Why museum visitors touch the exhibits when they do not have permission to do so

Rehabilitating unauthorised touch or why museum visitors touch the exhibits. Fiona Candlin.  The Senses and Society, Volume 12, 2017 - Issue 3, Pages 251-266. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2017.1367485

Abstract: In 2014 The Senses and Society published a special issue on “Sensory Museology.” Registering the emergence of this new multi-disciplinary field, the editor usefully observed that “its most salient trend has been the rehabilitation of touch.” Arguably, however, touch has only been rehabilitated as an area of study insofar as it is authorised by the museum. Scholars have rarely considered the propensity of visitors to touch museum exhibits when they do not have permission to do so. In this article I suggest that the academic emphasis on authorised forms of contact privileges the institution’s aims and perspective. Conversely, researching unauthorised touch places a higher degree of emphasis on the visitors’ motivations and responses, and has the capacity to bring dominant characterisations of the museum into question. I substantiate and work through these claims by drawing on interview-based research conducted at the British Museum, and by investigating why visitors touch the exhibits without permission, what they touch, and what experiences that encounter enables.

Keywords: Sensory museology, touch, museums, exhibits, visitors, vandalism

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Thus, the visitors therefore touched the objects on display to establish that were real and not replicas, to find out about the material qualities of an exhibit and the processes by which it was made, and to get a grasp on the skill involved in its manufacture. They also touched to make contact with the past. It is possible that a consciousness of being connected to past eras and peoples is what prompts visitors to touch, but judging from the interviews it seems that this experience is predicated on actual contact. Visitors needed to put their hands into the places that their predecessors touched, or to use their bodies to mimic the shapes of the initial makers and users in order to conceive of, or to bridge the enormous geographical and historical distances that lie between them and the objects’ contexts of production.
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For the visitors, touching the sculptures of animals and humans had a markedly different dynamic to that of touching architectural exhibits such as columns or sarcophagi. It did not provide a connection with the past, rather the representational character of the sculptures outweighed the consideration of who made the carvings, when, and under what conditions. These sculptures were not primarily conceived as products of human endeavor, but as quasi-men, women, and animals.
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A similar logic applied to the way that visitors touched other figures, both clothed and unclothed, and animals. Visitors behaved in ways that were appropriate to the real-life version of that thing, for example, stroking a horse’s nose, but precisely because it is a carving, they were free to push the boundaries of what is acceptable or safe.