We know that touch is one of the senses which is frequently forced into a paper bag during the museum visit. And this is in spite of the fact it is a highly sensitive one through which much can be understood. John Lewis’ fabric department is full of people feeling, rubbing, stroking. And these actions are not do to with purchases: they are to do with feeding the under-nourished sense of touch. (Smell would be included given a chance, but fabrics have a tendency to smell the same until they have started a life in service.)

What is it that people are gaining by touching? Is it understanding, is it just a pleasurable, sensual experience? Well, if you ever want to know what something really looks like , how it is made, what it is made from, and, most importantly, what it means, ask someone who cannot see. A V&A workshop with people who cannot see was a revelation. Is this just ‘developed sensitivities’? Possibly, but more likely what our hands- or our cheeks – can tell us if we are allowed to use them. And most people want to use them.

At a museum like the V&A, where we have been working on the British Galleries, visitors want to touch everything in sight

textiles – particularly velvet,

marbles – particularly bottoms and heels,

furniture – particularly highly polished timber, or marquetry, preferably with brass bits.

ceramics – preferably the most fragile of porcelain

the only things exempted are paintings, photographs and drawings – ie 2D things

The 15 British Galleries at the V&A trace the development of British Art and design from 1500 to 1900 and, for the first time, because of the new environmental conditions , paintings, drawings and prints are displayed alongside costume, textiles, furniture, glass, ceramics and fine art, together with five complete period rooms. The galleries display just under 3000 objects and woven throughout are 95 interactives – or interpretative devices – ranging from touch screen computers and videos, to bits of balustrade.

The desire to have objects on open display – away from glass, out of the case, making them more vulnerable in a way, and yet infinitely more accessible – perhaps because they are more vulnerable – means that they have to be positioned more than an arms length away, and since people have elastic arms, this can be quite a distance, and the joy of open display is lost though mist.

However, in the British Galleries we have put many objects on open display, not all of them that far away, and we have folded directly into the displays 30-40 objects – or fragments of objects – which people can touch. Shards of ceramic, bits of fabric, samples of mattress, chunks of timber. The visitor is encouraged to explore transparency, weight, texture, carved detail and so on. Many are primarily designed for the visually handicapped, but not all and few people pass them without a stroke. I think they succeed because they channel the frustrations of not touching the formally displayed objects into a focussed feel of the fragment: a poor substitute but something, and something which is related to the subject in hand.

(One of the difficulties we had of course was how to encourage the touching of the objects displayed for touching, but discourage the touching of everything else.)

We have also put out things that can be touched by the body: Try on a ruff, Try on a gauntlet, (like a Saville Row Suit) Try on a hooped petticoat, Learn to tie a cravat. Very simple, very sensual.

These activities are hugely popular and are often recorded as highlights of the visit. These are activities greedy for, and disruptive of, space and are consequently placed in ‘Discovery Areas’ – designated as family areas. But the children rarely go in there, because they are filled with adults. These are Woody Allen activities: everything you wanted to know…

So part of this desire to touch is a desire for knowledge: but I am suggesting that there is another, slightly stronger motivation.

We have all been to the cathedral or the shrine and witnessed the need to touch. The toe, the elbow, the breast, any part will do, but it tends to become established. It develops a shine, a sheen, with grimey edges. It becomes worn and smooth and eventually the details begin to fade. But the faith that goes with the gesture – which may be fleeting – is the key: the belief that this touch will communicate something; something will happen – a stigmata? Or a deeper understanding; or a sense of being part of something bigger than oneself?

Or possibly something we hadn’t thought of:- listen to Brian Sewell writing in the Evening Standard about the exhibition of Terracottas that opened last week at the V&A:

‘It is as though the material is freed from all decorous restraint, for his work in terracotta is so emotional, direct, immediate, feverish and passionate that we can hear the Verdi tenor and soprano in the background, experience the swift translation into form of the idea in his mind’s eye, feel the probing and prodding of the fingers and the thumb, their pinch and press, respond with the creep of flesh as the toothed claw scrapes texture into mass and the spatula slashes form and direction into the soft limbs.’

and so on and so on.

Here is another idea then: that what you touch is what HE has touched and that, by sharing this touch, something will move from HIM,/ HER through the object, to you.

Or is it simpler still: is the visitor who expresses a desire to get close to an object, but touching it, smelling it, (licking it? ) just a fool who hopes for a miracle, or a person seeking a way of seeing which is truly three -dimensional – hence the lack of interest in the 2D material. And does the touching help? Does it change perception?

My view is that most forms of interactivity can really help people to ‘see’. Touching is a simple one, but maybe one of the stronger ones: we do not know how strong, and I would like to know.

The part of the title of today’s discussion which most interests me is the word collaboration – which, to me , implies the active and creative participation of at least two people in a state of some kind of equality.

Interaction in museums and galleries is often concerned with the creativity of one party (a role usually assumed by the museum ) and the responsive activity of another (usually the visitor), but I would not describe this as collaboration. I would suggest therefore that true collaboration only occurs when the visitor and the museum are, for a brief moment, equal.

This I have seen when visitors are invited to ‘make your mark’. First seen at the AGO in Canada but witnessed at the V&A. This is when the host museum takes a step back and faces up to the fact that many of their visitors know more, feel more, see more, think more than they. And that this a is a resource which they have not yet begun to understand or tap into.

I would like to suggest that the word ‘collaboration’, if fully understood, leads us into a world where the museum, can learn from the visitor about faith: this is primarily about faith in the primacy of object, but it is also about faith in the personal response and the personal reading, or view – whatever that may be. And – it may not be what the museum expects, wants , or is prepared for, but, if Mrs Thatcher was right when she said museums are things of the past, the future of the museum depends on visitors being able to share these readings and for all of us to have the opportunity to listen.
Dinah Casson
Kings College, 2002
Related projects:

British Galleries