Tactile Art

i

Downtown St. Paul is home to one of the most extensive skyway systems in the world. The sprawling maze connects buildings via enclosed bridges above the streets. The skyway solves one of our challenges as DeafBlind people traveling through a city: crossing busy intersections. My family lived there for as long as we could afford to because it was such a joy to be a mouse racing inside and out, up and down, plying my long single whisker. Following my nose, I found all the best places to eat and, following other instincts, I infiltrated all the cleanest bathrooms hidden away from the masses.

One day my partner, Adrean, an ASL Deaf artist, came home to tell me about something she’d spotted. It was a sculpture of a giant open Braille book. She had never gone that way before, but I’d passed by it several times. It stood in a building’s courtyard, some paces from the street. You had to see it to see it.

A few days later friends from out of town were visiting. We took them out to our beloved Ruam Mit Thai, and after our feast we gave them a tour of the city. I remembered Adrean’s sighting and asked her to show us the public work.

It turned out to be a huge sheet of metal propped up, its bottom edge near the ground and its top edge a foot taller than I. Each Braille dot was the size of a golf ball. This made it impossible to read the text, which was supposed to be a passage from a Walt Whitman poem. Although the sheet mimicked the open face of a book, with two facing pages, each line ran across both pages.

There was a plaque with the title, artist name, perhaps a statement. Did the statement pay tribute to Braille? This information was not available in regular Braille.

As I struggled to read what the golf balls had to say, a security guard trundled out of the building. He spoke no sign language but we got the message. One of the nice secret restrooms was close by, and we hurried there to wash our hands.

ii

Museums are difficult to get to. They don’t want me to touch anything. They require that I make an appointment—by phone, no less. So my information about mainstream aesthetics has largely come from ducks.

They rule over gift shops, Goodwills, and garage sales. Squeaking rubber versions have long been infants’ first encounter with artifice. Minnesota’s state bird is the loon, and many homes and stores here feature wooden, ceramic, metal, stone, plush, and glass loons. Waterfowl are a favorite of woodcarvers. There is even a DeafBlind Canadian who whittles, paints, and sells ducklings. What they all have in common is a flat bottom. A goodly portion of their natural anatomy is taboo. They are meant to appear floating on the still waters of a tabletop, a windowsill, or a bookshelf.

The hitch is that were I to handle a live duck paddling across a pond, I would be able to feel it as a whole, for water is not a tactile barrier as it is a visual one.

Small wonder, then, that one of my definitions of beauty is a certain stuffed wood duck in the nature center at Richfield, Minnesota. A piece of ordinary taxidermy, its feathers are ridiculously soft. “Wood duck,” I was inspired to write in a slateku, a form I invented using the Braille slate, “I feel for you/You never had hands to stroke/Your own wings.” Even more bewildering are its round velvet bottom and granular webbed feet, which bespeak a master creator.

iii

“Here, you can touch my face.”

“Thank you, no.”

“No, it’s fine. Really.”

“Nah. I just—”

“I want you to.”

Well, I want to tell them, what you are offering for my inspection is just a skin-covered skull.

“A head,” jokes the eighteenth-century British comedian George Alexander Stephens, “is a mere bulbous excrescence, growing out from between the shoulders like a wen; it is supposed to be a mere expletive, just to wear a hat on, to fill up the hollow of a wig, to take snuff with, or have your hair dressed upon.”

A friend once showed me a prized possession of his, an egg-shaped sculpture. I could feel its eyebrows, nose, and mouth, but they conveyed nothing. For my sighted friend, it had an exquisite expression of serenity. “Peace,” it’s called.

At least it was bald. The bust of Mark Twain in a museum I visited in New York had him wearing a futuristic helmet, with fantastical whorling grooves. A terrible tumor grows under his nose. Ulysses S. Grant was similarly helmeted but had an iceberg stuck up his jaw.

Helmets notwithstanding, sculptors were onto something with nudity and gesture until the Victorians began to manufacture a statue for every philanthropist and politician. Of these “leaden dolls,” G.K. Chesterton grouses, “Each of them is cased in a cylindrical frock-coat, and each carries either a scroll or a dubious-looking garment over the arm that might be either a bathing-towel or a light great-coat.”

iv

You are the best one
in the museum. You don’t
try to be real. You
are wise not to attempt
hair. You have no face.
Your clothes make you. You
were inspired by a youth
famous for pretending to be
a statue. He would die
five years later. But you
are still here. We touch
you. You do not flinch.
—Cubist Statue  by John Lee Clark, after Jacques Lipchitz’s  Matador, 1914–1915

v

We will call her Allie. Shortly after her death I learned from friends that she was a fake. It was one reason she had relocated some years earlier, to leave a local DeafBlind community that had caught on to her.

I had known—or, rather, not quite known—Allie for many years as a fellow member on multiple listservs in our community. I’d met her in the flesh only once. The posthumous revelations were not that shocking; we’ve always had DeafBlind wannabes or compulsive sympathizers in our midst. For better or for worse, they are part of our lives. Whatever it is that any of them gets out of it, many do give of themselves in return.

In Allie’s particular case, she also gave me the most tactile work of art I own. It is a marvelous mosaic of seashells, judiciously arranged so to have it rise and fall by turns from roaring densities to quieter rumblings. Though just two inches at its tallest point, it is a work of such soaring lyricism that I begin to understand what is meant by the sublime.

A long-distance DeafBlind friend of Allie’s had lovingly put it together for her. It was the first time the artist had made something with a fellow DeafBlind person in mind. Allie explained to me that, unfortunately, the artist’s other work is visual, primarily concerned with color, with only feeble tactile features. So it was a DeafBlind fake who had challenged a real DeafBlind person to make an intentionally tactile piece for the first time.

I cannot stop running my hands over it. When Allie knew she was going to die, she sent it with a note saying, “This piece cried out to be enjoyed by Mr. Tactile so it goes to you. Love, Allie.”

vi

When I attended Deaf school growing up, I learned about a sickness that infects many hearing people. It keeps them awake at night unless they do something to bring music into our supposedly silent world. Dance troupes, bands, orchestras, and ex-hippie sound engineers invaded our campus every year.

I would later learn that sighted people were often afflicted in the same way. Only their desperate mission is to make visual art accessible to blind people. One victim of this malady is John Olson, a photojournalist and war photographer who made his mark dispatching images from the wars in Vietnam. After an illustrious career spanning five decades, he found himself wondering ...

what it was like for those who didn’t have access to art, to photography. I wondered what it was like for the blind community, who couldn’t access visual information. It was at that moment, on a Labor Day weekend of 2008, that I set out to develop a means by which blind people could see art, could see photographs, and could acquire visual information.

For the past decade, he has been busy with his company 3DPhotoWorks, creating raised representations of art, photography, maps, and graphics. As he told a convention of the National Federation of the Blind in July 2018, “it has been my goal from the very beginning to create a worldwide network of museums, science centers, libraries, and institutions willing to provide the world’s blind population with visual information using this tactile medium.”

No one seems to have asked whether we want access to visual information. Why would we want a representation of a representation of something? Why not a tactile representation of that something, bypassing visual representation altogether? Why force visual art to be what it is not? We accept that most visual art is meant to be visual alone. Sighted people and institutions are the ones having trouble reconciling themselves with this fact.

vii

What shall we call it—tactile grammar, semiotics of touch, Protactile aesthetics, tactiletics? True tactile art must have language. It should express and extract meaning. Texture, contour, temperature, density, give, recoil, adsorption, and many other elements are units in this language.

Most things made by sighted people that we touch fail to make sense. Heft is one common grammatical unit they get wrong.

There are many toy tanks, for example, that replicate the shape and many of the moving parts of a real tank. Visually, it looks exactly like the real thing, and is thus able to exude some of its menace.

In the tactile realm the toy tank is a joke, because it is made of flimsy plastic parts and is light, being hollow and without ballast. If I wished to install an exhibit about the terrors of totalitarianism, tanks rolling over protestors like so much cardboard, I would need tanks with real heft. The protestors can be made of, well, cardboard, and can even be taller than the tanks. But the power is with the heft, and the tanks have it.

