Proprioception

Art relies on our bodies. To experience art in its multifarious dimensions, the (human) beholder uses one or more of the five senses: touch, sight, hear, smell, taste. Less discussed yet equally important is the role of ‘proprioception’ in the experience of art. Proprioception is an (often unconscious) perceptive phenomenon defined as the central nervous system’s internal awareness of the positionality of the body’s limbs.(1) Receptors signal the movement of our bodies in space and the “feeling” of someone or something near us. 

Proprioception is vital to one’s experience of sculpture in the round, which beckons the viewer to walk around it. We rotate in relation to the physical presence of the sculpture, taking heed to come close but not too close. Proprioception registers the distance between us and the object. Goosebumps rise, hair stands. Like sculpture, canvases and panoramas hung on gallery walls, such as Night Revels of Han Xizai (12th c.) or Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhône (1888), require our bodies to move. To come close but not too close. To move along the surface’s edge, to stand up straight or crouch down. 

Anonymous (after Gu Hongzhong, 10th century), Half-section of the Chinese painting Night Revels of Han Xizai, handscroll, ink and colors on silk, 28.7 x 335.5 cm. 12th century remake from the Song Dynasty. Collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing.

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhône, 1888, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay.

In her dissertation "Modeling the Eighteenth Century: Clodion in the Ancien Régime and After," which was recently defended in MIT’s History, Theory, & Criticism program (2021), Dr. Elizabeth Browne states: “In eighteenth-century France, an artwork’s significance was understood through the relational engagement of the beholder with the work of art, the ways in which it appealed to viewers’ senses, imaginations, and emotions.” Though proprioception was coined much later in the early twentieth century, its theoretical precedence can be traced to the Enlightenment, and earlier. As Browne indicates, moving through space in a “relational engagement” with an artwork, was an important factor in one’s experience – and assessment – of an artwork’s overall significance.

Browne argues that the terracotta sculptures made by French sculptor Claude Michel, called Clodion (1738-1814), “embodied eighteenth-century theories of sensuous and imaginative perception.” Indeed, Clodion’s Intoxication of Wine (c. 1780-90) entices the viewer to walk up close, to circumambulate it.

With art, together, we dance. 

(1). "proprioception." Oxford Reference. . . Date of access 17 Apr. 2021, <https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100349984>