transfers from Blackboard : 6

Discussion notes 07.03.07
Sue Clarke

Heather brought in an article by Fiona Candlin, from the ‘Journal of Visual Culture’, which discussed three recent exhibitions concerning touch. Candlin queried the thinking behind these exhibitions – she felt the connection hadn’t been made between what touch tells you, and what the art is about. She saw a need for further work along these lines, and that recent exhibitions hadn’t gone far enough in exploring the issues. The artist’s intention needed to be considered. The exampe of translating a line drawing into raised lines so they could be felt rather than seen, is going off at a different tangent to what the artists intended.

Guiding questions from this morning’s session:
- How succesful can touch be in interpreting a work of art?
- To what extent can an art (or design) exhibition be experienced as much by touch as by sight?

We discussed events, rather than exhibitions, where there’d be a bank of items, a selection of which would be taken out each day by volunteers, who would supervise visitors handling the work, and explaining the artists’ thinking. etc, etc.


Afternoon discussion
I felt that we needed to select some items that we were interested in showing, and then check them against our various guiding questions to see what fitted, in the hope that this would focus our minds. Lynda and I went through our list of works and tried to categorise them. We were both keen not to restrict this to touch issues alone because of the number of previous exhibitions on this theme. At this point we worked with one main guiding question:
- How might we curate an exhibition that allows for a fuller experience than sight alone provides?
with two sub-questions (which might correspond to dividing the exhibition into two separate spaces)
(a) How do we heighten visitors awareness of how much we rely on sight?
(b) How can we encourage visitors to use their other senses?

So we divided the works into (a) examples of vision disorientating you, and (b) artworks that encouraged use of other senses.

Because a number of the works were quite large, and were already held by the Tate, ours could be a relatively small, inexpensive exhibition, and we could have handouts which would refer visitors to other works within galleries at the Tate. So our exhibition would be the root of the idea, but it would also serve to encourage visitors to look anew at exhibits they could see elsewhere in the gallery. Two of our very large pieces might be appropriate for the Turbine hall.

Presentation ideas
Snappy pitch as if to Tate trustees (check this) to propose our exhibition within their space;
followed by explanation of how we arrived at this proposal.

- Reluctant to use Blackboard as it’s been slowing us up throughout the module.
- Possibility of setting up a weblog so that we would have images ready organised for the presentation

Jobs
Lynda to compile images on weblog
Heather to think of a title
Sue to write up ideas (above)
All three of us to work on presentation ideas
14/03/07 need to check the technical facilities in MLT and compatability with our weblog