Or if I wanted to send a more hopeful message, I could reverse things. The tanks are made of cardboard, while the protestors possess the gravity of rock. The tanks could be much bigger, but the power, again, is with the heft. Visually, the power is with size; tactilely, size is much less important. That’s grammar.

viii

One winter, not long ago, your parents invite you and your boys to join them at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum to visit its greenhouse. It is lovely to inhale the heavy air, which makes your lungs giddy. Smiling, you reach out—

Cacti.

So much for unfettered intercourse with nature.

As you tiptoe deeper into the garden, you find where the proper plants are and begin to examine them. There, among the pencil trees and ferns, you meet the most beautiful flowering plant.

It has a fan of smooth arching blades, and from the fist that holds this fan sprouts stems stretching out at odd angles. A matte-like human skin covers these stems, and it reminds you of a warm handshake.

Excited, you look for someone to read the label, because nothing is in Braille here. The first sighted person you find is your mother. You tug her to meet your new friend and you ask her its name. She looks and says there is no label. “Why,” she then inquires of you, “do you want to know the name of such an ugly plant?”

Taken aback, your mind slips inside its library and pulls out Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. It is the story of a tall, loose-limbed gentleman who had been assembled in a laboratory. When he emerged into the world, however, he could find no one willing to be his friend—except for a blind man. They were engaged in a productive conversation when the blind man’s sighted family returned from their outing. Seeing the tall gentleman, they screamed.

Poor fellow, so unjustly treated! Well, you would be this plant’s friend. You decide that its name is “Frankenstein’s Handshake.”

ix

We have DeafBlind artists, but do we have DeafBlind art?

The potters carefully glaze for visual effect. Legos are easy to build with, but are hideous to the touch. Many attend painting and drawing classes at centers for the blind. There are dancers who spin into empty air. Actors hope they are aimed in the right direction. Hundreds have beaded or woven or quilted tapestries that are tactilely blank. Artists ask sighted assistants “What color is this?” and “Does it look all right?”

Sir Joshua Reynolds, the eighteenth-century Deaf British portraitist, provides a crude but helpful formula. “The regular progress of cultivated life,” he wrote, “is from necessaries to accommodations, from accommodations to ornaments.” We don’t have all our necessaries in place as tactile 
people. As yet we own very little of the material world and are forced to make do with sighted things.

But it isn’t true that we haven’t made much art. We have an incredibly rich literature. We probably have more writers per capita than any other community in the world. It is because there is one space within which we have gone from necessity all the way to art: our traditional virtual space. Our correspondence networks and access to books began in the middle of the nineteenth century and have served as our home until we could begin to make claims on the corporeal world.

The goal of the Protactile movement is for us to get, do, and make everything in our own way. After we peeled our language away from visual sign language and remade it completely, reciprocally, and proprioceptively tactile, Protactile storytelling, Protactile poetry, and Protactile theater quickly emerged. It makes sense that those forms would come first, as they do not require that we buy anything or lug equipment around or hammer something together. Just ourselves and each other. Protactile theater, though, is starting 
to play with costumes and props. Does this mean Protactile art is next?

x

I once dreamed about installing an exhibition of assemblage art, using familiar objects that my friends would recognize immediately. The only glue I use is gravity. They can lift anything, handle it in their hands.

Some of the pieces were:

A 1970s cassette player with the slot popped open. Inserted within is a sticky toy wind-up brain that pulsates. “The Brain Implant.”

A Midwestern-sized cereal bowl filled with hearing-aid earmolds. Silver spoon. “Breakfast of Champions.”

A coffin made of old and used white folding canes. At rest inside, surrounded by a few lilies, is a wrecked Franklin Mint replica of a car. “Accident.”

In another dream the exhibit is called “Buried Treasures.” Each box is filled with a hand-sinkable substance—sawdust, popcorn, glass beads, and, my favorite, quinoa. Buried inside these boxes are surprise objects that juxtapose with the materials we dig through to get at them.

In another dream, a museum has lovely railings that take us from one exhibit to another, following the poetry of co-navigation. But another dream shoves it aside because the museum is now a gloriously-walled labyrinth. It leads into a burrowing tunnel. This, in turn, cedes to a dream of water.

