Showing posts with label smoothness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label smoothness. Show all posts

15 Dec 2021

Look Don't Touch (Notes on Art and Haptic Compulsion)

 Image credit: Raul Arboleda / AFP / Getty Images
 
 
I. 
 
Touching objects is surely a vital activity. But just as green grocers don't like you handling the fruit and veg, so gallery owners seem to have a real problem with people touching works of art on display. 
 
Obviously, there are practical reasons for this; dirt particles and perspiration on the hands can stain or, over time, cause serious damage to the surface of a sculpture, for example, which it might be difficult (or even impossible) to repair. Whilst porous materials, such as wood or stone, are particularly vulnerable, even works made of bronze or stainless steel, are not entirely immune to damage. 
 
Thus, in public art museums the world over there are signs reading do not touch, white boundary lines marked on the floor, and security guards lurking nearby to ensure people keep their distance. The curators want the public to engage with the art and be inspired by it, but they want them to do so with their eyes whilst keeping their filthy paws off. 
 
Oh, and just to be clear, kissing statues is also strictly forbidden and very much frowned upon.   
 
 
II. 
 
Practical concerns aside, there are clearly other issues at play here; aesthetics is founded upon an ideal of detachment and enforcement of the golden rule of look don't touch. Nietzsche, however, mocks this ability to gaze upon beauty apparently free of all desire as immaculate perception and suggests that objective contemplation is very often a disguised form of emasculated leering: click here for a post in which I discuss this. 
 
We see this aesthetic idealism expressed in Byung-Chul Han's 2015 work Die Errettung des Schönen (trans. rather prosaically in English as Saving Beauty (2018)), where he writes disapprovingly of Jeff Koons's sculptures on the grounds that their ultra-smooth surfaces not only reflect a social imperative lacking in all negativity, but cause "a 'haptic compulsion' to touch them, even the desire to suck them" [1].
 
Han writes: 
 
"It is the positivity of smoothness alone that causes the haptic compulsion. It invites the observer to take an attitude without distance, to touch. An aesthetic judgement, however, presupposes a contemplative distance. The art of the smooth abolishes such distance." [2]     
 
Like Hegel, Byung-Chul Han wants art to be meaningful and that requires visual appreciation. For sight, along with hearing, is a theoretical sense that allows us to interpret, judge, and reflect upon a work. Smelling, tasting, or touching an object might inform us of its material reality and sensible qualities, but won't enable us to make profound sense of it as an artwork. 
 
And like Roland Barthes, Byung-Chul Han believes the sense of touch to be "'the most demystifying of all senses, unlike sight which is the most magical'" [3]. Why? Because whilst the latter preserves distance, the former negates it. To touch an object is to demystify it and make it available for enjoyment and consumption: "The sense of touch destroys the negativity of what is wholly other. It secularizes what it touches." [4]
 
For Han, Jeff Koons's seamless sculptures may embody "a perfect and optimized surface without depth and shallows" [5], but so do soap bubbles made of air and emptiness and as any West Ham fan will tell you, there's no real salvation to be found in blowing bubbles ...  
 
 
III.
 
The problem is, whilst I might agree with many aspects of Han's critique of smoothness, I'm a little more ambivalent on the subject than him (and I also like the work of Jeff Koons, as discussed in a recent post: click here).
 
Further, it seems to me that professor of museum studies, Fiona Candlin, is right to call for a radical rethinking of aesthetics as it has traditionally been conceived and to challenge the idea of art museums as sites of visual learning. In her 2010 study, Art, Museums and Touch, Candlin demonstrates that touch was - and remains - of crucial importance within the history, theory, practice, and appreciation of art, whilst, at the same time, contesting ideas of touch as an unmediated and uncomplex (i.e., primitive and inferior) mode of discovery [6].     
 
Having spent many years investigating why visitors to galleries and museums often can't help reaching out to (illicitly) touch exhibits, Candlin shows just how common this is. Whether those moonlike philosophers who wish us all to simply gaze upon life like it or not, the fact is many people want to physically touch objects they admire and don't like to think of art as something out of bounds and out of reach (nor do they wish to creep around a gallery speaking in hushed tones as if in a church surrounded by sacred relics).
 
Ultimately, perhaps this haptic compulsion is not a sign of an obsessive disorder, nor the mark of a philistine, but, rather a form of resistance to an overly visual (virtual) world. And perhaps sculptures today should be exhibited in darkened rooms where visitors in blindfolds are invited to feel their way around, physically interacting with objects and one another, groping their way into a future democracy; the democracy of touch [7].         
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2018), p. 3.  

[2] Ibid.

[3] Roland Barthes writing in Mythologies, quoted by Byung-Chul Han in Saving Beauty, p. 4.

[4] Byung-Chul an, Saving Beauty, p.  4.
 
[5] Ibid

[6] See Fiona Candlin, Art, Museums and Touch, (Manchester University Press, 2010).  
 
[7] The democracy of touch is an idea found in D. H. Lawrence's late work. I have written several posts discussing the idea; click here, for example, or here
      Interestingly, however, Lawrence isn't always pro-touch; see for example what he says in Chapter X of Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) about "hands exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, in fingering, and in masturbation". 
      As for aesthetics, whilst Lawrence doesn't feel the English are devoid of feeling for the plastic arts, he does believe them to be full of fear for the body and that this fear distorts their vision and instinctive-intuitive consciousness. Thus it is, says Lawrence, that even those intellectuals and critics who get an ecstatic thrill from looking at artworks are "only undergoing a cerebral excitation" and remain essentially unmoved and untouched. See 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 182-217. The line I quote from is on p. 190.    
 
   

5 Dec 2021

On Smoothness

Jeff Koons: Rabbit (1986) 
Stainless steel sculpture [1]
 
 
I. 
 
D. H. Lawrence famously contrasted the shape and surface of a peach with that of a billiard ball; privileging the former, velvety and wrinkled with secrets, over that of the latter, so round and finished but lacking in voluptuous beauty for all its smooth perfection [2].  
 
Clearly, for Lawrence, this is an erotico-aesthetic issue; he doesn't like the look or feel of the billiard ball as an object and regrets that it doesn't have the indentation or groove of the peach running along its body; the ripple down the sphere with the suggestion of incision [3].
 
 
II.
 
Byung-Chul Han is another writer who doesn't much care for smoothness and he not only perceives a connection between Brazilian waxing, the iPhone, and the sculptures of Jeff Koons, but objects to all these things on politico-philosophical grounds. 
 
Speaking in conversation with Niels Boeing and Andreas Lebert in 2014, Han explained why he sees similarities between these things and why the ideal of smoothness troubles him:
 
"The commonality isn't that difficult to see: it is the smooth. Smoothness is characteristic of our present. Do you know the G Flex, a smarthone by LG? This smartphone has a special covering. If it gets scratched, the scratch quickly disappears. That is, it has a self-healing skin, almost an organic skin. The smartphone therefore remains perfectly smooth. I ask myself: What is the problem with an object getting a few scratches? Why this striving for a smooth surface? And straightaway a connection opens up between the smooth smartphone, smooth skin, and love." [4] 
 
Han continues: 
 
"The smooth surface of the smartphone is a skin that cannot be damaged, that can avoid any injury. And isn't it the case that today we seek to avoid any kind of harm in love as well? We do not want to be vulnerable; we shy away from hurting and from being hurt. [...] 
      [...] Even art  seeks to avoid injury. There is no damage to be found on a Jeff Koons sculpture - no tears, no fault lines, no sharp edges, no seam either. Everything flows in soft and smooth transitions. It all appears rounded, polished, smoothed out - Jeff Koons's art is dedicated to the smooth surface." [5]    
 
 
III. 
 
What, then, do I think of this? 
 
Well, on the one hand, I quite agree that it's often the irregularities and imperfections that make things (including people) lovable and longtime readers will know that I subscribe to a gargoyle aesthetic [click here, or here, for example], which means I challenge all ideas of wholeness, or completion, or smooth perfection. The devil - which is to say the seductive charm - is always in the detail.    
 
On the other hand, I've also indicated in past posts that I'm a fan of the work of Jeff Koons [click here, or here, for example], have written on the beauty and genius of the iPhone [click here], wear spectacles with anti-scratch lenses, and prefer girls with legs that are silky smooth, rather than rough and hairy [6]
 
So let's just say I'm a little more ambivalent on this question than Han ... 
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Koons had three identical stainless steel rabbits made in 1986. One of these figures sold for over $91,000,000 in May 2019, making it the most expensive work sold by a living artist at auction. 
 
[2] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Peach', in The Poems, Vo. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 232. The poem can be found on the Poetry Foundation website: click here
      I'm aware of the fact that were one to closely examine a billiard ball one would find that it is neither perfectly round nor perfectly smooth, despite being machine manufactured and cast in resilient plastic materials. It might look (to the naked eye) and feel (to the poet's fingertip) absolutely smooth, but there are numerous micro pits, bumps and scratches on the surface of a billiard ball. 

[3] One is reminded reading this that, for Lawrence "fruits are all of them female" and that he cannot help relating the body of the fig, peach, or pomegranate to the body of woman and her sexual organs. See The Poems Vol. I, p. 229. 
      This metaphorical comparison between fruit and sex is of course long established in the arts; it is, in fact, something of a cliché for (predominantly male) poets and painters to compare breasts to melons, nipples to dark cherries, and moist cunts to ripe figs showing crimson through the purple slit, as D. H. Lawrence would have it. I comment at greater length on this elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark; click here for example, or here.
 
[4] Byung-Chul Han, 'I Am Sorry, But These Are the Facts', in Capitalism and the Death Drive, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2021), pp. 125-26. 
 
[5] Ibid., p. 126. 
      Note that Byung-Chul Han sets out his thinking on smoothness (in relation to the body and to aesthetics) in Saving Beauty, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2018). See the first three chapters in particular. 

[6] Having said that, in one of the earliest posts on this blog (8 Jan 2013), I wrote with regret about the universal Brazilianization of women obliged by porno-social convention to wax or shave their pubic region and recalled the words of Henry Miller to the effect that a hairless cunt lacks mystery and resembles a dead clam (one assumes that Byng-Chul Han would agree with this). Click here if interesed in reading the post in full.