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Des Moines Art Center’s new exhibit explores tactile pieces and performances.

BY eLAINe IRVINe

Touch is widely considered to be the most intimate of the five senses, one that has been highly politicized and rationed through the COVID-19 pandemic. For a long time, the general public wasn’t able to be physically caring with many of their loved ones, regardless of the need: a hug, a backrub, a kiss, sitting across the table and speaking over coffee.

Ange Altenhofen’s interactive exhibit

Occupation: Coax, Coddle, and Caress, seeks to study this urge to touch the items and people we care about, even if we don’t have access to one another.

Though the context of Altenhofen’s exhibit was influenced by the absence of touch during the pandemic, she began working on the collection 20 years ago, as she exited her graduate studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. The summer after her graduation, Altenhofen was diagnosed with a degenerative eye condition which doctors had suspected might leave her blind.

Facing a new fear of losing the visual career she just began, Altenhofen began teaching herself

Braille and turned it into a new medium.

“I was always sort of a process artist anyway,”

Altenhofen said. “I was learning Braille and embroidering it, using beads to represent the dots, onto objects that I’d been making before anyway.

It became this really rich, tactile surface—and became more about touch and interaction.”

Altenhofen cites Fluxus artists (a group

of experimental performance artists from around the globe, including Yoko Ono) and Ana Mendieta, a University of Iowa grad (BA, MA, MFA) and performance artist through the late 1970s and early ’80s, as direct inspirations. Though Altenhofen works primarily with sculpture, a medium usually seen but never touched, the process of viewing her artwork is not over until it is experienced with the sense of touch and tactile interaction—a performance requiring audience participation.

“All of the objects that I’ve made using the Braille beadwork requires interaction, or invites it,” explains Altenhofen. “In terms of art theory, it kind of breaks free of the preciousness … the art object you aren’t supposed to touch because you might damage or mar it. All of that [interaction] is what gives the object life and history.” Altenhofen’s work took a hiatus during the pandemic. Not only were most galleries and museums closed for viewing, but it was an

Ange Altenhofen’s braille Series, occupation: Coax, Coddle, and Caress, Des moines Art Center, Friday, Nov. 18 at 5 p.m., Free

INVESTING IN THE ARTS, INVESTING IN YOUR COMMUNITY.

GREA TER DES MOINES

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