Touching and Imagining

An Introduction to Tactile Art

Jan Svankmajer, Stanley Dalby

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857735300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Tecniche artistiche

Jan Svankmajer wrote this remarkable book on tactile art when he stopped directing films and experimented intensively with tactile art after repeated censorship by the communist governmnent of Czechoslovakia. Illustrated with over 100 imges, this book is organised around many reproductions of Svanmajker's wondrous tactile art objects, tactile poems, experiments and games. It includes dialogues with, and artworks by, other collaborating artists from the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists. Svankmajer also gathers together as contributors such notable exponents of tactical experience as Edgar Allan Poe, Guillaume Appollinaire, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim, Edith Clifford Williams, Ay-O, Valie Export, F.T. Marinetti and Karel Teige.

1

INTRODUCTION

Please Touch

Marcel Duchamp, 1947

Liberation always comprises of achieving, against degenerate stylistic, cultural and historical customs, against empty philosophy, abstract logic, withered intellect and barren tradition, a forever young, forever regenerating, accessible, honest and truthful vision, which does not violate objects or life but freely surrenders to the fullness of the moment. I can imagine an artist who would correct an occasion of corrupted vision with an appeal to honest touch; liberation means not being afraid of overthrowing the hierarchy of authority and summoning the courage for honest primitivism in times of perverse, false and illusory cultural and artistic complexity.

F. X. Šalda, 1901¹

OUR SIGHT IS being corrupted on an unimaginable scale. Daily it is drowned and blunted by a flood of the most banal consumerist culture which, aided by television, commercial film and advertising, degrades our visual sensibilities. To force the eyes to ‘stop’, to rest on an object and to enable its comprehension by our visual perceptions, is becoming more difficult with our increasingly superficial powers of observation. Whenever any of our senses have to deal with issues of art, we need to establish favourable conditions for this by freeing a specific sense, or its fundamental capacity, from utilitarian functions. The physical sense, commonly referred to as touch, by its very name implies that its exploitation happens above all with hands, with fingers. Contemporary technological civilization is daily liberating our hands from the coarsest of manual labour, thereby potentially freeing them for ‘aesthetic’ perceptions. The current dilemma facing our tactile sense is either to let it atrophy, as has happened during our evolution as humans, along with other senses which became superfluous (the latest one being the sense of smell), or to cultivate and apply it to functions other than manual labour. It will certainly require development over a long time. It will be a matter of adaptation, but didn’t the eye and the ear have to adapt? Precisely because right now we are standing at practically the zero point of this new function for our sense of touch, I feel justified in believing in a maximally authentic experience of the tactile world within and outside of us.

The physical sense has a special standing among the so-called higher senses. While vision and hearing are plainly objective senses, taste and smell are subjective. Touch is somewhere in the middle, partly objective, partly subjective. While touching, we project a sensation outwardly, outside of us; at the same time we perceive it subjectively, on our skin. It means that touch can play an important role in overcoming the opposition of Object – Subject. Perhaps precisely because touch had, of all senses, the longest utilitarian function it could not for practical reasons become ‘aesthetic’, it retained primarily a certain ‘primitive’ connection with the world. There is also the fact that the physical sense plays one of the most important roles in eroticism. This ‘primitivism’, not yet trivialized by aesthetic codes, and the instinctive experiences of tactile perception, will always throw us back to the deepest layers of our unconscious. Touch could well be the very sense most suitable for the functions of modern art. The fact that up to now touch stood on the sidelines of art history can be put down to its slavery to the mundane, from which it is slowly freeing itself. The experimentation that I am here proposing originated in an interpretative play that I prepared in 1974 for my friends in the Surrealist Group. The results were so thought provoking that, for me, henceforth touch became a potentially revolutionary class of our sensory life, brutally exploited and suppressed, supposedly in the interest of culture and civilization.

2

BETWEEN UTILITARIANISM AND IMAGINATION

The history of human spirit, as seen through psychoanalytical research, shows that all human needs are comprised firstly of material and utilitarian needs and how the fulfilment of one leads to the fulfilment of the other. Any aesthetic activities first lean towards the utilitarian functions serving practical life (cave paintings, Middle Ages trade skills, folklore) and only later becomes independent of them. Aesthetic activity and impressionability, just like sexuality, comes to life in conjunction with the most important living, physical and working functions.

