Dream Museum: Blindness, Language and Visual Art

For several years I have been working on a book about Helen Keller, the American deaf-blind writer and activist. One night I had a dream in which I went to an exhibition at a New York gallery of photographs of Keller by Margaret Bourke White. Somehow I knew a good deal about the exhibition; perhaps I had read an article or announcement somewhere. I was particularly interested in a group of pictures where Keller was posed on a high ledge of the Chrysler building, with the skyline of 1930’s Manhattan behind and below her.

I should point out that as far as I know, Margaret Bourke White never photographed Helen Keller. In fact she was not known as a portrait photographer. She had photographed the Chrysler building however. And she was a pioneer and an innovator so it seemed only natural —at least according to the logic of my dream—that she would have wanted to photograph another pioneer and innovator.

In my waking life at the time I was thinking a lot about Helen Keller and photography. I had begun to speculate that Keller may have been the most photographed woman of the twentieth century, in part because she lived to the age of eighty-eight, and spent most of her life in the public eye. She was photographed with all the celebrities of her day: movie stars, politicians, intellectuals and artists—and was extremely photogenic. Although she had been totally blind since the age of nineteen months and had no first-hand experience of photography, she seemed to understand from an early age that she could use her image to communicate with a public that was at once fascinated and horrified by her disability. She was adept at striking natural poses for the camera, and knew how to aim her eyes, prosthetic as they were. Directly at the lens.

But back to my dream. In the dream I presented myself at the gallery right at its opening hour. There were two women at the front counter, who told me politely but firmly, that the labels for the photographs were not available in Braille or large print or audio recording, and there was as yet no catalogue that I could buy to read, or have read to me at home. I said that I could return later with a companion who could read me the labels and describe the images, but still they declined. They expected a large crowd and the time I would take before each photo would impede the flow of patrons through the gallery. I insisted that I am quite nimble, and have a good sense of when someone near me wants me to move out of the way. And as everyone who reads to me knows, I am a very fast listener. I routinely set my computer’s synthesized voice at the fastest possible speed. I promised, trying hard not to plead, that my presence in the gallery would in no way affect the enjoyment of other visitors. But nothing I could say changed their minds. All the while they remained calm, polite but mostly a little perplexed at my request, while I became more and more frantic, trying with a stream of reasonable arguments flowing from my lips to keep them from speaking the words I knew were on their mind: “What do you expect? This is no place for a blind person.”

In my real life as a museum goer I have never been denied access in this way. But anyone who enters a museum or art gallery carrying a white cane or using a service dog is familiar with the stir our presence causes. Did we take a wrong turn and end up there by accident? What can the visual arts possibly mean to someone who cannot see? Nevertheless, museums around the world have begun to address this very question. In the last decade and more a good many other conferences and symposia have been held, as well as articles and books published, internships and training programs established, organizations and consumer groups founded. For the most part however, the access that is available tends to occur in special by-appointment-only tours or else to segregate blind visitors to special collections, frequently consisting of replicas of art works. As valuable as these programs are, they do not answer the needs of visually impaired patrons who already know something about art and art history, or who may be seeking access to an exhibition that has not been previously designated as of interest to the blind.

This then is what we are here to explore, today and tomorrow: how to move access beyond simple art appreciation to accommodate greater numbers of blind people. We need to start from the premise that the blind museum visitor is not necessarily a child, and is not in need of charity or special favors. The most reductive and destructive of all the stereotypes about blindness is that our experience and consciousness are so far from whatever is considered normal that we might as well have come from another planet. In fact, blind museum visitors have much in common with sighted visitors. For one thing, most of us used to be sighted, some until quite recently. And even those of us who were born blind grew up and attended school with sighted people. We read books written by and about sighted people and visual matters. We watch movies and TV shows featuring sighted characters. We speak languages replete with visual idioms and metaphors and can use these terms with as much skill as sighted speakers. In other words, the average blind person knows more about what it means to be sighted than the average sighted person knows about what it means to be blind.

I am using the word blind to encompass the widest possible range of visual impairments, including people born without any light or form perception to those who retain some residual vision, to those who had average sight throughout most of their life but have recently begun to lose some degree of acuity. Many will dispute this use of the word, and will want to make distinctions between the early and late blind, the partially sighted and totally sightless. Many will consider the very topic of this conference—blind access to visual art—to be insensitive, even offensive to people who are totally, congenitally blind. It may be useful to a museum docent leading a tour for blind people to know something about what those visitors can or once could see, or to know, for instance,that people who become blind late in life are less likely to read Braille than those who have been blind since childhood. Once we make all the fine distinctions about degrees of impairments and age of onset, however, there is too much of a risk that some subset of the group gets short changed. Aids and assistance designed for people who have been totally sightless from birth can also be useful to people who retain some residual vision. As we have learned in the organized blind movement and the disability rights movement generally, there is a danger in creating a hierarchy of the deserving and less deserving blind.

And speaking of objections, others will object that the topic of this conference is trivial when we take into account that the vast majority of blind Americans, including those with residual sight, are undereducated and unemployed. Only about forty-five percent of students with severe visual impairments or blindness graduate high school compared to eighty percent of their sighted peers. Unemployment among working age blind Americans still hovers around seventy percent. I am not arguing that access to the visual arts will improve these disturbing statistics, but I believe that social change needs to happen on many fronts at once. If we as a society can enlarge our understanding of what blind people can do we can perhaps raise the low expectations among the people who educate and rehabilitate the blind.

Rather than considering degrees of impairment, we should allow for the widest possible range of visual interest or knowledge. I will not presume that people who are totally blind will have no interest in the visual arts. In fact, many of the people I know who are most articulate about visual matters have impaired sight. They do not take vision for granted, and are accustomed to interpreting incomplete or imperfect visual experience, or to draw from visual memories. The conscious effort they employ makes it easier for them to communicate their experiences or memories to others. By the same token, I will not assume that all people with a visual acuity of 20/20 will want to spend their leisure time in art museums.

There is then, an element of self-selection in all this. I do not propose that we drag unwilling blind people into art museums with some abstract notion that it will be good for them, any more than I would propose rounding up hoards of unwilling sighted people. Determining why sighted people might avoid art museums is a problem for someone else. When blind people, with or without residual vision or visual memory, show up at an art museum, it is likely that they have some expectations about what they will find there, and are willing to employ a good deal of effort to get something out of the experience. Our goal is to find ways to make that experience easier and more rewarding.

To use myself as an example, I lost most of my sight at the age of eleven. I now have an acuity that is about five to ten percent of what’s considered normal. This does not mean that there is a massive blank spot before my eyes, blotting out ninety percent of the visual field. I can perceive light, color and motion with some degree of accuracy. But forms are amorphous, mutable and without distinct details. I sometimes say that I see Impressionistically, suggesting that my vision is something like an Impressionist painting, where fine detail is subordinated to a more general sense of light, movement and color. But also when I look at an object, I may be under the impression that it is a teacup or a turtle, but to know for sure, I must employ some other means to determine what it is. My visual perception is often entertaining and sometimes aesthetically pleasing, but it is notoriously unreliable, so in my ordinary life I use a number of nonvisual tools and techniques to find objects, to move through space, to read, to write and perform other routine tasks. At the same time however, I know a good deal about vision and the visual arts. Both my parents were visual artists. From my earliest childhood I was familiar with the materials and techniques, of oil painting and various forms of sculpture. I spent a lot of time in artists’ studios and in galleries and museums and heard the talk of artists, critics and art historians.

Many will argue however, that what I know about art I know by hearsay—literally what I have heard said, or heard read about it. I have no first hand experience of art, except of course for those works that I have been allowed to touch. This points to a fundamental problem to our enterprise. At least since the Enlightenment, philosophers have defined human knowledge as coming to us through the senses. And since vision is understood to be overwhelmingly the dominant sense in humans, knowledge therefore must be primarily made up of visual experience. For this reason, seeing is synonymous with knowing as in such idioms as “I see what you mean,” while blindness is synonymous with ignorance and obliviousness as in such idioms as: blind rage, blind lust, blind drunk, blind alley, blind chance, blind fool, and so forth. I have observed, however, albeit imperfectly since I cannot see what I’m talking about, that many sighted people claim knowledge of things they have not actually seen. Do you need to go to the desert to know that it’s dry?

I will not deny that there are aspects of the visual arts that I simply do not “get.” I can understand linear perspective intellectually and know that artist use precise formulae to draw lines at the correct angles to create the illusion of three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional surface, but I cannot say that I have ever experienced the illusion. Similarly, I know that some artists are so expert at these effects that they can make tromp l’oeil--an illusion so powerful that viewers believe they are seeing rough texture on a smooth surface, or protrusions and recessions where there are none. My question is this: are these viewers truly duped, or is there a willing suspension of disbelief? Have I so internalized the notion of the preeminence of sight, that I cannot believe that the eye could ever truly be tricked?

Hearsay or not, I carry the knowledge I have about art with me when I enter a museum. And while I habitually disregard my flawed visual perceptions in ordinary situations, in a museum I make the most of them. To do this, I must stand as close to the canvases as the guards can tolerate, often at an odd angle, and move my gaze over the surface of the painting to catch fragmentary glimpses of its parts. I usually have a companion with me to read me the labels and correct or enhance whatever I may be able to see. This may involve a good deal of pointing and gesturing which can farther alarm the guards. Certain media, pen and ink drawing, and black and white photography for instance, are almost impossible for me to see, so I tend to skip those works. Since, as I say, I see impressionistically, I often feel most comfortable viewing art where the distortions I experience as part of my impairment are a part of the image on the canvas. I naturally gravitate toward abstraction where there is no need to identify represented objects, and I instead can take pleasure in color, texture and energy. Still, I can never predict in advance what I may or may not see in an unfamiliar situation. Lighting, the weather, my own levels of concentration or fatigue can be factors.

Recently, I have begun to avail myself of touch tours, a relatively new innovation at some museums where blind visitors are allowed to touch certain works of sculpture. This can be immensely satisfying, especially when one is allowed to touch the actual works themselves rather than plaster casts. It is so gratifying, in fact, I wish the option was available to all visitors, even those with sight, since there are aspects of the materials and techniques of sculpture which are not necessarily apparent to the naked eye. This is the sort of comment that will send art conservators screaming from the room, because even the most durable materials that can withstand the tactile examination of a few blind connoisseurs would quickly deteriorate under the touch of the throngs of visitors who would like to get their hands on them. I have also made use of tactile diagrams of two dimensional works. These are also valuable, but often seem based on wishful thinking; the idea that touch in the blind is an absolute equivalent for sight in the seeing. A tactile drawing can help explain concepts such as composition or perspective, but cannot do full justice to other features or other types of images.

I have also used audio tours even though, until recently, these have been produced primarily for sighted auditors. The commentary usually includes enough description to give me at least a sketchy notion of the work before me. Audio description for blind visitors is increasingly on offer at art museums around the world. Originally conceived for live theater, film and television, audio description holds out the greatest hope that blind art lovers can access the widest range of art works, independently and without damage to museum collections. New playback equipment allows producers to add tracks designed for blind users to those produced for the sighted, permitting auditors to choose the type and amount of information they desire. But will audio description allow me and others like me to simulate the ideal experience of the sighted viewer. What is that ideal?

In the ideal, the art viewer stands before the work of art, to contemplate it alone and in silence. With the advent of linear perspective, the viewer even obtained an optimum viewing position--an exact location before the painting where the illusion of depth painters strove to achieve would have its maximum effect. The viewer might be an artist, there seeking inspiration or to pick up technical tips. Occasionally, the viewer may have a companion to murmur a few words of appreciation or criticism. This companion might even be the artist, giving a private showing to a potential buyer or patron, or hoping to show up a rival. But in any case, conversation is kept at a minimum. The viewer has an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of world art, and so can instantly recognize influences and innovations that have shaped the creation of the work. Between the viewer and the art work there is a silent and unmediated rapport, a wordless communion of perfect mutual understanding. The viewer’s experience is at once emotional and intellectual, ephemeral and tenacious, ineffable and sublime.

Like most idealized representations, this one has at best a minimal corollary in the real world. For one thing, real life museums today are too crowded and noisy to allow these viewing practices. The proliferation of wall texts and audio tours reflect the expectation that even sighted viewers need guidance and information. Still, there is an expectation that a sighted viewer placed before a work of art can experience the perfect wordless communion of the ideal. And because that communion is perfectly wordless unmediated by another’s interpretation, people resist the idea that it can be communicated to anyone who cannot see. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the assumption seems to be that those thousand words –or even a million words—will not do full justice to the picture. This belief persists despite the fact that ekphrasis, or poetry that describes visual art, has been around at least since Homer. Consider Keats on the Grecian urn, or Wallace Stevens on Picasso. It can be argued of course, that these poems are meditations launched by the works of art rather than true descriptions, and that the poets assumed readers would be able to see the works in question, even while the poet, as in the case of Homer, might be blind.

So the question becomes: is it possible to translate the viewer’s experience and make it comprehensible to people who have not had it themselves? Is it possible to describe a work of art with complete objectivity? Let us pretend that there is a painting here that I can see and you cannot. Since this is a fantasy, feel free to imagine that this is any painting, by any artist, from any public or private collection in the world. I insist on imagining a painting rather than a slide, first because I do not want to enter the controversy about digital versus film. More importantly, I believe that looking at a painting is different in every way from looking at a photograph of a painting. For one thing there is the issue of the size, relative to the viewer. Standing before a very large canvas one has the sense of it looming overhead, which can produce a feeling of awe. A smaller canvas can feel more intimate. In addition to the issue of size, there’s the matter of paint, the very materiality of paint, its texture and dimensionality that is impossible to capture in even the highest resolution photograph. And I suspect that for me to tell you about this painting I will eventually, inevitably have to talk about the paint: how it appears to have been applied, how its thickness or thinness contributes or detracts from what it is used to depict, how well or poorly its surface has been preserved since the time it was first applied. To better illustrate my point, I would even invite you up here to touch the paint (remember this is a fantasy) because I believe this would give you a better feel for anything I have to say about the artists “hand” –the brush work, or handling of the paint.

So we have our painting here. What would be the best way for me to describe it to you? Should I do it systematically, from left to right and top to bottom as I would read a text? Or should I begin with what’s central to the painting, recognizing that this might not be at the precise center of the canvas, and work outward to the less significant periphery? Is the periphery always less significant, or is it necessary to provide context and therefore meaning to the whole? Note that there is already an act of interpretation here, a distinction that makes a hierarchy, sorting out what’s most valuable or meaningful in opposition to what’s merely secondary.

If, for instance, there are any eyes in the painting, perhaps I should start there. We know that artists have many techniques to create images of eyes that look convincingly like real eyes, looking back from the painted surface, perhaps even appearing to meet the viewer’s gaze, and follow the viewer’s movements around the room. Are the eyes meant to be a focal point, the central point of interest? Is the viewer drawn in through those eyes like a strand of thread drawn through the eye of a needle? Once drawn in, drawn through, where are we?

And what exactly am I looking at here? Is it a window, through which I view the artist, a hand suspended in the act of creation, a brush poised somewhere around the eyes, in an attempt to capture an ephemeral vision of the world? To describe this painting then, should I describe the painter I glimpse through the window of the art work? And what do I really know of this artist? Is he or she, if not a figment of my imagination, then at least a compilation of information I have derived from reading biographies, reviews and criticism, and other material secondary to the painting before me? The painting then becomes not a window, but a screen onto which I project not only what I may know about this artist, but also what I know about other artists of the same time period, and the generations of artists that came before. Is the painting then a mirror in which I see my own perceptions, intuitions, knowledge and beliefs about this artist and art in general?

Perhaps we need to abandon the ideal of the objective, unmediated description, and embrace instead the very subjectivity of the whole enterprise. Whatever I find to say about this painting will differ, perhaps in every respect, from what another viewer might say. Multiple, even contradictory perspectives can add richness to my description. Are there any poems about this painting? And what about the artist? Should I quote what the artist has said or written about this painting, and his or her artistic practices and philosophy? But having assembled all these words will I have brought you any closer to the painting we are contemplating?

Let us return to my dream for a moment, and consider a question that many sighted people find intriguing—what are blind dreams like? For me, my dream as I experienced it, as in memory, is not essentially visual. There were, however some visual elements in the dream. There was a certain quality of light that I associate with New York, and perhaps particularly New York art galleries of a certain kind. The light suggested a space a floor or two above street level, perhaps on Madison Avenue, on the east side of the street: blueish winter sunlight filtered through gauzy shades over clean plate glass. There was also the pleasing quality of softly polished surfaces: the pale wood floors and the muted gray counter of some sort of faux stone where the two women sat. The two women were the least visible elements in the dream scene, not so much distinct forms, as sleek auras and a whiff of what I knew to be pricey fragrance. On top of the general atmosphere of a posh art gallery there was my excitement. I did not expect to be able to see the photographs, since as I say, black and white photography is inaccessible to me. And in my dreams I never see more than I can see in waking life. Rather what I wanted to find there was information around those images. I wanted some narrative about the meeting of these two formidable women. What did they say to each other? What did Bourke-White hope to achieve posing Keller out on that ledge? What did Keller make of the idea? Did she go out there willingly, or did she need a lot of cajoling. Was there a brisk wind blowing? Did they use a safety net?

