Ways of Sensing

Understanding the Senses In Society

David Howes, Constance Classen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317929475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Ways of Sensing is a stimulating exploration of the cultural, historical and political dimensions of the world of the senses. The book spans a wide range of settings and makes comparisons between different cultures and epochs, revealing the power and diversity of sensory expressions across time and space. The chapters reflect on topics such as the tactile appeal of medieval art, the healing power of Navajo sand paintings, the aesthetic blight of the modern hospital, the role of the senses in the courtroom, and the branding of sensations in the marketplace. Howes and Classen consider how political issues such as nationalism, gender equality and the treatment of minority groups are shaped by sensory practices and metaphors. They also reveal how the phenomenon of synaesthesia, or mingling of the senses, can be seen as not simply a neurological condition but a vital cultural mode of creating social and cosmic interconnections. Written by leading scholars in the field, Ways of Sensing provides readers with a valuable and engaging introduction to the life of the senses in society.

Part I Art and Medicine

1 Mixed messages Engaging the senses in art

DOI: 10.4324/9781315856032-1

The point that cannot be too strongly emphasized is that … any information of which the spectator [of art] has need must be information that affects what he sees when he looks at the picture because it is only through what can be seen when the picture is looked at that the picture carries meaning.

Richard Wollheim, ‘What the spectator sees’, in Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1991)

In the early afternoon the patient is led in by the Chanter and seated in the middle of the painting. As the Chanter sings the prayers and the chorus joins in, he rubs sand from each part of the figures of the gods [in the sand painting] on the corresponding parts of the patient's body.

Margaret Schevill Link, The Pollen Path: A Collection of Navajo Myths (1998)

Canny exhibition curators, whose job it is to keep track of the Zeitgeist and respond to the popular taste, realized years ago that ‘the senses’ was a theme that could entice people of all ages and educational levels into the museums.

Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (2005)

Viewing art

In the modern world, art is overwhelmingly visual. Whether it is considered an object of beauty, a work of genius, an historical artefact, a creative revelation, a valuable commodity, or a political statement, an artwork is assumed to be directed to the eyes. This is held to be true not only of flat paintings hanging on walls but also of three-dimensional sculptures, and, indeed, of all artefacts considered as aesthetic objects, whether Navajo sand paintings, Japanese tea bowls or Medieval tapestries. As soon as something is classified as art, its non-visual qualities are suppressed, and, as trained spectators, we know that the right thing to do is to stand back and look at it.

This single-sensed understanding of art, although it has deep roots in Western thought, only reached its full fruition in the modern period. Handmade and hands-on culture dominated in the pre-industrial world and art was part of that culture. The artist was a craftsman (or woman) and craftwork was appreciated by how it felt, as well as by how it looked. The intricately carved wood- and stonework of the Middle Ages speaks of this emphasis on tactile values. Paintings, as visually-oriented as they seem to us today, also partook of this hands-on culture. In fact, many paintings decorated objects that were meant to be handled, such as books and chests. The paintings themselves invited inquiring and desiring touches through their illusory representations of three-dimensional reality. Furthermore, in an era in which colours were attributed healing properties and in which brightly-dyed cloths were often expensive and rare, the rich colouring of paintings had a strong tactile appeal. People wanted hands-on contact with luxurious and powerful hues (Classen 2012: ch. 6). Touching religious images — which constituted a large part of premodern art — seemed to provide physical contact with the divine. This was an extension of the practice of touching saintly relics, which was believed to confer both good health and good fortune. The benefits to be gained by simply looking at a statue or a picture of a saint could not compare with the direct transfer of sacrality believed to be effected through a devout touch.

We find evidence of such tactile appreciation of art taking place not only in churches and private collections, but also in the early museums of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as the Ashmolean in Oxford and the British Museum in London. Some of this hands-on exploration was grounded in contemporary scientific notions of the importance of sensory investigation. According to the seventeenth-century empirical philosopher Robert Hooke, the range of qualities to be examined in an object included:

Sonorousness or Dulness. Smell or Taste … Gravity, or Levity. Coarseness, or Fineness. Fastness, or Looseness. Stiffness, or Pliableness. Roughness, or Brittleness. Claminess, or Slipperiness.

(cited in Arnold 2003: 76)

Hooke, indeed, explicitly stated that ‘ocular inspection’ must be accompanied by the ‘manual handling … of the very things themselves’ (cited in Arnold 2003: 76; see also Arnold 2006: 144; Candlin 2010: 67–68).

Empirically minded gallery goers took care to do just that. During his visits to European collections, the English diarist John Evelyn recorded a range of sensory interactions with artefacts. He shook a petrified egg to hear the yolk rattle and a crystal with water inside to see the water move. He lifted an antler to test its weight and he smelled scented wood from the Indies (Evelyn 1955: 471, 516 and passim). When applied to an artwork, such sensory investigations provided information not only about surface textures but also about the materials employed. (Investigating a piece of marble, one early curator of the Ashmolean, noted that ‘when rub'd or scraped [it] yielded a strong ungrateful smell’ [Arnold 2006: 56].) Clearly, just viewing museum objects would have been regarded as an insufficient means of acquiring information.

Some of the handling that took place in museums had aesthetic purposes, particularly in the case of sculpture. The sixteenth-century Florentine historian, Benedetto Varchi, stated that touch alone of the senses could appreciate the artistry of a sculpted work. In the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder argued that sculpture was the highest form of art precisely because it was perceptible to the sense of touch — a more aesthetic sense than sight, in his view, because of its intimacy and thoroughness (Herder 2002; Norton 1990: ch. 6, see further Nichols 2006; Johnson 2011). From this point of view, manacling the hands of modern museumgoers prevents them from experiencing art at its highest level. For the less sophisticated, a strong inducement to touching statues and paintings would have been their lifelike appearance. This ‘reality effect’ seemed to enable a museum visitor to pat an emperor, fondle a lion, or touch the sky. In the case of both artworks and artefacts there was also the pleasure of coming into contact with spatially or temporally distant peoples through the objects they had created and used.

It wasn't until the nineteenth century that the museum became the eyes-only space it is known for being today, and even then it required a long process of public education concerning correct museum comportment (Candlin 2010: ch. 3; Leahy 2011; see also Griffiths 2008: 162–72). From a practical perspective, this shift towards pure visuality was necessitated by a need to conserve collections. As museums became more open to the public in the nineteenth century and visitor numbers increased, the risk of damage or theft resulting from handling also increased. However, there were larger cultural forces and trends at work behind this transformation than mere concern for preservation.

Already in the sixteenth century there had been a backlash against touching art when Protestant reformers found kissing and touching religious images to be dangerously akin to idolatry. Such concerns regarding idolatry led to the destruction of thousands of religious images in Protestant Europe (the setting for the formulation of modern theories of art). The Reformation was also critical of sensuality in general, which affected attitudes towards touch as the most apparently sensuous of the senses. While, as we have seen, such attitudes did not prevent hands-on explorations from occurring in the museum, they would nonetheless have led many to feel self-conscious about the ways in which they interacted with art.

It was in the eighteenth century, however, that the privileging of a contemplative sight over an inquiring touch was fully elaborated as a philosophy of aesthetics. The concept of ‘aesthetics’ was coined by the philosopher Alexander von Baumgarten, who based the word on the Greek term for sense perception. For Baumgarten, aesthetics had to do with the study of the ‘plenitude and complexity of sensations’, which culminated in the perception of art (Gaiger 2002: 7; Gregor 1983: 364–65). When Immanuel Kant took up the concept, however, he drained it of its sensory plenitude and revised its significance to that of a ‘disinterested’ contemplation and judgement of beauty. It would be Kant's concept that dominated the development of modern theories of aesthetics (Kant 1911; Howes 2011: 167–69).

Although Kant's philosophy of aesthetics was metaphorically expressed in terms of ‘taste’, he made it clear that the sense most suited to the disinterested contemplation of art was sight. Both taste and smell were dismissed by Kant as senses that provide only sensations of pleasure or disgust and offer nothing to the contemplative mind. While hearing was praised by Kant for its objectivity, particularly when used to perceive the non-representational sounds of language, it was of little value in the perception of material works of art. Touch, in turn, was always part and parcel of any experience in which it participated and hence could never be disengaged in its perception of objects. The less we are aware of our bodies when we perceive, according to Kant, the freer we are to think and form aesthetic judgements about the thing being perceived. Only sight, the ‘noblest’ of the senses, seemed to have the detached ‘purity’ necessary for the task (see Schott 1988: ch. 8; Korsmeyer 2002).

If sight was to be the sensory channel for the proper perception of art, then it followed that art must direct itself to the eyes. One result of this way of thinking was to create a divide between the visual arts and handicrafts. The status of painting was enhanced through its association with the immaterial, ‘intellectual’ qualities of sight, while that of craftwork, associated with the ‘coarse’ materiality and functional values of touch, declined (Rée 1999: 353–63).

