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My New Year's resolution for 2011
or, 6 Ways of Looking at an elephant
I only made one big resolution for 2011, and it's that this year I will add more art to my life.
The seed of this idea was planted almost a year ago, back in January of 2010, when I helped to organize a tactile tour of the Arisia art show. This annual art show lends itself extremely well to the tactile experience of art, as it includes a wide range of art forms and materials, from jewelry to pottery to fabric to ironmongery, and in 2010 even included a steampunk computer (this last was not available for touching but we all agreed that it deserved a prize for best auditory art).
For me, it was one of the most exciting convention events I had ever participated in. A large part of my enjoyment came from getting to share in the enthusiasm of other visually impaired participants and from having the chance to talk to artists who were obviously very passionate about exploring not just the visual but the tactile aspects of their art.
What took me by surprise, however, was the sense of remembering something which I had so utterly forgotten: my love of art.
For me it was a
madeleine moment
http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/proust.html
an intensely-felt but involuntary sense-memory wich made my hands itch to beholding pencil and drawing paper. More than that, however, I missed the sensation of being in "the zone," that sort of half-dream state during which one is completely immersed in giving form to something which, until that moment, has existed soly within one's imagination. That sensation, in particular, was an experience which I longed to rediscover.
After the art show, I realized how much I had missed having art in my life, and I resolved to do something about that lack.
The next few months, however, brought a series of eye surgeries, and it seemed to take most of the rest of the year for me to recover my energy and sense of ambition for trying anything new.
As I found myself thinking about it more and more, however, I became increasingly aware that what I wanted to do was not merely to find ways in which I could express my creativity. What I also wished to do was explore my thoughts and feelings about Art with a capital 'A,' to compare what art meant to me when I was a sighted art student and what it means to me as a blind adult. I wished to explore why I felt that regaining art in my life had begun to seem so important to me, and I wished to find out how many of the concepts and experiences which I had learned as a sighted art student could be translated into what I experienced as a blind adult.
Okay, so many might say that that already gives me plenty to chew on.
But in considering the intersection of art and blindness, I realized that it could be used to explore some larger questions which help define our ideas regarding art, such as what art is, how it should be accessed and appreciated, and by whom:
The very desire to create art as a blind person immediately brings up a lot of tangled questions and complicated issues, in large part because we live in such a visual culture which has come to automatically identify art as something which is, by nature, visual. The mere ability to observe an object in detail and make sense of it as a whole--one of the most basic but also most difficult skills required of an artist, and also of a scientist, come to that--is often considered to be beyond the abilities of a blind person. Indeed, the possibility is often regarded as being somewhat ridiculous, a cultural attitude which is given form in the poem "The Blind Men and the Elephant" by John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887)
http://hinduism.about.com/od/hinduismforkids/a/blindmen.htm .
However, as the Wikipedia entry on "Blind Men and an Elephant"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
points out, the purpose of the original Indian story upon which this poem is based is to illuminate how we all tend to go around with blinders on, restricting ourselves by becoming attached to our own narrow perspective, a habit which not only interferes with our ability to see another person's point of view but which also inhibits our ability to see the big picture. I'm often reminded of this story when someone tells me that "blind people can't... do art/do science/do math." These people often remind me of Henry Higgins pacing about exclaiming "Impossible!", never considering for a moment that it is his narrow view of other people--not their real abilities--which is limiting his own possibilities.
In thinking about art and blindness, one soon discovers how narrowly Western culture has come to define art. While reading the introductory art text _Living with Art, Eighth Edition_, by Mark Jetlein (McGraw-Hill, 2007), I was struck by how often art is referred to as "visual art," even when the specific work of art being discussed is a sculpture, a ceramic bowl, or some other object which seems to be as much tactile as visual. This defining of art as visual is further complicated by the way in which most art is viewed, namely, either from a distance, behind a rope or under glass, in a museum, or within the medium of a textbook or coffeetable book of photographs. Art becomes something which is distanced from us onmultiple levels: physical distance, economic distance, the distance enacted by the camera lens, and the aesthetic distance that art is something which exists outside of our everyday experience.
A number of these points have been taken up by various art movements which attempted to change the way art is removed from everyday existence., and studying these movements can help to break down some of the unnecessary barriers which prevent us from experiencing art as purely visual. Two of my personal favorite art movements are the
Arts and Crafts movement
http://char.txa.cornell.edu/art/decart/artcraft/artcraft.htm
and art nouveau
http://www.nga.gov/education/tchan_1.shtm
both of which attempted to restore art to the realm of everyday experience by embodying artistic ideals into objects such as furniture, tables and chairs, jewelry and textiles. Yet the idea that evreyday objects could be both useful and beautiful had existed outside the boundaries of formal ideas of Western art for a long time, as is evidenced by objects such as the furniture of the Shakers, African masks and textiles, Islamic rugs, and Chinese tea bowls.
