Existent Fingers

Responding to Merleau Ponty’s (2012) ideas of how we can intensify our ways of perceiving in the particular spaces of the (art) museum, Hubert Dreyfus suggests that ‘without our embodied ability to grasp meaning, relevance slips through our non-existent fingers’ (1998, p.11). If we literally hold onto ideas through an alternative interpretative engagement (with existent fingers), can the matter of these objects (when considered in proximity to exhibited artworks) potentially interrupt habitual perception and extend visual literacies? A move away from familiar trajectories of understanding towards less stable and more subjective diverse ways of knowing.