The Texture of Art–Sensory Shifts in Contemporary Art–Feeling, Seeing and Making

Contemporary art is a feast for the senses. But have we reduced art to vision? And what does the hand do, now that we have machines and automated ways of making, editing and showing images? And what are images?

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This episode is the second audio/video essay of the season. It will take you on a trip to a sensory shift across times, blurring the boundaries between line, image, wall, surface, paper, and machines. Where the hand is, what it does and how it is re-articulated by automation is promising and exciting if we let it.

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I was invited to participate in a conversation on the occasion of the launch of Trajectories, Variations on a Gesture a book which is almost a sculpture or an exhibition in itself, containing 10 drawings made at Massana school of crafts (Barcelona) by Edouard Cabay. The director of the school, Xavi Capmany invited Cabay, an experimental architect and artist to bring his algorithmic practice at the heart of a school teaching manual crafts in order to create a dialogue between the different uses of the hand, of patterns, of the eye, the brain, muscle and memory. I dediced to start by reading a short text, which you can enjoy, in a longuer version, here.

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About us: If you enjoy the podcast If Books Could Kill and You Are Good, you will enjoy Exhibitionistas, where artists are unveiled through current and pertinent angles, and through thoughts and feelings. These podcasts were a great inspiration for our format because they're nerdy and engaging, researched and approachable. The co-host and the guest co-host engage in a conversation informed by an accessible and lively presentation of the subject, through which you can reflect on a show you've seen or discover it if you can't go, learn or re-evaluate artistic topics crossing over into our everyday lives.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

I'm Joanna Pierre Nevis, your host, and this is Exhibitionistus. I'm an independent writer and curator with a wide-ranging two-decade career in contemporary art, from commercial galleries to art fairs, from research to curating, from Lisbon to London through Paris. But when I'm asked what I do outside the art world, the inevitable reaction is, oh, I don't know anything about contemporary art. Ouch. So call it a midlife crisis, call it arrogance. But I gave myself the task of trying to fill that gap with co-host conversation episodes centered around a genuine exchange of thoughts, feelings, and precious context around solo exhibitions, interviews, and special episodes based on a particular topic to keep you alert and on your toes. If you want to read further into some of the topics discussed in the episodes and more, you can also find me on Substack under my name Joanna Pironevis. This is one of those shorter episodes based on a topic often prompted by a lecture or a conference. This is no exception. I was invited to participate in a conversation on the occasion of a book launch, which is the outcome of a really interesting project. So the story behind it is really fascinating. Picture Barcelona, picture a school of traditional crafts such as ceramic, weaving, sculpting. The school is called Masana, and its director, Chavi Capmani, decided to invite experimental architect and artists, also based in Barcelona, Edward Cabet, to bring his work based on automation, algorithms, coding to the school as a residency project. So of course, the purpose was to combine or articulate handcraft technologies with new digital learning technologies. The culprit here is going to be the hand, of course. So you'll imagine the students working with their haptic abilities and the artists pressing buttons and looking at screens. On the other hand, I have investigated for many years an inventor of the nineteenth century called Etienne Jules Marais, who was French, who basically perfected and established the use of graphic recording machines. And I argue that this is the big shift. And what shift is this? So think seismograph, think electrocardiograph, but think mostly the first invention of Maray, which was the sphigmograph. It was a small device that you applied to the wrist with a sensor, which activated the stylus. And he showed this in Napoleon's court. So at the time there were these massive events around these innovations. Of course, photography comes to mind. But here it was basically something used by doctors. All doctors bought this device after this. So this small device was applied to the wrist, and then the movement of blood was sensed by a makeshift kind of sensor, which then carried that information to the stylus. The stylus would move across a cylinder which was covered by a paper darkened with smoke. And so the movement of the stylus scraped off parts of that smoke, creating a white line, a graph, that kind