U of T's Department of Art's fourth annual graduate symposium took place last Thursday and Friday. Out of Sight: Looking Beyond Seeing was an interdisciplinary symposium addressing the non-visual senses as a means for understanding in the arts.

The conference provided an opportunity to explore those senses usually ignored in the appreciation and experience of art and culture.

Generally, the act of looking has always taken precedence in our analyses of art and culture. Yet sound, olfaction, and touch often play an enormous role in our reception of the complete artistic experience.

Barbara Fischer, Executive Director/Chief Curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, remarked how exciting and avant-garde it is to bring not-normally-included topics into discussion of the arts.

With speakers from Canada, the U.S.--and for the first time since the inauguration of the symposium--Europe, the audience was largely composed of graduate students. Speakers, composed of Masters and PhD students, visited from 10 different universities and a variety of programs, including Cultural Studies, Communication Studies, Art History, and Literature.

Keynote speaker, Dr. Jennifer Fisher, kicked off the symposium by discussing Scotiabank’s Nuit Blanche 2009--which used the city of Toronto as a canvas for art by closing down Bay Street for 12 hours, and utilizing the financial district, C.N. Tower and Union station. This, Dr. Fischer claimed, proved that we are moving toward a “mass art audience who can deal with the medium of art, with gusto.”

The papers presented were divided into four sessions, each one dealing with the non-visual senses: sound, taste/smell, touch, and multi-sensation. Topics presented varied from the aesthetics of food art to the implications of touching.

The full version of selected papers presented in this symposium will be published in the online U of T Art Journal (http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/UTAJ).

Papers on the sense of taste broadened the field of what we would normally constitute as art. Art, in this case, cannot be framed or archived in the museum. It is transient, degradable, yet its memory is archived in our sense of taste and smell.

The session dealing with touch demonstrated how feeling can either advance our understanding or interpretation of art--as in the case of Bernini's Constanza--or inhibit it, as in the case of museum technology.

Academic symposiums of this nature are important because they present opportunities for graduate students to share their research, offer insight, and receive feedback from other scholars in the field.