The art of touch
Touch Me
10.10.03-9.11.03
Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fontanka House
St. Petersburg
The "Touch Me" project brought together the works by Russian and American
artists and was presented by two curators - Olga Thomson (the "Russki Album"
Foundation, KvadraT Art Gallery, St. Petersburg) and Anna Frants (St. Petersburg
Arts Projecr Inc., NY).
"Touch me" is both a tender request and a firm order. This fairly recent coinage
is often used to characterize dangerously intimate and seductive contemporary
art. Marinetti and Duchamp's "tactile" revolution has changed viewers' code of
behavior. Nowadays palpation and tactless penetration is the way people tend to
establish "rapport" with works of art. Fifty years ago viewers were "waltzing"
with exhibited objects. Today it is more of a hanky-panky kind of
contact.
The project in question was positioned as a continuation of "touch art"
tradition, which is definitely a conventional, narrow and slightly far-fetched
notion. It seems that the main idea here was to show viable and variable
objects, whether they were "touchable" or not.
Delicate and nostalgic "Warm message" (2003) by Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov
is a good example of "tactile art". Four envelopes with letters inside were
shown under a semi-transparent cloth. When touching them the viewers felt warmth
and tender intimacy of these messages.
The installation "Mother" by Sun Jay Park (1998) gave us an opportunity to
plunge into our childhood and recall the warmth of mother's body. The work is a
sculptural female torso on a fur-lined, which got warm when being
touched.
Olga and Alexander Florensky animated the myths of Russian culture - professor
Pavlov's dog and images taken from the renowned Russian
paintings.
Alina Blumis and Anna Frants presented interesting, viable and interactive
project "Touch me" (2003). The digital Mobius ribbon was projected on to the
screen. Following it a viewer traveled along man's life from birth to death and
in 10-15 minutes time was able to decipher the sign of infinity. However a
viewer could choose different directions, as the movement along the Mobius line
was free and variable. Although there were quite a few images in film, it had a
rich color scheme, as if to suggest that color is a spring of
life.
 Generally speaking the exhibition "Touch me" was a success. Its only drawback
was that some artist used long and boring descriptive narratives in their
projects, so they actually showed nothing. It is clear that nowadays the idea
hidden in an artwork should be "palpated" and understood with the help of visual
interactive images. Unfortunately, some artists still don't get it. Michael
Epstein for one thing was trying to describe his "tactile ideal", but his heavy,
inappropriate, complicated texts spoiled the work and figuratively destroyed the
objects. Epstein's project was too boring to be good.
Although the exhibited objects varied from paintings to installations and
digital animation, they were traditional, because the time of "touch for touch's
sake" has passed away, art got used to viewer's persistent soliciting. The time
has come "to chose something else". All participants of the project are for the
kind of art, which "acts, which a child can lick, the art, which one can kiss as
if it were a doggie" (Claus Oldenburg). However the exhibition proved that there
might be different kind of contacts between viewers and objects - a respectful
distant engagement (Nadezhda Zubareva "????"), an intellectual dialogue (Jeff
and Alina Blumis "Social Engineering") or even an outward antagonism (Vitaly
Pushnitsky "Las Meninas II"). The "Touch me" exhibition was not about "touching"
or "touch art". It was about tactful, philosophical, delicate and diverse art of
touch.
Olga Khoroshilova
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