Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website PRIÈRE DE TOUCHER – The Touch of Art al Museum Tinguely, Basilea
febbraio 10, 2016 - Museum Tinguely

PRIÈRE DE TOUCHER – The Touch of Art al Museum Tinguely, Basilea

Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale. 

Museum Tinguely is pursuing the project of an exhibition series with which it sheds light on the complex theme of the five human senses and their portrayal in art up to the present day. 2015 saw the opening of the first exhibition under the title, 'Belle Haleine – The Scent of Art', and this year will see a continuation with 'PRIÈRE DE TOUCHER – The Touch of Art'. This exhibition is devoted to the fascinating phenomenon of haptic perception and makes a break with customary museum practice of appealing primarily to the visitor's visual sense.
The exhibition is centered around the sense of touch and the haptic system as a possibility of aesthetic perception, and it throws up a series of questions at the same time: How do we perceive tactile art? What happens when our skin suddenly plays the main role in the experiencing of art? Even without direct physical contact with the beholder, can artworks appeal to their sense of touch? Can tactile experiences be described and translated into images? Works from entirely different eras testify to an understanding of art that includes the tactile dimension. Tactility has increasingly become a deliberately employed #design element since the mid-20th century.
The sense of touch is our first and oldest sense. It operates as a 'proximal sense' at minimal distances through direct physical contact. The skin is our largest organ. It is fundamental for recording the reality that surrounds us. Depending on the historical, geographical, and cultural context, the sense of touch is described sometimes as the most primitive, sometimes as the most existential and most complex sense. Primary organs of the sense of touch are the hands, especially the fingertips. Using them we are able, by means of stereognosis, to get a picture of a felt object without seeing it. However, the lips and tongue also have a multitude of sense cells, which is visually comprehensible in the portrayal of the somatosensory homunculus, where these three organs are represented in oversize. Aristotle assigned the sensations cold, warm, dry, and wet to the four elements. Further, in line with a material's properties, distinctions can be drawn between hard, soft, rough, and smooth. In addition to mechanoreceptors and thermoreceptors, our skin is also equipped with nocireceptors, which signal pain to us. The skin harbors sense systems organized in highly diverse ways. Haptic stimuli can trigger pleasure or displeasure. Touching cannot be detached from one's own body, but it does enable the experiencing of intercorporeality (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) and is associated with intimacy and emotionality.
In Didier Anzieu, the notion of the body as house and shell of the 'Ego' is the point of departure for a nuanced psychopathological differentiation of the functions of the 'Skin-Ego'. Sensory deprivation leads to serious pathological damage. Touches, above all but not only through the skin, grooming for example, are a lubricant of social life – they make us happy. Our spatial orientation, along with our physical perception, also has its relational benchmark in the proportions of the human body: We have a body, we are a body (Wilhelm Reich).
The convention of oculocentrically orientated art perception emanates from our ability, primarily and almost exclusively, to comprehend images using our eyes, but at the same time to grasp them – in a widespread form of synesthetic perception – physically and tactilely too, with the 'haptic gaze'. With the transformation of our apperceptive apparatus brought about by technology, as a result of acceleration, distancing, and medialization (Walter Benjamin, Paul Virilio), the functions of our proximal senses have changed. Body extensions, artificial sensory organs, technological add-ons (prostheses) create new forms of communication, but simultaneously throw us back onto our senses' limited possibilities. Of these, the cutaneous sense is the most versatile and most elementary sense. Without it we are not viable. Without the hand as a tool there is no art, either. Creating art requires contact in the twofold sense.


PRIÈRE DE TOUCHER – The Touch of Art
Museum Tinguely, #basel: 12 February – 16 May 2016

Accompanying programme
The exhibition will be accompanied by numerous special guided tours, family Sundays, sculpture workshops with the artist Pedro Wirz and special tours for visually impaired #people.
An interdisciplinary symposium with experts from the arts, architecture, religions, media studies, ethnology, anthropology, cultural studies, medicine and neurobiology takes place on 8 and 9 April 2016 at #museumtinguely. The lectures of the conference will be published as a compiled volume afterwards. A publication of the last symposium 'Belle Haleine – The Scent of Art' (April 2015) is already available: ISBN: 978-3-9524392-3-4.
Curator of the exhibition: Roland Wetzel
Curatorial assistance: Lisa Anette Ahlers
Curator of 'The touch in religions practices and rituals': Eva Dietrich
Curator of 'Baroque allegories': Lisa Anette Ahlers
Hands-on tour ancient sculptures: in collaboration with Skulpturhalle #basel, cast collection of the Antikenmuseum
The Blind Robot and Inferno by Louis-Philippe Demers: in collaboration with HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel)
Special thanks to Museum der Kulturen, #basel and the collection of Peter and Ruth Herzog, #basel
for their generous support and loans.
Museum Tinguely: General Information
Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday: 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Special opening hours:
Monday, 15 February 2016, Carnival, closed Friday, 25 March 2016, Good Friday, closed Monday, 28 March 2016, Easter Monday, 11 am - 6 pm Sunday, 1 May 2016, Labor Day, 11 am - 6 pm Monday, 16 May 2016, Whit Monday, 11 am - 6 pm
tinguely.ch

News correlate

luglio 25, 2023
novembre 29, 2022
novembre 09, 2021

Prosegue fino al 18 settembre la #mostra #edmondobacci. L'energia della luce, doveroso tributo della #collezionepeggyGuggenheim al...

Giovedì 1 dicembre 2022 alle ore 19.00, Pirelli HangarBicocca presenta un nuovo appuntamento del Public Program dedicato alla #mos...

Otto mostre monografiche di protagonisti della scena internazionale:Anicka Yi, #stevemcqueen, #brucenauman, #dineosesheebopape, #g...