2022

Marta Smolińska

Haptic aura:

Signal and Noise by Diana Fiedler and Ewa Kulesza as an Empathy Laboratory

Yet feel more acutely than before 

That I reach no further than my outstretched arms 

And no higher than I can rise on the tips of my toes

Halina Poswiatowska

What is haptic embraces the whole body.

John Michael Krois

The exhibition Signal and Noise from Diana Fiedler and Ewa Kulesza struck me immediately by the boldness with which it treated all of the senses as having the potential to generate aesthetic experiences. I was immediately seduced by the way in which both artists ostentatiously ignored the traditional hierarchy of the senses and - almost as an aside - cast doubt on certain theories of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a central patron of phallo-ocular-logo-centrism. For Hegel, sight and hearing were the only theoretical senses. The rest - smell, taste, and touch - were definitively excluded from the experience of art, being as they were purely practical senses. Fiedler and Kulesza's actions are not simply compatible with the postmodern revalorization of the hierarchy of the senses, they also contrive to supplement that narrow list. Their work here analyzes such phenomena as movement, balance, and claustrophobia; the experience of being watched and overheard, controlled and alienated; of being blinded by flashing lights and breathing in an air thick with dust. That analysis is consistent with the views of those theorists who have added other senses to the classical five, among them balance, proprioception (kinaesthetic) and pain.

The sensations evoked by the work of Fiedler and Kulesza - perfectly set out throughout the exhibition space - give the viewer some sense of empathy for those who are forced to migrate. The border crossings that must be endured, with their associated submission to scrutiny. The drastically curtailed living space. The loss of familiar normality and the necessity of complying to hierarchical systems of power. All of which is currently felt so acutely due to the war in Ukraine and the general migration crisis.

Signal and Noise then is far from ‘innocuous’. Through our capacity for haptic perception - which encompasses all of our senses and our entire bodies - the exhibition puts us in an uncomfortable, unpleasant, and oppressive situation. Walking through the Municipal Art Centre in Gorzów Wielkopolski, we become physically aware of how our world is, as Oksana Zabuzhko puts it, “changing, crossing some fateful boundary, right here and now, this very moment.”

Fiedler and Kulesza have created a cohesive and coherent environment whose aura is inhospitable, inhuman and depressing. There are metal sheets, perfectly engineered and shining; aluminium skeletons, with sterile strips of yellow rubber hanging from them; grates with peeling paint; strange, cold lights alternating on and off; odd sensors and spy-holes; mysterious and disturbing sounds; wiring; patches of light-sensitive substances, watching us; heavy metal cross-braces, piled dangerously high, their arms black and brutal, defending and guarding access to some unknown thing; brick dust mixed with water, spreading across the walls and floor like some kind of living organism, gradually engulfing the room. And everywhere an air so thick that sound does not so much as move through it, as hang from it. These artists play out their haptic symphony across such materials whilst simultaneously and meticulously orchestrating the dialogue between the individual works. The result, a multi-sensory narrative for the whole body and for all of the senses, not just those favoured by Hegel. 

There were times when, unable to read the aura prevailing in the space, we lose not only our balance but our confidence in the stability and position of our own body. This happens when stepping on Kulesza’s Background, which is accompanied by an unpleasant metallic sound, or when standing uncertainly before Fiedler’s Spiders, which seem about to fall on us at any moment. A sense of equilibrium allows us to feel the position of our body in space, while the proprioceptive - also known as the kinaesthetic sense - allows us to orientate ourselves in terms of the position of the individual parts of the body, without the need to see them. For Fiedler and Kulesza, both of these senses have become crucial as centers of artistic experiences.  It is thanks to their activation in these objects that the artists feel - perhaps more acutely than ever before - that they are reaching no further than their outstretched arms, and no higher than their raised toes can lift them. This sensation is transferred so completely to their work, that we feel it empathically and share in it with them. The haptic encompassing our entire being. 

The classic definition of the haptic, proposed in 1901 by Alois Riegel in Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie does not apply here. In that definition haptic perception is guaranteed by only two senses: sight and touch, the latter being a modality of the former. In the context of the work of Fiedler and Kulesza, Riegel’s view is inadequate as it does not refer to a haptic that encompasses the entire body, but only to haptic seeing. The haptic to which I refer - and to which I define as augmented hapticity - is bodily and emotionally activated. It involves the entire repertoire of the body's materiality and its sensorimotor and somaesthetic experience, and incorporates a profound sensitivity that arises from the position and dynamic of the body in a given space. Augmented hapticity is a somaesthetic modality of many senses experienced by an empathetic haptic subject who has a feeling body and a sensory consciousness. Fiedler and Kulesza are perfectly aware of all of this.

