tangible ramblings

The Tangible – my notes

-       How can artwork involve the body in ways that are ‘tangible’? Physically registered? Embodied engagements? The materiality of artistic practice

-       artwork that facilitates multisensory experience

-       immersive/participatory installations

-       synesthesia – when different tangibilities become confused?

-       use of ephemera/waste/detritus – what objects accrue more value as ‘tangible’ than others? Could tangibility be associated (problematically or no) with a form of physical ‘authenticity’?

-       what is the function of tangibility in artistic practice? Creating embodied engagements? Physical reciprocity? Associations with memory and personal experience? Facilitating intersubjective interactions within the exhibition space? 

-       And conversely, what about the intangible? How does a lack of materiality similarly (or differently) leave impressions on our bodies, our experiences?

o   Or when tangibility is transferred from one medium/sense to another? Like video art that visually/audibly attempts to convey a sense of haptic or olfactory experience

§  Laura U. Marks – The Skin of the Film and Touch (incidentally I’d love to see her as a keynote but she’s from BC and is more of an art-focused person.. still awesome though!)

-       What happens when tangibility slowly ebbs away? Does that equate with forgetting? I’m thinking of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Candy Spills

-       Tangibility – the circulation and the accrued social life of objects – Will Straw’s work on used bookstores and yard sales, how does the tangibility of objects change as they circulate through a city, accumulating ‘use’?

-       The tangible as something fearful, disgusting, abject

-       Feelings/affects that are tangible/palpable

-       Absence/lack as a tangible feeling – the lack or loss of something (or someone) taking physical shape – like Rachel Whiteread’s House and other casting work

-       How can typically non-tangible media (digital art for instance) create its own sense of tangibility? (Again, Laura Marks has a cool chapter on the haptic materiality of web art) 

-    The tangibility of ruined spaces - I've been reading a lot of work by this cultural geographer named Tim Edensor lately, he writes (pretty romantically) about the materiality of industrial ruins, and how these liminal spaces accumulate memory, create affordances for new uncontrollable experiences, etc

-     tangibility and public memorials - transferring a cultural/historical memory or trauma into something publicly tangible?

-       Or, a methodological question – how do we reinsert tangibility back into art historical research? We spend our days with slides and photocopies and jpgs, etc – writing about work we may not have ever seen in the flesh. But what does it mean to see something ‘in the flesh’? what are the problems of privileging that sort of immediate, physical engagement with a work of art as more ‘authentic’ or more ‘tangible’? Can art historical writing accrue a materiality/tangibility on its own terms, without a reliance on the physical ‘aura’ of an object?

Reading back over all of this, I guess what I’m mainly interested in is how tangibility can become unfixed as a material experience from objects, how it circulates, how it can seem stronger at certain points in an object’s trajectory rather than others. Also, how it can be used as a way to consider sensory experience, or as a way to explore how materials considered discardable/disgusting/abject convey certain affects.

Does that make any sense?