit of visually impaired people concentrate on scents and sounds and, when appropriate, the textures of the plants rather than their colours. Perhaps the enormous resources of goodwill and ingenuity currently being directed towards facilitating unintended secondary approaches towards visual works of art might be better employed in developing new types of audio-tactile creations in which smells might also play a part. Foods, for example, already occupy part of this niche and a former Keeper of the Department of Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Delves Molesworth, when he suffered severe visual impairment in old age, took to cooking because he was able thereby to gain enormous personal satisfaction in exercising his creative talents using fully the combination of senses still available to him. After all, with a potential audience of six million, creative artists should need no additional incentives to exploit this approach further.

Photo Credits: National Gallery, London

PETER CANNON-BROOKES

A Postscript to ‘The (Un)making of Thomas Holloway’s Picture Collection’

In the October 1995 issue of Business Life, published by British Airways, the Sales and Marketing Office of Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London, placed the following advertisement: