May 30, 2025 • 34 mins
Contemporary art is a feast for the senses. But have we reduced art to vision? And what does the hand do, now that we have machines and automated ways of making, editing and showing images? And what are images?
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This episode is the second audio/video essay of the season. It will take you on a trip to a sensory shift across times, blurring the boundaries between line, image, wall, surface, paper, and machines. Where the hand is, what it does and how it is re-articulated by automation is promising and exciting if we let it.
If you enjoyed this episode, and if you enjoy reading, Joana's Substack might be for you.
I was invited to participate in a conversation on the occasion of the launch of Trajectories, Variations on a Gesture a book which is almost a sculpture or an exhibition in itself, containing 10 drawings made at Massana school of crafts (Barcelona) by Edouard Cabay. The director of the school, Xavi Capmany invited Cabay, an experimental architect and artist to bring his algorithmic practice at the heart of a school teaching manual crafts in order to create a dialogue between the different uses of the hand, of patterns, of the eye, the brain, muscle and memory. I dediced to start by reading a short text, which you can enjoy, in a longuer version, here.
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About us: If you enjoy the podcast If Books Could Kill and You Are Good, you will enjoy Exhibitionistas, where artists are unveiled through current and pertinent angles, and through thoughts and feelings. These podcasts were a great inspiration for our format because they're nerdy and engaging, researched and approachable. The co-host and the guest co-host engage in a conversation informed by an accessible and lively presentation of the subject, through which you can reflect on a show you've seen or discover it if you can't go, learn or re-evaluate artistic topics crossing over into our everyday lives.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
I'm Joanna Pierre Nevis, your host, and this is exhibitionist
this. I'm an independent writer and
curator with a wide-ranging 2 decades career in contemporary
art, from commercial galleries to art fairs, from research to
curating, from Lisbon to London through Paris.
(00:28):
But when I'm asked what I do outside the out world, the
inevitable reaction is, oh, I don't know anything about
contemporary art. Ouch.
So call it a midlife crisis, call it arrogance, but I gave
myself the task of trying to fill that gap with Co host
conversation episodes centered around a genuine exchange of
(00:51):
thoughts, feelings and precious context around solo exhibitions,
interviews and special episodes based on a particular topic to
keep you alert and on your toes.If you want to read further into
some of the topics discussed in the episodes and more, you can
(01:11):
also find me on Sub Stack under my name, Joanna Pierre Nevis.
This is one of those shorter episodes based on a topic often
prompted by a lecture or a conference.
This is no exception. I was invited to participate in
(01:33):
a conversation on the occasion of a book launch, which is the
outcome of a really interesting project, so the story behind it
is really fascinating. Picture Barcelona.
Picture a school of traditional crafts such as ceramic weaving,
sculpting. The school is called Masana and
(01:56):
its director Chabi Kapmani decided to invite experimental
architect and artists also basedin Barcelona, Edwah Kabi, to
bring his work based on automation algorithms coding to
the school as a residency project.
(02:19):
So of course, the purpose was tocombine or articulate handcraft
technologies with new digital learning technologies.
The culprit here is going to be the hand, of course.
So you'll imagine the students working with their haptic
(02:40):
abilities and the artists pressing buttons and looking at
screens. On the other hand, I have
investigated for many years an inventor of the 19th century
called Etienne Jean Marais, who was French, who basically
perfected and established the use of graphic recording
(03:01):
machines. And I argue that this is the big
shift. And what shift is this?
So think seismograph. Think electrocardiograph, but
think mostly the first inventionof Mare, which was this
figmograph. It was a small device that you
(03:22):
applied to the wrist with a sensor which activated the
stylus, and he showed this in Napoleon's court.
So at the time there were these massive events around these
innovations. Of course photography comes to
mind, but here it was basically something used by doctors.
(03:44):
All doctors bought this device after this.
So this small device was appliedto the wrists and then the
movement of blood was sensed by makeshift kind of sensor, which
(04:06):
then carried that information tothe stylus.
The stylus would move across a cylinder which was covered by a
paper darkened with smoke. And so the movement of the
stylus scraped off parts of thatsmoke, creating a white line, a
(04:28):
graph that kind of emerged from that black background with the
unique pattern of that person's blood pressure.
The image in Mary's book called Le movement, I think, or the
graphic method. I think that's in the graphic
(04:48):
method illustrating this device shows a hand idle and a machine,
the Sigmograph drawing. So from here on, and that's kind
of what I argue, there's a reconfiguration of the body.
So the eye does not provide the visual stimulus to the eye and
(05:12):
the hand, which together draw quite the opposite.
So the eye receives the drawing and interprets it.
So this changes the way we use our bodies in relation to
(05:33):
drawing and this is kind of whatIdwa brought to the table at the
Masana school. What Idwa did was to bring this
idea of the machine, the automated process, into the
(05:56):
school. So he worked with 10 students
that he isolated HE3D, scanned their hands working on different
manual disciplines. Then he translated this movement
with an algorithmic syntax that he developed and he extrapolated
100,000 times the curve that he obtained.
(06:20):
And so the text that I received says quote.
The series of 10 drawings captures and reveals the
infinite repetitions and variations of human movements
contained in the almost automatic action of the
craftsperson when working with the material, UN quote.
(06:41):
So notice that he applies the notion of automation to the
human body. And I did something a bit
similar, which was to focus on the movement and what happens in
it for us. I ignored the time span between
manual production and digital production or consumption or use
(07:03):
and kind of read them together. And I propose perhaps another
way of considering connection proximity and creation.
(07:37):
I'm looking at a screen. I'm holding it.
I lift my index finger to tap onit.
An image appears. I drag my index finger across
the screen. Another image appears, and
another, and another, and another.
(08:00):
Compared to the world it replicates, the image is small,
but it has depth and colour. My eyes roll into it.
The retina is attached to the core of the nervous system.
The brain. My brain is in my hand.
(08:20):
It's vibrating. I drag my index finger across
the screen and a voice calls my name.
I greet it as I place the screenagainst my ear.
I've moved seamlessly into the corner of my mind where I
concentrate. Once the exchange is over, the
(08:43):
screen turns to black. I see the deposits of grease on
the aluminosilicate glass where my finger and my ear touched it.
What made the things move and the voice resonate, however, was
not my skin, with its miniscule deposits of fat and dead cells.
(09:03):
It was the electricity at the tip of my index finger.
It disrupted the electrostatic field of the glass layers,
awakening the images, pulling them up onto the glass.
This was not haptic. It was contact.
Heptane in Greek, meant to grasp, to claw, to contain
(09:25):
something within the clasp of a muscle, the bone, the flesh,
through the thin layer of skin that holds them together and
tells them that they're working.The thing is held, Hey, we can
do something with it, but contact is something else.
(09:46):
When I was studying in Paris, I went to the College de France to
listen to Giorgio Agamben's lectures.
I can't remember any of it except a sentence.
Contact is the absence of representation.
I've tried to find its source. I seem to remember that he was
quoting someone, but I haven't found it yet.
(10:09):
Contact is the absence of representation, a sentence
uttered 30 years ago when I was so intent of remembering that I
forgot everything. A quick search for Illinois
Contato El Esenza de Representanza provides a stream
of legal suggestions. The origin of the sentence will
(10:30):
most likely remain lost. I've carried it for a while.
Like when you keep a new ingredient in the back of the
larder because you can't cook with it.
Once in a while you come across a recipe and you think you may
have found something to use it in.
But let me stop right here. Ideas are not spices, even if
(10:51):
they can be spicy. They have a life of their own,
and they grow inside you, carrying trains of thoughts to
the surface of consciousness. This sentence may have been
responsible for my relentless fascination with the line, and
with beginnings and with elementary gestures and forms.
(11:12):
The line is the moment of contact, a stylus moving across
a surface, a papyrus, a sheet offine interlaced fibers of
Mulberry tree, a soft cellulose A4 page.
That moment is something unique,which many artists try to
preserve and expand. Emmanuel Behonger runs toward
(11:37):
the wall at great speed, as if it wasn't there, and he makes it
disappear for a quick second. As he continues running up the
wall at 90°, his body rotates and then jumps onto the ground.
The work called Hobondiere is one of my favourites because it
becomes apparent only when you've read the label.
(12:01):
Oh, there's a work on this wall?People asked.
The work was the stain of his bare feet at almost chest level,
traces of the accumulated dirt of the floor, fixated by his
perspiration. It was almost negligible and it
didn't have the beautiful aura of a footprint.
(12:24):
This notion of trace was used bya lot of theorists to talk about
photography. Intellectuals entertain a
certain romantic disposition towards the trace and analogic
devices because they still operate with traces, even
though, like the screen, the outcome is an image replicating
what we see. Footprints, marks, indentations
(12:49):
fascinate. They're the outcomes of contact.
But our strongest, most omnipresent form of trace is the
photographic image and the logic.
Of course, although the digital one bears its memory as a trace
left by light and shadow on celluloid, we are dealing then
(13:10):
not with presence, but with pastpresence, which is to say the
hollowed out presence of an absence, wrote Margaret Iverson.
What to be romantic or literal? I like literal.
Contact is the absence of representation because it's the
(13:32):
absence of distance. You kiss with your eyes closed.
Contact is what happens before the trace.
It's togetherness. It's my list of contacts.
It's infection, contagion. In mathematics, it's the
touching of a straight line and a curve of two curves or of two
(13:55):
surfaces. The meeting of two curves or
surfaces at a point so as to have a common tangent or tangent
plane at that point. The coincidence of two or more
consecutive points on each of two curves.
(14:15):
Contact is a point or several. The point of contact where 2
lines meet, but also where they separate contacts is
momentaneous. During the pandemic, Katherine
Schrebel called the museum staffof the Stuttgart Kunt Museum,
(14:38):
where she was invited to do an exhibition into one of its
spaces, a 25 metre long hallway.The director, the curators, the
security personnel, the assistants, the cleaners and the
HR people all met her there, oneat the time.
She asked about their daily tasks next to the long pristine
(15:00):
wall of the space. They talked about sitting at the
desk, moving paintings, filling up exhale sheets, preparing food
in the kitchen, mopping the corridors, standing still in the
museum rooms, or distributing leaflets.
(15:20):
Meanwhile, she invited them to touch the wall while they were
speaking. Some did, almost distractingly,
others would forget about it, and some were very performative
about it, almost dancing. I can imagine the surprising
association between touching andspeaking, the cold and
(15:43):
uneventful feel of a modern wall, the sensual liberation of
an unusual contact, the perfunctory gesture.
For some, after this unskilled performance, only their loose
dead cells, the precise chemistry of their humours,
remained on the walls, invisibleto the naked eye.
(16:05):
Catherine Schreuber then appliedforensic powder onto the wall,
revealing the endless ruminations about everyday
actions, professional gestures performed without anyone giving
it a second thought. This was during the pandemic.
The museum was closed, mouths were covered with masks.
(16:26):
Contact and therefore contagion was avoided.
You could touch things, but witha fine layer between a glove, a
tissue. So in this context, contact was
present as a menace, but also asa basic unfulfilled need.
Touching the wall must have felttransgressive and good, as if
(16:48):
the words were re enacted by thehands and then the feeling of
freely touching somehow became ahug.
Warmth as much as it's lack thereof.
The focus was on the hands, the body, as usual in Struble's
work. What you do, what you touch,
what touches you, Not what you grab, take with you and use, but
(17:12):
what at some point in time and space crosses paths with you,
alters you, while you keep goingyour way, moving about in your
space, in your life. Over this layer of smudge
desires, Strobel hung her own drawings framed, suggesting that
(17:33):
their content was perhaps more permeable than expected.
One of the images is taken from a documentary showing the
liberation of Germany at the endof the Second World War, where
the Generale de Gaulle pinned medals on different soldiers.
Here, in Strobel's drawing, an Arab man, most likely from the
(17:55):
former French colonies of North Africa.
The scene took place about 100 meters away from the Koontz
Museum, and Schrebel patiently, diligently draws it again.
Nevertheless, what the visitors could see was a dirty wall
(18:16):
bearing partial traces of people's hands and fingers, as
if they did the unthinkable in amuseum, which is to touch,
which, unless prescribed, doesn't happen in art spaces.
It always haunted me, this privilege of the curator, the
technician, even the artist or the artist's family, sometimes
(18:37):
their kids, who live with the artwork as if it was part of a
strange ritual, passing from hand to hand, dusted, regularly
cleaned. But when one sees the work in a
museum, it is solely for the pleasure of the eyes, or the
strange choreography of the viewer, as we call museum goers.
Getting close, walking around, penetrating its face if it has
(19:02):
one sitting in front of it. But doesn't the eye touch?
Doesn't it feel textures in its own way, the delicate, feathery
touch of a fragonard, the oily, mushy and yet dusty feel of a
painting by Anselm Kiefer? Aren't compelling images more
(19:22):
focused on contact than on haptic adventures?
Haptane means to fasten. The emphasis was and still is,
on what you do once you touch something.
It focuses on the uses a connection allows for.
But when there is an encounter, A tangential interaction, there
(19:45):
is an exchange rather than an action.
If I touch a hammer, it's to grasp it and move it in order to
hit the nail and achieve something.
Contact is simply the happening,sometimes unintentional, of a
recognition, as in a reciprocal acknowledgement.
(20:07):
But once contact has occurred, The thing is gone.
The curve curves and only its negative remains.
The light touching the celluloidcoated with gelatin emulsion
with microscopic photosensitive crystals create something else.
Which we've called a photographic image, where the
(20:29):
outlines of the shapes that formobjects are drawn with light and
shadow. The trace is a leftover layer
which at times still bears a resemblance with a thing that
made it. As is the case with photography
most of times. And at times it doesn't.
If romantics enjoy contemplatingthe absence of the presence, I
(20:52):
prefer to think of the third thing, the line, the direction,
the meaning, the compulsion, thefinger mindlessly yielding
electricity. To be in touch with our friends
and family, we perform a sort ofmindless contact, swiping,
tapping, opening up a space of abstracted experiences.
(21:17):
To be in contact is to have an open line of communication.
To wear contacts is to re establish a constant and
simultaneous relation with the visible world.
The line is contacts. It's an immediate and continuous
complementary relation between two behaviours.
(21:40):
The stylus indents and the soft,grainy material of the ground
receives and gives back the mark.
Why think of this as an absence rather than a communication?
But who is communicating in Julie Merichu's catalog, A
(22:02):
universal history of everything and nothing?
Marina Warner remembers listening to a lecture by the
Moroccan scholar Abdel Fattah Kilito where he was asked who
invented writing. I love his answer because it
diffuses the nationalist hubris behind the question Kilito
(22:24):
answered. Animals.
It was animals who taught us howto read.
Warner remembers the discomfortsin the room and a few giggles.
Notice that he puts the onus on reading, not on writing.
Reading came before writing, at least symbolically, because we
(22:49):
had to learn how to read the marks.
Animals made the tracks on the ground, but also the flights of
birds, Warner writes. But you'll say flights do not
leave traces, and that's where Iwill say they do.
Ideation is contacts. The emphasis on haptic devices
(23:12):
is strange. They're not haptic, which is why
they're so magical to us. They're weirdly technological
and ancestral. By haptic we now mean device,
which works through touch by reacting to it.
However, haptic is usually a oneway experience.
You pick up a hammer and you useit.
(23:33):
You grab a flat Pebble and throwit.
But then the Pebble flies along the water tangentially.
It affects it ever so slightly, forming circles as it rebounds
over and over until it loses momentum.
(23:56):
In Portugal, most folk stories start with back when animals
knew how to talk, etcetera, etcetera.
So they taught us how to form words too.
Animals. Violen Luchu's work hybrid,
where she sings different bird songs, which she carefully
annotated during months and months of bird watching, awakes
(24:20):
A primordial memory. She translated different types
of birdsong into her own, invented symbols created for
each species so that she could interpret them by singing and
become a hybrid between woman and bird, high bird.
But to me it evoked this moment that never existed in such
(24:43):
purity, surely, where we discovered our own vocal cords
and their possible sounds. They started by not being words
just yet, like the approximativespelling you see in all archives
when orthography wasn't totally calibrated.
The lightning in the sky is a letter before the Z ever became
(25:06):
one. The bird's footprint on the
ground was another letter beforethe Y.
You can see them on the wall of Paleolithic caves.
Pectiforms. You can see why graphine, which
is the ancestor of the word graphic, encompasses writing and
drawing through the line and themark as contact.
(25:28):
Graphine contains a small part of the touching and touched
body, which works not at the level of representation, but at
the level of information right after contact occurred.
In the Perigord in France there is a cave with art from the
(25:52):
Upper Paleolithic, but before that, way before humans started
going into the caves, bears lived there.
There's a whole area with hollowbear nests, circular beds which
look like craters where a group of bears slept soundly
(26:13):
hibernated. You can imagine the pace,
breathing of those strange animals, able to stand upright
but also moving on 4 legs between bipeds and quadrupeds,
as if hesitating whether to moveto the humanoid side.
Another thing they did was to manicure their nails on the
(26:35):
walls of The Cave, which are made of a soft limestone, always
wet and damp, perfect for mark making.
I don't know if our retinas are different or if our retinas are
perhaps faulty, but the animals don't seem as mesmerized as we
are with imprints, traces and marks.
(26:58):
The Magdalenian people who used that cave noticed the claw
marks. They were used to read the
drawings of nature and started replicating them.
The bears taught them how to draw on the limestone.
There are some drawings made by humans over the ones made by
bears, but more importantly, theHoofing Yak cave has many other
(27:24):
types of drawings, one of which is the line made by two or three
fingers across the walls of The Cave.
It reminds me of Kat Hinchwogle's wall, but here,
with lots of strange stories to tell.
Protuberant flintstones. Damp and thick surfaces,
progressively lit and thrown Into Darkness again by the
(27:45):
passage of people with torches. Their mammoths.
Rhinoceros bisons, but also tactiforms and finger flutings,
that is, walls and ceilings covered with Serpentine lines
made with the index finger or two fingers swiping, dragging
(28:06):
across the cold moon milk, a precipitate from limestone and
other aggregates. The Magdalenian people went to
caves for contact, as the bears had taught them.
As a Glaswegian artist, Carla Black put it, quote, the marks
will never dry and remain as malleable as the day they were
(28:28):
made. This to me is what art really
is, an impetus towards physical response.
I'm always trying to get back tothat UN quote.
If we were suddenly giants stomping on the planet, looking
around, we would notice the precision of the drawings from
(28:52):
the time when animals could speak, or when we were still
collectively fluent in bird and bear.
We would see the economy of the mammoth depictions, their close
cohabitation with the naked and linear contact of the finger
flutings. We would also notice that in
Europe we suddenly became enthralled with these marks,
(29:14):
which became elaborate superimpositions of lines,
smudges, planes, thick patina taken to the utmost detail until
we couldn't take it anymore. And between the 17th and the
19th centuries of our current era, we had to invent
photography. We would certainly notice, were
(29:35):
we giants, that Europe is the exception, and that we've become
more and more attuned to the precision of the image.
To the point where we invented the screen called retina,
containing the little squares which compose our images in such
a way that they're sharper than our vision.
(29:56):
And so that we can move them, enlarge them, cut them with our
agile fingers, ceaselessly working the star milk of our
screens. This episode was recorded on the
27th of May. It is the first draft of my
(30:25):
lecture Breeding, I don't know what to call it, at the Mears
van der Hoe house in Barcelona. At this point, when you're
listening to this episode, the conversation will have taken
place, and so it may reappear ina third version on my sub stack
(30:51):
in the form of a text, most likely, as it usually happens.
So don't hesitate in downloadingthe app if you don't have it.
Sub stack is a really interesting form of social
media. It's as if Blue Sky and
Instagram had had a baby. So give it a chance and give it
(31:15):
some time. You can find, other than me,
other people who publish texts about medieval writing, about
birds, so many topics, about football, about gaming, so many
topics. You do have to check references.
(31:39):
You do have to do your own job, but that's what you're supposed
to do, isn't it? You're not supposed to just
accept what people tell you. You have to do your own
research. And I think that sub stack kind
of gives you that excitement of the maverick and at the same
time that responsibility of the adult modern awakened reader
(32:04):
that you are that you can potentially be if you want to
give it a chance. So I am in there as Joanna PR
Nevis. It's easy to find me.
And if you don't want to read, if you prefer to listen, well,
there's lots of past episodes. If you haven't listened to all
the episodes of Exhibitionist, this and there's also Instagram.
(32:28):
So don't forget to reach out to us if you have suggestions, if
you have comments, you can leavecomments on YouTube, on
Instagram, on Spotify. It's great to hear from you.
I put these episodes out there and then crickets.
I don't know. And I'm so curious.
Anyway, it is an honor as ever to be in your eardrums.
(32:53):
I love that you stuck it out till the end and I will be back
in two weeks. If you want to know more about
the next episode, don't forget, subscribe to the newsletter.
You have a link to it in the show's notes or you can go to
exhibitionist.com on the page, the homepage.
(33:14):
So thank you. Take very good care of
yourselves. Thank you so much for being
here, and I will be with you very, very soon.
Have a good one. Exhibitionist is an indie
podcast with its perks and its productive challenges, but I'm
(33:34):
very thankful to be in your eardrums or somewhere in your
screens. Don't forget to support
independent content. Give us a nice rating, subscribe
to the newsletter and if you can, click on the show's notes
or go to our website and buy us a latte.
Thank you for being here, thank you for supporting us, thank you
for listening. Have a good one.
I'm Joanna Pierre Nevis, your host, and this is exhibitionist
this. I'm an independent writer and
curator with a wide-ranging 2 decades career in contemporary
art, from commercial galleries to art fairs, from research to
curating, from Lisbon to London through Paris.
(00:28):
But when I'm asked what I do outside the out world, the
inevitable reaction is, oh, I don't know anything about
contemporary art. Ouch.
So call it a midlife crisis, call it arrogance, but I gave
myself the task of trying to fill that gap with Co host
conversation episodes centered around a genuine exchange of
(00:51):
thoughts, feelings and precious context around solo exhibitions,
interviews and special episodes based on a particular topic to
keep you alert and on your toes.If you want to read further into
some of the topics discussed in the episodes and more, you can
(01:11):
also find me on Sub Stack under my name, Joanna Pierre Nevis.
This is one of those shorter episodes based on a topic often
prompted by a lecture or a conference.
This is no exception. I was invited to participate in
(01:33):
a conversation on the occasion of a book launch, which is the
outcome of a really interesting project, so the story behind it
is really fascinating. Picture Barcelona.
Picture a school of traditional crafts such as ceramic weaving,
sculpting. The school is called Masana and
(01:56):
its director Chabi Kapmani decided to invite experimental
architect and artists also basedin Barcelona, Edwah Kabi, to
bring his work based on automation algorithms coding to
the school as a residency project.
(02:19):
So of course, the purpose was tocombine or articulate handcraft
technologies with new digital learning technologies.
The culprit here is going to be the hand, of course.
So you'll imagine the students working with their haptic
(02:40):
abilities and the artists pressing buttons and looking at
screens. On the other hand, I have
investigated for many years an inventor of the 19th century
called Etienne Jean Marais, who was French, who basically
perfected and established the use of graphic recording
(03:01):
machines. And I argue that this is the big
shift. And what shift is this?
So think seismograph. Think electrocardiograph, but
think mostly the first inventionof Mare, which was this
figmograph. It was a small device that you
(03:22):
applied to the wrist with a sensor which activated the
stylus, and he showed this in Napoleon's court.
So at the time there were these massive events around these
innovations. Of course photography comes to
mind, but here it was basically something used by doctors.
(03:44):
All doctors bought this device after this.
So this small device was appliedto the wrists and then the
movement of blood was sensed by makeshift kind of sensor, which
(04:06):
then carried that information tothe stylus.
The stylus would move across a cylinder which was covered by a
paper darkened with smoke. And so the movement of the
stylus scraped off parts of thatsmoke, creating a white line, a
(04:28):
graph that kind of emerged from that black background with the
unique pattern of that person's blood pressure.
The image in Mary's book called Le movement, I think, or the
graphic method. I think that's in the graphic
(04:48):
method illustrating this device shows a hand idle and a machine,
the Sigmograph drawing. So from here on, and that's kind
of what I argue, there's a reconfiguration of the body.
So the eye does not provide the visual stimulus to the eye and
(05:12):
the hand, which together draw quite the opposite.
So the eye receives the drawing and interprets it.
So this changes the way we use our bodies in relation to
(05:33):
drawing and this is kind of whatIdwa brought to the table at the
Masana school. What Idwa did was to bring this
idea of the machine, the automated process, into the
(05:56):
school. So he worked with 10 students
that he isolated HE3D, scanned their hands working on different
manual disciplines. Then he translated this movement
with an algorithmic syntax that he developed and he extrapolated
100,000 times the curve that he obtained.
(06:20):
And so the text that I received says quote.
The series of 10 drawings captures and reveals the
infinite repetitions and variations of human movements
contained in the almost automatic action of the
craftsperson when working with the material, UN quote.
(06:41):
So notice that he applies the notion of automation to the
human body. And I did something a bit
similar, which was to focus on the movement and what happens in
it for us. I ignored the time span between
manual production and digital production or consumption or use
(07:03):
and kind of read them together. And I propose perhaps another
way of considering connection proximity and creation.
(07:37):
I'm looking at a screen. I'm holding it.
I lift my index finger to tap onit.
An image appears. I drag my index finger across
the screen. Another image appears, and
another, and another, and another.
(08:00):
Compared to the world it replicates, the image is small,
but it has depth and colour. My eyes roll into it.
The retina is attached to the core of the nervous system.
The brain. My brain is in my hand.
(08:20):
It's vibrating. I drag my index finger across
the screen and a voice calls my name.
I greet it as I place the screenagainst my ear.
I've moved seamlessly into the corner of my mind where I
concentrate. Once the exchange is over, the
(08:43):
screen turns to black. I see the deposits of grease on
the aluminosilicate glass where my finger and my ear touched it.
What made the things move and the voice resonate, however, was
not my skin, with its miniscule deposits of fat and dead cells.
(09:03):
It was the electricity at the tip of my index finger.
It disrupted the electrostatic field of the glass layers,
awakening the images, pulling them up onto the glass.
This was not haptic. It was contact.
Heptane in Greek, meant to grasp, to claw, to contain
(09:25):
something within the clasp of a muscle, the bone, the flesh,
through the thin layer of skin that holds them together and
tells them that they're working.The thing is held, Hey, we can
do something with it, but contact is something else.
(09:46):
When I was studying in Paris, I went to the College de France to
listen to Giorgio Agamben's lectures.
I can't remember any of it except a sentence.
Contact is the absence of representation.
I've tried to find its source. I seem to remember that he was
quoting someone, but I haven't found it yet.
(10:09):
Contact is the absence of representation, a sentence
uttered 30 years ago when I was so intent of remembering that I
forgot everything. A quick search for Illinois
Contato El Esenza de Representanza provides a stream
of legal suggestions. The origin of the sentence will
(10:30):
most likely remain lost. I've carried it for a while.
Like when you keep a new ingredient in the back of the
larder because you can't cook with it.
Once in a while you come across a recipe and you think you may
have found something to use it in.
But let me stop right here. Ideas are not spices, even if
(10:51):
they can be spicy. They have a life of their own,
and they grow inside you, carrying trains of thoughts to
the surface of consciousness. This sentence may have been
responsible for my relentless fascination with the line, and
with beginnings and with elementary gestures and forms.
(11:12):
The line is the moment of contact, a stylus moving across
a surface, a papyrus, a sheet offine interlaced fibers of
Mulberry tree, a soft cellulose A4 page.
That moment is something unique,which many artists try to
preserve and expand. Emmanuel Behonger runs toward
(11:37):
the wall at great speed, as if it wasn't there, and he makes it
disappear for a quick second. As he continues running up the
wall at 90°, his body rotates and then jumps onto the ground.
The work called Hobondiere is one of my favourites because it
becomes apparent only when you've read the label.
(12:01):
Oh, there's a work on this wall?People asked.
The work was the stain of his bare feet at almost chest level,
traces of the accumulated dirt of the floor, fixated by his
perspiration. It was almost negligible and it
didn't have the beautiful aura of a footprint.
(12:24):
This notion of trace was used bya lot of theorists to talk about
photography. Intellectuals entertain a
certain romantic disposition towards the trace and analogic
devices because they still operate with traces, even
though, like the screen, the outcome is an image replicating
what we see. Footprints, marks, indentations
(12:49):
fascinate. They're the outcomes of contact.
But our strongest, most omnipresent form of trace is the
photographic image and the logic.
Of course, although the digital one bears its memory as a trace
left by light and shadow on celluloid, we are dealing then
(13:10):
not with presence, but with pastpresence, which is to say the
hollowed out presence of an absence, wrote Margaret Iverson.
What to be romantic or literal? I like literal.
Contact is the absence of representation because it's the
(13:32):
absence of distance. You kiss with your eyes closed.
Contact is what happens before the trace.
It's togetherness. It's my list of contacts.
It's infection, contagion. In mathematics, it's the
touching of a straight line and a curve of two curves or of two
(13:55):
surfaces. The meeting of two curves or
surfaces at a point so as to have a common tangent or tangent
plane at that point. The coincidence of two or more
consecutive points on each of two curves.
(14:15):
Contact is a point or several. The point of contact where 2
lines meet, but also where they separate contacts is
momentaneous. During the pandemic, Katherine
Schrebel called the museum staffof the Stuttgart Kunt Museum,
(14:38):
where she was invited to do an exhibition into one of its
spaces, a 25 metre long hallway.The director, the curators, the
security personnel, the assistants, the cleaners and the
HR people all met her there, oneat the time.
She asked about their daily tasks next to the long pristine
(15:00):
wall of the space. They talked about sitting at the
desk, moving paintings, filling up exhale sheets, preparing food
in the kitchen, mopping the corridors, standing still in the
museum rooms, or distributing leaflets.
(15:20):
Meanwhile, she invited them to touch the wall while they were
speaking. Some did, almost distractingly,
others would forget about it, and some were very performative
about it, almost dancing. I can imagine the surprising
association between touching andspeaking, the cold and
(15:43):
uneventful feel of a modern wall, the sensual liberation of
an unusual contact, the perfunctory gesture.
For some, after this unskilled performance, only their loose
dead cells, the precise chemistry of their humours,
remained on the walls, invisibleto the naked eye.
(16:05):
Catherine Schreuber then appliedforensic powder onto the wall,
revealing the endless ruminations about everyday
actions, professional gestures performed without anyone giving
it a second thought. This was during the pandemic.
The museum was closed, mouths were covered with masks.
(16:26):
Contact and therefore contagion was avoided.
You could touch things, but witha fine layer between a glove, a
tissue. So in this context, contact was
present as a menace, but also asa basic unfulfilled need.
Touching the wall must have felttransgressive and good, as if
(16:48):
the words were re enacted by thehands and then the feeling of
freely touching somehow became ahug.
