The Optical House of Tactile: The Bricolage-Like Response to COVID-19
From Firenze University Press Journal: Aisthesis
Marco Innocenti, Università degli Studi di Bergamo
COVID-19 pandemic has not had (nor it will continue to have) an impact on our lifestyle just in social and economic terms, but also in aesthetic ones. Alois Riegl’s distinction between tactile and optical approaches to the image can help us to understand its effects, also since his dichotomy between “tactile connection” and “optical isolation” can ring a bell in a year characterised by video calls and social distancing. In fact, the Viennese art critic intends to attribute a sort of tacticity to the point of view that perceives images in their unity, while locating a more strictly optical gaze where people look at things in their mutual individuality (Riegl [1901]: 21). Applying these considerations to today’s situation, we also have to keep in mind features such as the «uninterrupted and immediately convincing materiality» (Riegl [1901]: 65, transl. my own) of tactile and the penchant for thoughtful detachment encouraged, instead, by the works of art made during an “optical” era such as the late-Roman period.
Immediacy has undoubtedly no place on Zoom, among “elbow to elbow” greetings, or where a constant measurement of distances requires a mental grid in front of our gaze. How-ever, it is also true that those behaviours have not happened because we have «begun to find a fascination (Reiz) in having to complete a work of art with a mental effort» (Riegl [1901]: 65, transl. my own) as instead, according to Riegl, did the late-Roman intellectuals. On the one hand, external, sudden, and clearly negative circumstances forced us into this approach; on the other one, it involves social classes in quite a transversal way, given the nature of the virus, and not just the elite that dictates the «fashion art» (Modekunst) (Riegl [1901]: 65).
The “masses” themselves are involved in an optical point of view, whereas Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Era of its Technical Reproducibility (1935), wrote that their very inclusion in the enjoyment of artistic production was responsible for art being sinking into a tactile «distraction» (Benjamin [1935]: 31, 32). In facts, film is the art form that «corresponds to deep-rooted changes in the apparatus of perception» (Benjamin [1935]: 49) widespread among the masses exposed to the perils of modern life. That is because it prevents viewers from contemplating an image through an uninterrupted flow of frames which «cannot be pinned down» (Benjamin [1935]: 32).Therefore, the pandemic has led people to an optical gaze, both sudden and unnatural, which has been imposed on our minds too abruptly to replace harmoniously the haptic closeness we all mourn. That invites us to ask ourselves where the tactile approach could be hidden now and how it can endure in an eye bombarded by signs to wash our hands, to wear a mask, and to stay six feet away from other people; or after hours of smart-working. The hypothesis that we will try to develop throughout this article concerns the possibility that the optical world-view is perceived (in a more or less unconscious way) as a sort of custodian of tactile. I will try to argue this point as a result of the diffusion in everybody of the bricoleur’s way to look at things, in the terms in which Claude Lévi-Strauss describes it in his essay La pensée sauvage (19 62).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Aisthesis-12104
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/12104
