Art unseen. What can we do with art besides looking at it?

There is nothing wrong with standard, conventional art education – sharing information about styles, periods and famous artists (and it is even better if we include stories about women artists and a commentary on their ‘absent’ presence in art history). It probably forms the basis for a large part of university syllabuses (art history, curatorial studies). It may also be a topic of a school lesson – if there will be any school left with enough time and money to include art classes in its core curriculum. I will not dwell on the sadness and wistfulness that has probably been prompted (and “painted” on readers’ faces) by the previous sentence. Unfortunately, there is way too much to say about imperfections of Polish schools. The knowledge of art can be very useful, for example when you want to impress other people by replacing commas with such interesting words as Rothko, Dix or Gentileschi, or when some principal comes up with the idea to teach the youth about, for example, Dorota Nieznalska or Julita Wójcik (in a dreamland?) and you happen to be looking for a job as a graduate in some “non-market” humanistic field.

Documentation of sensory integration workshops, by Bartek Lis

Anyway, art can be very well and practically used in (at least) one more situation. The situation in which we are required to switch from standard “education for art” (the education that is typical and characteristic of, for example, dominant classes/groups – in this symbolic way, in the next stage of class conflict, social stratification takes place: if you do not blush with embarrassment when you hear someone speak about the Fauves, you have probably received a good and expensive education) to “education through art,” and it is probably the most exciting part of this text. Social activists, cultural organisers and educators (and many more activists of all kinds) may finally breathe a sigh of relief. Yes! We can use art, for social and cultural work as well. We can use it with groups with lower key competences and basic skills, with residents of the saddest streets in Dębiec and Sołacz in Poznań (it is possible that each of these streets is sad for some different reasons, but the direct causes and actors or perpetrators of these misfortunes are often the same – women and men who are not so good at communicating their needs and verbalising their emotions). We can also use it with elderly people (who often depend on others), with two neighbours who have been fighting over the same parking spot for a decade, with kids who compete for a bus shelter (so that they will not get wet in the rain when they try to self-organise and build their “third place” – the world outside school and home), and, finally, with people with some deficiencies in the broadest sense of the word. Deficiencies, shortages, inadequacies, imperfections – who does not have some of these? If we adopt such a perspective, everyone in the world will be equal; a person with a physical disability or hearing impairment will stand side by side with that one lady with blonde hair, a wool cap and a terrible insecurity about her intelligence, which was once planted in her by her father. And art can be a perfect means for working with all these people and their problems. It can and should be used for that.

Documentation of sensory integration workshops, by Bartek Lis

Sensory integration workshops are hardly an original idea; it is nothing new and it would probably be a bit difficult to find the very first person who came up with this. It does not matter. What does matter is that we try to use art and an exhibition as a space to renegotiate signs, concepts, and our understanding of things. We create a situation – the situation that is safe because it is free from judgment – in which different adults can meet (adults in a broader sense, for it is well-known that maturity is not always linked to age) and play together with art. They can stop and reflect upon different things in reaction to some painting, installation or sculpture. I have forgotten to mention that it is important not to… look at all these artefacts; to close one’s eyes and forgo visual perception. It probably sounds iconoclastic – especially when we look into the words: “VISUAL arts.” But we know that it is only a matter of convention, and artists have long ago started to engage other senses and types of communication to tell art. Sound, smell, movement – all these and others can be aspects of almost every work – even the most soundless, scentless and motionless one (or the one that only seems that way). When I look at (yes, let’s use the sense of sight this time) the paintings by Sophie Taeuber-Arp, then even though the medium of the conveyed content/story is mostly flat and enclosed in a regular frame, it is the power of my imagination or additional information about the artist’s life that allows me not only to see the depicted geometry, stripes and lines, but also hear music or see a dance. Why should we hear about dance and movement – it is better to stand up and prance around the gallery. If we cover the eyes of the willing participants of such an experiment, then those who have avoided this activity for their entire lives will very likely start to dance within a few weeks. This is what happens when people cannot see and start to believe they cannot be seen as well. If the participants have their eyes covered (if they are not visually impaired), then blind and partially sighted people can also take part in the workshop. We create a safe, comfortable situation in which people of different abilities can meet, often for the first time in their lives. When we talk about them in normative terms, it turns out that 6 sighted and 4 blind people have participated in a workshop. But during these workshops no one really uses their sight. They just listen (to audio descriptions of works, musical compositions, self-generated sounds and sounds produced by homemade instruments), smell (soft meringues, dark chocolate, carrots and polyethylene – if this is what is chosen by educators, quite arbitrarily, to describe one of the works by Basia Bańda¹), move and rustle (by moving about with big sheets of paper and creating their own interpretations of the story they have just heard about Czechoslovakian art from the Cold War period), or simply touch (we have already felt the sculptures by Paweł Althamer² and Tony Cragg³). It is possible if the artist is generous enough and does not fear that someone will rip Anda’s ear off (“Anda” is one of the sculptures from the “Polyethylene. In the darkness” exhibition, which was presented at Wrocław Contemporary Museum in 2013, and for which the author of this text had an opportunity to hold a sensory integration workshop for the first time, together with Magda Skowrońska).

Documentation of sensory integration workshops, by Bartek Lis

We already know that we can engage our senses in a non-visual experience of art. As we do that, we may also talk about important issues concerning, for example, social stratification, the situation of economic migrants⁴, sexual and social revolutions⁵, carefreeness and an upcoming war⁶. During every meeting we present a “non-school,” untraditional approach to art – we show that art should not be feared (you can miss out on a lot of fun if you do) and that there is no need to treat art as an altar/idea which can be offended. Our “rebellious” actions are an attempt to break out of the violent discourse which talks about art with reverence. To reduce art to its aesthetic function is to kill its potential and confine it to an ornamental space, to deprive it of its agency and usefulness. The curatorial approach does not have to be wrong – it simply can and should be supplemented. This is what we try to do in our practice. Playing with art is also a perfect tool to make up for the deficiencies of our art/creativity education (I have talked about this at the beginning). Covering your eyes opens your mind, activates some strange, unknown connections in the brain (I have no clue – I am definitely not a specialist in neuroscience) which help you like contemporary art (the scary one!). Such classes should be prescribed for adults by doctors, not only due to a healing return to one’s childhood (thanks to carefree fun) but also for more serious, mundane reasons. Activating and stimulating the brain is nothing but good for us. Finally, the strongest and the most important reason for me – by participating in sensory, non-visual workshops we create a space in which both the sighted and the visually impaired can meet. All of them embark on this educational adventure from the same starting point and open up to different sensory experiences.

Bartek Lis – a sociologist (PhD), social scientist, cultural organiser and educator. A curator and coordinator of social projects at the Centre for Educational Practices at ZAMEK Culture Centre in Poznań. Since 2013, together with Magdalena Skowrońska, he has held fourteen original sensory workshops for exhibitions: twelve at Wrocław Contemporary Museum and two at ZAMEK Culture Centre in Poznań.

¹ “He loves me tough luck! Sensual art workshop without barriers”

² “Althamer haptically”

³ “Cragg haptically. Sensual workshop”

⁴ Both these issues were raised during the workshop which accompanied the “Labor Relations” exhibition, Wrocław Contemporary Museum, 2016. “Nothing is what it seems”

⁵ “I Use my Camera as a Weapon. Gordon Parks,” Wrocław Contemporary Museum, 2017. “Tell me Parks. Sensual workshop” 

⁶ “Breaking into a New Dimension. The Artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp,” ZAMEK Culture Centre, 2019.