The Invisible
Touch brings together an international group of artists
who
confirm art as a sensory communication: next to sight, touch, smell, taste and sound play
a major role in their work. Despite any formal differences, the artists in this project
share a common creative goal: they search out alternate paradigms of conveyance based on sensory
methods. In the process, by exploring sentient dimensions they achieve a more concrete connection with
their public, full of living and individuated possibilities that advance the possibility
of art as a vital experience rather than as a form of mediated
representation. The artists
in this project effect a redestination from aesthetic formality to a directness of the
creative experience. By placing sensory over rhetorical communication, their artwork
"is" and "does" rather than simply represent or
depict. And, art is
articulated as a working-active reality. Many of these works strive for a flexible,
elastic connection, even assimilation with various real experiences or
situations, that
would extend the performative possibility of art, and thereby also strengthen the bond
between art and life. The Invisible Touch provides an opportunity to see art less as a
one-sided object or effect set up for public edification, than a reciprocating and less
predictable exchange of communication that requires our involved
participation. The artwork in this
project trusts the ability of artwork to engage its public actively. Through various
sentient dialogues, these contemporary practices expand the experience of artwork as an
perceptual interactivity rather than simply the more usual visual
communique. Sound, touch, smell, taste and
sight-all sensual experiences that reside at the very heart of what makes reality
palpable, urge us to become more than viewers; they invite us to rethink and reimagine the
ways by which we recognise the world around us through direct
experience.
The rush of critical themes that have emerged over the last
decade, such as sentience, subjectivity, engagement or interaction suggest a desire to relocate or to find
an alternate situation within art practice and its essential Other-the
viewer. However,
many discussions and efforts later, these critical maxims run the risk of becoming mere
designer labels. The question poses itself: are the promises of "out-reach",
"interaction" and "engagement" being fulfilled, or can we discern in
different facets of practice: in art making, in the public presentation and display of
art, a silhouette of conservative constraint which is all the more insidious and
implacable because it disguises itself behind theoretical posturing that does not
deliver? Often, we still seem to want to place art in a
comforting, non threatening
"safety-zone". But, by endorsing such premises, we do little else than offer a
limited opportunity for artwork, and run the risk of turning it into a
formalized, more or
less predictable cultural commodity that offers few surprises or
provocations.
There is nothing harmless here. It seems as if art practice embraces a quite
cautious attitude that runs the risk of becoming result oriented and less and less
controversial, less risk taking. The propensity to synthetically "fit an artwork
into" some preordained context, rather than activating it outward, toward
individuated possibilities constitutes a crisis. Instead of encouraging
differentiation,
exhibitions more often end up over-determined or encyclopedic in
approach. It's as if in
art making, curating and exhibiting, we are leaving the theory behind and encouraging late
Modernist structures of aesthetic and conceptual distance between artwork and viewer that
to do little to enhance the public experience of art, or allow for
ephemeral, intangible moments of creative communication. Too
often, it seems we do not encourage
attitudes to become forms, but rather, encourage forms to become
attitudes.
The Invisible Touch asks: how can we reverse this? In response to the conceptual
and aesthetic souvenirs of Modernism, artists are becoming increasingly aware of the
failures of protected contexts and are seeking fresh ways to engage their
public. The
artists in this project eroticize art by mining the realm of the senses. These artists
propose sensory models of creative communication that revitalise and intensify
perception,
and transform the communique between artwork and the public into an interactive
exploration. These varied practices explore the realm of the senses to intensify our
experience of artwork and activate the participation of the essential Other of art
practice as a more fully engaged, perceiver / participant. We come back to experience
these artworks in perceptual and sentient terms. Ringing with
possibilities, they require
to be touched, tasted, listened to and smelled, as well as looked at. These pieces take us
to places where our perception, imagination and senses are working out a protean
situation.
Victor Hugo wrote "to entrust is sometimes to abandon" and to entrust art
today is perhaps a question of letting go, of abandoning aesthetic and expanding schema of
perception in favor of more negotiable, open-ended exchanges. Sentience is one of these
ways. The Invisible Touch suggests sensory creative communication as a new realism in the
making.
In order to encourage a more direct public appeal, the project involves both indoor
and outdoor situations - various interventions throughout the city of Innsbruck as well as
the surrounding landscape. The gallery would be utilized to invite interaction or direct
participation in order to experience the artwork. In the process, it is also
resensitized.
Maia Damianovic,
Innsbruck, September 1999 |
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