360º | TOUCH 2.0 scanning for synesthesia
The exhibition “Please (do not) touch” 2019, by Inês Norton at the MNAC (Chiado Contemporary Art Museum. Lisbon) - curated by Adelaide Ginga and Emília Ferreira, is the initial moment and predecessor of “TOUCH 2.0 / scanning for synesthesia”. In this exhibition at the CARRASCO gallery, half of the works on display are some of the core pieces of “Please (do not) touch” integrated with other new works, for this second moment.
About these pieces, the curator and director of MNAC, Emília Ferreira, wrote in 2019:
MERELY SKIN DEEP. THE ERROR OF NARCISSUS, Emília Ferreira
1. PREVIOUS NOTES
Skin deep is an expression that stands for a certain degree of superficiality. In Portuguese, an almost similar expression that could be freely translated as ‘having one’s emotions at a skin level’ has been used to describe those who can hardly control their emotions, something rather criticised by a society that valued intellect over emotions. Nowadays, however, we know that emotions are central to decision-making. Knowing this, via a recent finding that contradicts the sole role of pure reason in such a domain (Damásio, 2012), how can we think of the digital simulacrum and of the rejection of the body, something that is on the rise in today’s world, in various aseptic imaginaries? This is the thinking behind Inês Norton’s exhibition at the MNAC, Please (do not) touch. Her abiding focus on the analysis of the dialectic between the concepts of natural and synthetic, evaluating the tensions between the two, so evident in contemporaneity, take a new step in this exhibition.
The expressions we associate with the seduction and power of the digital (the world ‘within touching distance’ or ‘the world at your fingertips’) take on a whole new meaning in this exhibition, with its palpable objects that we are forbidden to touch. In this case, they assume a meaning of denial and distance. They also take on a sense of irony, given the museo logical context that, since the beginning of its history, has assumed the impossibility of touching as imperative. The museum is indeed traditionally a space that keeps visitors at a safe dis-tance from its treasures. Touch is prohibited by preventive conservation issues and, in this sense, the notion that the skin can communicate loses meaning in itself. Please (do not) touch assumes, for these reasons, a double meaning in the bitter irony of our time: the distance that we create between bodies, the fear of contact, and the inability to – through a self-imposed taboo – reach out for the other in an emotional and deep way. Bitter, because reaching out has always been a human need. Ironic, because at a time when digitisation is opening doors to a more comprehensive globalisation, the contact and the encounter with the other are frankly compromised. In addition to that, we are also living a paradoxical historical moment, in which privacy (something that was hard to achieve, as Bologne so vividly recalled in his Histoire de la Pudeur, 1986) is blurred on the screens of a new supposed social (and global) sense of life. The skin, the organ that defines us most thoroughly and which continues to create so many barriers to communication, as it constitutes the first and most distinctive visible trait of each of us, is simultaneously exhibited, used, protected and even hidden, assumed as taboo. This is the void and self-contradictory territory in which the 18 pieces of Inês Norton resonate. “As a souvenir”, “Three doses of visual pleasure”, “Aseptic synaesthesia”, “Immersive hug”, “Cutaneous identity”, “Contactless”, “Induced mutation”, “Intimate encounter, part I, II”, “Touch skin”’, “With your skin, I make my own”, “Collected by a toucher”, “Reciprocal experience of connection I, II”, “Ephemeral sync”, “Tactile revolution”, “The interlude of surface” or “The skin you left behind”. Emphasising the omnipresence of artificiality, the artist confronts us with the presence of death, both of the body and of consciousness, which means the doom of the essence of the human condition.
2. THOUGHTS ON THE CONCEPT OF RESEMBLANCE
Every object on display at this exhibition poses as a stage of the concept of resemblance, providing the visitor with a certain dose of teasing or provocation. In ‘Three doses of visual pleasure’, we are confronted with a tactile seduction perfectly calibrated in its packaging and visually ‘delivered’, as if to remind ourselves of the need for restraint in the face of real-world solicitations. At the same time, it reminds us how the pleasure of touch is subjected to mere visualisation, to a contact that must keep a distance at the same time that science mediates it and aseptically controls it in a laboratory, as is happening with the new trend of assisted reproduction.
