The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch

Touch in the Museum

136 chapter six sensuous multiplicity is further enhanced by the fact that eight of A la Ronde’s windows are placed on the angles of the house, creating two-sided vistas rather than flat pictures of the exterior. In A la Ronde, therefore, we find craftswomen working at creating a total environment that engaged multiple senses.The Parminters did not just adorn a house with their handiwork, the house itself was their handiwork.They lived within their art.The importance of this total environment is suggested by the name of the house itself—A la Ronde,“in the round.” Ladies’work,such as that engaged in by Mary Delany and the Parminter cousins , can be seen as an artistic and sensory ghetto in which creative women were pressured by gender conventions to contain—and downgrade—their aesthetic and intellectual aspirations.Practitioners of feminine craftwork would find their work not only trivialized by men but also by women who saw in it a means of female subjugation (Hivet 2005).While many women undoubtedly felt disengaged or stifled by ladies’work,evidence indicates that many others found it stimulating and that they employed it as a means for developing and expressing their own creative interests.The endeavors of such women, even those of eminent craftswomen such as Mary Delany, would remain outside the established boundaries of art and for the most part unpreserved and undisplayed outside the home. Nonetheless, within a broader and more multisensory assessment of the history of aesthetics,traditional feminine craftwork occupies a key position,elaborating significant alternative practices and values to those of mainstream art. Touch in the Museum In the late seventeenth century English traveler Celia Fiennes recorded a visit she made to theAshmolean Museum of Oxford: There is a picture of a Gentleman that was a great benefactor to it being a cavalier, the frame of his picture is all wood carved very finely with all sorts of figures leaves birds beasts and flowers . . . there is a Cane which looks like a solid heavy thing but if you take it in your hands its as light as a feather, there is a dwarfe shoe and boote, there are several Loadstones and it is pretty to see how the steele clings or follows it,hold it on top att some distance the needles stands quite upright hold it on either side it moves towards it as it rises and falls. (Fiennes 1949: 33) From this run-on description (which mimics the experience of rushing from one exhibit to another) we learn that touch had a role in the early museum. Fiennes’s interactive approach to the Ashmolean was of a piece with her behavior in related tourist sites.While in Oxford she also visited the Physic Garden Classen_Text.indd 136 3/15/12 2:48 PM Tactile Arts 137 (which in some ways constituted the botanical counterpart to the Ashmolean) with its collection of rare, curious, and beautiful plants. Among the exhibits she interacted with there were a mimosa—“take but a leafe between finger and thumb and squeeze it and it immediately curles up together as if pained”—and a humble plant—“do but strike it, it falls flatt on the ground stalke and all.” Nor is she above sinking her teeth into certain of the exhibits—“the Wormwood sage [has] a narrow long leafe full of ribbs, in your mouth the flavour is strong of Wormwood to the taste” (22–27). Fiennes’s descriptions of her behavior at such sites offer no suggestion of the necessity of subduing one’s senses within collection settings.The overall impression is of a lively exploration of whatever a particular site has to offer—and the more interactive that happens to be the better.The museum, along with other exhibition sites, is treated as a kind of gymnasium for the senses. The acts of manual investigation taken for granted by Fiennes in the seventeenth century would scarcely be possible in most modern museums. In fact, it is now generally taken for granted that museums collections are not for touching (although certain groups and museums are challenging this rule [see Candlin 2010: chs. 5 and 6]). In the early museums of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,by contrast,touching within collection settings was commonplace,so commonplace as to customarily escape mention.Hence,in his account of his visits to English museums and collections, the German traveler Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach made note of one place where his sense of touch...