Works for the Blind (Nothing and Nobody)

Working with a wide variety of media including photography, film, installation, and arrangements dealing with the economy of meaning and value in objects and images, Barbara Bloom examines the mechanisms of perception and investigates viewers’ experiences since the 1970s. Bloom’s focus on “framing” as a metaphor and her interest in the ephemeral quality of traces deal with memory and the experience of seeing in their relationship with materiality. In her works, she often deals with the concepts of fading out of existence, or the inability to experience existence by using text, linguistic expression, and books.

In her series entitled "Works for the Blind", where Bloom furthers her research through images, digital prints, and specially-woven carpets, the texts are written in Braille, which constitutes a constraint on experiencing the work as a whole. Blind people capable of deciphering the alphabet and reading the text won’t be able to perceive the work visually, whereas most of the people who are able to see the works won’t be able to read the textual extracts that Bloom borrowed from leading authors in the history of literature and thought, such as André Gide, Roland Barthes, Hannah Arendt, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Text in Braille: “Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is, is meant to be perceived by somebody. Not Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth.”

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind