[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] Article: Blind at the Museum at Berkeley Art Museum

[Shelley L. Rhodes]

Artdaily.com
Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Blind at the Museum at Berkeley Art Museum

BERKELEY, CA.- The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific 
Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presents Blind at the Museum, an exhibition on view 
in the museum's Theater Gallery through July 24, 2005. Guest curated by 
Katherine Sherwood, Professor of Art Practice at U.C. Berkeley, and Beth 
Dungan, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Medicine, the 
Humanities, and Law, Blind at the Museum investigates the nature of 
blindness and the "visual arts" in works by numerous artists who probe the 
limits of optical experience.

An art museum would seem to be no place for the blind, as co-curators 
Sherwood and Dungan remind us. "Yet art objects address many sensory 
mechanisms - touch, hearing, scent, taste - and thus offer an opportunity to 
reconsider the process of 'viewing' or responding to art. Visual artists are 
often thinking about the very nature of vision: What does it mean to 'see'? 
... And what are the limits, or the liabilities, of the gaze?"

Blind at the Museum explores visual experience in works by Sophie Calle, a 
French artist known for her series on blindness; sculptor Robert Morris; 
multimedia artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Joseph Grigely; photographers 
John Dugdale and Alice Wingwall, and others. The artists in the exhibition 
address the nature of visual experience from a variety of perspectives: some 
emphasize sound, touch and multisensory experience; others probe the 
unreliability of vision, or rethink the process of viewing within a museum; 
yet others explore metaphors and stereotypes of blindness.

Works in the exhibition examine vision as a wide range of optical 
phenomena - such as floaters, peripheral vision, and distortion - that occur 
along a visual continuum. Photographer John Dugdale, for example, depicts 
optical aids, from eyeglasses to camera lenses that form part of his 
photographic process. Alice Wingwall's photographs depict her lived 
experience of blindness, using panoramic cameras and other technologies to 
give a visual 'warp' to her images. With a background in sculpture and 
architecture as well as in photography, Wingwall invites the viewer to 
experience her renegotiation of beloved architectural sites in a series of 
photographs of her guide dog Joseph.

In this exhibition and at the related Conference (see below), the curators 
propose a rethinking of questions of 'access,' disability, and the museum. 
Prompted by recent disability rights legislation, museums around the world 
have attempted to make their collections more accessible, but this tends to 
relegate blind patrons to "special" programming and collections. Blind at 
the Museum addresses issues of intellectual access to visual art, such as: 
What is the relation between seeing and knowing, between words and images? 
How is blindness represented in visual art? How do artists with impaired 
sight represent visual experience? How does the idea of the "blind 
photographer" or "blind painter" question and change the museum as an 
environment for aesthetic judgment and experience? What role can technology 
play, as both tool and artistic medium, in the accessible museum of the 
future?

"Often, concerns about access address the physical environment and design - 
large font size, ramps - rather than diversifying perceptual and 
intellectual access to artwork," write Sherwood and Dungan. "If technologies 
of vision (such as lenses) change our experience, if peripheral vision, 
blind spots, or floaters influence our notions of looking, how might 
alternative perspectives and technologies invite us to adopt new behaviors 
and approaches? As part of a larger movement of institutional critique, 
Blind at the Museum prompts us to reconsider the practice of looking within 
the museum, to imagine new ways of seeing and knowing for all viewers."


http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=12588




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