Warmth as much as it's lack thereof.
The focus was on the hands, the body, as usual in Struble's
work. What you do, what you touch,
what touches you, Not what you grab, take with you and use, but
(17:12):
what at some point in time and space crosses paths with you,
alters you, while you keep goingyour way, moving about in your
space, in your life. Over this layer of smudge
desires, Strobel hung her own drawings framed, suggesting that
(17:33):
their content was perhaps more permeable than expected.
One of the images is taken from a documentary showing the
liberation of Germany at the endof the Second World War, where
the Generale de Gaulle pinned medals on different soldiers.
Here, in Strobel's drawing, an Arab man, most likely from the
(17:55):
former French colonies of North Africa.
The scene took place about 100 meters away from the Koontz
Museum, and Schrebel patiently, diligently draws it again.
Nevertheless, what the visitors could see was a dirty wall
(18:16):
bearing partial traces of people's hands and fingers, as
if they did the unthinkable in amuseum, which is to touch,
which, unless prescribed, doesn't happen in art spaces.
It always haunted me, this privilege of the curator, the
technician, even the artist or the artist's family, sometimes
(18:37):
their kids, who live with the artwork as if it was part of a
strange ritual, passing from hand to hand, dusted, regularly
cleaned. But when one sees the work in a
museum, it is solely for the pleasure of the eyes, or the
strange choreography of the viewer, as we call museum goers.
Getting close, walking around, penetrating its face if it has
(19:02):
one sitting in front of it. But doesn't the eye touch?
Doesn't it feel textures in its own way, the delicate, feathery
touch of a fragonard, the oily, mushy and yet dusty feel of a
painting by Anselm Kiefer? Aren't compelling images more
(19:22):
focused on contact than on haptic adventures?
Haptane means to fasten. The emphasis was and still is,
on what you do once you touch something.
It focuses on the uses a connection allows for.
But when there is an encounter, A tangential interaction, there
(19:45):
is an exchange rather than an action.
If I touch a hammer, it's to grasp it and move it in order to
hit the nail and achieve something.
Contact is simply the happening,sometimes unintentional, of a
recognition, as in a reciprocal acknowledgement.
(20:07):
But once contact has occurred, The thing is gone.
The curve curves and only its negative remains.
The light touching the celluloidcoated with gelatin emulsion
with microscopic photosensitive crystals create something else.
Which we've called a photographic image, where the
(20:29):
outlines of the shapes that formobjects are drawn with light and
shadow. The trace is a leftover layer
which at times still bears a resemblance with a thing that
made it. As is the case with photography
most of times. And at times it doesn't.
If romantics enjoy contemplatingthe absence of the presence, I
(20:52):
prefer to think of the third thing, the line, the direction,
the meaning, the compulsion, thefinger mindlessly yielding
electricity. To be in touch with our friends
and family, we perform a sort ofmindless contact, swiping,
tapping, opening up a space of abstracted experiences.
(21:17):
To be in contact is to have an open line of communication.
To wear contacts is to re establish a constant and
simultaneous relation with the visible world.
The line is contacts. It's an immediate and continuous
complementary relation between two behaviours.
(21:40):
The stylus indents and the soft,grainy material of the ground
receives and gives back the mark.
Why think of this as an absence rather than a communication?
But who is communicating in Julie Merichu's catalog, A
(22:02):
universal history of everything and nothing?
Marina Warner remembers listening to a lecture by the
Moroccan scholar Abdel Fattah Kilito where he was asked who
invented writing. I love his answer because it
diffuses the nationalist hubris behind the question Kilito
(22:24):
answered. Animals.
It was animals who taught us howto read.
Warner remembers the discomfortsin the room and a few giggles.
Notice that he puts the onus on reading, not on writing.
Reading came before writing, at least symbolically, because we
(22:49):
had to learn how to read the marks.
Animals made the tracks on the ground, but also the flights of
birds, Warner writes. But you'll say flights do not
leave traces, and that's where Iwill say they do.
Ideation is contacts. The emphasis on haptic devices
(23:12):
is strange. They're not haptic, which is why
they're so magical to us. They're weirdly technological
and ancestral. By haptic we now mean device,
which works through touch by reacting to it.
However, haptic is usually a oneway experience.
You pick up a hammer and you useit.
(23:33):
You grab a flat Pebble and throwit.
But then the Pebble flies along the water tangentially.
It affects it ever so slightly, forming circles as it rebounds
over and over until it loses momentum.
(23:56):
In Portugal, most folk stories start with back when animals
knew how to talk, etcetera, etcetera.
So they taught us how to form words too.
Animals. Violen Luchu's work hybrid,
where she sings different bird songs, which she carefully
annotated during months and months of bird watching, awakes
(24:20):
A primordial memory. She translated different types
of birdsong into her own, invented symbols created for
each species so that she could interpret them by singing and
become a hybrid between woman and bird, high bird.
But to me it evoked this moment that never existed in such
(24:43):
purity, surely, where we discovered our own vocal cords
and their possible sounds. They started by not being words
just yet, like the approximativespelling you see in all archives
when orthography wasn't totally calibrated.
The lightning in the sky is a letter before the Z ever became
(25:06):
one. The bird's footprint on the
ground was another letter beforethe Y.
You can see them on the wall of Paleolithic caves.
