ABSTRACT
At her final retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London, Barbara Hepworth invited the public to touch, strike, caress, become physically involved with her sculptures. She even created a special Walk-Through, an enormous bronze structure which people could step up into, sit in, look out of, walk through. Similarly Isamu Noguchi created a series of Walk-Ons, like crusted turds, providing the feet with a tactile experience of art. Sculpture, they were saying, is no longer an object to be placed on a plinth and admired at a genteel distance. It is through one's hands, through one's feet, through one's body, that these works are to be approached, as much as through the eye. We have a tactile as well as a visual experience. As Pierre Boulez has said of the new music, so also it may be said of the new art, the new dance and the new theatre: that it is like going through a labyrinth. We may get lost but we are being invited to enter into a total experience. After all, we cannot know a tree by merely looking at it. We have to feel the texture of the bark, knowing it at all seasons. So with a work of art.