Lastly, the pairing of art and blindness brings up what can still be perceived as a quite controversial question: who is expected to understand and create art? This question always reminds me of a great television moment when the late Dennis Hopper was a guest on the Dennis Miller show in the mid-1990s, and Dennis Miller was complaining about how he didn't get modern art, and Dennis Hopper went off on a detailed discussion of art. It turns out that Hopper was a very knowledgeable art collector and artist himself, but for some reason, few people ever thought of him in this light.
Art seems to remain one of those touchstones that demonstrates how often we really do judge people by superficial appearance, and many individuals and groups are still dismissed because it is assumed that they don't possess the intelligence, the imagination, and/or the desire to appreciate something beautiful or emotionally moving. The writer Jose Saramago wrote in his novel _Blindness_ that blind people were incapable of appreciating beauty, of being creative, or of possessing a sense of aesthetics, and no one countered or criticized these statements in reviewing the book.
As human beings, most of us have brains which automatically attempt to make observations about the world around us, create patterns and stories to represent that world, and develop a sense of aesthetics which helps us to seek out experiences which have the potential to be the most meaningful. An aesthetic is, after all, one's sense of what is good and beautiful, what affects each of us emotionally and psychologically and even sometimes physically.
Let me underscore that last bit, because sighted individuals often seem to forget this: beneath all the linguistic and theoretical abstractions of art and aesthetics lies the fact that we are talking about reacting to what is, after all, the physical world and it's affect upon us.
Obviously, my original vague and simple itch to make accessible art has grown into a larger, more complex topic full of complicated questions about both art and blindness. Why not, I thought, dedicate an entire year to the subject? And why not write a book about the experience? After all, there must be other blind people who have the same questions I have and there aren't any books on the subject, at least none that I could find. There are at least two university professors who have written academic books on the subject of blind people and art: Simon Hayhoe, who will be a guest scholar at the Museum of Modern Art later this year, and John M. Kennedy, a Canadian professor who has written about the blind artist Esref Armagan (refer to the end of this essay for book titles and Web sites). There are a couple of books which focus on art projects for children and there is even a book on the subject of depictions of blindness in art, but I could find no books on the subject of art for blind adults.
Resources
accessibleimage: Accessible Image for the Visually impaired mailing list
http://www.freelists.org/archive/accessibleimage/
Note: This is the same list as
Art Beyond Sight Theory and Research
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research_nfbnet.org
Esref Armagan
http://www.armagan.com/
Art Beyond Sight Web site
http://www.artbeyondsight.org
Axel, Elisabeth Salzhauer, and Levent, Nina Sobol. _Art beyond sight: A Resource Guide to Art, Creativity, and Visual
Impairment_. (American Foundation for the Blind, 2002)
Barasch, Moshe. _Blindness: A History of a Mental Image in Western Thought_. (Routledge, 2001)
Blindness and Arts .com
http://www.blindnessandarts.com/
Hayhoe, Simon. _Arts, Culture, and Blindness A Study of Blind Students in the Visual Arts_. (Teneo Press, 2008)
Hayhoe, Simon. _God, Money, and Politics: English Attitudes to Blindness and Touch, from the Enlightenment to Integration_. (Information Age Publishing, 2008)
Heller, Morton A., and Ballesteros, Soledad. _Touch and Blindness: Psychology and Neuroscience_. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005)
Kennedy, John M. _Drawing and the Blind: Pictures to Touch_. (Yale University Press, 1993).
Kennedy, John M. "Haptic pictures." (Scarborough College University of Toronto, 1980)
Article:
http://www.artbeyondsight.org/teach/how-blind-draw.shtml
and
http://www.artbeyondsight.org/handbook/text-research.shtml
Kent, Deborah, author, and Cunningham, Ann, illustrator. _Because Pictures Matter: A Guide to Using, Finding, and Creating Tactile Imagery for Blind Children_. (National Braille Press, 2008)
This book is available for free from NBP in large print format, and is also available in Spanish. To order, go to
http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/BPM.html
Showalter,Gail Cawley. _Time for art: Art Projects and Lessons for Students with Visual Impairments_. (American Printing House for the Blind, 2002)
http://www.aph.org/products/timeforart.html
I only made one big resolution for 2011, and it's that this year I will add more art to my life.