Apart from lab-based emotionlessness, the digital realm offers the illusion of ease. By surpassing physical distance and making everything accessible, without having to face the obstacles of everyday life (distance, time, weather, expense), this illusion generates other problems that will, eventually, turn against us, against our body and against the way we experience the world within that body’s perspective. By deluding distance and time (Han, 2013), it also makes us forget our own mortality and all that we have done over thousands of years to circumvent it: knowledge and creation. The passage of knowledge is a power-ful legacy that makes the other become more than just another person. The other becomes the destiny of the self. Inês Norton aims to examine all these questions, focusing on the central issue of the importance of the skin. She does this by staging them in one of the most problematised sites in recent times within the digital debate: the museum. In fact, digitisation has been a great asset to the museum, democratising it. But many have questioned whether it has also created the illusion that we no longer need to go to visit the museum. Could it be that the act of going out and trying to meet (and sometimes to confront) the original works is no longer necessary, and can be replaced by a display on a screen, in the comfort and safety of our home?
In this exhibition, a rose hue takes on a dominant presence. It is due to ‘a mixture of an attempt to approach the universe’s ‘skin’ with the intention of highlighting the artificiality into which we are increasingly walking and from which we emerge’, while also ‘alluding to a certain ‘sensuality’ that the theme evokes’, as the artist explains. Thus, skin is suggested by the use of colour (a hue close to a Caucasian person) and by surfaces that invite viewers to touch or avoid them. One way or another, all mediation is done through substitutes, obstacles that intervene between bodies.
Working as a pretext for a reflection on our priorities and on our own ontological definition (who are we?), this is an exhibition in which uncomfortable questions follow each other, addressing the anti-desire, the centring of oneself, the fear and the simulacrum of the human, in a fuller sense, which thus makes humans themselves become disposable.
3. “AS A SOUVENIR”
From the museum’s point of view, the fragment is a regular presence. The 18th-century Enlightenment Museum, conceived as a visual encyclopaedia, complemented the Grand Tour in the cultural and artistic education of the European upper classes (Hooper-Greenhill, 2004, 559). In many ways, the museum did so through the use of fragments: paintings that represented landscape points of view, portions of sculptural or architectural bodies. Minerals. Travel notes, drawings, etchings. And later on, photographs, films, performances and installations. Although never really intending to replace the world itself, the museum was packed with presences that were cut off from life by the interdict of touch. With the democratisation of travelling, a sense of urgency took the place of the early desire to bear witness and learn. Today’s virtuality (laziness? disinterest? fear?) takes its place. Are we aware of this make believe when it is put on stage in the form of an acrylic box with a landscape inside and some headphones whose promise of real-life sound only reaches us through a recording? This work by Inês Norton, ‘As a souvenir’, sends out a warning. Everything is becoming increasingly hard and absent, as far as skin is concerned. Everything is becoming less than skin deep. In a context where the skin disappears, what will happen to emotions? Who do we become?
4. GETTING UNDER THE SKIN
Touching someone’s skin is, as we all know, to reach the first boundary of someone else’s space. The skin establishes the boundaries between the self and the other, after the first mediation through gaze and even after the mediation of the word. The touch is the following step. When we touch we break a distance, we communicate and relate. Are not lovers often ‘con-fused’ about where the body of the self finishes and the body of the other begins?
Skin does not lie. It shows who we are and how we feel. It has a specific way of writing our own story (2). Here is an organ that is entirely renewed throughout our lives and still manages to display everything we have lived: the way time has treated us, our genetic inheritance, our health, our habits and our cultural heritage (Jablonski, 2006, 2). Discarding the importance of the skin, in our relationships, is to discard all this legacy and thus our own nature and our place in the world. The connexion between skin and identity is clearly stated in the old phrase to ‘feel good in our own skin.‘ This suitability reflects identity at a deep level. Touch is, indeed, our primal sense, that which is most developed in mammals, particularly in primates. That is also made clear by the expression we use when we want to keep someone in our lives and we say ‘let’s keep in touch’ (Jablonski, 2006, 97).
Touch, while cultural and variable — there are cultures of non-touch, as American anthropologist Nina Jablonski reminds us (2006, 110–111), stressing that these are also where family ties are more fragile and where violence comes easier — is a key tool for knowledge, pedagogy and therapy. In order to grasp the power of touch, it is enough to think about how physical punishment was developed, emphasising the importance and power of the relationship with the skin. In fact, we could say that skin gives us the exact measure of adequacy/boundaries of communication/invasion of private space, personal, physical. Skin is the measure of the relationship. And although the fingertips of the primates — particularly the homo sapiens — are particularly sensitive, the truth is that our brain has developed along with other parts of our body (hands, face and feet, Jablonski, 2006, 99). On a more complex level, we might add that our brain developed in connection with the whole surface of our body. Just think of the amount of information skin receives and transmits. Touch is closely linked to our development as a species, not only because it allowed us to choose the ripest and most nutritious fruits (an act that we still perform today), but because our skin reacts to the world before our consciousness, by sweating, blushing, drying, bristling hairs, etc. It transmits information to others (making us readable, and allowing us to read other people’s emotions towards us). Skin is more than our biggest organ; it is also our biggest sex organ. We get to know and to acquire intimacy through touch (Jablonski, 2006, 110–119). Intimacy cannot depend on gaze alone, any more than it can depend on the sense of hearing or on a screen. If we choose this path, we will be limiting ourselves to a mere shadow of what we can truly be, detached from our inner self and from the world around us.
5. A CULTURE OF FEAR?
In ‘Cutaneous identity’, Inês Norton explores the issue of fear through the metaphor of a second skin. Involving real stones in a suede fabric, the artist erases the reality of the stones, their true surface, their ability to transmit their nature, replacing it with ‘another’ nature, softening their touch. However, this softening entails a distance: that of knowledge. The ability to touch a real body, now rendered impossible, denies the passage of information. It may become ‘easier‘, but it is tamed — or smoothed, to use a concept dear to the philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2015). Nature breaks its inner capacity to learn. Thinking about how reality becomes remote when you simply cannot touch it, these wrapped stones with their successive layers are metaphors that remind us that we are losing this effective and affective contact with the world (and with the other). Inês Norton criticises the creation of a parallel, fictitious and frightening omnipresent universe, where nature is forced to develop ‘a second dermis to relate to the new paradigms’, as the artist claims.
Making a statement for absence and loss, a cry for the urgency of a clear awareness, these works ask successive questions as the exhibition unfolds. What would we feel, in fact, if our hands became alien to our bodies, if they became as industrial and serial as supermarket products, packed and properly protected by latex gloves and wrapped in adherent film, as in ‘Aseptic Synesthesia’? What would we do if our hands became useless, as Inês asks us in ‘Induced mutation’ symbolising a human hand that has had to adapt to its dysfunction by using only two fingers (thumb and forefinger, the most used digits for touching and activating programs, sending messages or, when used together, increasing or decreasing images or texts to suit our needs)? What sense would we make of replacing our skin with a fake, as proposed in ‘Interlude of surface’, a piece that is the result of several ‘formal experiences around the concept’, in which the skin is replaced by satin?
By reducing touch to the digital and to a certain omnipotence of the gaze, everything is reduced to mere limbs of amputated bodies. That is what we find either in ‘Induced mutation’ or in the two moments of ‘Intimate encounter’ (I and II), in which contact becomes subjugated to the aseptic. Again, we find the almighty power of the digital meddling between us and reality, sanctioning a certain degree of intimacy. In any case, the human is left alone if he/she can only relate to synthetic, digital bodies — at a safe distance and with the mere involvement of his/her fingertips.
Do we really want digital to replace the role of skin and the considerable information that it provides? Do we really want digital (or an algorithm, an app) to simulate the world and tell us what and how we feel? In ‘Intimate Encounter II’, in an enclosed space, evoking peepshow booths, an application offers the simulation of touch and the sound it produces. Inês Norton reanalyses the concept of SLIME and questions us on the reasons that make us avoid the touch of real skin, while not resisting the touch of synthetic and viscous substances, although they are often digital.
If we avoid touch at all costs, superficiality will become the rule in relationships. This is the artist’s take on works such as ‘Ephemeral sync’ or ‘Touch Skin’, which evoke the need for artificial mediation. Without the capacity for deeper connections, and with the cult of quick navigation through numerous sources of information, virtuality takes the place of actual experience. A vision previously built by others takes its place in our relationship with the world, without any capacity for evaluation on our part.