Karel Teige, ‘Poetry for the Five Senses or the Second Manifesto of Poetism’, 1928¹

6. Touching is one of our basic needs. If we could not use our sense of touch we would suffer mental deprivation. Under each square centimetre of the tip of our forefinger are 200 nerve endings; they register cold, heat or pain according to the nerve structure.

7. Meissner’s tactile loop magnified by factor of 150. The oval cluster of cells of this loop is one millimetre below the fingertip. The group in the middle represents tactile cells connected to nerve connections. The spiral nerve transmits a signal to the brain where it is identified. Tactile sensations are associated with visual ones that manifest themselves strongly, for instance, in the erotic field.

Tactile utilitarianism objects

Comb

Toothbrush

Face cloth and brush

Soap

Ointments and creams

Manicure scissors

Clothes, shoes

Massage equipment

Working equipment, tools, materials

Condoms

Surgical tools

Weapons

etc.

Tactile utilitarianism activities

Manual work

General sexual activity

Visit to a doctor (medical examination)

Surgical procedure

Barefoot walking

Sunbaking

Swimming

Body washing

Getting dressed

Trimming fingernails

Perspiring

etc.

Experiments in expanding the utilitarian functions of touch

These experiments take place in the two spheres of our psychological life:

1. Touch; used to enlarge the possibilities of inter-human communication.

2. Tactile therapy.

Research into the fundamental importance of tactile communication, conducted in the USA in the 1950s by Frank A. Geldard, Professor of Psychology and Dean of the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, can be regarded as significant. Even though this research was undertaken for totally utilitarian purposes (it was financed by the Ministry of Navy) and has little connection with my experimentation, it is interesting for several reasons.

Science finally took notice of the unrealized potential of touch and commenced its systematic investigation.² Furthermore, it pointed to the quantitative range of tactile sensibilities and technical perspective of its exploitation, which could also have some bearing on tactile art.³

Although tactile therapy could be classed in some ways among the unconventional utilitarian actions (attempting relaxation, personal balance, improving of physical and mental condition and so on), at the same time it fits into imaginative tactile procedures, reminiscent of a simple nursery rhyme.⁴

There is no doubt that the application of tactile therapy can have a considerable effect on the cultivation of touch, thereby serving as a preparatory education of future tactile ‘audiences’. I regard this as being of major significance for the new tactile arts. Jerzy Grotowski has attempted expansion of tactile perceptions beyond narrow utilitarian functions in some para-theatrical projects. Richard Mennen, in ‘Grotowski’s Paratheatrical Projects,’ describes one such experience:

As with Scierski’s ‘narrow group,’ Cieslak’s was a one-day introduction to a process that ordinarily takes several weeks. There were more than thirty participants who waded up streams, jumped in mud holes, danced with flaming torches, caressed each other with wheat but there were so many experiences that later I could not recall the precise sequence. By the end I felt a profound connection with the natural world and that I had begun to search in a very physical way for roots and sources. One of the most memorable moments was when I found myself digging with my hands into the loose earth of a recently ploughed field full of roots and asking the roots who I was. I wrote in my journal:

As I dug deeper into the earth, my whole arm in it and the roots, I felt in my body, with each thrust, something strong, hidden, like birth, like sex, like death; frightening and necessary. I do not know what it was, but it was something. It was also like a source.⁵

It seems that the purpose of these experiments is to break with the usual stereotypes of tactile (and non-tactile) sensory experiences, to divorce them from utilitarianism and to stimulate the imagination. In that sense it is a pragmatic preparation of sensitivity, of its sharpening, of freeing it from utilitarian habits, to enable us to perceive the world and its challenges in a new way. It is comparable to the preparation of tactile perception of objects – as described by Marinetti in his manifesto. Thus even the para-theatrical project of Jerzy Grotowski and similarly the tactile therapy of Bernard Gunther...