Art & Tactility
Texture is an important part of many of your works. So it would be possible for someone to have a tactile as well as a visual encounter with them. If someone who is not visually impaired were to touch one of your completed works, would that be a way of appreciating the work? Would it be a failure to appreciate the work properly? Or would touching it have no bearing on either the work’s aesthetic properties or the observer’s aesthetic experience of it?
My work is on the surface rather dark, but it actually revolves completely around light — which in turn inevitably goes hand in hand with texture. The light is caught on the canvas due to the deviations and inconsistencies of its surface, enabling the light’s own nuances and values to reveal themselves completely on their own.
A visual encounter with my work is of course important, but to some extend the tactile one is even more so. When I was in architecture school I read Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin (a book that I still go back to all the time) which is basically a treatise on the inadequacy of vision. “The art of the eyes has certainly produced imposing and thought — provoking [architectural] structures,” he writes (in which architecture could just as well be replaced with art), “but it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world.”
A great deal of today’s art is, in my view, rather flat (not just physically, but conceptually as well). In the words of Pallasmaa: “Modernist design” (of which contemporary art is still very much influenced by) “has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.”
This flattening of our art seems to, in other words, also have flatted our imaginative abilities. Modernism aside (that’s a vast debate in and of itself), I think this has a lot do with our increasing presence inside of our digital screens. Of course, the irony of me writing these words on just such a screen is not lost on me.
Screens are non — physical, two — dimensional, and solely visual. I agree with Pallasmaa in that our non — visual senses are largely what keeps us grounded in the material world. Screens completely lack that dimension and thus keep us away from that place — and it seems to me that we are longing for a return to it.
In other words (and to answer your question), if someone were to physically touch my work — or at least see it in real life rather than on a screen — that would most certainly be a way of appreciating it, perhaps much more so than what a mere visual encounter would.
