Touching and the Enjoyment of Sculpture: Exploring the Appeal of Renaissance Statuettes, which opened Jan. 21 at the Walters Art Museum, centers around how touch contributes to art and sculpture. As the name implies, the exhibit allows patrons to touch sculptures and other artifacts that would generally be off limits in a museum.
The forces behind this unusual exhibit, Walters curator Joaneath Spicer and Hopkins neuroscientist Steven Hsiao, come together from two very different fields to meld history and neuroscience together. The exhibit consists of replicas, made carefully with precise digital scans, that the public is free to pick up and touch. Spicer and Hsiao agree that interacting the art with a different sense — tactility — provides a learning experience for visitors.
"The purpose of this exhibition is to alert people how extremely important the sense of touch is to they way they interface with the world and certainly with the aesthetic experience," Spicer said.
The exhibit also poses a couple of questions according to Hsiao.
"1) Why some objects are more aesthetically pleasing than others and 2) to examine whether there is an aesthetic to sculptures that were meant to be held in the hand" Hsiao wrote in an e-mail to The News-Letter. "To my knowledge this is the first exhibition to explore these issues in a public setting."
Walking into the exhibit, the room brings together two different fields: art history is displayed on the right, while the neuroscience component is showcased on the left. Both come together at a round table in the center.
The sculptures originate from the European Renaissance, a time when the sense of touch became more important when creating objects, Spicer noted.
"In the Renaissance, because of various circumstances, there was suddenly a very wide range of objects, of some luxury, that someone might really have in their hands," Spicer said. "[This] really has not been true up until this time. . .the understanding of objects as well as simply the environment that holding the object, touching them, even sort of caressing them, in a way, was a very important aspect of the aesthetic environment. We are offering the public an opportunity to see what this is about."
The exhibit also looks at the neural responses involved in touching. This is where Hsiao comes in and applies his research in the Hopkins lab to the art at the Walters.
"My research for the last 30 years has been on how the brain processes tactile information." Hsiao wrote. "What are the neural mechanisms of how we feel the texture, size and shape of objects with our hands. Here we are extending those studies to include how features of objects are represented to why do some objects feel better than others. Are there systematic rules that dictate why some things feel better than others? These studies will lead to more in depth probing of the neural mechanisms."
Aside from his work in the lab analyzing tactility of sculptures and working to replicate them, Hsiao designed the floor plan that ties the historical and scientific aspects together. Hsiao's studies involved in this exhibit was funded by a grant awarded by the Brain Science Institute.
The exhibit also aims to rejuvenate the public's view on the importance of touch, a sensation that Spicer notes is often taken for granted.
"Perception from touch is different from the other senses in that it evokes intimate feelings. The intimacy of touch is used by artists not only in the creation of objects to be held but also in paintings where the depictions of the hands carries the emotional impact of the painting. . .In this age of digital communication, there is a need for people to come together and to interact with each other. The sense of touch is the way to bring intimacy into your life and is an important source of pleasure whether it be from using a well designed mouse to holding hands with a parent or lover," Hsiao wrote. "If students leave the exhibition with an appreciation of the importance of touch in their everyday lives, I would be happy."
Despite the small size of the exhibit, Spicer notes that it is gaining a lot of interest.