of emerged from that black background with the unique pattern of that person's blood pressure. The image in Maray's book, called Le Mouvement, I think, or the graphic method, I think that's in the graphic method, illustrating this device shows a hand idle and a machine, the sphigmograph, drawing. So from here on, and that's kind of what I argue, there's a reconfiguration of the body. So the eye does not provide the visual stimulus to the eye and the hand, which together draw. Quite the opposite. So the eye receives the drawing and interprets it. So this changes the way we use our bodies in relation to drawing. And this is kind of what Edoard brought to the table at the Masana school. What Edouard did was to bring this idea of the machine, the automated process into the school. So he worked with ten students that he isolated, he 3D scanned their hands working on different manual disciplines, then he translated this movement with an algorithmic syntax that he developed, and he extrapolated a hundred thousand times the curve that he obtained. And so the text that I received says, quote, the series of ten drawings captures and reveals the infinite repetitions and variations of human movements contained in the almost automatic action of the craftsperson when working with the material. So notice that he applies the notion of automation to the human body. And I did something a bit similar, which was to focus on the movement and what happens in it for us. I ignored the time span between manual production and digital production or consumption or use and kind of read them together. And I propose perhaps another way of considering connection, proximity, and creation I'm looking at a screen. I'm holding it. I lift my index finger to tap on it. An image appears. I drag my index finger across the screen. Another image appears, and another and another and another. Compared to the world it replicates, the image is small, but it has depth and colour. My eyes roll into it. The retina is attached to the core of the nervous system, the brain. My brain is in my hand. It's vibrating. I drag my index finger across the screen and a voice calls my name. I greet it as I place the screen against my ear. I've moved seamlessly into the corner of my mind where I concentrate. Once the exchange is over, the screen turns to black. I see the deposits of grease on the aluminosilicate glass where my finger and my ear touched it. What made the things move and the voice resonate, however, was not my skin with its minuscule deposits of fat and dead cells. It was the electricity at the tip of my index finger. It disrupted the electrostatic field of the glass layers, awaking the images, pulling them up onto the glass. This was not haptic, it was contact. Heptane in Greek meant to grasp, to claw, to contain something within the clasp of a muscle, a bone, the flesh, through the thin layer of skin that holds them together and tells them that they're working, the thing is held. Hey, we can do something with it. But contact is something else. When I was studying in Paris, I went to the College de France to listen to Georgiamben's lectures. I can't remember any of it except a sentence. Contact is the absence of representation. I've tried to find its source, I seem to remember that he was quoting someone, but I haven't found it yet. Contact is the absence of representation. A sentence uttered thirty years ago when I was so intent of remembering that I forgot everything. A quick search for Il Contato El Cenza di Representanza provides a stream of legal suggestions. The origin of the sentence will most likely remain lost. I've carried it for a while, like when you keep a new ingredient in the back of the ladder because you can't cook with it. Once in a while you come across a recipe and you think you may have found something to use it in. But let me stop right here. Ideas are not spices, even if they can be spicy. They have a life of their own, and they grow inside you, carrying trains of thought to the surface of consciousness. This sentence may have been responsible for my relentless fascination with the line, and with beginnings, and with elementary gestures and forms, the line as the moment of contact, a stylus moving across a surface, a papyrus, a sheet of fine interlaced fibers of mulberry tree, a soft cellulose A4 page. That moment is something unique which many artists try to preserve and expand. Emmanuel Beranger runs toward the wall at great speed as if it wasn't there, and he makes it disappear for a quick second as he continues running up the wall at ninety degrees. His body rotates and then jumps onto the ground. The work called Rebondir, is one of my favorites, because it becomes apparent only when you've read the label. Oh there's a work on this wall, people asked. The work was a stain of his bare feet at almost chest level, traces of the accumulated dirt of the floor fixated by his perspiration. It was almost negligible and it didn't have the beautiful aura of a footprint. This notion