Instead, it seems that audiences have become so habituated to normative visual cultural paradigms that even when restrictions on touch are explicitly lifted, and guidance is provided on ways to touch, it is a struggle in a one-off event to persuade audiences to break the codes of ocularnormative civility.
Humans get so used to doing things one way or routine that it hinders us from branching out and doing things differently, more creatively.
to avoid bare hands transferring natural skin oils or dirt to the materials
It does make sense why viewers cannot also touch the artwork, but nonetheless, it does hinder the experience.
We approached the artwork as if it was a set of step-by-step instructions, beginning with the unfolded bills and then carefully following the procedure, folding, unfolding, comparing our version with the original as we made and corrected errors.
In my Renaissance Art class, we learned how art historians can use techniques like reflectography and ultraviolet fluorescence to uncover what the process of creating the artwork was like.
Not surprisingly, a great pleasure in this research was having the luxury of more or less unlimited time to spend with these works. As mentioned above, even the best museum touch tour has to keep to a schedule and there is seldom an opportunity to backtrack and re-handle a previous item.
Time is everything when observing art.
I talk about touch I fall back on sets of binary adjectives: hard/soft, smooth/rough, warm/cool, etc. I crave greater complexity and precision"
Maybe if we were allowed to touch artwork more frequently, we would learn how to better explain the touch.
I began to claim my unstable vision more explicitly as a central force in my artistic practice
Art is making something completely new out of things that are already there.
Why not employ blind docents to conduct tours where they touch the art and describe the experience to people who are not allowed to touch?
Recently, my professor told me that there are tours where a non-blind person will guide a blind person through a museum.
sometimes even ask me what it feels like to touch the art.
Essentially, this is why art exists: to explain something in another way. For example, for someone who can not physically see, a writer can create a mental picture for them.
touch tours are usually rushed.
We want -< Slow Looking >-!
facets and features that are not visible to the eyes alone
I think this relates to today's discussion about what should be considered fine art and what shouldn't be. Traditionally, most people would think of looking at a painting when asked to think about art. Nowadays, other forms of expression have become fine art -- like fashion. Fashion isn't only visual, but also tactile. Essentially, I think the art world is starting to encompass something for everyone sense.
the textural qualities of different finishes.
In fashion especially, touch/texture is very important.
I was diagnosed as "legally blind" when I was eleven, and though I retain a degree of residual vision, I am accustomed to exploring objects haptically and to scanning surfaces digitally for texture and temperature.
There are so many ways to appreciate art. Depending on the artwork, sometimes a viewer can experience all five senses -- maybe literally, or imaginatively like if a writer described sensory perception in detail.
forbidding touch
It's ironic how touch is such an important part of "aesthetic appreciation," yet most museums don't allow viewers to touch artwork.
Through this process, he and Taffe came to the realization that although the Park Board“was not ready for their message” about Xw way Xw way, it was of the upmost importance thatthe performance happen in Stanley Park in order to assert the rights of the Coast Salish peopleto continue to perform their songs and dances in their unceded territories.
Without taking the risk to step out and make a statement, change will never happen. Change usually isn't comfortable.
displaced
Displacement is a central theme in most indigenous history, unfortunately.
econciliation efforts
actions > words
It was the women who started to rescue the survivors and in the process of doingthat, paddling the survivors to the north shore, they created a song to keep the spiritslight in the canoe.
Part of their culture is female appreciation.
He described Thunderbird as a supernatural being that perches his feet ontop of two North Shore mountain peaks, known to the Squamish as The Sisters.
All of this exemplifies how art can be activism.
S7aplek agreed to the collaboration, emphasizing again the importanceof creating new songs and dances to address the unique demands of such a performance.
Not only is traditional Indigenous dance being revitalized, but it is also being modernized to create new dance.
Rights to songs and dances, which are primarily hereditary
This reminds me of an article I read for my anthropology class called “The Passamaquoddy Reclaim Their Culture Through Digital Repatriation” by Tammy E. Kim. Jesse Walter Fewkes gathered the Passamaquoddy tribe of northeastern United States to record their folk stories, songs, and chants; these were the first anthropological recordings. All thirty-one recordings remained in Harvard’s Peabody Museum, which the tribe did not have curatorial control or even access to until later when digital repatriation became a priority. Now, only some of the recordings are available to the public while the more private ones are only accessible to tribal members through online access.
The fundamental connection is that protocol governs both the right to per-form songs and dances and how performances occur. Among Northwest Coast First Nations peo-ple, rights to songs, dances, and associated masks, headdresses, robes, and ceremonial regalia, arevehemently guarded as they are not only integral to individual and collective identity but theyalso define ownership of territories (both land and waterways)
With so much having been taken away from Indigenous peoples by European colonizers, mostly intangible aspects or smaller objects are left to revitalize.
the heavy-handed assimilation efforts
Because Native American tribes were pressured to assimilate into European culture, a lot of the tribes' traditions and customs were lost, and with the extent of assimilation these tribes went through, it's very hard to recover these lost traditions and customs.
Regardless of thesepre-existing relationships, it takes a great deal of time to build the trust necessary for an in-depthinquiry into their practices.
A significant step in conducting ethnography is the anthropologist first establishing trust with the person/people they are studying. Without trust, it's unlikely the conversation will be very in-depth, and thus, the research will not be very in-depth either.
I define dancingsovereignty as self-determination carried out through the creation of performances (oratory,songs, and dances) that adhere to and expand upon protocol in ways that affirm hereditary privi-leges (ancestral histories and associated ownership of songs, dances, crests, masks, headdresses, etc.)
From my understanding, the purpose of dancing sovereignty is to revitalize disappearing Indigenous heritage.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work ofart, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is alreadythere. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all
It seems that the premise of her argument is to take a step back to enjoy the entire artwork rather than narrowing our perspective.
We must learn to seemore, to hear more, to feel more.
This is synonymous with the practice of slow looking.
The flight from interpretation seems particularly a feature of modernpainting. Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense,no content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation. PopArt works by the opposite means to the same result; using a content soblatant, so “what it is,” it, too, ends by being uninterpretable
Some art challenges interpretation by aiming to be "uninterpretable."
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusalto leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make usnervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpretingthat, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable,comformable.
Finding the "answer" to a work of art is comforting, in a sense. It alleviates overthinking, and it gives us something to rely on.
Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. Tointerpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up ashadow world of “meanings.”
Interpreting artwork is limiting, and it narrows our minds instead of embracing our possibility for creativity.
The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful;it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style ofinterpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” thetext, to find a sub-text which is the true one.
She argues that the old style of interpretation allows for more subjectivity and multiple meanings in a piece, while the new style is objective and aims to find the one "right" meaning.
Looking and looking back, black women involve ourselves in aprocess whereby we see our history as counter-memory, using it as away to know the present and invent the future.
Nowadays, change is finally happening.
White people in thefilm are unable to “see”that race informs their looking relations
When an issue is not directly affecting a certain group of people, that certain group of people will often fail to realize that there even is an issue.
The absence of definition andexplanation suggests they are assuming an essentialist stance whereinit is presumed that black women, as victims of race and genderoppression, have an inherently different field of vision. Many blackwomen do not “see differently” precisely because their perceptions ofreality are so profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways ofknowing.
Because of history, there's a theory that black females "see differently," as if they naturally became programmed to do through habit.
o threat of violation.Significantly, I began to write film criticism in response to the firstSpike Lee movie, S he’s Gotta H ave It, contesting Lee’s replication ofmainstream patriarchal cinematic practices that explicitly representswoman (in this instance black woman) as the object of a phallocentricgaze.
Nowadays, black female film critics are starting to voice their opinions on how black females are being portrayed within the media.
It is difficult to talk when you feel no one is listening, when youfeel as though a special jargon or narrative has been created that onlythe chosen can understand.
After living in perpetual silence through all of history, it's very difficult to attempt to break that silence and start a conversation of advocacy.
