Some Notes on TouchNotes on Touch.

Split Natures: Visual Touch and the Quest for Space.

Phil King.

“What greatly attracted me – and it was the main line of advance of Cubism – was how to
give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint
chiefly still lives, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space. I
wrote about this moreover 'When a still life is no longer within reach, it ceases to be a still
life...'. For me that expressed the desire I have always had to touch a thing, not just to look at
it. It was that space that attracted me strongly, for that was the earliest Cubist painting – the
quest for space.”
Georges Braque.

While painting is undoubtedly visual – it primarily addresses the eye – there is no doubt that
it also relates to the problem of being able to touch or grasp objects within that visual nature;
there is at its heart, appearing as if within our eyeballs themselves, something that triggers a
kind of mental synaesthesia. Following Braque, Modern Painting’s drama is that it can
convince us of the reality of some kind of animated haptic creation; somewhere in which,
somehow, we can actually touch images and ideas; a world in which we can handle things.
*
Seeing in such painting works to create a kind of virtual, and yet actual, touch. It’s a way of
seeing that embodies the unique affect of its tactile activity. Participation in some kind of
perceived manipulation – a noticing of feeling – is what defines painting’s wider quality and
creates the experiential nature of painting itself. Painting is seen to have the power to create
the experience that we make of it. In short modern painting in particular can be seen as a
question of the invention of new forms of haptic imagination, forms in which we are all
supposed to have a hand. Through its primary double act of ‘seeing touching’ and ‘being
touched by sight’ we invent and wander; caught in a matter of fact movement between visual
intimacy and touching distance.
*
19th century Art Historian Alois Riegl introduced the general idea of “tactile” or “haptic”
vision or seeing, in which the contributing role of the hand and touch has become synthesised
and emphasised. He wrote on Dutch painting in 1902:
“Among the means painting has at its disposal for producing spatial depth, the two haptic
ones (overlap and foreshortening) serve to render the cubic space of the bodies of figures. Of
the two optical techniques, shadow can be used both as body shadow (modelling shadow) for
rendering cubic space and as spatial shadow or chiaroscuro for depicting free space; cast
shadow embodies the middle position between these two effects. The second optical
technique is based on a dissolution of outlines and a distinct modification of local colours,
and is identified as aerial perspective, which serves exclusively to depict air-filled free
space.”
*
Modern Painting, while currently often understood as a somewhat old-fashioned activity,
doesn’t represent tactile experience; it is at its best a new feeling, (or question - in the sense
of quest), that has to be created, actively imagined and continually made up. It doesn’t ‘stand
for’ touch as such but provides a visual matrix for the handiwork of visionary invention.
When we look at a classic painting from the Modern period a whole drama of touch comes
into play, a drama in which we actively notice traces of gestures in a way that is able to
animate their potential anew, able to recreate such gestures imaginatively as part of each
painting’s fundamental source. Modern Painters played with this kind of involved reading of
their mark-making, gestures were evoked subject to rhythms that were capable of predicting
further marks to come – such ancestry offers up latent traces that are not actually there but
that continue to insist. Painting produces its own production of such abstract ‘coming to be’
as a kind of reversible play between actual and perceived materiality.
*
Printmaking based on painting can be seen as taking this fundamentally haptic nature further
into the merely visual and yet it is often with prints that our looking comes face to face with
the need to believe in and create virtual tactile experience for ourselves. Such printing gives a
good impression of the disjunctive nature of painting – the best prints both contain and
liberate paintings’ creative awkwardness; their demand for a visual reality that can be
handled. They actually give us an opportunity to see such a haptic actuality; they demonstrate
and circulate its demanding grit even as it is effectively removed. Paradoxically such a
sensation of ‘hands on’ opportunity equals a sense of distance – the intimacy of touch can be
seen more clearly at a distance and the role of seeing itself, as a vehicle of touch and its
implications, becomes ever more evident. The early analytical cubist etchings of Picasso and
Braque might well offer some of the clearest tactile sensations of all their haptic
investigations … breaking down their visions in black and white.
 *
“The body itself, and above all its surfaces, is a place from which both external and internal
perceptions may spring. It is seen in the same way as any other object, but to the touch it
yields two kinds of solutions, one of which is equivalent to an internal perception.”
Sigmund Freud.
*
In terms of developing understandings of what painting might have been, or might become,
we can start with the idea of ‘the seen’. Freud makes a distinction between what is seen of a
body, and what it feels like. A body’s - or any object’s - appearance is a singular agreement;
it offers its surface first of all to a single point of view. In contrast, we have the example of
how a doctor’s palpation takes perception further, into our body itself.
*
It is the sensation of touch, a sense of physical feeling, that liberates a split sensation at the
heart of painting that frees objects from any singular coherent vision, that lets it sing out in
many wayward voices. Just as with the musical instruments that Braque habitually painted, a
painting is there to be coaxed to life, it has to be picked up and used.
*
We see touch in painting, and seeing it we split everything apart. A painting, offering itself
purely to sight’s harbour, includes other kinds of perceptions within that apparently
individual appearance. And these perceptions divide the individual ‘us’ that paintings once
upon a time aspired to guarantee. Touch is a form of inclusive disjunction, it unites different
feelings within a single percept – the outside and inside of a body felt as a single universal
divided object. The objectivity of touch can never come up with a single answer, it destroys
any appearance it inhabits. It puts surface appearance in question.

*
‘Aesthetic appreciation appears to be an exercise in the perception of an outside structure
that elicits strongly and pleasurably a perception of an inner structure”
Adrian Stokes
*
While privileging a superior individual aesthetic consciousness (following Freud’s insight)
Adrian Stokes implies that aesthetic appreciation itself is a question of touch – of feeling –
from this we can extrapolate that there is actually in such aesthetic perception a question of a
split – of a sense of divided attention. We see the outside of a perceived inside, and that
seeing is a kind of touching. Contrary to the privileging of the visual perception – indeed at
the very heart of it – we find inclusive division: seeing is touching. Artistic Form, instead of
being a cohesive unity, can be better understood as such a divided unity; conscious attention
and unconscious intuition meet in one sense, in one desire.
*
“From the aesthetic contemplative point of view any record of feeling, any emotional gesture
in itself, is something of which one tires sooner or later; that is the experience of those who
spend their life in art; whereas the excitation from formal values is regarded always as
inexhaustible, as ‘life enhancing’ and only then, through their complicity, any particular
content may be so viewed. “
Adrian Stokes.
*
The call for the primacy of visual formal appreciation over anything else in art, where
measurable formal values underpin everything as a manifold matrix is often taken as
exclusive of any other values, rather than being wholly supportive of them, and the ability to
support ‘emotional gestures’ and other feelings is, arguably, a result of form’s own actual
heterogeneous and divided nature: a disjunction in visual form whereby the visual in its very
heart finds the blindness of creative touch.
*
“Haptic" is a better word than "tactile" since it does not establish an opposition between two
sense organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfil this non optical
function..”
Deleuze and Guattari.
*
Visual tactile space is smooth, things are unformed in it, remain unperceived. Paint becomes
a symptom of forces; we feel intuitively what is going on. It is a material to be shaped; there
is no perspective or last word to it. Things remain unseen. This is more than simply an
aesthetic question; it is a problem of a total change in how we understand perception and
thought in general; in how we choose to participate in life itself. Freed from visual idealism
and its coordinates, a freedom to be lost is generated from within the eye’s most prized
cultural paradigm: painting itself. Framed within its realm we find that it is there, (and within
the disciplines that flow from it and inform it such a printmaking), that we can best inhabit
worlds of difference, unlikely worlds of touch that we can’t actually touch.