For Jack Youngerman

Early one evening not long ago, after a day of vexed struggle with a problem in my work, I left the studio and headed for the solace of the woods. It was late spring, and the soft light glowed on tiny eruptions of young green, the trees just awakening from their long winter slumber. Giving myself over to the wisdom of the rooted world, I began, as I had so many times, to be cleansed of the day. But while it’s usually enough just to look and listen, on this occasion I had the impulse to touch. I approached one of my oldest friends – an august black oak with the skyward thrust of a cathedral – and began to run my fingertips over its bark. Stroking the coarse surface, the pattern of its ridges and valleys tapping a silent rhythm on my skin, I had a sudden sensation of intense aliveness. All thoughts of my work retreated, and just as I myself seemed to disappear, it came to me: the solution to my problem.

We call these moments of insight, but it might be more accurate to call them moments of intouch. For rather than as mentally conjured visual images, insights register as whole body events, internal stirrings that seem to touch us from within. A surge of warmth may arise, or the skin might tingle. In this instance there was a feeling of being drawn downward toward the earth, as if gravity had decided to give me a swift tug. Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that this one was brought on by skin touch, the skin being our oldest and most sensitive organ. The first part of us to develop embryologically, our skin is deeply connected to our central nervous system, making whatever happens on it happen to our whole body. With my innermost rhythms recalibrated by the encounter, my body delivered to my awareness something formerly hidden from it.

But there is yet a deeper connection between touch and insight, this one bearing directly on the revelation of that day. This is that, in some deeply bodily and largely unconscious way, there seems to be a fundamental link between touch and veracity. It is said that seeing is believing, but feeling is truth, there being no greater verification of a thing’s existence than to feel it with one’s hands. But if touch is the ultimate testament to local matters of fact, might there also be a connection between touch and a larger truth? Might the very act of touching – of making skin-to-skin contact with another manifestation of matter – bring us into a felt alignment with some fundamental principle of nature itself? (And what is insight if not a moment of contact – of being seized by a truth that seems to sweep into us from beyond?)

It was exactly this larger sense of the truth of touch that came to me that day in the woods. The problem that had been so troubling me was the one that afflicts all artists – namely, the search for the right formal language with which to express our ideas. I was starting a new series, and although I could feel as an inner impulse the direction I needed to go, I had no visual image to guide me, no idea of its form. For weeks I had been groping, guided only by a dual compulsion – first, to fill sheets of paper with exploratory marks, and then, failing to find in them the right form, to efface all the marks by rubbing my charcoal into the paper’s surface. And for weeks I’d been left with nothing but rubbed paper: a thousand and one failed experiments and no progress to speak of. Until, at last, the touch of deliverance: hand moving over bark, the tree speaking to my skin through the texture of its own: It’s the texture of the paper – the texture IS the form. Let the texture speak, for it has something to say. 

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Texture in visual art is a curious thing. For while we can imagine that this hasn’t always been so (the worn surfaces of pre-modern artifacts suggest that it has not), texture speaks to a sense that the viewer is denied. Although the crafting of art objects involves close physical contact – the artist’s handling, brushing onto, scraping away from, sweating into – the viewer, on the receiving end, is forbidden from touching. Indeed, in formal settings, even close proximity is prohibited. When we admire Cezanne’s sense of touch or the texture of a Noguchi, what we’re responding to is tactility as experienced by the eye, which is to say indirectly, or at a one-step remove. There is thus about our medium a certain duplicity: on the one hand a seduction – a bodily pull toward the art object by its tactile presence – and on the other a refusal of what that presence is felt to promise. Visual art since the modern era is not just an art for the eye; it is an art for an eye bodily distanced from the beheld. It is an art, in other words, of detached spectatorship.

Historically, this principle of detached seeing has invested our medium with a certain authority. The reason in plain enough: in our decidedly occularcentric culture, vision enjoys pride of place in the hierarchy of the senses – a hierarchy that, not incidentally, places touch at the bottom. Associated with objectivity and control, with instrumental reason, vision seems to operate as if from on high, observing the sensual surround but neither touching nor being touched by it. Conceived as the function of a kind of pure consciousness – a consciousness, that is, spared the insults of carnality – vision thus affirms the guiding myth of the modern West: the belief in the autonomous mind, separate both from the body it presumes to govern and from the world it perceives to be outside itself. With its idea of the pure eye uncontaminated by touch, visual art has been a tacit agent of the Cartesian dualism.

But while the broad category of visual art falls on the winning side of this dualism, even it is not innocent of the latter’s hierarchy and value system. Take, for example, the privileged status of painting; between painting and sculpture, few would argue that it is sculpture that enjoys more prestige. Assumed to appeal to the eye – and therefore mind – rather than the body, painting hews closer to the Cartesian ideal. Sculpture, on the other hand, is unabashedly bodily, and is therefore to the Cartesian mind an art for women and animals. (Note that bowerbirds, for all their creativity, would never be said to make paintings; if what they make can be considered art, it would most likely be categorized as a kind of decorative sculpture.)  And finally, even within painting itself we find Descartes lurking. Back when I was in art school, an elderly male professor put it very succinctly. “Texture,” he said by way of critique of my paintings, “is, you should know, the handmaiden of painting.” The phrase was so telling that it has stayed with me all these years, an imperious ghost ever reminding me that pictorial form is the (male) master.

But what of today? What of the spectatorial eye in our post-Cartesian era? Now that the myth of the disembodied mind has been exposed for what it is and the old dualisms are ceding ground to more relational understandings, the old hierarchy of the senses no longer seems to hold. While it can hardly be doubted that vision is still culturally dominant – the mad proliferation of images is evidence enough – the reigning sense has been denuded of the ideological weight it once carried. Indeed, with the shift toward a consciousness that sees not isolated things but interconnections, the old hierarchy might be said to have been turned on its head. If vision was the defining sense of the Cartesian era, the inherently relational sense of touch suggests itself as that of the new one.

To be clear, none of this is to imply that vision itself is corrupt, or that visual art should renounce its native orientation. It is our ideas about vision that are at issue here – ideas that, being culturally inherited and largely unconscious, greatly shape how we experience the world. We know all too well the consequences of thinking ourselves separate from nature (if the climate crisis is telling us one thing, it is the tragic fallacy of this idea), but continuing to experience vision as if it does not involve the body is a less obvious variant of the very same error. But like all unexamined assumptions, these ideas can change when brought to the light of awareness. If visual art’s denial of touch before effected a kind of reassurance (we can experience the sensual world while remaining outside or above it), the same in the new era can evoke something else entirely. Indeed, if brought into the service of art’s expressive power – if made a conscious constituent of a work of art’s meaning – this tension between what is given and what is denied might become a seedbed for insight into the larger truth of touch.

What, then, is the larger truth of touch? The larger truth of touch is nothing less than that it forms the foundation of our world. There is much talk these days about how “everything is interconnected,” but this is not just an abstraction; it is physically true. Everything is interconnected because every thing is in deep contact with everything around it. One stunning example is the mycorrhizal network: as recent science confirms, all the plants we see as separate individuals above ground are in fact deeply interconnected down in the soil. Up here in our world, we walk through the day touched by the earth: with every step we take rising away from it, it pulls us back to itself, gently, ceaselessly, bringing us back home. We are touched by the sun whenever we go outside; imbibing its substance through the porous membrane of our skin, our bodies are in constant communion with the star that sustains us. We are touched by the air as we breathe it into our lungs, and very concretely by the food that makes its way through our bodies. And of course to be touched by anything is simultaneously to touch it; there is no touch without reciprocity, and hence no touch without a transformation, big or small, to both bodies. On the most fundamental scale, all matter is held together by touch; without the nuclear forces pulling the particles toward the center, the contents of every atom would dissipate into space. And the atoms themselves seek contact with each other as they attract and bond to form complex molecules.  Everywhere we look we find a fundamental reaching outward: bodies seeking other bodies in ever-shifting patterns of relationship and exchange.