The concept “Woman” effaces the difference between women inspecific socio-historical contexts
Because of the connotation that whiteness and womanhood are conjunct, this devalues black females, almost suggesting as if they aren't "real women."
Looking at films with an oppositional gaze, black women wereable to critically assess the cinema’s construction of white womanhoodas object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with eitherthe victim or the perpetrator.
They were forced to adopt an oppositional gaze which further silenced the black female community.
As one black woman put, “I couldalways get pleasure from movies as long as I did not look too deep.”For black female spectators who have “looked too deep” the encounterwith the screen hurt. That some of us chose to stop looking was agesture of resistance, turning away was one way to protest, to rejectnegation.
Looking only at the surface level and not "too" deep is a form of denial. By conforming to this, the black women further instill in their minds that their portrayal in media is "okay." This creates a kind of generational trauma.
To experience pleasure, Miss Pauline sitting in the dark must imagineherself transformed, turned into the white woman portrayed on thescreen. After watching movies, feeling the pleasure, she says, “But itmade coming home hard.”
Again is the idea of the "mask" we all wear.
They resented the way these screen images could assaultblack womanhood, could name us bitches, nags. And in oppositionthey claimed Sapphire as their own, as the symbol of that angry partof themselves white folks and black men could not even begin tounderstand.
There became a stereotype around black women as them being "angry."
“What does it sayabout racial purity that the best blondes have all been brunettes(Harlow, Monroe, Bardot)? I think it says that we are not as white as wethink.”
This is very interesting to think about. Everyone essentially wears a mask. Does this "perfect female" society idealizes even exist, or is the real sell making the audience buy into the fascination that there is?
identification can only be made through recognition, and allrecognition is itself an implicit confirmation of the ideology of the statusquo.
Because of the status quo, minorities often do not receive recognition and therefore lack identification in society.
denies the “body” of theblack female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it aphallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at anddesired is “white.”
This is similar to how the main female protagonist in films is usually always white. The hero or the favorite character being while connotes the idea to younger black girls that they don't have a chance at being the hero or the favorite characters. It's quite debilitating.
The prolonged silence of black women as spectators and critics was a response
Black women were still not given any "right" to gaze.
interpreting his look as violation, as“rape” of white womanhood
There was also a gender difference in which a white man could quite literally catcall or even grope a woman, but if a black man looked at her, he would be considered to be in violation and as a threat to society.
To stare at the television, or mainstreammovies, to engage its images, was to engage its negation of blackrepresentation.
Although blacks so strongly wanted the human right to look, when given the opportunity, they just realized that by doing this, they were in a way supporting white supremacy. To look or not to look, there was truly no winning situation.
The “gaze” has been and is a site of resistance forcolonized black people globally.
With so little power and so little freedoms in the black community, an act even as small as gazing was still considered one of the most effective ways the blacks could resist --- since there were almost no other ways of resisting without truly risking one's life.
That all attempts to repress our/black peoples’ rightto gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, arebellious desire, an oppositional gaze.
This is similar to when you tell a child not to do something, it will only want to make them do that something even more. So, psychologically, this method is not an effective method to stop the slaves from gazing but rather an effective method at promoting the slaves to gaze just so they can be punished.
were such that the slaves weredenied their right to gaze.
It's interesting how a normal human function like gazing became political in the sense that it was viewed as a right, a right that the slaves didn't have.
The “gaze” hasalways been political in my life. Imagine the terror felt by the child whohas come to understand through repeated punishments that one’s gazecan be dangerous. The child who has learned so well to look the otherway when necessary. Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents,“Look at me when I talk to you.” Only, the child is afraid to look. Afraidto look, but fascinated by the gaze. There is power in looking.
This is contradictory. Although we are encouraged to view and analyze in some situations, we are discouraged in doing so for some others. As one grows older, we learn what is appropriate to do in each situation, but as a child, it's much more difficult for us to distinguish. But even as adults, who is to say when looking is appropriate and when it's not? There is a sort of subjectivity.