The Romantic movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries furthered the association of painting with sight by promoting the ideal of the artist as a visionary who gazed down on the world from the solitary heights of genius. The ‘down-to-earth’ craftsman, by contrast, seemed to require no such visionary genius, but only a skilful touch. Of course, it was understood that painting, like craft, involved manual dexterity, but the emphasis was on a discerning eye. (The twentieth-century art theorist Richard Wollheim would declare: A good artist ‘paints with … his eyes’ [1991: 101].)

Within the dedicated space of the nineteenth-century museum, the public was confronted with the notion of an art that existed only to be looked at and not touched. Furthermore, the museum made it clear that looking at art was a concentrated act that should not be united to any other activities, such as praying, listening to music, or dining, as would often have occurred when art was situated in churches or homes. This situation could not be made the subject of complaint, however, for it had become an accepted truism that the only meaningful perceptual act that can be undertaken in relation to art is seeing. Rather than wishing to do more with art, therefore, all one could wish for was to see more. At the same time, the perception of the museum as a ‘temple’ of art that promoted ‘pure’ visuality, made it seem the most suitable and highest destination for art. As a result, artists increasingly created works with this end in mind — to be viewed on a gallery wall.

No doubt photography and later film, with their exclusively visual presentations of the world, facilitated the acceptance of this single-sensed view of art. The separation of visual art from other cultural domains that occurred in the gallery was also consistent with a wider fracturing of social and sensory life in modernity, which led to music being listened to in concert halls, meals being consumed in restaurants, and physical activity being undertaken in gymnasiums or playing fields. All aspects of life in the modern world, it seemed, required compartmentalization.

Sensing art across cultures

The culturally-specific nature of the visual exclusivity of Western art becomes apparent when we look at the rich sensuality of many non-Western artefacts and aesthetic forms. (The term ‘art’ can only be used very broadly outside of the West as many non-Western cultures do not share the Western concept of art.) For the Desana people of the Colombian rainforest, for example, an important element of the aesthetics of basketry consists of the distinctive odours produced by the different vines, reeds, and leaves with which baskets are made.

Reeds and palm fronds often have a dry, sweetish odor whereas vines can have an acrid pungent smell and a bitter-tasting and irritating sap. Splints, leaves, fibers, and bark have odors that are said to be pleasantly sweet.

(Reichel-Dolmatoff 1985: 24)

Similarly, an important element of the Tanké Ge masks produced by the Dan of West Africa is the sound created by the jewellery and other accoutrements attached to the masks (Reed 2004). Japanese tea bowls, in turn, are valued not only for their visual appearance, but also for their rich tactile qualities:

To hold a tea bowl is to grasp a microcosm of the universe in one's palm. It is to experience through one's fingers the delicacy and soft tactility of its form, the textures of the clay and glaze, its volume and mass, the finish of its foot and the contours of its interior.

(Lewis and Lewis 2009: 191)

These sensory traits are important not simply because they are part of the physical experience of Desana baskets, African masks, or Japanese tea bowls, but because they are a subject of commentary and appreciation by the people who make and use them. And, just as particular designs or images can have religious and cultural associations, so may any other sensory dimension of an artefact. In the case of Desana baskets, ‘The odor and shape of a piece of vine link it to the image of a forest woman, a snake, an umbilical cord, or a trance state’ (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1985: 43).

The sensory dimensions of such artefacts do not only reside in the objects themselves, but in the ways and contexts in which they are used. Sensory elements are added to Desana baskets when they are used to carry fruit or drain the juice from grated manioc or serve cassava cakes. Tea bowls become fragrant and warm and ‘tasty’ when they are filled with hot tea. When Tanké Ge masks are worn in the performance of a dance they become part of the movement of the dancers and the music of the singers and drummers. The helmet mask made by the Pende people of the Congo is not only worn by dancers but also used as a platter for serving ceremonial meals during rites of initiation.

These are not just incidental background elements, like the colour of a wall on which a painting is hung, but a vital part of the social and aesthetic presence of these artefacts. They situate the artefacts within webs of practice and significance. In the case of the Pende, chiefs are expected to have an acute sense of smell, indicating their powers of discernment, and to exercise control over their speech and appetites. These values are conveyed by the prominent nose and closed mouth on the mask, and internalized by initiates when they ritually eat off the face of the mask (Reed 2004: 98–100; Silverman 2004: 247–48).

With certain artefacts, the process of creation is itself a vital part of their beauty and power. In the West, what happens during the process of creation is deemed to be largely irrelevant to our appreciation of a work of art. It may be interesting to learn that Leonardo kept the sitter for the Mona Lisa in a good humour while she was posing for her portrait by having musi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: ways and meanings
• PART I Art and Medicine
• PART II Politics and Law
• PART III Marketing and Psychology
• References
• Index