An Eye Does Not Make an I: Expanding the Sensorium.

Art educators have previously noted that senses other than sight are frequently engaged by contemporary art (e.g., Springgay, 2004; Garoian & Gaudelius, 2008), craft (Congdon, 1991), material culture (Bolin & Blandy, 2003), and popular culture (Duncum, 2004). However, despite their efforts, on the whole, art education remains indebted to the legacy of modernistartcritiqueand practiceand so valorizes vision to the exclusion of other senses. Additionally, the recent visual culture movement tends to similarly sideline consideration of senses other than the optic (Duncum, 2004; Freedman, 2003;Tavin, 2002).'In this article, I employ the concept of the sensorium - the sum total of our ways of sensing and perceiving the world - in order to argue that art educators need to embrace senses beyond sight. Otherwise, conscious consideration of some of the diverse directions art education is now taking will be severely limited. I explore how contemporary approaches to the sensorium overturn long held assumptions about the senses, which opens up new possibilities - and challenges - for art education. I critique the assumptions on which ocularcentricism was foundational to modernist art and modernist art education, and I survey how contemporary art intentionally goes well beyond the visual to engage other senses. This problematizes the word visual in visual culture (Elkins, 2002; Mitchell, 1995), and I show how even digital screen images are best conceived as multisensory. I argue that it is necessary to acknowledge that even in afield whose focus is rightly on what is visual, consideration of sight alone is not enough. In considering how identity is formed through sensory experience, an eye does not make an I.The SensoriumContemporary psychological and philosophical accounts have defined the sensorium much more broadly than the senses. The sensorium has been conceived as the total character of the sensory environment which together includes sensation, perception, and the interaction of information about the world around us. It is the whole sensory apparatus of the body, "the subject's way of co-ordinating all of the body's perceptual and proprioceptive2 signals as well as the changing sensory envelope of the self" (Jones, 2006, p. 8). The sensorium refers to how the senses operate in consort to make up perceptual systems, how these systems operate in relation to the environment, and our own interpretive capacities (Gibson, 1966, 1986; Serres, 1985/2008).A Reconceptualized SensoriumThere have been three long-standing, popular assumptions about the senses, each of which are now considered problematic by psychologists and philosophers alike: (1) there are only five senses; (2) they are hierarchically ordered in terms of their importance to knowledge; and (3) they operate separately from one another. Below, I explore how reversing these assumptions creates new directions for art education in relating to both contemporary art and the popular images and artifacts that many art educators are now addressing.Many SensesFirst, there has long been less agreement about the number of senses than is generally supposed, or even what is to count as a sense. For example, Democritus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, thought of all the senses as variations on just one, the sense of touch (Connor, 2008). Aristotle was more generous, but he still counted only four senses, considering that taste was a "modification of touch" (cited in Conner, 2008, p. 2). Socrates was especially generous, advancing the idea of a potentially limitless number of senses. In addition to the usually defined senses, he is alleged to have said, "there are others besides, a great number which have names, an infinite number which have not" (cited in Connor, 2008, p. 2).Contemporary psychologists have sided with Socrates. They have differentiated many senses, including "heat, effort, lightness... weight and speed"(Gibson, 1966, p. …