If any of my words evoke a mental image—of Helen Keller, of Margaret Bourke White’s photography, of the Chrysler Building, of New York art galleries – let me ask you this: what is that Image made of? What is its substance? Where does it come from? Does it come to you unbidden? Can you control and manipulate it? Could you communicate it to someone else through words or other media? Could you draw me a picture of my dream?

If we can answer these questions, pinpoint the location of the mental image in the case of those of us who have one, I think we are getting closer to our goal. The task of translating a work of visual art into language may be a daunting one, but not so daunting that we should throw up our hands in despair. We need to remember that the people receiving these words also have imagination, knowledge, memory and curiosity, whether or not they have perfect vision.

I would like to turn briefly to the second aspect of our topic. While we are concerned with the issue of providing access to museum visitors who are blind, we also want to consider the challenges faced by blind artists who wish to gain access to mainstream museums and galleries. Throughout the history of art, the artist’s vision has always been assumed to be perfect. In fact artistic vision is always represented as somehow superior to that of the average sighted person. Of course we know that many artists have had varying degrees of visual impairments. Artists’ eyes, like those of all human beings, are prey to injuries, illness, and aging. Some experts have speculated about possible vision impairments from features of an artist’s work, in effect diagnosing vision problems from the art work left behind when the literal eyes are no longer available to examine. In more recent history, there are well documented cases of artists who developed significant impairments in their later lives—Degas and Monet to name two familiar examples. We accept the fact that an established artist may lose vision late in life, and this will affect the way he or she works or thinks about the work. But after a lifetime of work, are those artists dependent on their eyes alone, or do they make use of images in their mind’s eyes—images made up of observation, memory, intellect and desire? And what happens when the artist relies on assistants for visual tasks? Is this different from the assistance artists have always employed for mechanical tasks of their work—painting in backgrounds, making casts of sculptures, or prints of photographs?

Do blind artists who announce their disability limit their audience? Is there a risk that their work will be seen as a version of a freak show display, with only charitable or scientific interest? Do they automatically fall victim to the prejudice that a person with low vision cannot produce high art? Would it be better to let the art speak for itself without the messy details of the artist’s biography? Or should these artists invite the scrutiny, and allow the work to engage in dialogue with work by sighted artists? And what about those artists? In what ways does the work of a blind artist or a blind viewer alter other artists' goals and practices? Should we rule out the possibility of artists born blind, or assume that they would choose sculpture rather than painting or photography or some other medium or combination of media yet to be named? And how does any of this art affect the ways it should be displayed and viewed?

I will leave these questions to the panel of artists who follow, and conclude by adding fantasy to my dream about the Helen Keller photographs. Can I imagine a happy ending to my dream, an ideal museum that would be accessible to me and others like me? In this dream the women at the reception desk would greet me without surprise. It would seem only natural to them that I should want to visit this exhibit; they would tell me that they could offer me large print, Braille, or audio descriptions of the photos. There would be an easy to operate portable audio device with a menu of tracks to choose from. In addition to descriptions of each of the photos, there might be a reading of Keller’s own account of the photo shoot, a recorded interview with Bourke-White recalling the event, and some commentary by photography critics. There might also be some sort of tactile diagram of at least some of the photos highlighting aspects unique to Bourke-White’s work. There might even be a scale model of the Chrysler building. These would be as interesting to sighted visitors as to the blind. The gallery would be crowded, because in my dream, such an exhibit would attract a large audience. But there would be space enough for me and others to approach the photographs without raising an alarm. There might be music in the gallery, to evoke the time period or the personalities of the two women, though I cannot think what this should be. Better perhaps would be a sound piece involving a recording from the top of the Chrysler building, with the sound of the whistling wind at ear level, and the hum of traffic way down on the street below.

Among the other visitors there may well be a young artist. She may well be blind. But she has studied art history and visited museums with services designed to enhance that study. She may have encountered art by blind people and derived inspiration from it. She may also, as young artists are prone to do, reject its premises and practices in favor of innovations, new media and techniques of her own devising. I sense her presence near me, leaning in to peer at a print, holding her breath to keep from fogging up the glass. She leans back. Perhaps she smiles, perhaps she frowns. Perhaps her free hand opens and closes in an unmistakable gesture of making something. In her mind, an idea takes shape. The idea may have visual elements, or sound, or words, or palpable forms. After another minute, she turns and leaves the gallery, returning the audio device she’s been using to the front desk. She does not speak, wary of disturbing the idea in her head with words. Then she takes the idea home with her where she will begin to work.