What Is a Form of Art That Can Be Touch
To touch and exist touched:
Affective, immersive and critical contemporary art?
Saara Hacklin
In my article, I will present equally a case study the collection exhibition shown at the Museum of Gimmicky Art Kiasma in 2016.[1] The starting indicate for the exhibition was the metaphor of touch. Equally a concept, bear on is ambivalent: it is more intimate than sight, which has been the traditional metaphor for noesis in Western thinking. Nevertheless touching is besides about grasping or understanding, as in information technology we are taking hold of something. Our curatorial squad, Eija Aarnio, Arja Miller, and myself, was interested in touch early on, because with information technology the distance to the observed is lost: when touching something nosotros, besides, are existence touched. To be clear, nosotros did non desire to create an exhibition where spectators are actually able to touch. Instead, we were looking at the collections of the museum and searching for artworks that would "bear upon" united states of america—works that were able get under our skin. While forming the conceptual cadre of the exhibition, our curatorial team recognized a tension in the way in which "touchy bug," affects and emotions, are perceived in our society. On the one manus, we were interested in emotions and affects raised by the artworks. Nosotros wanted to focus on the immersive dimension of the art that seems to escape verbalization, a dimension that makes utilise of the multisensory experience and addresses the viewer in a direct manner. On the other hand, nosotros as well became enlightened of how guild in general has been taken over by an emotional surge. If previously feelings and emotions were not meant to exist shown in public, today they have go commonplace. What was emotional and affective seems no longer to exist private, but shared and public.[2] In fact, stiff emotions seem to be a prerequisite for success, be it a affair of reality idiot box or politics. This is also connected to the search for extreme emotions and experiences, an attribute we felt needed to be included in the exhibition—non the to the lowest degree because in museums' competition for audiences, the experience-laden works are often seen as an respond.[3]
I will discuss here the concept of our collection exhibition through selected instance studies. I attempt to shed light to the discursive (i.due east., theoretical) groundwork of our "immersive" exhibition project. Unfortunately, I am not able to cover the whole exhibition, which was based on the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma'south collections, and included over twenty-v participants. By choosing only v artworks for this article, I necessarily create an interpretation. However, my intention is to demonstrate with the selected artworks aspects that, from my curatorial perspective, are important for the thematics: how the spectator can be touched through multiple senses, which is especially reflected in the works that bring forth different senses and the embodied spectatorship, as well equally address the traditional mind-torso dualism, and lastly, how the theme is connected to the emotional surge that has taken over the public sphere to the signal it becomes normal to speak of emotions of such inanimate things as the market. In the following, I volition not present an in-depth analysis of the individual works, only instead point towards interpretations that, in my listen, communicate the exhibition's conceptual background.[iv] Prior to presenting the case studies, however, I volition clarify some of the theoretical word that influenced the planning process.
The affective plow
Society in general is obsessed with feelings, emotions, and affects. Likewise, art inquiry as well as cultural studies and sociology have for some years been interested in the melancholia. Media theorist Marie-Luise Angerer comments how "emotion and touch are at present viewed as crucial to cognition and advice."[five] Within fine art research, this can be seen in the interest towards the emotional and affective reception of the artworks past the public. Indeed, some researchers speak of the affective plough. In their introduction to The Impact Theory Reader, Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg bespeak to the watershed moment that came in 1995, with the publication of Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank's essay, "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold," too equally Brian Massumi's "The Autonomy of the Affect."[6] It is impossible to summarize all of the theoretical discussion influencing the so-called turn.[vii] Yet, for the sake of this article, I wish to point towards some parts of information technology: the of import discussion around phenomenology concerning embodiment and perception,[8] as well as the turn seen every bit a counterreaction to the previous theoretical accent on language and meaning in poststructuralism and deconstruction.[ix] My ain perspective on the thematics of the affective is deeply rooted Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and its legacy in continental philosophy. His studies in perception and embodiment have influenced my approach to the field of gimmicky art, as I look at the artworks from the perspective of philosophy.[x]
Through the renewed involvement in bear upon, questions of the torso, the sensuous, and the emotional have become central for many researchers. Inside the affective turn there are unlike ways to define touch. Massumi underlines how touch on is singled-out from emotions and feelings. According to him, bear upon predates personal feelings and cultural emotions, as it is something that does not yet, or cannot take a name. He comments that "emotion and affect—if affect is intensity—follow different logics and pertain to different orders."[11] Affect is something that is not within the conscious thought. In emotions, the intensity of bear on has been labeled and owned.
Through the theoretical discussion around the melancholia plow, information technology is possible to find concepts and tools to talk over the emotional surge in our society. Every bit Angerer has remarked, "Today, the enthusiasm with which affects, emotions and feelings are habitually used to underpin arguments points to a dispositif of impact."[12] Angerer uses the Foucauldian concept of dispositif to depict a permeating discursive construction that affects us both in institutional and individual level. Every bit such, the affective plough is non an elementary concept—at that place has been interest into affect and emotions inside philosophy for centuries.[13] I choose to use the term here in its broad sense, to refer to the heightened interest in affect and emotions seen in both researchers and Western societies. The interest has brought to the fore the challenges of affect—those in-betweens that escape conscious thought—merely also turned attention to emotions and aspects of human experience that take long been either unarticulated or considered unimportant. While my outset case studies draw from the bodily feel, the subsequently examples indicate more towards the social aspects examined within the melancholia turn.
Touch on and its limits
In the history of Western philosophy, senses take been bandage in unlike roles. For instance, Aristotle remarked how perception works in dissimilar means: gustatory modality and touch crave contact, whereas the other senses allow distance.[14] Of all the senses, vision has been the nearly ordinarily used metaphor for certainty, but so again, it has besides been perceived every bit something dubious. This double demark can be seen, for instance, in the Cartesian tradition: how it both rejects senses, as they are associated with charade, and how vision is used as a metaphor for knowledge. In fact, this association with seeing has permeated Western thinking to the signal that, equally Hannah Arendt has commented, "Thinking has been thought of in terms of seeing."[xv]
Touch differs from vision radically, as with information technology the distance to that which is sensed is lost. Moreover, some other aspect that seems to haunt philosophers is the way in which bear upon escapes usa. Jacques Derrida writes, "Nosotros can simply touch on on a surface, which is to say the pare or thin peel of a limit."[sixteen] The idea that touching is non taking in possession, such as grasping or taking hold of something, but is merely approaching something that does not permit itself be touched. An of import aspect in touching has to do with the disproportion of the feel. The phenomena of touch has been discussed, amidst others, by Merleau-Ponty. His philosophy influenced many thinkers and artists, particularly in its ability to bring attention to the embodied experience and how it is non possible to perceive the world without one's body: nosotros cannot step outside the world and notice it from outside, as we are already in information technology. These insights have affected the way we call back almost visual art, too.[17] I am particularly interested in the reversibility and asymmetry of touch. Merleau-Ponty wrote about the experience of a handshake and the double touching that takes identify in his posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible. In the chapter "The Intertwining — the Chiasm," he wished to address the double nature of the body equally the seen and the seer, the touched and the touching, but he argues that these two experiences, the touching and the existence touched, are not simultaneous or coinciding. The ii hands that touch 1 another always remain split up, and destine the roles of touching and of existence touched between them. Reversibility is "ever imminent and never realized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right mitt touching the things, but I never reach coincidence."[18]
Here, the rejection of total coincidence equals departure. Nosotros cannot touch without being touched, and yet these two never seem to coincide totally; the moment is ever defined past asymmetry. This double nature of touch on—exposing oneself to something other and, at the same time, the impossibility to accomplish full coincidence serve as a metaphor for encountering artworks.
Smells of the earth
Christian Skeel and Morten Skriver's Babylon (1996) is a piece of work of art that touches the spectator through the sense of smell.[19] The work consists of twenty-nine dissimilar smells placed in ceramic pots. The championship of the work is a reference to the ancient city of Babylon in Mesopotamia, a metropolis known every bit a trading hub and a melting pot for different tribes. It is also the origin of the Biblical story nigh the Tower of Babel that has been used to explain the multiple languages nosotros speak—and the inability of humans to work together.
The smells that Skeel and Skriver chose for their work come up from dissimilar sources—sandalwood, civet, castoreum—and all have different origins. The geographical and cultural dimension of smells becomes axiomatic in the piece of work: what is perceived as pleasant in one place might seem unpleasant elsewhere. In addition to the different smells, a large pot in the center of the work mixes all of these smells together. Within the exhibition, the piece of work highlights one of the dimensions that the modernist white cube context wished to ignore, at least according to its critics; namely, the sense of smell.[20] However, within contemporary art, there have already been several artists exploring the sense of smell since the 1960s and '70s, such as Joseph Beuys or Wolfgang Leib, as well every bit more contemporary figures, such equally Ernesto Neto or Hungarian artist Hilda Kozári. In the exhibition, Babylon can exist seen every bit a gesture to remind the spectator of this multisensory attribute of gimmicky fine art, and of our own actual being.
To connect aroma to the thematics of this article, I wish to return attention to touch. As Aristotle remarked, information technology does not allow distance—similarly to gustation—merely is based on contact. Smell, on the ane manus, seems to give space to distance. A small sniff can already tell us that we exercise not desire to approach the source of a smell. We can likewise close our nostrils if we want. On the other mitt, even a sniff tin can accept s strong outcome. Can we make the bad smell get abroad once information technology has entered our olfactory sense? Does smell not, like touch, require contact, and in one case having been exposed to it, is it not difficult to control? Those familiar with the sense of smell can perhaps point towards the privileged connection to emotion and memory.[21] The olfactory feel seems to then have the ability to address us more directly and strongly than i could anticipate. This is why Babylon tin be affective: smell's tight connection with memory is guaranteed to create spectatorial experiences that are beyond our command.
Touching color
Finnish creative person Kaarina Haka (b. 1974) builds her work to the infinite using various materials and elements that together class a total installation. Information technology is hard to define her work, every bit it seems to be both painting and sculpting at the same fourth dimension. One could connect her creative process to such contemporary artists every bit Katharina Grosse, Tarja Pitkänen-Walter, or Marianna Uutinen, all of whom are exploring the limits of painting.
Fig 1. Kaarina Haka, work in progress, creative person's studio in Feb 2016. Photograph by Saara Hacklin.
Typical materials for Haka are painted balloons emptied of air, fishnet, found stuffed toys, bondage, and glue. The final works tin be seen both every bit images—when observed from a distance—or installations, where the spectator can enter and walk effectually. In the former, the spectator can ignore the material attribute of the colour; in the latter, the materiality of the work plays a crucial part.
In my reading, Haka's piece of work poses challenges to the spectator: equally already mentioned, it escapes the traditional definitions of painting and sculpture.[22] Withal what is more of import is the manner in which her work ties together materiality and color. This event makes me think of one of the fundamental comments made by Merleau-Ponty. He argued that color does non exist independently, but it is always the colour of some materiality, similar the redness of a dress, for case. Merleau-Ponty writes how "the red wearing apparel a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of the visible, and thereby onto a cloth of invisible being."[23]
Color is connected to the visible, to materiality, but it also has a connection to the invisible deep within it. Merleau-Ponty writes how "a naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision…."[24] To him, color is part of the texture of the world. The redness of the wearing apparel is connected to fibers of visible, in all its materiality, but it is likewise indivisible from the invisible, like, as he suggests, in the case of the red dress it links to the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers, and Revolution. In brusque, color is both material and meaningful. And this same intertwining of the two worlds, invisible and visible, also takes identify in the observer. "Since the aforementioned body sees and touches, visible and tangible vest to the same world."[25] We see colors and connect them to their materiality and the web of interrelations, but also "feel" them in our torso, although perceiving them just through vision. In lodge to describe this phenomena of intertwining, Merleau-Ponty developed the concept of flesh (la chair).[26] Encountering Haka's work addresses the spectator in various levels. Her work draws attention to the qualities of color, their connectedness with manifold of materials and cultural history, and how our perception of that item material alters as we perceive it from a distance or from close range. The seen has an ability to make u.s.a. experience the colour, exist it a sense of touch—for example, in the memory of touching a stuffed toy—or its reference to colour and our personal and cultural memories connected to information technology. Also, the way in which the piece of work posits the spectator—existence inside an installation, disorientated and unable to control[27]—calls for a visuality where we are unable to have possession from a distance, simply are instead immersed within the painting in Diderotian style.
Hurting and the body
Roma Auskalnyte (b. 1988) is a Lithuanian-born artist who works with printmaking, video, and performance. In her three-aqueduct video installation, Punishment (2014), the spectator sees the artist kneeling over a metal plate. On the two side monitors, the spectator is faced with close-ups of the artist's knees. The messages of the metallic printing plate imprint Auskalnyte's pare: "In text I trust / In written truth / I believe / Read more." The video installation is accompanied by a printing plate with the aforementioned letters.
Fig 2. Roma Auskalnyte, Punishment (2014). Photo past Roma Auskalnyte.
In her artist'southward statement, Auskalnyte mentions an old punishment: "In that location was a punishment in the schools: if a pupil is misbehaving, not listening and non doing what due south/he is told to do, s/he was sent into a corner to kneel on dry peas."[28] Auskalnyte's piece of work associates with diverse performances that accept made use of the artist'south body and (potential or real) hurting.[29] For the spectator, thinking about the sharp metal under one'due south knees can make one shiver. Through the artist's statement, pain is strongly associated with learning. Passionate feelings such as honey or detest can be painful. Notwithstanding also learning has been linked with pain in different times. It is possible to force information into usa? Does pain make the learning process more efficient?
Auskalnyte's slice addresses the relation of knowledge—or written word, to be precise—and bodily experience. I suggest that her piece of work tin can be seen as an encounter between the immersive (embodied feel) and the discursive (text, theory). It juxtaposes bodily experience and new "knowledge" (i.eastward., written word) that is situated outside the torso. In the work, the artist turns herself into a piece of paper, and in and so doing lets the letters and words inscribe their volition into her body in an Kafkaesque mode.[30] Merely does inscribing brand the statement true?
I propose that Auskalnyte's piece of work points towards 1 of the challenges that the affective turn addresses: the listen-trunk dualism. Or, to put it another fashion, as Massumi has written about Stelarc and his creative practice, "in what way is the body an idea, and the idea bodily?"[31] Auskalnyte'south work invites one to remember near how the bodily, lived experience is related to noesis and the function of pain. There is an interesting remark by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his essay, "Can Thought go along without a Body?," where he ponders the possibilities of thinking and its relation to the body. He writes, "Thinking and suffering overlap."[32] In Lyotard'due south analysis, thinking is painful, because in it we are encountering something that is new, and not something that is already part of our experience and thoughts. "The unthought hurts considering we're comfy in what'southward already thought."[33]
Reading Auskalnyte in Lyotardian lines, ane could say that both the torso and pain are necessary for thinking. Hurting tin can serve as a catalyst for thinking—in lodge to truly think, at that place has to be suffering. On the other hand, the style Auskalnyte's work connects pain and thinking poses questions about the self. The text inscribed into the artist's knees seems to signal accented trust and submission to the written word. The cocky is being set aside for the words and wisdom of the written truth. However, in the end, there are the words: "Read more." This statement can be interpreted in many means. It is a commandment set to the artist, but also a commandment to the spectator: to read more than. This catchphrase is familiar to all of u.s. browsing the Internet; a hyperlink that 1 tin can click to find out more than, a promise of the never-ending, new possibilities of the Web, here paralleled with the artist'south torso. In the terminate, the words will fade away from the artist's knees, like hyperlinks become inactive.
The refusal of experience
Thinking about the self and its relation to knowledge from the outside, I wish to now turn towards my fourth example, namely Hanna Saarikoski (b. 1978), a Finnish painter and video artist. In her See Paris and Dice (2012) video work, the artist is giving the spectator the possibility to follow her first visit to Paris. Equally such, the aesthetics of Saarikoski's performative video is relatively minimalistic, following the lines of many performance videos. What is curious about the work is that the creative person will go nigh in Paris with eyes tightly shut. To emphasize her refusal to see, she has painted pictures of eyes on her eyelids.
Fig 3. Hanna Saarikoski, Encounter Paris and Die (2012), nonetheless from the video.
Watching the video of an artist trying to feel the sights and typically "Parisian" activities, like enjoying a baguette and some wine in the park, always with her eyes close, information technology becomes articulate that Paris comes to her in smells, sounds, and tastes—in the multisensory experience of the city. I propose that removing sight from i's everyday senses invites the spectator to imagine how the "touch" of Paris would experience like. The slice directs thinking towards the multiplicity of sense-experience without the hegemony of vision and its possessive look.
Nevertheless, I want to too underline another aspect of Saarikoski'southward piece, namely its association with tourism. The proverb, "See Naples and die," makes a connexion between seeing and death. Having visited the city of Naples, ane has seen it all and can die in peace. The mental attitude of this maxim is even more topical at present, and it can be connected with today's experience-oriented society—people are encouraged to search for more farthermost experiences in order to be moved. See Naples and many more, forget not to share it on social media! Instead, in Saarikoski's piece of work, the saying is interpreted literally. Seeing means death. Shutting her eyes is an attempt to keep death at arm'due south length. Some other association has do with Stendhal syndrome, which can exist especially linked with the overwhelming richness of Italian republic. While protecting herself from death, the artist is keeping herself abroad from the potentially overwhelming dazzler and richness of the city. Instead of trying to get concur of the sights through seeing, she wants to limit her experiences. Referring back to the Merleau-Pontian discussion earlier, while he underlined the idea that we are not able to see without being seen, or touch without existence touched, Saarikoski refuses the position of an active seer, the role of the tourist or flaneur that "takes" the metropolis, and instead exposes herself to the looks of others. Towards the end of the video piece of work is a scene filmed in the Louvre. The commencement passage shows tourists trying to get a glimpse of the Mona Lisa. The second shows the artist, who has stepped aside from the crowd and becomes photographed like the artworks in the museum. The boldness of some beau spectators is bewildering, as they push button their cellular phones very close to Saarikoski's eyelids. The "blind" artist becomes a spectacle for others.
Spectacle and the spectator
My final example is Tuomas A. Laitinen's (b. 1976) Wall Street (2009), an installation made out of neon lights and sound. The piece of work forms a large and twinkling tic-tac-toe in which the figures of X and O blink. Adjacent to the colorful, flickering spectacle is a mechanism that has a 1950s-style microphone standing next to information technology. The audio of the machine that changes the lights is amplified with the assistance of the microphone. The machinery used in the work incorporates slot machine parts.
Fig 4. Tuomas A. Laitinen, Wall Street (2009). Installation photo by Kimmo Syväri.
Creating an impressive calorie-free and sound installation and naming it Wall Street, the artist creates various parallels. Wall Street, the stock substitution and heart of the Western economy, is here represented equally a random game. Some other parallel that the work creates is that of a circle: past amplification of the audio and paradigm, they together create an impressing totality, a arrangement that seems to brand no reference to the outside globe.
These associations underline, in my mind, the idea of spectacle. Like in the Debordian spectacle, he or she can just be allured by the inviting colors of the spectacle, but not interfere with it—the piece of work appears as a tautology.[34] The spectator is being left outside the blinking lights that class the mechanisms of the market place. The market place has a life of its own; it is represented here as a closed system that does not take whatsoever input from the spectator. We can gather around the neon lights, watch them in awe, yet never participate or "win."
I wish to make a final connexion betwixt the work and the way in which "the market" is talked virtually in our society. Psychologizing the market has get common through the metaphors of economic system. This is seen, for example, in the style in which we receive messages through media that the stock market has get "nervous" and needs to "absurd down." The market has become a self-supporting system with a life and emotions to which we are subjected, yet have no control over. The impressive spectacle of the stock marketplace may be a game and a facade, and however information technology touches us in many ways.
Determination
I began this article with a reference to the concept of affect and concluded it with blinking neon lights. Through the selected case studies of the exhibition, I hope to have opened up those theoretical aspects that guided the curatorial work. What became crucial for the states during the planning procedure was that, besides the thought that immersive and affective works address the spectator in multisensory ways, it was of import to have into disquisitional consideration the emotional surge that has taken over our societies. This question also became a claiming. How could nosotros find works that would speak of the manner in which spectators are beingness torn in different directions past the bombardment of media imagery? Thinking about the unlike ways of interpreting touch had led to looking for not only intimate and personal, "immersive" works, but also pieces that were able to heighten questions concerning our experience-driven gild that in turn highlight strong emotions and affectivity—the ways in which society in general wishes to "touch" us and guide u.s. towards preset responses.
Saara Hacklin lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. She has studied at the University of Helsinki. Her PhD thesis in aesthetics was titled Divergencies of Perception. The Possibilities of Merleau- Pontian Phenomenology in the Analyses of Contemporary Art (2012). During her doctoral studies she has also been visiting researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (autumn 2008). She has worked as a deputy curator at the Kiasma Museum of Gimmicky Art, Helsinki, both at the collections and exhibitions departments in three occasions, most recently 2014–xvi. In improver she has experience as a freelance curator in different projects, for instance for the AV-arkki – Distribution Centre for Finnish Media Art equally well as independent projects. She has been teaching fine art theory in unlike institutions, such equally Aalto Academy, and writing art criticism and essays for diverse publications.
Notes
[one] Open to public from April 22, 2016, until January 29, 2017.
[2] Eeva Jokinen, Juhana Venäläinen, and Jussi Vähämäki, "Johdatus prekaarien affektien tutkimukseen," in Prekarisaatio ja affekti, eds. Eeva Jokinen and Juhana Venäläinen (Jyväskylä: Academy of Jyväskylä, 2015), 14.
[3] The popularity of immersive exhibitions like Yayoi Kusama, seen at the Louisiana Museum of Mod Fine art in autumn 2015, does not exclude, notwithstanding, the dimension of the discursive and research. Julian Stallabrass has commented that impressive installations are the art globe's way to fight against mass culture. Run across Julian Stallabrass, Gimmicky Art: A Very Brusk Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Academy Press, 2006).
[4] Another kind of commodity could accept been written non only by choosing different artworks from the same exhibition, but likewise by focusing on dissimilar questions in the case of each artwork.
[5] Marie-Luise Angerer, Want After Touch on (London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015), 1.
[6] Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham and London: Knuckles Academy Press, 2010), five.
[7] Gregg and Seigworth list eight approaches to the theorization of affect. Come across Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 6.
[viii] Run into for instance Vivian Sobchack's influential contribution to film studies, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
[9] Patricia T. Clough, "The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies," in The Touch on Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 206.
[10] Saara Hacklin, Divergencies of Perception: The Possibilities of Merleau-Pontian Phenomenology in Analyses of Gimmicky Art (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2012), https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/29433.
[11] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Bear on, Sensation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 27.
[12] Angerer, Desire After Affect, xv.
[xiii] For an assay of the turn, see for case Marguerite La Caze and Henry Martyn Lloyd, "Editors' introduction: philosophy and the 'melancholia turn,'" in Parhhesia, no. thirteen (2011): ane–thirteen.
[14] Jacques Derrida, On Touching (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), v.
[15] Cited in David Michael Levin, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 2.
[16] Ibid., half dozen. Derrida's thinking takes on Jean-Luc Nancy'due south ideas on touching.
[17] For Merleau-Ponty's reception within visual arts, meet for example Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Oasis and London: Yale University Printing, 2000).
[eighteen] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 147.
[nineteen] All of the artworks discussed in this article belong to the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, office of Finnish National Gallery. For information on collections, run into https://www.kiasma.fi/en/collections/
[20] Brian O'Doherty, Within the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Academy of California Press, 1999), xiv–15. First published 1976 by Artforum.
[21] Laura U. Marks, Bear upon: Sensuous theory and multisensory media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Printing, 2002), 120.
[22] The Untitled (2016) piece by Haka is notwithstanding unfinished at the moment of writing. My analysis is based on encountering diverse previous works by Haka, and besides by studio visits during the process of preparing a new site-specific piece for Kiasma.
[23] Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 132.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid., 134.
[26] I will not go deeper into the new ontology Merleau-Ponty worked on in the terminal phase of his career. For more than, see for example Hacklin, Divergencies of Perception, v.
[27] Claire Bishop, Installation Fine art: A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 13.
[28] Roma Auskalnyte, "Roma Auskalnyte," in Kuvan kevät 6.–31.5.2015, exh. cat., eds. Anni Anttonen, et al. (Helsinki: Academy of the Arts Helsinki, 2015), 31.
[29] For example, performances by Marina Abramović, Chris Burden, Yoko Ono, and Dennis Oppenheim.
[30] I am thinking in particular of Kafka's short story, "In the Penal Colony" (1914).
[31] Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xc.
[32] Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), eighteen.
[33] Ibid., 20.
[34] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, § thirteen, accessed February 24, 2016, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm.
Saara Hacklin, "To Touch and Be Touched" Stedelijk Studies Journal 4 (2016). DOI: 10.54533/StedStud.vol004.art08. This contribution is licensed under a CC By 4.0 license.
Source: https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/to-touch-and-be-touched/