With every object that confronts us in this exhibition, we see simulacra gaining ground. Objects are collected for something they had, and yet we now see them wrapped in a sort of a new skin (a new identity), as happens in ‘Collected by a toucher’. Every time the experience of touch is denied or reduced (‘Reciprocal experience of connection I, II‘), every time we plasticise the body (and by that action remove the body of the other from the equation), every time we let machines mediate our bodies (‘Contactless’ or ‘Immersive Hug’) we make way for the abyss to invade our lives. Such an abyss can be perceived in the way we have started to collect other people’s skins, as the hidden trophies of sociopaths. Exposure heads down an apparent path of no return, a destiny of loss where deeper, more time-consuming and unique relationships with the real disappear for good.
Do we really want to create more obstacles to our own capacity for knowledge by allow-ing a completely artificial mediator to come between ourselves and the world? Or will we be able to react, in a revolutionary act of reclaiming our body, as in the work ‘Tactile Revolution‘?
At the end of the exhibition, ‘The Skin You Left Behind’, a 10-metre roll of latex in the same rosy tone that passes through the exhibition, with some lighter tones, unfolds before our eyes. Like a snake that has left its old skin behind, we leave the exhibition leaving behind us our story, as we abandon the most distinctive of our organs.
6. O ERRO DE NARCISO
How do we connect to the world if we insist on keeping it at arm’s length? How to love and care (in its multiple forms) without celebrating the senses? Knowledge depends on the senses, as Kant asserted and neuroscience reaffirmed. And it depends on all of the senses, not just sight, however much this is the most valued (and intellectualised) way of relating to the world around us. Tact (the word we use in Portuguese to state the decoding ability of the right measure – to have tact for something is to have the capacity for analysis, for evaluation, but also for adequate reaction) is what better summons the body, in its wholeness. The fragmented body is mainly the reflection of the domain of the gaze. The act of seeing depends on the isolated moment. But the body can feel everything at the same time. Seeing operates through syncopes, focusing on isolated details at a time. But the fragmented body is devoid of being, objectified (abjected) and made the subject of external perception, of cold, rational, distant analysis. Is this the world in which we want to live and in which we voluntarily amputate ourselves from our deepest sense?
Contrary to what one might think, skin deep is not superficial at all. And to celebrate the connection with the skin, putting it at the centre of the debate is to draw attention to the urgency to rehabilitate Eros, to save us, at the same time, from the depression that comes from self-focusing. As tempting as solitude may be, its agonizing and suicidal call will rob us of everything that is human, through our rejection of the experience of the other (Han, 2012). It is urgent to remember that Narcissus did not die of astonishment, falling consciously in love with himself, but of solitude. Narcissus dropped into the water as he realised that what he saw on the surface was no more than his own mere reflection.
A final warning for those who think that the problem rising on the horizon will come from machines that threaten our humanity. As always, it will come from us, from our bizarre dream of feeling nothing. From the dry, useless and sterile will of absolute rationality. From the fear of the other that will lead us, if we risk nothing, to our most irreducible and tragic solitude, leaving, behind us, the perfect and empty skin that has never been touched and has never touched another.
Rome - Milan, 15 June 2019.
1 Title of a book by the French philosopher Louis Lavalle (1883–1951).
2“Our skin reflects our age, our ancestry, our state of health, our cultural identity, and much of what we want the world to know about us. People on all known cultures modify their skin in some way, often using deliberate marking and manipulation to convey highly personal information about themselves to others.” (Jablonski, 2006, 2).
REFERENCES
Damásio, António. 2012. Self comes to Mind. Constructing the Conscious Brain. London: Vintage Books. Damásio, António. 2017. A Estranha Ordem das Coisas. A Vida, os Sentimentos e as Culturas Humanas. Lisbon: Temas e Debates. Han, Byung-Chul. 2012. A agonia de Eros. Trad. Miguel Serras Pereira. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água. Han, Byung-Chul. 2013. No Enxame. Reflexões sobre o Digital. Trad. Miguel Serras Pereira. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água. Han, Byung-Chul. 2015. A Salvação do Belo. Trad. Miguel Serras Pereira. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean, 2004. ‘Changing Values in the Art Museum. Rethinking Communication and Learning‘. In Museum Studies. Na Anthology of Contexts. Ed. Bettina Messias Carbonell. Malden, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing. P. 556–575. Jablonsni, Nina G. 2006. Skin: A Natural History. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
