Wherever we go in a museum, the “Don’t touch” signs are there. From our childhood we are taught to keep our hands to ourselves. The etymology of the word “visitor” makes it clear that we are only there to see. So the Take Me (I’m Yours) show at Monnaie de Paris is a most unusual proposition. The curators, artist Christian Boltanski and Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, are determined to confront a few taboos, encouraging viewers to pick up objects or, better still, take them home.
However sacrilegious it may seem, this is not a new idea; Boltanski and Obrist tested it at the Serpentine in 1995. Boltanski has often used garments and at the Paris exhibition he urges visitors to rummage through heaps of clothes. “They’ll think it’s a joke,” he says with a smile. “A bit like telling children they can eat as much as they like in a cake shop.”
For his installation, American artist Jonathan Horowitz puts a different twist on the idea, setting out a shop and encouraging people to take whatever they fancy, as long as they put something else in its place. Daft as it may seem, the aim is not to turn the gallery into a jumble sale but to change our relationship with art. “An exhibition is a free ritual, unlike theatre, opera or a concert. You can come and go, move around as you like,” Obrist explains. “But the ritual is an exclusively visual experience, which explains why people only linger for 10 to 15 seconds in front of a work.”
Sight has not always been the predominant sense. The owners of the first cabinets of curiosities – the forerunners of museums in Europe – urged the privileged few to handle their precious objects. In the 17th century visitors to the salons of France’s royal academy were allowed to hold or touch works, the better to appreciate them. When the Louvre opened as a museum in 1793, copyists moved paintings and sculptures around to catch every angle. But the management soon became concerned that this might damage pieces and introduced measures to keep viewers at a distance.
The ban on touching became stricter as the number of visitors increased. In the meantime the value of the exhibits soared: they were not simply rare, they were irreplaceable. Now the typography of “Don’t touch” signs at the Louvre even allows for the words being gradually effaced, a metaphor for some problematic erosion. “Humans are greasy animals. When they touch something, they pick up as much of the material as they leave behind. Not touching reflects a concern for the common good,” says Dominique Cordellier, head of the Louvre’s graphic arts department. Once, in 2003, the museum allowed visitors to touch its porphyry sculptures, during an exhibition of the same name. The stone is hard enough to withstand touch.
Museums are nevertheless beginning to grasp that we need to do more than just gaze. Touching is part of cognitive development. “Of the five senses it’s the one that affords the most accurate knowledge of an object. It helps us memorise and triggers emotions,” Cordellier explains. “By preventing visitors from touching, we deprive them of a means of learning, reducing a work to no more than an image.”
Breaking new ground 20 years ago, the Louvre opened a tactile gallery within its permanent sculpture collection. Originally designed for disabled visitors, it appeals to anyone who want to stimulate their senses through direct contact with smooth and rough surfaces, matter and its absence.
Other museums have followed suit. This summer the Prado, in Madrid, opened its first exhibition for the visually impaired, with six 3D copies of old master canvases. At the end of August Tate Britain launched Tate Sensorium, which is designed to sharpen the imagination through touch, hearing and smell. Such multisensory approaches are not just a way to give in to temptation. “They are also an opportunity to explain things, which in a way gives priority to touch,” says Michel Lo-Monaco, who handles accessibility issues at the Louvre. “We explain that visitors can touch here, but not in the other rooms. It’s easier than presenting visitors with a straight ban.” The tactile gallery may seek to rid people of some of their inhibitions, but they are still unsure about whether they can really touch. If they dare, they may get disapproving looks from those who have not yet realised that in this small space it’s permissible.
Contemporary artists were the first to play on such transgression. At his show at MAC/Val in 2012, Fabrice Hyber prompted visitors to test his bizarre prototypes (POFs) such as a square ball or a swing fitted with a dildo. “They wore out very quickly. We had to replace them after the first week,” the artist says, adding: “You have to accept being recycled all the time.” In a different vein the latest edition of Un Nouveau Festival at the Pompidou Centre earlier this year featured about 20 reproductions of facetious games invented by the avant-garde Fluxus movement in the 1960s. Visitors to the Pompidou could play with a finger box invented by the Japanese artist Ay-o. The original is on show, behind glass, in the museum’s Modernist collection.
Even works by artists who want their creations to be widely enjoyed, as was the case with Fluxus, end up in a case. “We are required to take good care of objects, but the heritage rationale does mean we distort the original meaning of some movements,” says Michel Gauthier, a curator at the Pompidou Centre. The retrospective of the Japanese Gutai group, staged by the New York Guggenheim in 2013, was typical of such betrayal. The distance between visitors and art imposed by the museum went against the group’s core principles. As we couldn’t touch the replica of a wooden box by Saburo Murakami, designed to change attitudes to art, we couldn’t hear the clock ticking inside it.
It is absurd that we cannot put on the clothes dreamed up by German artist Franz Erhard Walther or handle the plaster Passtücke Austrian sculptor Franz West specifically designed to be touched. “The quantity of art which demands interaction with its audience has ballooned,” Gauthier points out. “Museums will have to find an answer. Otherwise in 100 years time we’ll have a completely misleading, objectified idea of these pieces.”
Cultural institutions should take comfort in the fact that, apart from a few vandals, their visitors are well behaved. At the Nouveau Musée National in Monte Carlo no one dared touch the remarkable ceramic creations of Italy’s Fausto Melotti despite there being no barrier. “If the display is sufficiently sophisticated people won’t touch,” says senior curator Marie-Claude Beaud. “The work is desirable, within reach, but the design of the show emphasises that this is a museum.”
Even when the show is low-key visitors are cautious. Aude Cartier, head of the Malakoff arts centre near Paris, discovered this in 2012 when she organised Prière de Toucher (please touch), a show of donated works for a fundraising auction. Some pieces were on the floor, others perched in odd positions. “People would take great care to put things back where they belonged,” says Cartier. “They were quite happy to touch but somehow thrown by the fact that it was no longer transgressive.”
Take Me (I’m Yours) is at Monnaie de Paris until 8 November
This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde
