Detouched isn’t a word. As a word that isn’t a word, it exists somewhere between retouched and detached. It’s also fairly close to untouched, which means that it has a lot to do with touch. It might be best understood as describing a detached sense of touch, or an act of touching that doesn’t involve an act of touching, however paradoxical that may sound.
Most mornings, for example, I drink a cup of coffee and touch the New York Times. I don’t hold it in my hands, but I pinch-and-drag it with my fingers. I don’t read it as much as I skim through it, and this involves a fair amount of touching. It’s an interactive, tactile, and rather comfortable experience. But no ink rubs off on my fingers, because I’m not actually touching the New York Times. I’m touching the New York Times without touching the New York Times. So perhaps it’s best to say that most mornings, over coffee, I almost touch the New York Times.
Part of what’s impressive about the Internet is that it’s infinite, immaterial, and uncontainable—it’s untouchable—but I still touch it many times a day. I’m touching information that exists in the cloud—a cloud that isn’t actually a cloud—and the entire world, as the saying goes, is at my fingertips. After a century of technology dedicated to inventing tools that replace manual labour, we find ourselves brought back to the hand—the first, oldest, and most basic human tool. It makes sense: the digit and the digital make a natural pair.
But today, to touch doesn’t mean the same thing it used to. Touching an object no longer requires being next to it, but involves being far away from it. By merging the hand with the machine, contemporary technology generates a detached sense of proximity, or a sense of detouch—it not only incorporates but also negates, prevents, and replaces one sense of touch with another. Detouched is about the distance of touch.
Dennis Oppenheim’s Air Pressure (Hand) (1971) is a film featuring a close-up view of a single hand. From outside the frame, an invisible high-pressure air source directed towards the hand makes the skin on its surface undulate. For her five-channel video installation touch parade (2011), A.K. Burns re-enacts a series of five “plastic love” YouTube clips. Connected across vast distances via the Internet, these object-touchers share their personal and intimate fetishes—crushing eggs underfoot, pumping car pedals, putting on layers of rubber gloves. Alice Channer’s sculpture rub marble up against metal in floor sculptures that evokes the body as much as the machine. Seth Price’s vacuum formed works are forms of extreme touching—plastic wraps itself around objects in a way that preserves their shape, but separates them from the world behind a synthetic skin. In her large-scale paper works, Sunah Choi revisits the ancient tradition of frottage or rubbing, bringing them into a language of abstraction and urbanity.
None of the works included in Detouched can be touched, but all of them evoke the sense of touch. Please feel free to detouch them all you want.
Please join us for a floor talk about the exhibition on Thursday 24 January at 5.00pm, as guest curator Anthony Huberman takes us through the ideas and processes involved in Detouched.