of trace was used by a lot of theorists to talk about photography. Intellectuals entertain a certain romantic disposition towards the trace and analogic devices because they still operate with traces, even though like the screen, the outcome is an image replicating what we see. Footprints, marks, indentations fascinate. They're the outcomes of contact. But our strongest, most omnipresent form of trace is the photographic image, analogic, of course, although the digital one bears its memory, as a trace left by light and shadow on celluloid. We are dealing then not with presence, but with past presence, which is to say the hollowed out presence of an absence, wrote Margaret Iverson. What to be romantic or literal? I like literal. Contact is the absence of representation because it's the absence of distance. You kiss with your eyes closed. Contact is what happens before the trace. It's togetherness, it's my list of contacts, it's infection, contagion. In mathematics it's the touching of a straight line and a curve, of two curves or of two surfaces, the meeting of two curves or surfaces at a point so as to have a common tangent or tangent plane at that point, the coincidence of two or more consecutive points on each of two curves. Contact is a point or several, the point of contact, where two lines meet, but also where they separate. Contact is momentaneous. During the pandemic, Katrin Straubel called the museum staff of the Stuttgart Kund Museum, where she was invited to do an exhibition into one of its spaces, a twenty five meter long hallway. The director, the curators, the security personnel, the assistants, the cleaners, and the HR people all met her there, one at a time. She asked about their daily tasks next to the long pristine wall of the space. They talked about sitting at the desk, moving paintings, filling up Excel sheets, preparing food in the kitchen, mopping the corridors, standing still in the museum rooms, or distributing leaflets. Meanwhile, she invited them to touch the wall while they were speaking. Some did, almost distractingly, others would forget about it, and some were very performative about it, almost dancing. I can imagine the surprising association between touching and speaking, the cold and uneventful feel of a modern wall, the sensual liberation of an unusual contact, the perfunctory gesture for some. After this unskilled performance only their loose dead cells, the precise chemistry of their humours remained on the walls, invisible to the naked eye. Katrin Strobel then applied forensic powder onto the wall, revealing the endless ruminations about everyday actions, professional gestures performed without anyone giving it a second thought. This was during the pandemic the museum was closed, mouths were covered with masks. Contact and therefore contagion was avoided. You could touch things but with a fine layer between, a glove, a tissue. So in this context, contact was present as a menace, but also as a basic unfulfilled need. Touching the wall must have felt transgression and good, as if the words were reenacted by the hands, and then the feeling of freely touching somehow became a hug, warmth, as much as its lack thereof. The focus was on the hands, the body, as usual, in Strobel's work. What you do, what you touch, what touches you, not what you grab, take with you and use, but what at some point in time and space crosses paths with you, alters you while you keep going your way, moving about in your space, in your life. Over this lair of smudged desires, Straubel hung her own drawings, framed, suggesting that their content was perhaps more permeable than expected. One of the images is taken from a documentary showing the liberation of Germany at the end of the Second World War, where the General de Gul pinned medals on different soldiers, here, in Strobel's drawing, an Arab man, most likely from the former French colonies of North Africa. The scene took place about a hundred meters away from the Kunstmuseum, and Strobel, patiently, diligently, draws it again. Nevertheless, what the visitors could see was a dirty wall, bearing partial traces of people's hands and fingers, as if they did the unthinkable in a museum, which is to touch, which, unless prescribed, doesn't happen in art spaces. It always haunted me this privilege of the curator, the technician, even the artist or the artist's family, sometimes their kids, who live with the artwork as if it was part of a strange ritual, passing from hand to hand, dusted regularly, cleaned. But when one sees the work in a museum, it is solely for the pleasure of the eyes, or the strange choreography of the viewer, as we call museum goers, getting close, walking around, penetrating its face, if it has one, sitting in front of it. But doesn't the eye touch? Doesn't it feel textures in its own way? The delicate feathery touch of a Fragonar, the oily, mushy and yet dusty feel of a painting by Anselm Kiefer. Aren't compelling images more focused on contact than on haptic adventures? Haptain means to fosten. The emphasis was and still is on what you do once you touch something. It focuses on the uses a connection allows for, but when there is an encounter, a tangential interaction, there is an exchange rather than an action. If I touch a hammer, it's to grasp it and move it in order to hit a nail and achieve something. Contact is simply the happening, sometimes unintentional, of a recognition, as in a reciprocal acknowledgement. But once contact has occurred, the thing is gone, the curve curves, and only its negative remains. The light touching the celluloid, coated with gelatin emulsion, with microscopic photosensitive crystals creates something else which we've called a photographic image, where the outlines of the shapes that form objects are drawn with light and shadow. The trace is a leftover layer, which at times still bears a resemblance with a thing that made it, as is the case with photography most of times, and at times it doesn't. If romantics enjoy contemplating the absence of the presence, I prefer to think of the third thing, the line, the direction, the meaning, the compulsion, the finger mindlessly yielding electricity. To be in touch with our friends and family, we perform a sort of mindless contact, swiping, tapping, opening up a space of abstracted experiences. To be in contact is to have an open line of communication. To wear contacts is to reestablish a constant and simultaneous relation with the visible world. The line is contacts, it's an immediate and continuous complementary relation between two behaviors. The stylus indents, and the soft grainy material of the ground receives and gives back the mark. Why think of this as an absence rather than a communication? But who is communicating? In Julie Meritou's catalogue A Universal History of Everything and Nothing, Marina Warner remembers listening to a lecture by the Moroccan scholar Abdelfatar Kilito, where he was asked Who invented writing? I love his answer because it diffuses the nationalist hubris behind the question. Kilito answered Animals It was animals who taught us how to read. Warner remembers the discomforts in the room and a few giggles. Notice that he puts the onus on reading, not on writing. Reading came before writing, at least symbolically, because we had to learn how to read the marks animals made, the tracks on the ground, but also the flights of birds, Warner writes. But you'll say flights do not leave traces and that's where I will say they do. Ideation is contact. The emphasis on haptic devices is strange. They're not haptic, which is why they're so magical to us. They're weirdly technological and ancestral. By haptic we now mean device which works through touch by reacting to it. However, haptic is usually a one way experience. You pick up a hammer and you use it. You grab a flat pebble and throw it. But then the pebble flies along the water tangentially. It affects it ever so slightly, forming circles as it rebounds over and over until it loses momentum. In Portugal, most folk stories start with back when animals knew how to talk, etc So they taught us how to form words too animals. Violen Luchou's work Hyberd, where she sings different bird songs, which she carefully annotated during months and months of bird watching, awakes a primordial memory. She translated different types of bird song into her own invented symbols, created for each species, so that she could interpret them by singing, and become a hybrid between woman and bird, high bird. But to me it evoked this moment that never existed in such purity, surely, where we discovered our own vocal cords and their possible sounds. They started by not being words just yet, like the approximative spelling you see in old archives when orthography wasn't totally calibrated. The lightning in the sky is a letter before the Z ever became one. The bird footprint on the ground was another letter before the Y. You can see them on the wall of Paleolithic cavesforms. You can see why graphine, which is the ancestor of the word graphic, encompasses writing and drawing through the line and the mark as contact. Graphine contains a small part of the touching and touched body, which works not at the level of representation, but at the level of information right after contact occurred. In the Perigor in France, there is a cave with art from the upper Paleolithic, but before that, way before humans started going into the caves, bears lived there. There is a whole area with hollow bear nests, circular beds which look like craters where a group of bears slept soundly, hibernated. You can imagine the pace breathing of those strange animals, able to stand upright but also moving on forelegs, between bipeds and quadrupeds, as if hesitating whether to move to the humanoid side. Another thing they did was to manicure their nails on the walls of the cave, which are made of a soft limestone, always wet and damp, perfect for mark making. I don't know if our retinas are different, or if our retinas are perhaps faulty, but the animals don't seem as mesmerized as we are with imprints, traces and marks. The Magdalenian people who use that cave noticed the claw marks. They were used to read the drawings of nature and started replicating them. The bears taught them how to draw on the limestone. There are some drawings made by humans over the ones made by bears. But more importantly, the Huffignac cave has many other types of drawings, one of which is the line made by two or three fingers across the walls of the cave. It reminds me of Katrin Strogel's wall, but here with lots of strange stories to tell, protuberant flintstones, damp and thick surfaces, progressively lit and thrown into darkness again by the passage of people with torches. There are mammoths, rhinoceros, bisons, but also tectiforms and finger flutings, that is, walls and ceilings covered with serpentine lines made with the index finger or two fingers, swiping, dragging across the cold moon milk, a precipitate from limestone and other aggregates. The Magdalenian people went to caves for contact as the bears had taught them. As a Glaswegian artist Carla Black put it, quote, the marks will never dry and remain as malleable as the day they were made. This to me is what art really is, an impetus toward physical response. I'm always trying to get back to that. If we were suddenly giants stomping on the planet, looking around, we would notice the precision of the drawings from the time when animals could speak, or when we were still collectively fluent in bird and bear. We would see the economy of the mammoth depictions, their close cohabitation with a naked and linear contact of the finger flutings. We would also notice that in Europe we suddenly became enthralled with these marks, which became elaborate superimpositions of lines, smudges, planes, thick patina, taken to the utmost detail until we couldn't take it anymore, and between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries of our current era, we had to invent photography. We would certainly notice, were we giants, that Europe is the exception, and that we've become more and more attuned to the precision of the image, to the point where we invented a screen called retina, containing the little squares which compose our images in such a way that they're sharper than our vision, and so that we can move them, enlarge them, cut them with our agile fingers, ceaselessly working the star milk of our screens. This episode was recorded on the twenty seventh of May. It is the first draft of my lecture reading, I don't know what to call it, at the Miers van der Hoog House in Barcelona. At this point, when you are listening to this episode, the conversation will have taken place, and so it may reappear in a third version on my Substack in the form of a text, most likely, as it usually happens. So don't hesitate in downloading the app if you don't have it. Substack is a really interesting form of social media. It's as if blue sky and Instagram had had a baby. So give it a chance. Um give it some time. You can find other than me other people who publish texts about medieval writing, about um birds, so many topics, about football, about gaming, so many topics. You do have to check references, you do have to do your own job, but that's what you're supposed to do, isn't it? You're not supposed to just accept what people tell you, you have to do your own research, and I think that Substack kind of gives you that excitement of the maverick, and at the same time that responsibility of the adult, uh modern, awakened reader that you are, that you can potentially be if you want to give it a chance. So I am in there as Joanna P. R Nevis. It's easy to find me. And if you don't want to read, if you prefer to listen, well, there's lots of past episodes if you haven't listened to all the episodes of Exhibitionistus, and there's also Instagram. So don't forget to reach out to us if you have suggestions, if you have comments, you can leave comments on YouTube, on Instagram, on Spotify. It's great to hear from you. I put these episodes out there and then crickets, I don't know, and I'm so curious. Anyway, it is an honor as ever to be in your eardrums. I love that you stuck it out till the end, and I will be back in two weeks. If you want to know more about the next episode, don't forget subscribe to the newsletter. You have a link to it in the show's notes, or you can go to exhibitionists.com on the page, the homepage. So thank you. Take very good care of yourselves. Thank you so much for being here, and I will be with you very, very soon. Have a good one. Exhibitionists is an indie podcast with its perks and its productive challenges. But I'm very thankful to be in your eardrums or somewhere in your screens. Don't forget to support independent content. Give us a nice rating, subscribe to the newsletter, and if you can, click on the show's notes or go to our website and buy us a latte. Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you for listening. Have a good one.