Touch
(The Unconscious Intention to Receive)
Touch begins with the way in which one engages the physical world; one’s conscious “being within” a world is the first instance of touching it. There is no rule in Nihil about how to look at the world. Touch shouldn’t be confused with looking, though one might well learn to touch with the eyes. The notion of touch expands out toward how one simply is in space, even in how a course might be plotted, conscious or not, through space, and in how one improvises when required.
Touch is many things. What comes into the ear, for example, touches the breath, which touches the picture that forms in the eye. I begin to understand that I both touch and am touched in the same gesture. The more points of contact I become conscious of, the more I am in contact with what is to become the painting. This is how the painting begins before painting begins.
Anything can touch the surface, hand or tool. The touch can be skilled or unskilled — actually there’s no difference. None of these distinctions mean anything outside the game of meaning. Soft, patient, wild, angry, forgiving… on and on. I am not trying to run the gamut, I’m simply not that stable. The touch will unconsciously learn to settle into its individual non-importance for the sake of the accumulation, which is yet another kind of touch.
This attitude demonstrates itself at every stage.
Sitting: I am not trying to transcend the world; I hardly know it. What I want is to let go of the abstraction that had previously stood for the world.
Drawing: I’m not worried about what it looks like, I’m just making way through space. This is what making way looks like.
Collected objects: They are neither the garbage of the past, nor future paintings, but artifacts of an anonymous present. It is very likely the hand is unneeded, but only the hand can say. Perhaps the hand is needed to rid the object of what the hand has done.
Painting: It’s not enough to make a schematic and apply the auto filter as seems enough to satisfy markets, schools, and museums today; the touch must be human and something other, inimitable by current and future AI. Someone must be there, in the work, not persona, but mind behind mind, ear behind ear.
Touch, at every stage of the process, is neither the act of giving nor forcing, but of receiving what the body believes lost. The accumulation of touches is the reformulation of its memory.