Pectiforms. You can see why graphine, which
is the ancestor of the word graphic, encompasses writing and
drawing through the line and themark as contact.
(25:28):
Graphine contains a small part of the touching and touched
body, which works not at the level of representation, but at
the level of information right after contact occurred.
In the Perigord in France there is a cave with art from the
(25:52):
Upper Paleolithic, but before that, way before humans started
going into the caves, bears lived there.
There's a whole area with hollowbear nests, circular beds which
look like craters where a group of bears slept soundly
(26:13):
hibernated. You can imagine the pace,
breathing of those strange animals, able to stand upright
but also moving on 4 legs between bipeds and quadrupeds,
as if hesitating whether to moveto the humanoid side.
Another thing they did was to manicure their nails on the
(26:35):
walls of The Cave, which are made of a soft limestone, always
wet and damp, perfect for mark making.
I don't know if our retinas are different or if our retinas are
perhaps faulty, but the animals don't seem as mesmerized as we
are with imprints, traces and marks.
(26:58):
The Magdalenian people who used that cave noticed the claw
marks. They were used to read the
drawings of nature and started replicating them.
The bears taught them how to draw on the limestone.
There are some drawings made by humans over the ones made by
bears, but more importantly, theHoofing Yak cave has many other
(27:24):
types of drawings, one of which is the line made by two or three
fingers across the walls of The Cave.
It reminds me of Kat Hinchwogle's wall, but here,
with lots of strange stories to tell.
Protuberant flintstones. Damp and thick surfaces,
progressively lit and thrown Into Darkness again by the
(27:45):
passage of people with torches. Their mammoths.
Rhinoceros bisons, but also tactiforms and finger flutings,
that is, walls and ceilings covered with Serpentine lines
made with the index finger or two fingers swiping, dragging
(28:06):
across the cold moon milk, a precipitate from limestone and
other aggregates. The Magdalenian people went to
caves for contact, as the bears had taught them.
As a Glaswegian artist, Carla Black put it, quote, the marks
will never dry and remain as malleable as the day they were
(28:28):
made. This to me is what art really
is, an impetus towards physical response.
I'm always trying to get back tothat UN quote.
If we were suddenly giants stomping on the planet, looking
around, we would notice the precision of the drawings from
(28:52):
the time when animals could speak, or when we were still
collectively fluent in bird and bear.
We would see the economy of the mammoth depictions, their close
cohabitation with the naked and linear contact of the finger
flutings. We would also notice that in
Europe we suddenly became enthralled with these marks,
(29:14):
which became elaborate superimpositions of lines,
smudges, planes, thick patina taken to the utmost detail until
we couldn't take it anymore. And between the 17th and the
19th centuries of our current era, we had to invent
photography. We would certainly notice, were
(29:35):
we giants, that Europe is the exception, and that we've become
more and more attuned to the precision of the image.
To the point where we invented the screen called retina,
containing the little squares which compose our images in such
a way that they're sharper than our vision.
(29:56):
And so that we can move them, enlarge them, cut them with our
agile fingers, ceaselessly working the star milk of our
screens. This episode was recorded on the
27th of May. It is the first draft of my
(30:25):
lecture Breeding, I don't know what to call it, at the Mears
van der Hoe house in Barcelona. At this point, when you're
listening to this episode, the conversation will have taken
place, and so it may reappear ina third version on my sub stack
(30:51):
in the form of a text, most likely, as it usually happens.
So don't hesitate in downloadingthe app if you don't have it.
Sub stack is a really interesting form of social
media. It's as if Blue Sky and
Instagram had had a baby. So give it a chance and give it
(31:15):
some time. You can find, other than me,
other people who publish texts about medieval writing, about
birds, so many topics, about football, about gaming, so many
topics. You do have to check references.
(31:39):
You do have to do your own job, but that's what you're supposed
to do, isn't it? You're not supposed to just
accept what people tell you. You have to do your own
research. And I think that sub stack kind
of gives you that excitement of the maverick and at the same
time that responsibility of the adult modern awakened reader
(32:04):
that you are that you can potentially be if you want to
give it a chance. So I am in there as Joanna PR
Nevis. It's easy to find me.
And if you don't want to read, if you prefer to listen, well,
there's lots of past episodes. If you haven't listened to all
the episodes of Exhibitionist, this and there's also Instagram.
(32:28):
So don't forget to reach out to us if you have suggestions, if
you have comments, you can leavecomments on YouTube, on
Instagram, on Spotify. It's great to hear from you.
I put these episodes out there and then crickets.
I don't know. And I'm so curious.
Anyway, it is an honor as ever to be in your eardrums.
(32:53):
I love that you stuck it out till the end and I will be back
in two weeks. If you want to know more about
the next episode, don't forget, subscribe to the newsletter.
You have a link to it in the show's notes or you can go to
exhibitionist.com on the page, the homepage.
(33:14):
So thank you. Take very good care of
yourselves. Thank you so much for being
here, and I will be with you very, very soon.
Have a good one. Exhibitionist is an indie
podcast with its perks and its productive challenges, but I'm
(33:34):
very thankful to be in your eardrums or somewhere in your
screens. Don't forget to support
independent content. Give us a nice rating, subscribe
to the newsletter and if you can, click on the show's notes
or go to our website and buy us a latte.
Thank you for being here, thank you for supporting us, thank you
for listening. Have a good one.
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