The art of touching
WHO hasn’t dreamed of touching a painting or stroking a sculpture while strolling through the galleries of a museum?
This is now possible at the Sainsbury Centre. The British institution, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, has announced its intention to “become the first museum in the world to recognise art as being alive.”
The Sainsbury Centre has come up with a series of initiatives that allow art lovers to experience the works on display differently than in most museums and cultural centres around the world.
The goal is to encourage visitors to treat the paintings, statues and other creations on display as if they were a living being rather than an inanimate object.
Visitors can choose whether they want to experience the Sainsbury Centre galleries in a traditional, digital or experiential way, reports the specialist website, Museums Association.
This latter option gives people the opportunity to experience the artworks through different senses, including touch. Traditionally, it is forbidden to run one’s fingers over the pieces on display for conservation reasons. But this social convention sometimes detracts from the perception of works of art, such as Henry Cooper’s Mother And Child.
The British artist is said to have designed this sculpture, depicting a child in its mother’s arms, with the idea that viewers would wrap their arms around it to rekindle their own childhood memories.
The Sainsbury Centre is now encouraging visitors to do so, while stressing that this physical closeness will not damage the integrity of the statue.
“Over time it will develop a patina, but that’s part of the ageing process – art isn’t something frozen,” the centre’s director, Jago Cooper, told Museums Association.
Elsewhere in the museum’s galleries, visitors are invited to lie down in a hammock to admire a portrait by the Swiss artist Alberto Giacaometti from a new angle, or to become a moving work of art themselves by stepping into a glass case.
The museum has also partnered with the Smartify application to offer a new kind of audio guide, emphasising accessibility and cultural democratisation.
In recent years, several museums around the world have adopted a similar approach to that of the Sainsbury Centre, mounting exhibitions focused on integrating the sense of touch into the perception of artworks.
Examples include Please Touch The Art at the Cantor Fine Art Gallery in Los Angeles in 2016, or more recently, Priere de toucher at the Palais des Beaux-arts de Lille in northern France, earlier this year.