The seed of this idea was planted almost a year ago, back in January of 2010, when I helped to organize a tactile tour of the Arisia art show. This annual art show lends itself extremely well to the tactile experience of art, as it includes a wide range of art forms and materials, from jewelry to pottery to fabric to ironmongery, and in 2010 even included a steampunk computer (this last was not available for touching but we all agreed that it deserved a prize for best auditory art).
For me, it was one of the most exciting convention events I had ever participated in. A large part of my enjoyment came from getting to share in the enthusiasm of other visually impaired participants and from having the chance to talk to artists who were obviously very passionate about exploring not just the visual but the tactile aspects of their art.
What took me by surprise, however, was the sense of remembering something which I had so utterly forgotten: my love of art.
For me it was a
madeleine moment
http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/proust.html
an intensely-felt but involuntary sense-memory wich made my hands itch to beholding pencil and drawing paper. More than that, however, I missed the sensation of being in "the zone," that sort of half-dream state during which one is completely immersed in giving form to something which, until that moment, has existed soly within one's imagination. That sensation, in particular, was an experience which I longed to rediscover.
After the art show, I realized how much I had missed having art in my life, and I resolved to do something about that lack.
The next few months, however, brought a series of eye surgeries, and it seemed to take most of the rest of the year for me to recover my energy and sense of ambition for trying anything new.
As I found myself thinking about it more and more, however, I became increasingly aware that what I wanted to do was not merely to find ways in which I could express my creativity. What I also wished to do was explore my thoughts and feelings about Art with a capital 'A,' to compare what art meant to me when I was a sighted art student and what it means to me as a blind adult. I wished to explore why I felt that regaining art in my life had begun to seem so important to me, and I wished to find out how many of the concepts and experiences which I had learned as a sighted art student could be translated into what I experienced as a blind adult.
Okay, so many might say that that already gives me plenty to chew on.
But in considering the intersection of art and blindness, I realized that it could be used to explore some larger questions which help define our ideas regarding art, such as what art is, how it should be accessed and appreciated, and by whom:
The very desire to create art as a blind person immediately brings up a lot of tangled questions and complicated issues, in large part because we live in such a visual culture which has come to automatically identify art as something which is, by nature, visual. The mere ability to observe an object in detail and make sense of it as a whole--one of the most basic but also most difficult skills required of an artist, and also of a scientist, come to that--is often considered to be beyond the abilities of a blind person. Indeed, the possibility is often regarded as being somewhat ridiculous, a cultural attitude which is given form in the poem "The Blind Men and the Elephant" by John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887)
http://hinduism.about.com/od/hinduismforkids/a/blindmen.htm .
However, as the Wikipedia entry on "Blind Men and an Elephant"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
points out, the purpose of the original Indian story upon which this poem is based is to illuminate how we all tend to go around with blinders on, restricting ourselves by becoming attached to our own narrow perspective, a habit which not only interferes with our ability to see another person's point of view but which also inhibits our ability to see the big picture. I'm often reminded of this story when someone tells me that "blind people can't... do art/do science/do math." These people often remind me of Henry Higgins pacing about exclaiming "Impossible!", never considering for a moment that it is his narrow view of other people--not their real abilities--which is limiting his own possibilities.
In thinking about art and blindness, one soon discovers how narrowly Western culture has come to define art. While reading the introductory art text _Living with Art, Eighth Edition_, by Mark Jetlein (McGraw-Hill, 2007), I was struck by how often art is referred to as "visual art," even when the specific work of art being discussed is a sculpture, a ceramic bowl, or some other object which seems to be as much tactile as visual. This defining of art as visual is further complicated by the way in which most art is viewed, namely, either from a distance, behind a rope or under glass, in a museum, or within the medium of a textbook or coffeetable book of photographs. Art becomes something which is distanced from us onmultiple levels: physical distance, economic distance, the distance enacted by the camera lens, and the aesthetic distance that art is something which exists outside of our everyday experience.
A number of these points have been taken up by various art movements which attempted to change the way art is removed from everyday existence., and studying these movements can help to break down some of the unnecessary barriers which prevent us from experiencing art as purely visual. Two of my personal favorite art movements are the
Arts and Crafts movement
http://char.txa.cornell.edu/art/decart/artcraft/artcraft.htm
and art nouveau
http://www.nga.gov/education/tchan_1.shtm
both of which attempted to restore art to the realm of everyday experience by embodying artistic ideals into objects such as furniture, tables and chairs, jewelry and textiles. Yet the idea that evreyday objects could be both useful and beautiful had existed outside the boundaries of formal ideas of Western art for a long time, as is evidenced by objects such as the furniture of the Shakers, African masks and textiles, Islamic rugs, and Chinese tea bowls.
Lastly, the pairing of art and blindness brings up what can still be perceived as a quite controversial question: who is expected to understand and create art? This question always reminds me of a great television moment when the late Dennis Hopper was a guest on the Dennis Miller show in the mid-1990s, and Dennis Miller was complaining about how he didn't get modern art, and Dennis Hopper went off on a detailed discussion of art. It turns out that Hopper was a very knowledgeable art collector and artist himself, but for some reason, few people ever thought of him in this light.
Art seems to remain one of those touchstones that demonstrates how often we really do judge people by superficial appearance, and many individuals and groups are still dismissed because it is assumed that they don't possess the intelligence, the imagination, and/or the desire to appreciate something beautiful or emotionally moving. The writer Jose Saramago wrote in his novel _Blindness_ that blind people were incapable of appreciating beauty, of being creative, or of possessing a sense of aesthetics, and no one countered or criticized these statements in reviewing the book.
As human beings, most of us have brains which automatically attempt to make observations about the world around us, create patterns and stories to represent that world, and develop a sense of aesthetics which helps us to seek out experiences which have the potential to be the most meaningful. An aesthetic is, after all, one's sense of what is good and beautiful, what affects each of us emotionally and psychologically and even sometimes physically.
Let me underscore that last bit, because sighted individuals often seem to forget this: beneath all the linguistic and theoretical abstractions of art and aesthetics lies the fact that we are talking about reacting to what is, after all, the physical world and it's affect upon us.
Obviously, my original vague and simple itch to make accessible art has grown into a larger, more complex topic full of complicated questions about both art and blindness. Why not, I thought, dedicate an entire year to the subject? And why not write a book about the experience? After all, there must be other blind people who have the same questions I have and there aren't any books on the subject, at least none that I could find. There are at least two university professors who have written academic books on the subject of blind people and art: Simon Hayhoe, who will be a guest scholar at the Museum of Modern Art later this year, and John M. Kennedy, a Canadian professor who has written about the blind artist Esref Armagan (refer to the end of this essay for book titles and Web sites). There are a couple of books which focus on art projects for children and there is even a book on the subject of depictions of blindness in art, but I could find no books on the subject of art for blind adults.
Resources
accessibleimage: Accessible Image for the Visually impaired mailing list
http://www.freelists.org/archive/accessibleimage/
Note: This is the same list as
Art Beyond Sight Theory and Research
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/art_beyond_sight_theory_and_research_nfbnet.org
Esref Armagan
http://www.armagan.com/
Art Beyond Sight Web site
http://www.artbeyondsight.org
Axel, Elisabeth Salzhauer, and Levent, Nina Sobol. _Art beyond sight: A Resource Guide to Art, Creativity, and Visual
Impairment_. (American Foundation for the Blind, 2002)
Barasch, Moshe. _Blindness: A History of a Mental Image in Western Thought_. (Routledge, 2001)
Blindness and Arts .com
http://www.blindnessandarts.com/
Hayhoe, Simon. _Arts, Culture, and Blindness A Study of Blind Students in the Visual Arts_. (Teneo Press, 2008)
Hayhoe, Simon. _God, Money, and Politics: English Attitudes to Blindness and Touch, from the Enlightenment to Integration_. (Information Age Publishing, 2008)
Heller, Morton A., and Ballesteros, Soledad. _Touch and Blindness: Psychology and Neuroscience_. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005)
Kennedy, John M. _Drawing and the Blind: Pictures to Touch_. (Yale University Press, 1993).
Kennedy, John M. "Haptic pictures." (Scarborough College University of Toronto, 1980)
Article:
http://www.artbeyondsight.org/teach/how-blind-draw.shtml
and
http://www.artbeyondsight.org/handbook/text-research.shtml
Kent, Deborah, author, and Cunningham, Ann, illustrator. _Because Pictures Matter: A Guide to Using, Finding, and Creating Tactile Imagery for Blind Children_. (National Braille Press, 2008)
This book is available for free from NBP in large print format, and is also available in Spanish. To order, go to
http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/BPM.html
Showalter,Gail Cawley. _Time for art: Art Projects and Lessons for Students with Visual Impairments_. (American Printing House for the Blind, 2002)
http://www.aph.org/products/timeforart.html
no subject
There are two memoirs by blind artists which might prove useful:
Ordinary Daylight
Andrew Potok
Holt, Rinehart, & Winston 1980
Bantam Paperback 1981
Touching the Rock
John Hull
Pantheon Books 1990