Please Do Touch the Daisies

Just past the portals of Gallery C, a wing of one of the fine-arts buildings at California State College in Long Beach, the visitor pushed through a many-layered curtain of black vinyl and entered a pitch-black world. His only guide was his sense of touch. Through tubes and rubbery barricades, up and down gradients, past something that felt like an oscillating fur muff, the visitor groped his way. Just before emerging again into the light, he was engulfed, not unpleasantly, by a water-filled plastic mattress with a temperature about the same as his own.

The labyrinth was the main feature of what was billed as the First International Tactile Sculpture Symposium, which drew 15 artists, psychologists and teachers to discuss such things as the importance of touch to emotion and art. The exhibits were public. Reaction, as registered on questionnaires distributed at the entrance, may or may not have affirmed the symposium's point. "Fearful," read one response, "Sexy," read another One young woman resurfaced from the darkness in the buff, clutching her garments. "It's too much of an experience in there," she said matter-of-factly. "I didn't understand why I was wearing these clothes."

Prominent Commandment. Convened by Dr. August F. Coppola, a professor of comparative literature at Cal State, the symposium was designed to demonstrate his conviction that "ours is a touch-starved society." Coppola reached this conclusion after spending ten days blindfolded, on a summer study grant, touching everything out of sight. The experience opened his eyes to the sensations lying just beyond the fingertips, in a culture that has as one of its prominent commandments, "Don't touch."

Gallery C extended a warm, week-long invitation to ignore this mandate. From Paris, Sculptor Lygia Clark imported two powder-blue space suits of her own design. After a man and a woman entered the suits and Miss Clark sealed the sightless helmets, the occupants found that their only access to each other was through zippered pockets strategically located over the erogenous zones. When the man opened one of her pockets, he felt a hairy male chest rather than a soft female bosom; the woman, in turn, reached out to touch a rubber breast. Somewhat south of these pockets were more impressive surprises,

San Francisco Designer C. Prior Hall arrived with the water-filled mattress. He calls it the Pleasure Pit, and passed out copy advertising its virtues: "It is a friend in love with you. Beckoning you to grovel in rapturous sensual splendor" --and so on, down to the punch line: "The Pleasure Pit is like taking your bed to bed with you,"

Richard Register, a young California artist, exhibited his PREFOTEMMS, short for pressure, form, temperature, electricity, movement and moisture--which are objects designed to be touched and felt. Since the hand can respond to all these sensations, says Register, why not give it the chance?

In a way, the symposium could be described as the first translation into software of the sensitivity training advocated by California's Esalen Institute (TIME, Sept. 29, 1967). Esalen's associate Bernard Gunther was there to give the effort his wholehearted approval. "The increasing promiscuity and need for drugs are manifestations of touch hunger," he said. "We have lost our sensory innocence. You rarely touch somebody in this culture unless you want to make it with them." Nevertheless, Gunther insisted that touch does not necessarily have anything to do with sexuality.

The symposium neither proved nor disproved that. But it may have proved something. Midway through the week, the labyrinth had to be shut down for repairs. Now Gallery Director Carl Day, who built the maze with some of his students, understands why society is full of DON'T TOUCH signs. "People sure do break things," he said. "This experience has taught me what a bull the human being really is."

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