In another dream, I meet Genghis Khan. Most DeafBlind people have Usher syndrome, whose genetic history can be traced back to the Mongolian juggernaut. I realize from this wonderful statue in the dream that wood is so suggestive of living flesh; that most statues should be naked and then covered with clothing or representations thereof, for we feel right through clothes in real life; and that foam is a fine way to represent hair. Beneath his armor and linens I could feel Genghis Khan’s love handles and the loins whence we came.

In another dream I am in a vast library of tactile objects. Millions of objects are housed there. They have an acquisitions department and a replica-
making department. Things too small to feel with my hands are magnified. Things too large to grasp are reduced to the right scale for manual inspection. Many of the library’s holdings are real objects. Most importantly, the great bulk of the collection is mailable. I can order anything, and a few days later, a box arrives.

xi

Since most of what may be understood as tactile art doesn’t exist yet, there are no master strokes. But this doesn’t mean there haven’t been lucky strokes. My friend Robert Sirvage, a DeafBlind architect and design consultant, stumbled upon two such examples while traveling in Norway in the fall of 2017.

Norway had then recently legislated the separation of church and state. The formerly official national Lutheran Church had seven Deaf churches—called Døvekirken—that provided many services to the Deaf and DeafBlind communities. Now that these churches would no longer administer these programs, the seven Døvekirken realized that they would need to reinvent themselves. Sirvage was hired to help them reimagine their role and their spaces.

Upon entering the Bergen Døvekirke, Sirvage’s cane rapped against the base of the first of two extraordinary works. A priest at the Døvekirke in Stavanger named Georg Abelsnes had created them with DeafBlind parishioners in mind. He gave the pieces to the new Døvekirke in Bergen when it opened its doors on December 10, 1989.

The first piece, God Bless You, rests on a board about three feet from the floor. The main portion is a sectional cut of a tree trunk, a section where it starts to spread its roots. The grains are pleasantly rough, and the middle grain is studded with gemstones.

Sirvage found himself moving his hands downward and outward, his thumbs bumping across or wiggling past the gemstones. He turned to ask his host how they said “bless” in Norwegian Sign Language. It was as he thought—the piece indeed invites hands to follow its grains and in doing so say the word “bless.”

By returning to the top, this time beginning properly with closed fists, he discovered that the piece has another feature. Cleverly placed along its downward planes is a stick. When Sirvage moved his hands downward, he felt the stick gently opening up his hands. He marveled and later told his friends that the artwork is “all about motion and tempo, not static at all.”

As wonderfully interactive as this piece is, nothing could have prepared Sirvage for what he encountered next. He was later given to understand that the second piece is called something like “God Loves and Protects You.” Standing about four feet tall, it is made of rounded, polished, and unevenly-
shaped wood. It has subtle suggestions of a head, neck, and torso. Just below and in front of the torso-trunk of the figure, the wood becomes hollow, and within this is another piece of wood with a different texture. It includes a handle carved to slide into one’s grasp.

His host suggested that he walk around to hug the figure from behind. When he rested his head on the crook of the figure’s neck, he told me,

My heart jumped. Holy—Remembering that I was in a house of worship stopped me from completing the thought. It felt like I was transgressing big here, but in a good way. It felt like I had found a whole new way of knowing God.

What he had done was to temporarily assume the place of God, leaning over to hug the figure, which now represented Sirvage himself, his hand the Hand of God holding the handle, perhaps the hilt of a sheathed sword.

Shaken, Sirvage stepped back to ask his host more about this “performative artwork.” He learned that the DeafBlind parishioners and many others would, upon entering, commune with both pieces and go through the whole motions of simultaneously performing and receiving the messages.

“After my host became distracted talking with someone else,” Sirvage went on to share,

I turned back to interact with it again. This time I let myself relax and hug the figure. To make the message clearer, I allowed my heart and physical being to radiate with tenderness and love. After a while, I stood up and caressed my body. Somehow I knew that I would retrieve myself if I said something, and I was instantly retrieved when I whispered, “Thank you.”