Remember Flashdance? What a feeling…

This is the fourth installment in our series to explore Art and the Five Senses where we are now at the sense of touch, our ability to gather information at our fingertips, via feeling something with the soles of our feet or any other part of our being that is not listening, not seeing, not tasting or smelling.

As you know by now: The Heidi Horten Collection in Vienna is showing LIGHT SOUND SENSES from 20 September 2024 – 23 March 2025. Inspired by this, we asked our beloved Gallery Girl London aka Lizzy Vartanian as an art historian and the wonderful Melisza Neckel a Capetonian in Vienna and a Psychotherapist, with a private practice, how the senses relate to art and our enjoyment and experience of it.

We will cover all 5 senses in the coming months and urge you to go see the show if you can, tune into the works described, see what your own senses tell you about the show, the work and yourself.

Sense Three: Feeling or Touch

The idea of “touch” and “art” seems counterintuitive. When we first go to galleries and museums as kids, we are constantly told “you can look, but you can’t touch.” When we get older, we learn that these artworks are worth thousands, or even millions. At that point, the idea of touching the art seems even worse, in case we cause even a hint of damage. But, actually, touch is pivotal to the art world.

Before AI and machines, all artworks were made by hand. Those paintings you wouldn’t dare stand too close to inside the museum? They have an artist’s – or more likely, the artist plus their assistants – handprints all over them. They didn’t just magically appear out of nowhere, an artist and their team would have spent many hours all over their masterpiece, smearing paintbrushes and moulding clay until it became that museum piece we all love. So really, touch, is pivotal to the art world, it’s just something that is usually reserved purely for the artist and not the viewer.

Following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the University of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum held an exhibition all about art and touch. The Human Touch explored anatomy and the skin among many other topics. The human body has always been integral to art. The artist uses their hands to create. Without touch, art might not exist at all. Moreover, the human form itself, covered in nerve-endings that feel, is the most popular subject in art. After all, what is art school without life drawing? A personal favourite work is Jean-Leon Gerome’s Pygmalion and Galatea. The painting is based on a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses when the sculptor kisses a sculpture who has been brought to life by Aphrodite. He is basically kissing the artwork. Imagine kissing a painting in a gallery?! Scandalous!!

But did you know touch goes way deeper than the physical? Famed 20^th century art critic Herbert Reed believed that our own sense of touch had an impact on how we perceive art ourselves. And that’s despite that fact that we don’t usually use our own bodies to feel an artwork. His idea was that we experience the world through our bodies. We connect to work not just by seeing it, but though our own being. In other words, viewing art is a physical experience.

In 2020, a large sculptural hand made by Rodin sold at Christie’s for 175,000 USD. The hands of the artist is admired in the same way as a dancers foot. They not only create art but are magical works of art, and apparently, worth a lot of money. But now, in our digital age, is the artist’s hand becoming less valuable?  In 2021 Beeple’s NFT Everydays: the First 5000 Days sold at Christie’s for $69.3 million USD. This prompted many to question the value of handmade artworks and the beginning of countless think pieces on the future of technology in the art world. But, while many thought this was the decline of appreciation for sculptures and paintings, the price of subsequent NFTs by Beeple began to fall, and the popularity of NFTs and digital artworks have not been as groundbreaking as people once thought.

Now that AI has become commonplace in our lives, digitally created images are often popping up on our screens, but half the time it is to laugh about when an extra limb has been added by accident. And, even though technology is making them, human touch still coded the original technology in the first place.

So, if ChatGPT and algorithms aren’t hitting the spot just yet, maybe robot art is the future? Ai-Da was created in 2019 by Aidan Meller and caused quite a scene. She’s a robot artist who is probably more successful than most, having had exhibitions across the globe and having 100K followers on Instagram. Perhaps robotic touch can be as celebrated as human touch in the near future? Only time will tell.

In the Heidi Horten show, Finnbogi Pétursson’s work Sphere draws us to its materiality. Light meets water, water meets sound, and sound and light permeate each other. It features a transparent acrylic bowl filled with water that is placed on top of a centrally positioned column and animated with interacting light and sound, casting a shadow of the water on to the ceiling. Acoustic impulses induce vibrations in the water, resulting in a continuously evolving display of the water’s movement on the ceiling. The sinusoidal vibrations of the sound pass through the fluid consistency of the water, causing it to resonate and making the sound waves visible to a certain extent, almost so we can imagine touching something that isn’t physical in form. Pétursson’s work prompts the view to reconsider the physical format of an artwork, where the soundwaves themselves could be drawings and sculptures.

Installation art is probably the most “touchable” form of contemporary art. Walking around an immersive space completely made by the artist, it’s almost like standing on art. And who remembers the Rain Room? Random International’s room where water literally fell from the sky onto the viewer. Installations occupy three-dimensional space, so you’re almost walking around the artist’s brain. It’s touch, but in a whole new way.

Let’s take it back in time and finish by looking at a collaborative painting by two greats of art history: Brueghel the Elder and Rubens. In 1618 the pair worked on a series of paintings illustrating the five senses, and of course, that included touch. The image is flooded with symbolism in every angle, but the eye is drawn to the lightest part of the painting, where a nude motherly-looking figure embraces a winged child. Nothing feels as good as a hug, right? Art doesn’t usually physically touch us, but it can make us smile and cry. Sometimes it can bring a shiver down your spine or give you chills. So, while we never really think about touching an artwork, art has been touching us for centuries, even millennia, and probably will do for many years to come. 

How does hearing even work? What happens so we can hear?

One could go into a profound amount of detail from a neuroscientific perspective around the sense of touch but let’s try keep it as simple as possible. The brain interprets touch through a series of steps that involve the skin, sensory nerves, the thalamus, and the somatosensory cortex. Sensations begin as signals generated by touch receptors in your skin that travel along sensory nerves made up of fibres that connect to neurons in your spinal cord. Then these signals move to the thalamus, the part of your brain that passes information to the rest of your brain. The thalamus sends this to the somatosensory cortex. These signals and or information from all over your body spreads itself onto the cortex forming a topographical map of sorts, that then twists around your brain like headphones and this is translated into a touch perception.

Tactile sense is a sense that most of us are aware of, as it is one of the five senses we would have been taught about in school. Simply put, the touch sense responds to anything that touches our skin. However, this sense has many functions, interpretations and perceptions that we can discuss more deeply. 

Touch is the first sense to develop in the womb and our first social interaction at birth. The touch sense has an important social function where it can tell you when something or someone is dangerous by letting you feel pain. Most of us would remember an older person and or primary caregiver teaching us that the stove plate is hot by using sounds “ooo”, “ouch”, by using words hot and role playing the effect of touching the heat as painful. Therefore, the touch sense has a major role in keeping us safe. Furthermore, we humans mostly learn through doing so some of us might have been curious and touched something hot, felt the pain and from there on didn’t touch it. This example can also be used in relation to people. A relationship continuously hurts me and after time we need to end that relationship due to emotional and physical pain.

This leads us into distinguishing between forms of touch. This can be done very briefly by describing types of physical touch such as handshakes, high fives, hugs and more. Physical touch allows for the release of oxytocin known as the love or cuddle hormone, which has significant benefits for our mental health and well-being. As we are  generally not allowed to physically touch art. Let’s look at emotional and mental touch from a psychological perspective. There is a high chance we have all heard someone say something touched them or even personally expressed that an experience and or gesture touched us or grabbed us. “That touched me” is a common expression used to describe that something had a strong emotional effect on you. From a psychological perspective, this is where art and the touch sense connect. Even more so, since art has grown into an immersive experience using all the senses that in turn create an emotional experience.

As explained previously the sense of touch is complex. Art and touch are clearly  and powerfully linked in spite of not physically touching the artwork. Therefore, every art work in the LSS show could be discussed and related to the sense of touch. The LSS show at Heidi Horton is an emotional experience, it moves you, and it touches you. The stories, description and meaning each artist provided about their work allows for being touched by it. 

From a therapist’s perspective, I will describe one piece from the show by Carsten Nicolai because in my opinion, its illustrates the touch sense the best. The artwork “ Bausatz noto” 1998/2015/2024, is particularly interesting in relation to the touch sense.  Carsten Nicolai’s works are both sculpture and sound instruments activated through physical performance. Nicolai invites the audience to mix the sound loops and create their own sound compositions using vinyl’s, four turntables and headphones. The audience has to physically touch the vinyl’s provided and place them on turntables, and then also use headphones. As previously mentioned, “these signals and or information from all over your body spreads itself onto the cortex forming a topographical map of sorts, that then twists around your brain like headphones and this is translated into a touch perception.” This artwork encompasses all the features around the  touch sense therefore leading to the work  touching you physically and psychologically. This experience of music can also give someone goosebumps, touching you physically. 

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Introduction by Anna Maja Spiess. First Paragraph by Lizzy Vartanian. Second Paragraph by Melisza Neckel.

The exhibition featuring the works is LIGHT SOUND SENSES at the Heidi Horten Collection, Vienna. 20 September 2024 – 23 March 2025

Iv Toshain’s website & Carsten Nicolai instagram & Edgar Knoop

EVENT ALERT: planning your Vienna trip?

On Jan 28th 2025 at both 5pm & 6pm there is a special guided tour: Spotlight on: László Moholy-Nagy the great revolutionary light artist.

And on Jan 30th 2025 at 6pm the Heidi Horten Collection is hosting an expert talk with Andreas Beitin, Siegrun Appelt and Julia Hartmann. (talk in German)

Header image:
Finnbogi Pétursson, Sphere © Ouriel Morgensztern/Heidi Horten Collection