Right now, our instinct to abject is ever-more fervent, excessive in itself, but because of constant warning signs ripping through everything we’re just used to.
My worry is that this will have lasting effects on our view and treatment of bodies -- especially those that already transgress the patriarchal ‘norm’...or exist as ‘Other’ comfortably or otherwise.
Does this then perpetuate our worries on borders? On the protectionist treatment of Green Space?
A note on excess:
The progressive moralisation of the body meant that sharing bits of our bodies, visually, otherwise sensually, became ‘too much’, because it is a powerful thing that bodies as bodies transcend social standing in a sense that we all have them.
I want to make it clear that in no way is this a dismissal of the noted differences in bodies and how this correlates in a socio-economic sense, but that through accepting ‘the body’ as a whole, that all of our bodies make the whole, maybe the societal corpus at large can be unionised…..
D: TOUCH shrouded in a rare serene stillness, undermined by the decaying presence of the ghosts and shadows of historical violence, a sudden and significant shift in my individual and shared understanding about the world I’m in……. particular how my knowledge, had built up, constructed and imagined was not at all what I experienced.
G: That bodily excess triggers bodily responses is ultimately a shared experience that allows us to feel a shred of collectivity amongst the alienating promotion of individualism - that we can link sharing through the body -- it is maybe, in some contexts, a kind of antidote to the aspirational, capital excess that is continuously promoted.
D: The oscillating situation of apprehension and comprehension, the instability of miss reading and miss understanding opened up instability, and now amplified in our current COV-19 world, knowledge is by definition very unstable and not fixed, also it has become increasingly defined now by being remote – distance, proximity, mobility are not what they were to me……can we travel there again or do we then re-imagine and re-shape what we started?
What is wrong with instability?
Does it matter if you really ever know?
G: Push back - instability is so loaded, it's easy to say this from stable positions, we should be able to have movement, certain important ‘freedoms’ (I find this word very loaded to be perfectly honest) if we have a basis of human rights, income, housing, education…
D: These issues raise lots of pressing question - pre and now during COV-19 of a microcosm of inter-related history, cultural metaphor, motifs and shared concerns now ‘remote’ - distant in time - memory, or by definition remote from once familiar everyday experience, we are now distantly related…….in a variety of representational forms - complex relationships of personal immediacy remotely?
– remote – the idea of a place - distant. What does distance and proximity mean now, is touch – our feet on the ground, caress and physical proximity - now the new distance and what does our dependency on a variety of electronic devices create - remote devices for knowledge production and exchange - operating or operated at a distance? So are our representations and artefacts responsive critical friction points in an ‘image saturated’ culture, that become read disposable and forgettable, with erasure and remembering, moments of displacement, contest our white christian identity politics of belonging and the ghosts of historical violence.
Here representation and remembering is as a thing in itself, changing material relationships, towards the act of reading images, how they perform and the ethical concerns of representation between related worlds…..
“I make the history of colonialism part of my history in the only way I know,” the artist Pia Arke once wrote, “namely by taking it personally.”
G: You’re right that instability is loaded. On the one hand I think this is where a lot of thriving can happen, creatively at least because you’re forced to just do things...but I’m really uncomfortable with simply washing off stability as a base necessity. If we’re talking socio-economic stability - which when you’re talking about instability you inevitably ARE - how can anyone do anything without basic human rights being upheld as stable? I don’t ever want to dismiss stability as a necessity. How privileged is it to say “oh, stability is overrated”...as I’ve heard several artists do.
-- maybe then we need another word, because I think what we’re talking about when we discuss instability as productive in this way, is really a kind of fluxus, liminality?
D: I'm not a fan of 'liminality' as a concept, it sits for me in another kind of privilege, to find something 'liminal' is to be spoken about, more or less in cultural theoretical terms as an object of somebody else’s subject. I think we need to move on from that.
It is a privilege, that's what we are talking about, and it's so important we have accountability for that privilege. So for example, to look at something, I just assume I can look, to look away or not pay attention is another thing all together.
So is it not art, or our activity here, is not merely a question of education, but rather a process founded on the culturally rooted – an anchoring from where development can progress. Taking part in a questioning and practices of inter-dependency of what we see, and the act that allows or is accountable for this, in avoiding or adopting a foreign conception of art or creative actions that is not development but mere superficial imitation.
G: Passing a baton, an implication of trust and responsibility, an exchange. Touching is how communication is often conveyed really — maybe converged, or divulged is a better word.
Sharing
Is
Necessary
Caring
Is
Preferable
The baton slips out of a sweaty palm, and into the twitching grasp of the next, I palm it off
Itching and red from that momentary friction, open gestures closed for a moment.
That gesture would not be so fluid now, in fact it’s because of fluids that it would not be so fluid.
Fluidity relies upon a lack of fluid? It’s an issue of transmission.
D: Hering conceives memory as a fundamental property of reproduction of organic beings. The nervous substance of any organism retains the traces of its experiences and hands them down as an inheritance to the following generations, just as we received in its turn a certain amount of traces from the previous generations.
G: Touch is how we relay information to one another, in a lot of contexts, this sharing is gone and the relay defunct.
Hang on,
I’m terrible at tone on these things
I don’t know if you’re being serious or not?
Moments of corporeality are exchanged like a baton; over and over repetition sees bodies extended in small gestures. The baton of corporeality is passed on through proximity and proximity is my attempt at extending touch where maybe I can’t do so physically - the reciprocal generosity of sharing touch. We repeat these things without thinking about them because it’s a way to feel close to someone, to break down certain barriers in communication —
It is also involuntary in that maybe we don’t want it, maybe it is an act of violation.
Exchange is participation, engagement in transitory and promised coalition.
Now, is communication weaponised?
D: When hasn’t it been ? Language systems and forms of representation are weapons.
How does art touch you?
So for the few spaces where tech is not already mediating our relationships, there was a plan – to replace in-person teaching with virtual learning, for instance, and in-person medicine with telehealth and in-person delivery with robots. All of this has been rebranded, post-Covid, as a touchless technology, as a way of replacing what has been diagnosed as the problem, which is the problem of touch. And yet, on a personal level, what we/I miss most is touch - and a solidarity of touches - the situation in which feelings, ideas, or problemsspread from one place to another….this is forming in front of us as we speak.
In relation to this, solidarity feels very haptic and the ideas we have been exploring together suggest the word solidarity was more an idea of people standing in things together and related very strongly to the green thoughts and work we have been making.
A touch too much ?
Relating to the sense of touch, in particular relating to the perception and manipulation of objects using the senses of touch and perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body.
This is what I am thinking a lot about. Klien also points us towards a set of ideas and a proposition: I have a few ideas. One has to do with the softness that the pandemic has introduced into our culture. When you slow down, you can feel things; when you’re in that constant rat race, it doesn’t leave much time for empathy. From its very beginning, the virus has forced us to think about interdependencies and relationships.
The first thing you are thinking about is: everything I touch, what has somebody else touched? The food I am eating, the package that was just delivered, the food on the shelves. These are connections that capitalism teaches us not to think about”.
This feels like a call for individual and collective solidarity as we are roaming in the gloaming*a kind of hazy, uncertain and to be, moment.
*Gloaming dates back to the 12th century, which is pretty old for a word still used and understood today. It has Middle English, Scots, and Old English roots in words such as glom and gloming which mean twilight and glowan which means to glow.
Dictionary definitions talk of two aspects of solidarity: the uniting of a group of people with a common purpose, and mutual-dependency (or interdependency) of people.
I would also add that this is also an ethical proposition; as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another - empathy?
As George Bernard Shaw pointed out, “Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you—they might have different tastes.”
I am in no way suggesting we adopt some sort of binary ‘luddite*’ position, for or against technology and touch, it's more how our bodily gestures, movements and touch has been somewhat re -thought, imagined, defined, replaced, distorted and amplified - in particular from behind a screen as we find ourselves in on line communications.
*The Luddites were a secret oath-based organization of English textile workers in the 19th century, a radical faction which destroyed textile machinery as a form of protest.
What do you think Grace ?
G: I think that this goes back to cultivating solidarity, and as we’ve been thinking and talking about a lot, there is a lot of potential for this within greeness, green space.
In many ways, art itself is a ‘green space’ (as in cyclical, fertile, extensive, ripe, generous, common).
There’s no denying that the arts engage in - perpetuate even - the present aspirational consumerist atmosphere, as an artist you cannot simply remove yourself from this, but you can operate from within this reality to productive ends. This is where an idea of the artist acting as some kind of ‘double agent’ comes into play; working from within a system sought to be changed, with acknowledgement of what needs changing. Humour/satire is a useful tactic in this framework - a generous leaning towards ridiculing the ridiculous, even if work is not laugh-out-loud funny. In this way, there is plenty of opportunity to ridicule and seek change from the inside.
Aristotle wrote about art (mostly referring to plays, but I think easily applied to all forms) as giving people the ability to “test” scenarios, emotions, to trial responses to situations not always easy or accessible to us. For me, this idea presents two interesting opportunities of escapism, and the ability to “test” scenarios of opposition to current socio-political climates. As “radicality” (whatever that means) can still apparently be deemed acts of terrorism, we need to think laterally about what form opposition can take.
Was it also Aristotle who measured the ‘becoming’ of a human as happening only when a child begins to laugh, on their fortieth day in the world?
With the current climate, government, structures, I don’t want to sit comfortably. This is where the idea of acting as “double-agent” may fail: is it actually productive to become but another cog - even if it is a rebellious cog? When wielded improperly I think that “radicality” is just narcissism masquerading as something socially productive, but this is where humour is pivotal. Whilst simply ‘laughing at something’ doesn’t always feel productive, laughing is a brilliant tactic for disempowering and gaining the trust of otherwise unwilling audiences. Humour is a great way to engage more universally, and performs both these roles of escapism, and potentiality. I do think that it’s more nuanced than this, laughter can become authoritarian, a distraction tactic, but laughter can also be powerful when harnessed with positive degradation, beshitten abandon, a sense of renewal in mind, particularly for women; to be a beshitten women when women shouldn’t suffer ablutions - jollity overcomes this.
Absurdity in approach is sometimes necessary to point out the absurdity in reality.
It’s important to distinguish stances against oppressive, dogmatic, hegemonic seriousness, but equally against laughter of the same nature. Perhaps there’s something in greeness that empowers this. An embrace of the liminal coexistence of laughter and tears - the physical states are so similar and they cross over regularly.
In light of current circumstances, there’s potential for social ‘reset’ - also coinciding with certain political shifts in the world - one approach in the discourse around this pandemic is that it may provide a ‘fresh start’ of some kind... tenuous, who knows if and when it will be ‘over’, but it is certainly food for thought. Then in relation to this idea of borders and biohazards, we’re having to adapt very quickly to new ways of working, connecting, communicating. This transcends physical space - so then, when we ‘enter’ the ‘new reality’, the ‘fresh start’, will borders be obsolete?
I fear that they will be ever more assured, bolstered by the new fear of the alien ‘other’ that may infect us. Simultaneous, and heinously reported, refugee crises perpetuate this panic of ‘other’ influences infecting, killing, replacing. I’m worried that we will become even more disconnected.
Will people ever touch again?
Maybe we need to redefine ‘touch’?
