When the art world is labelled 'exclusive', it is often code for 'alienating'. Sometimes artworks are considered too obscure and are not open to being read. Or, in a world where the most direct route to anyone's heart to is to be a commodity, sometimes the (however justifiably) hefty price asked for some works distances people too. Sometimes, admit it, a hoity toity 'purveyor of fine art' might intimidate. Sometimes art doesn't care that it alienates people, sometimes that is even what it aspires to do.
In our cringing withdrawal from art it is easy to forget that our alienation is actually only partial. We still have some kind of engagement with works, whether it is positive or not. But given that visual art is, by definition, primarily a visually-mediated form of expression, there are those who are totally excluded from any encounter with it at all: the blind. Object's Out of Sight: Tactile Art 2004 , an Australia-wide $10,000 biennial award held in conjunction with the Royal Blind Society, proves that this need not always be the case and that sometimes art aims to be inclusive, to touch audiences, to open their eyes.
The award's name is actually somewhat misleading, as the ten finalists seem generally to appeal to a much more rounded sensory experience than touch alone. Indeed, the ears rather than the fingertips are stimulated first. Upon my (recently caffeinated) entrance into the foyer of the gallery, a voice burst forth from some unseen source, "Welcome to Object!" and proceeded to give a little spiel about something I might have been interested in had I not been clinging to life from the shock. A flight of stairs and hairpin bend later, another disembodied voice gushes at me about the 40 exhibition, a cabinet of 40 artists installed to mark Object's 40th year. Scurrying further along I enter the gallery and there she is again, or rather, there she isn't, enthusing about Duke Albada's exhibited work and I'm beginning to wonder if I should get my head checked.
These recorded voices, informative and no doubt helpful for blind patrons, also serve to give sighted people a tiny taste of the disability. It is disorienting when hidden voices chat away and you have no idea where the next one will come from. I imagine this happens to blind people all the time and it must be damned annoying. So while these recorded voices empower the blind they also disempower the sighted, levelling out the overall experience a little. This aural miasma clashes a bit with the serenity I've grown to expect in galleries, especially in this particular space, which was once a chapel and retains some of that holy quietitude. Love it though, I'm all for subverting expectations.
Speaking of which, Simon Lloyd is an arch-villain when it comes to subverting expectations and his prize winning 'Fabricating the Mundane' gains much of its appeal from doing exactly that. It is difficult not to make a beeline for this work, which, apart from practically standing astride the entrance, is spectacular and engaging. Orange straps hanging from the ceiling suspend an assortment of various objects, such as a hat, an axe, a funnel, a hot water bottle, a hammer, a watering can. They would be an unremarkable little collection except that the materials they are made from reverse any practical application we might usually assign them, each becoming its own little joke. Try cutting wood with the ceramic axe, for a start. The heavy concrete boot on the floor would certainly make walking anywhere difficult. Cook food with the wooden frying pan and you might end up cooking more besides. In the touchy-feely stakes, picking the objects up, handling them, adds new dimensions to the experience: the felt watering can sags a little; the white ceramic hammer is much lighter and colder than a regular hammer; the cork hairdryer is velvety and softer than the usual crass plastic and noisy wail.
I imagine a blind person would explore this work from the opposite end, beginning with the material and then deducing the object. A metal object turns out to be a brush, something usually made from fibre; but a fur object turns out to a funnel, something usually made from metal or plastic; and a paper object turns out to be a hat, something usually made from felt, and so on. Thus the transmogrification is a two-way street: we learn as much about our relationship with materials as with objects.
This work has a strong connection with that of Izabela Pluta, 'Velour', which similarly makes contradictory links between an object's function and its capacity to fulfil it. Her pile of grey cushions seem velvety, soft and plush, and their puckered fabric covers invite fingers to caress them. This exploration, however, reveals them to be the reverse of what they appear to be - in fact they are cast in cement, cold and hard. Pluta's work is somehow more solemn than Lloyd's, though. Rather than quirkiness or irony, Pluta conveys a sense of domestic betrayal, where objects of comfort instead turn out to be unyielding and difficult.
It is a tidy segue from Pluta's cushions to Nicholas Folland's hot rocks. His work is also grey, scattered, for sitting, hiding out, loitering, particularly if you have eight legs, fangs and abundant body hair. Folland has upscaled his overindulged pet tarantula's living environment to human size and made a cluster of large rocks with heating elements within. While perhaps relying a little too heavily on one-dimensional novelty, there is indeed something mysteriously attractive about a hot rock. I think of joyous discoveries of brick walls in the evenings of hot days, where the captured heat of the day still radiates out after sunset. There might be a bit of spider in all of us.
Duke Albada's work 'Soul Revival' addresses the co-hosts of the exhibition head on. Supplying viewers with sensitive canes and textured paths in the gallery space, she leads them to three white wall-mounted boxes that play snatches of recorded anecdote about the past life of the gallery space, the St Margaret's Hospital chapel. It is a fun exploration, and many of the recordings are interesting and evocative, but something about this work evokes some cynicism in me. There's something a bit tokenistic, maybe, about her nods to both the Royal Blind Society and to Object. The two elements don't really fit together in a convincingly seamless and meaningful way, and overall it gives an impression that she was more interested in flattering judges than in communing with an audience.
I confess to be a past offender as regards violating the sacred space between my body and Great Art. The first time a gallery attendant reprimanded me for touching the art was as a small child. The most recent was last week. So, given that furtive exploratory zeal has got me into trouble before, I hesitated in diving into the tactile experience at Out of Sight without first checking with the Object staff if it was OK. Of course I could touch, they said. Halleluiah! Despite the good reasons for usually keeping bodies and artworks separate, I hate mentally straitjacketing myself every time I enter a gallery. Indeed, to deny an audience the opportunity to touch a work denies them a whole facet of sensory engagement with it, and as such can almost be considered a form of blindness in itself, a tactile blindness. But here, the rules are reversed: touching is essential and seeing is only optional.
But, as this exhibition reveals, it is not wholly the fault of galleries and the hallowed conventions of exhibition-going. Of the finalists, the better works cater for both the sighted and the visually impaired, and the best works bring the two experiences to an equal footing. In nullifying the hierarchy, the sensory shortcomings the visually over-dependent are brought to light. How much more do I, with my five fabulously functional senses, actually perceive in this world than someone who is less well equipped? What do I miss, housed in this smug complacency? Who is actually more disabled: those who can't see, or those who won't?