Touch as the founding principle of the cosmos: What would change in our lives if we could carry this in our awareness? If we knew we were touching and being touched by everything around us, would we become more responsible inhabitants of our natural and cultural ecosystems? Would we care more about what happens elsewhere if we knew that every elsewhere is ultimately connected to right here? Could we come to feel the constant embrace of the earth and know from it that we are at home? Could we come to experience the air not as so much empty space between us but as a shared fluid body that breathes life into us all? All of these are real and important possibilities. But even on a more prosaic level the truth of touch has much to teach. At a time when we are living ever more of our lives in the virtual world, we have fallen literally out of touch with the real one. Consciously or not, we long to touch the world; as organisms born of an interwoven cosmos, we have an innate need to feel different surfaces and textures, to touch other bodies like and different from our own. It can be no coincidence that at a time when most of our tactile stimulation comes from the cold plastic of a keyboard, vinyl records are making a comeback in many youth circles. Ask anyone who loves vinyl why she loves it and she will tell you: It’s not the sound so much as the ritual of the handling – the holding of the album cover, the placing of disc on player, the delicate lifting of the needle just so. Seen in this light, one wonders how many of today’s problems are really the throes of bodies in tactile starvation.

And now what of visual art? How can the truth of touch be evoked in a medium that is inherently visual? One way lies in the aforementioned tension – the one that arises from art’s very refusal of touch. Much like black and white photographs enhance our awareness of color, art’s spectatorial distance might come to evoke by negation: By deliberately drawing our attention to the touch we cannot have – which is to say by foregrounding the haptic qualities long considered secondary to optical form — art might bring awareness to our native longing for touch, and with it a sense of our bodily immersion in the world. But there is yet another way – one that is at once obvious and transgressive. What if we were to invite actual touch into the visual art experience? The idea is not entirely without precedent. One thinks of the Brazilian modernist Lygia Clark, whose relational objects were made to be handled, and who, in her belief in the body as the locus of our intelligence, arrived at today’s insights decades before we did. But over the long sweep of Western art history, haptic engagement has gone largely unexplored. Among numerous other possibilities, we might imagine a new hybrid form: a kind of haptico-visual partnership where touchable objects might be introduced alongside the purely visual, the two experiences complementing and intensifying each other.

There is one precedent for what is being proposed that is still very much with us today. Since 1972, New York’s Museum of Modern Art has been offering a program called Touch Tours. Part of an initiative to grant greater access to the disabled, the program allows the blind to experience the museum’s collection through touch. While the tours have been a gift to many over the years, today they have acquired an unintended poignancy. For at a time when we are becoming increasingly alienated from touch, one wonders if in a sense we have not all become disabled. Retreating ever further into the abstract space of online life, steeped in the lingering residue of an ideology of disembodiment, and now dogged by a virus that has made bodily contact a health risk, the human organism has been robbed of a crucial component of its life force. If we could all take a touch tour, what might we learn? We might, at the very least, be roused into a lost aliveness. But we might also be seized by a discomfiting paradox: namely, that in our fixation on vision as a means of knowing the world, we have been blinded to a deeper truth. Where vision sees a world full of separate objects and actions, touch knows, because it feels, the manifold forces that connect them. Where vision construes the world as other against self, touch knows, atom to atom, that there is only one substance.  While vision posits truth as something abstract and over there, touch reminds us that the deepest truth is always already right here.

Many are now suggesting that this will be the era of kinship – a time when we finally come to recognize all our mutually dependent relations, animate and inanimate, human and otherwise. But what the truth of touch tells us is that we are more than related. Deeply embedded within the warp and weft of the cosmos, we are – everything is – continuous with everything else. Seen in this light, texture emerges as a powerful symbol. Related to both text and textile, the word bespeaks the truth of our interwoven world. Heralding texture as the leitmotif of the new era, visual art might make palpable the defining insight of our time: that what we have with the world is not so much kinship as an infinitely valent, intimate, and indissoluble skinship.

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Art, Psychology, Science