Signal and Noise is an exhibition that is tailor-made to this very subject. Walking along a  narrow corridor and under two aluminium wedges, their strange blue glare seeping out and over us (Fiedler’s Parenthesis), or passing by a storm-light as it blinks on or off once again (Kulesza’s Wall), we shrink, uncertain, tensing in response to some indeterminate threat. Inhaling the sticky air saturated with brick dust (Kulesza’s Dust), and listening to the sounds oozing like poison from Fiedler’s installations (Filter and In the Air), we begin to lose our sense of certainty and ease in the world. Instead, we feel discomfort and nausea, we feel a gradual tightening of the throat and a growing sensation of not being able to control our own body.

Graham Dunstan Martin, who researches kinaesthetic senses in the context of the so-called visual arts, rightly points out that proprioception, as part of the sensory message imparted by any work of art, must be taken into account for a complete study of the process of perception. According to him we have proprioceptive expectations, and consequently it is possible to suffer proprioceptive illusions and hallucinations. These in turn can make us nauseous or indeed actually sick. Dust spreads under our feet, crawls up and across the wall as if some kind of alien. While Filter is tirelessly filtering - but filtering what exactly, and why? Was the air filtered out because it was poisoned? Or conversely, is something poisonous being pumped inside? What was In the Air? What do we feel as we move through the work, facing one piece after another?

Movement - so central to this exhibition - was entirely excluded from Riegel's classic definition of hapticity. With Mark Paterson's contemporary interpretation, movement is not only included but also explicitly and highly regarded. His definition refers both to the movement occurring on the part of the object, image or space, as well as that on the part of the perceiver who observes the object, image or space. It is therefore a kind of synergy between sight, touch, body balance and spatial awareness, the proprioceptive model functioning in this context as a haptic phenomenon. According to Paterson, the proprioceptive fusion of kinaesthesia occurs together with a tactile and cutaneous perception. We can say that Paterson, working from a basis in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, develops haptic perception as proprioceptive and kinaesthetic, that is, as the perception of the position, state and movement of the body and its extremities in space. The route delineated by Fiedler and Kulesza within the exhibition space itself is experienced phenomenologically and haptically. The work is intensely present, as much to us as we are to it. They prod our corporeality, our empathy and compassion, stimulate all our senses and show us - without the slightest mercy - what it is like to find Asylum, as in Kulesza's installation, in a claustrophobic cage. Our haptic imagination has us double-over and force ourselves into that enclosure to sit at that table inscribed behind that trellised cuboid. It is painful, and induces proprioceptive hallucinations and nausea. Add to this the unbearable exposure to those outside the cage, observing you through those openwork walls. This is not unlike a refugee camp, where those who have finally reached the coveted European ‘paradise’ must spend long months in a confined space, sleeping on bunk beds and with curtains for walls. This is their Asylum, which they finally reach having passed through many checkpoints, borders and barricades - embodied by Fiedler's Spiders. This is their Asylum, having shuffled through the body scanners which Fiedler's Cellula recalls. The way is narrow for this process of segregation, and it is uncertain as to whether you will ‘pass the test’ and be permitted to continue. The heavy yellow sheets of rubbery plastic hanging down the sides of this installation have an organic quality, sticky membranes that cling to your skin, weigh you down and impede your progress. The smell, familiar but also alien, adds to the sense of menace. 

Prince Saurau, the protagonist of Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles (German Verstörung), observes that “the horizon is the most useful of all nonsense”. However, it is the horizon that is often the most stable and reliable reference for our sense of balance. The horizon, together with our systems of perspective, are the conventions that make it possible for the vertical and the horizontal to form the basis for perceiving and organizing the world. Friedrich Nietzsche has suggested that if a person ever managed to escape the world of perspective, they would immediately lose their balance and their footing. Precisely this kind of experience is offered by Fiedler and Kulesza. Fiedler with her Spiders, unstable at best. Kulesza with her Dust, and its capricious horizon… a line that pays no heed to the horizontal or the vertical as it meanders across its wall. 

“Hearing is a specialised form of haptic perception limited to a specific part of the body.” Reflecting on this phenomenon, Jean-Luc Nancy writes that while visual presence is tangible, sound precedes it, and has - in and of itself - the character of an attack or assault. Signal and Noise sweeps the ground from under our feet, and that discomfort is further compounded by our sense of hearing as a haptic sense. With this exhibition the assault is haptic and corporal. The Filter and In the Air installations by Fiedler fill the viewer’s body, and the space within which it is situated, with sound. Together they vibrate and resonate. This show demonstrates that an art object can be perceived by all the senses, and that the artist who makes use of acoustics creates work which is also somatic. Sound affects the viewer physically, linking an individual’s memories to a bodily experienced perceptual situation. As a result, the body is subject to thematization and an intense presence. The human ear remains active at all times, perceiving sound according to its frequency. Sound impulses are not only processed cognitively but must also be experienced sensorially. The ephemeral nature of sound produces a bodily experience related to the temporal, which allows an individual to perceive its being in the world. As such sound is never isolated, it always establishes a relationship with the world. Sound works on the physical self in everyday life as much as it does in artistically generated situations, such as this exhibition. It has a huge potential to transform the space in which it unfolds and to impact the haptic empathetic subject, who co-breathes and co-pulses as they navigate their way through the work of these two artists.

This exhibition, treated like a haptic Gesamtkunstwerk, organically integrated into its space - helped in no small part by those those vertical standing lamps - is difficult if not impossible to forget. It is now embedded in the empathetic memory of each and every viewer that moved through it. The body - so important in the work of Fiedler and Kulesza - is present first and foremost in the actual bodies of the audience. Within the exhibition itself, its presence is only signalled visually by a single archival and anonymous photograph (Untitled by Kulesza). With the superimposition of light-sensitive emulsion, however, only the legs of a figure remain visible, as if stuck in time and place. This emulsion, which also features in several of Kulesza’s other works (including Background), registers images of the present. That is, it registers the movements of the visitors to the show, absorbing us as we absorb it, generating a haptic aura, in which we feel more acutely than ever before…

¹ H. Poświatowska, Właśnie kocham… / Indeed in love…, selected and translated by M. Peretz, Kraków 1997, s. 53. [online: https://docplayer.pl/29430213-Teksty-wierszy-wedlug-wydania-halina-poswiatowska-dziela-poezja-1-2-wydawnictwo-literackie-krakow-1997.html; dostęp: 28.01.2022].

² J. M. K., Bildkörper und Körperschema. Schriften zur Verkörperungstheorie ikonischer Formen, Berlin 2011, s. 227.

³ G. W. F. Hegel, Estetyka, t. 1, tłum. A. Landman, Warszawa 1967, s. 68. 

⁴ Zob.: U. Zeuch, Umkehr der Sinneshierarchie. Herder und die Aufwertung des Tastsinns seit der frühen Neuzeit, Tübingen 2000.

⁵ O. Zabużko, Planeta Piołun, transl. K. Kotyńska, Warszawa 2022, p. 8.

⁶ A. Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie, Wien 1927. See also: M. Fend, “Körpersehen. Über das Haptische bei Alois Riegl”, in: Kunstmaschinen. Spielräume des Sehens zwischen Wissenschaft und Ästhetik, hg. A. Mayer, A. Métraux, Frankfurt am Main 2005, pp. 166–202.

⁷ See: M. Smolińska, Haptyczność poszerzona. Zmysł dotyku w sztuce polskiej drugiej połowy XX i początku XXI wieku, Kraków 2020.

⁸ See: R. Shusterman, Introduction: Aesthetic Experience and Somaesthetics, in: Studies in Somaesthetics. Embodied Perspectives in Philosophy, the Arts, and the Human Sciences, ed. R. Shusterman, Leiden – Boston 2018 (Somaesthetics and Aesthetic Experience, Vol. 1), pp. 1–13.

⁹ Porównaj: G. Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik, siebte, erweiterte und überarbeitete Auflage, Berlin 2013, s. 17.

¹0 G. Dunstan Martin, Proprioception, Mental Imagery and Sculpture, in: From Rodin to Giacometti. Sculpture and Literature in France 1880–1950, ed. K. Aspley, E. Cowling, P. Sharatt, Amsterdam – Atlanta 2000, p. 213. 

¹1 Ibidem, p. 207.

¹2 M. Paterson, The Senses of Touch. Haptics, Affects and Technologies, Oxford and New York 2007, p. IX. IX. See also: Idem, Seeing With the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch after Descartes, Edinburgh 2016.

¹3 Idem, The Senses of Touch…, s. IX.

¹4 T. Bernhard, Zaburzenie, transl. S. Lisiecka, Warszawa 2009, p. 181.

¹5 F. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884–1885, G. Colli, M. Montinari (red.), Berlin 1974, s. 285, cyt. za: M. P. Markowski, Nietzsche. Filozofia interpretacji, Kraków 1997, s. 142.

¹6 M. Grunwald, Homo hapticus. Dlaczego nie możemy żyć bez zmysłu dotyku?, tłum. E. Kowynia, Kraków 2019, s. 29.

¹7 J.-L. Nancy, Zum Gehör, ins Deutsche von E. von der Osten, Zürich – Berlin 2010, s. 23.

¹8 B. Lange, Relationale Situationen. Soundinstallationen von Haroon Mirza als Instanzen von Subjektivierung, w: Jenseits der Repräsentation. Körperlichkeiten der Abstraktion in moderner und zeitgenössischer Kunst, hg. von O. Moskatova, S. B. Reimann, K. Schönegg, München 2013, s. 179. Zdanie Lange podziela również Caleb Kelly. Zobacz: C. Kelly, Gallery Sound, London 2017.

¹9 B. Lange, Relationale Situationen…, dz. cyt., s. 180.