Touch in Museums

Policy and Practice in Object Handling

Helen Chatterjee, Helen Chatterjee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000323733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Études des musées

The value of touch and object handling in museums is little understood, despite the overwhelming weight of anecdotal evidence which confirms the benefits of physical interaction with objects. Touch in Museums presents a ground-breaking overview of object handling from both historical and scientific perspectives. The book aims to establish a framework for understanding the role of object handling for learning, enjoyment, and health. The broad range of essays included explores the many different contexts for object handling, not only within the museum, but extending beyond it to hospitals, schools and the wider community. The combination of theoretical analysis, policy assessment and detailed case material make Touch in Museums invaluable reading for students and professionals of museology or cultural heritage.

Part I What Do We Mean by Touch?

1 Museums, Modernity and the Class Politics of Touching Objects

Fiona Candlin

There is some considerable evidence that visitors to the first public museums touched the collections, David Howes and Constance Classen have suggested that this had stopped by the early to mid-nineteenth century, a change that they attribute to modern notions of observation, objective science, surveillance techniques, the visual display of capitalism and the increasing equation of touch with 'primitive cultures'. This is an excellent analysis but what it forgets is the degree to which class inflects touch. A closer analysis reveals that the upper classes always had licence to touch and their touch was deemed rational and non-damaging. On the few occasions when the lower classes could touch museum collections it was considered unruly and dirty. Moreover, in many cases their admittance to museums was actively restricted. It was only when museums became properly public and open to all classes rather than just to an elite, that touch was prohibited. The question remains: is a similar dynamic still in place today? Is an elite touch still considered rational? Is the touch of the masses still filthy?

Introduction

Throughout the twentieth century numerous writers paid close attention to concepts of vision and the forms of knowledge that vision enables. In doing so they have tended to specify vision as the dominant sensory mode of modernity and to relegate the other senses, particularly touch, to a less sophisticated past. For instance, within art history Erwin Panofsky constructed a trajectory from classical art, which 'recognized only what was tangible', to the visual and conceptual refinement of Renaissance painting (Panofsky 1991. p. 41), His near-contemporary Clement Greenberg argued that the arts had conflated different mediums and their correlative senses until modernist artists finally perfected painting and sculpture which had purely visual effects (Greenberg 1985, p. 43). Despite their marked differences both authors considered this visually oriented, modern approach to be both aesthetically and intellectually superior to the earlier multisensory forms of practice. A similar pattern can also be discerned in other disciplines; the anthropologist Walter Ong suggested that inventions such as the printing press, microscope and telescope were keys to the transition from oral to visual cultures (Ong 1967), as did Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan and Fiore 1967). Even writers such as Martin Jay, who are highly critical of homogenous and hegemonic notions of vision, have still accepted that sight is 'the master sense of the modern era' and have paid little attention to the ways in which the other senses may also have had a role in the construction of modern knowledge, art or subjectivity (Jay 1988, p. 3).

Museum studies have proved no exception to this ocularcentnc tendency, indeed they might be one of the main exponents of it. Perhaps most significantly for the discipline, Michel Foucault demonstrated the shift from pre-modern and multisensory to modern and visual knowledge in relation to cataloguing and collecting. He described how specimens from archives, gardens, herbariums and natural history collections had come increasingly to be laid out alongside each other forming tables that could literally be read off by a viewer; in short, collections were one of the places where modern visual systems of knowledge were generated (Foucault 1970). More recently Donald Preziosi has developed Foucault's thesis arguing that the modern museum 'was the most extraordinary optical instrument of all; the veritable summa of opticality, of visuality' (Preziosi 1996, p. 106). As such, the museum was not only productive of knowledge about objects but functioned as 'an instrument for the manufacture of ... societies, ethnicities, races, classes, genders, and individuals; of history, progress, and moralities' (ibid.). For Preziosi it is the visual structure and dynamics of the museum that has made it such a powerful contributor to the formation of modern subjectivity at both an individual and collective level.

This exclusive association between vision, knowledge and modern subjectivity potentially presents problems for the collective project represented in this book - namely, to conceptualize the use of object handling within museum education provision and beyond. After all, how can touch tours or object handling offer any kind of educative experience if touch is not considered to make any contribution to modern learning or subjectivity? Rather than suggesting that museum educators abandon all forms of tactile provision, this chapter reconsiders the accepted model of modern, visually oriented learning. In particular, I question whether there was a wholesale transition from tactile, pre-modem sensibility to visual modern knowledge, and whether public museums, as paradigmatically modern institutions, have always structured learning in relation to visual experience.

Touching and Rationality in the Eighteenth-century Museum

One of the few accounts to provide an alternative to ocularcentnc notions of the museum is 'The Museum as Sensescape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artefacts' by Constance Classen and David Howes. In this fascinating article, Classen and Howes draw on eighteenth-century journals and diaries to describe how museum visitors of the period regularly handled the objects on display. They note that in 1702, on a visit to the Ashmolean Museum, Celia Fiennes contrasted the light weight of a cane to its solid appearance and picked up loadstones, moving them around to explore the effects of magnetism. Similarly, they quote Sophie de la Roche who, at the other end of the eighteenth century, handled the collections at the British Museum:

With what sensations one handles a Carthaginian helmet excavated near Capua, household utensils from Hercaulaneum ... There are mirrors too, belonging to Roman matrons ... with one of these mirrors in my hand I looked amongst the urns ... Nor could I restrain my desire to touch the ashes of an urn on which a female figure was being mourned. I felt it gently, with great feeling. (Classen and Howes 2006, p. 202)

The authors argue that at this point in time touch was considered to provide an entirely legitimate way of learning about and enjoying the museum collections but by the mid-nineteenth century, the acceptance of tactile experience had disappeared. Here they cite the renowned art writer Anna Jameson, who in 1841 expressed her disapprobation of touching collections in the strongest terms:

We can all remember the public days at the Grosvenor Gallery and Bndgewater House, we can remember the loiterers and loungers ... people who instead of moving among the wonders and beauties ... with reverence and gratitude, strutted about as if they had a right to be there; talking; flirting; touching the ornaments - and even the pictures, (ibid.)

Classen and Howes argue that this sensory shift was due to the development of industrial capitalism which emphasized the appearance of commodities, surveillance (particularly within the context of social institutions), and to the growing use of visualizing techniques in science.

In maintaining that touch did contribute to museum visitors knowledge, imaginative experience and subjectivity Classen and Howes implicitly challenge Foucault and Preziosi's view that touch had no intellectual role in museums during the eighteenth century. At the same time they still concur with the dominant supposition that touch was eventually excluded from museums. Effectively, then, Classen and Howes also posit a transition from multisensory to visual learning within museums; they move the date of modernity forwards rather than specifically challenging the accepted link between vision and modernity. That transition and the link between vision and modernity can, however, be questioned if we reconsider Classen and Howes's sources from the standpoint of who touched rather than when they touched.

Celia Fiennes was an aristocrat who investigated the Ashmolean collection in 1702 on one of her long journeys that eventually stretched as far afield as Newcastle and Penzance. Discussing these travels, Fiennes's biographer Christopher Morris comments on the privileges afforded to the aristocracy of this period recounting that, along the way, Fiennes went hare-coursing without permission, an activity which prompts Morris to comment that 'only someone of the most assured social position could have risked this defiance of the new and savage game laws' (Morris 1995, p. 23). Morris notes that aristocratic immunity from censure or punishment was so extensive at this time that 'when Celia's kinsman the fat Earl of Lincoln made his servants beat a "prentice boy to death for gazing at him in the street" the coroner's jury found that the boy "long before was sick of consumption and died of that disease" '(ibid). In this context it is highly unlikely that the museum assistants would have objected to Celia handling the loadstone and canes.

Similarly, not only was Sophie de la Roche wealthy enough to take the Grand Tour but she was extremely well connected; her stay in London included meeting the royal family and socializing with Warren Hastings, the Governor General of India and his family. De la Roche's social standing was important because it meant that she could easily gain access to the British Museum collection. This was much more difficult than we might imagine today.

In the late eighteenth century the British Museum was only open to the public on Mondays:, Wednesdays and Fridays, with Tuesdays and Thursdays reserved for artists and private visits. It was closed at the weekends and on public holidays, thereby prohibiting visits by anyone in regular employment. In addition, acquiring a ticket was a labyrinthine and exclusive process: potential visitors had to apply in writing, giving details of their status and residence, to be approved and granted entry by the Principal Librarian who was the most senior member of staff. The applicant then had to return to collect their ticket, which could rarely be used on the day of collection. Moreover, as only ten tickets were allowed for each hour of opening, an immense backlog of applicants soon formed and the museum was forced to advertise announcing 'Persons applying are requested to send weekly to the porter to know how near they are upon the List' (Wilson 2002, p. 38). Entrance to the museum therefore required a minimum of three visits: application, collection and attendance, and preferably the use of a servant to regularly check the list. Anyone without independent means would scarcely have found the time to even acquire a ticket.

As an extremely well-connected visitor of means, Sophie de la Roche visited the British Museum on a private day and was given a personal tour by one of the curators. She therefore had plenty of time to view and handle the objects at her leisure. Her experiences form a sharp contrast with those recorded by the Birmingham merchant William Hutton who visited the year previously in 1785. Hutton had eagerly anticipated his visit to the museum but in order to gain access he had to pay a ticket tout the exorbitant charge of two shillings and, this being a public day, he was rushed around at great pace. Instead of being able to 'regale the senses, for two hours, upon striking objects', he compared himself to Tantalus who in Greek myth was condemned to reach for food and water that was perpetually snatched from his grasp (Hutton 1785: 191-2).

Fiennes, de la Roche and other elite visitors of the period all took their licence to handle museum collections for granted. As Classen and Howes note touch was understood as a legitimate and even essential means of engaging with art and artefacts during the eighteenth century. However, not everyone had the chance to do so; restricted opening hours, public and private days as well as the private nature of most collections meant that the working classes and, to some extent, even the middle classes did not gain access anywhere near as easily as the elite.

Equally importantly, touching objects in collections was not considered to be a universally valid activity. On the occasions that the working classes did have the opportunity to handle the museum collections, it was understood rather differently to when the elite did so. Sophie de la Roche happily picked up the weighty antique shields at the Tower of London but utterly disapproved of the female warder "handling the things, turning them round and putting them back again', writing that 'it seems impossible that a woman, furthermore so ungainly in appearance, should be put in charge of pure gold and all that a crown implies' (de la Roche 1933, p. 129). Similar attitudes are also in evidence earlier in the eighteenth century. Like Celia Fiennes, the German traveller and eminent diarist Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach also visited the Ashmolean Museum and the Royal Society Collection where he handled the objects, comparing weights, textures and the effects of magnetism. Predictably this did not stop him making ironic comments about the liberalism of the doormen and the surprisingly good condition of the collections, given that '...