We are accustomed to holding the world in the palm of our hands. People, landscapes, products, opinions, and comments from all over the world move at great speed under the command of our fingers. As our lives become increasingly digitized, our hands are compelled to acquire new skills to keep pace with interfaces: mice, pads, keyboards, touchscreens, etc. However, this naturalized way of interacting with the world entails a mode of thinking that originates in the fingertips, one we rarely explore. Discussions about digitality usually revolve around visuality—the quality of images, the depth of their colors, the definition of their pixels. The primacy of the visual over the tactile dimension is such that recent advances in robotics and artificial intelligence aim to emulate human manual dexterity through the use of tiny cameras in the fingers of robotic hands. But what happens with this everyday labor performed at our fingertips? What possibilities of thought does it configure, and which are obstructed by constant contact with the flat, ascetic surfaces of interactive screens? As Horkheimer once said, concerned with the mechanization of our subjectivities, “the proposition that tools are extensions of human organs can be inverted to assert that organs are extensions of tools.”[1]
The arts actively participate in these battles over our perceptive organs, adopting, rejecting, or subverting the uses of new technologies. Interestingly, after the cyborg fever of the 1990s and the rise of interactive and video art in the first decades of the millennium, we are now witnessing a resurgence of artisanal traditions in the art world. Textiles, carvings, cutwork, and ceramics of diverse origins are gaining increasing prominence in fairs, galleries, museums, and biennials through the appropriation and reinterpretation of contemporary artists. This shift in aesthetic valuation responds to a variety of factors—including the growing appreciation of Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies in the face of climate chaos and digital alienation—while also intervening in the field of haptic perception, that is, the apprehension of the world through practices of contact between bodies.
The artist’s hand has been a point of tension in Western art history over the last century: fetishized by the public as the embodiment of modern ideas of talent and genius; initially displaced from its centrality by the avant-gardes through Dadaist assemblages and readymades in the 1920s; and later emphasized less after the conceptual dematerialization of artworks and the development of industrial production techniques from Minimalism and Post-Minimalism of the 1960s. New interpretive keys emerge within this logic of recent valuation of crafts from diverse cultures. A particularly interesting milestone is the recognition of the influence of Yupik masks—culturally known as Inuit—on Surrealism, thanks to André Breton, who collected them. The recent exhibition Moon Dancers: Yup’ik Masks and the Surrealists (2018) delved into this particular relationship.[2] These masks are characterized by the inclusion of hands encircling the face without the mediation of arms. The hands emerge from the face and unfold as halos, crowns, or skeletal forms, generating a highly particular vision of the human body that displaces the primacy of the face as the embodiment of identity and the eyes as the point of access to the world through an autonomous, individual mind. The Yupik culture, without a pictorial or written language tradition prior to colonization, understands hands as a point of connection with other dimensions of existence that exceed the human. Inspired by this conception and in the aforementioned revisionist spirit, I would like to take the opportunity to explore the Balanz Collection to highlight different strategies through which contemporary Latin American artists engage with avant-garde legacies while developing a strong tactile dimension in their work.
The hand is a constant presence in Liliana Porter’s early work, whether as a visual motif or as the implicit subject of the depicted action. Between 1968 and 1973, Porter repeatedly documents her hands in different situations. She photographs the grasp of a brick between her fingers. She executes a sequence in which she rips and folds a photographic postcard of Florence. She plays with the drawing of a wandering square that travels between different points on the page and her fingers, frame by frame. She gradually crumples a sheet of paper into a compact ball. She draws on her hands, reinforcing shaded areas with line grids or tracing lines that extend from her fingers onto the paper (or vice versa). She also offers her hands to the viewer, as one offers a choice between two candies, displaying a pyramid in one palm and the drawing of a triangle on the other. Porter produced this series in New York during a period when the city was the center of Minimalist, Pop, and Conceptual proposals, which were displacing the traditional valuation of the hand and the artist’s characteristic gesture. In 1964, the year of her arrival in the United States, Porter collaborated with artists Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo to found the New York Graphic Workshop, a collective space imagining new conceptual horizons for printmaking in an attempt to “transcend the craft.”[3] The influence of New York conceptual operations is evident in several of Porter’s works, as she incorporates multiple levels of representation of a single object (a pyramid and its two-dimensional abstraction as a triangle), approaching seminal works of this movement such as Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965).
However, the centrality of the hand distinguishes her from her contemporaries. Porter avoids the absolute primacy of visuality and language in meaning-making and offers us haptic visions of the world and artistic creation—perspectives of physical contact between mutually transforming materials. Porter challenges traditional artistic conventions by turning the hand—usually an instrument or agent of labor, hidden from the viewer—into a recurring motif in her work and also a surface for contact and inscription through drawing. The paper itself loses its conventional role and is presented as a malleable object, reflecting the overlooked corporeality of all two-dimensional production (drawing, printmaking, photography, etc.). The Florence postcard becomes a body subject to the movements of contact with other bodies; it can be torn, crumpled, folded. The photographic image is presented as a sensitive, vulnerable body. In this sense, Porter shares concern for tactility in the aesthetic experience with other female artists working in performance, such as Yoko Ono (Cut Piece, 1964), Valie Export (Tap and Touch Cinema, 1968), and Marina Abramović (Rhythm 0, 1974).[4]
These early experiments constitute a prelude to the deployment of her miniature imaginaries in the following decades, often populated by toys and figures engaged in manual activities like knitting, watering, raking, chopping, or hammering. They confront us explicitly with the tactile origin of her fictions and her capacity to compress the world into the palm of her hand through a play of scales and levels of representation. It is unsurprising, then, that forty years later she revisited these early works. Forty Years IIB (hand, over line II) juxtaposes two distinct moments in her production through mise en abyme—a visual game in which an image contains a replica of itself. Porter takes the 1973 photograph of her hand with the index finger intersected by a diagonal extending across the paper and, in 2013, continues the line outside the photographic frame, crossing the fingers of her forty-years-older hand. From skin to paper and back, two different moments of representation, artistic creation, and life are connected in a single image. The connecting line allegorizes a lifetime of work, enacted through small staged scenarios.
Liliana Porter, "Forty Years IIB (hand, over line II)", 2013
Two different temporalities in Nicola Costantino’s work also find a point of contact in her 2007 reworking of the iconic Dadaist photograph by Man Ray, Black and White (1926). Nicola replaces the model with herself as part of a photographic series in which she re-enacts key works from Western art history. Instead of holding an African Baoulé mask, she substitutes this ceremonial representation of the human face with a sculpture of herself from ten years prior. With a serene, tilted face, she holds Chancho Bola (1998), an aluminum and resin cast of a pig compacted and folded into a sphere. A tension between figuration and abstraction defines this compression process, where an organic, animal form is forced into a geometrically perfect volume. Despite the passivity of the replicated corpse, the sphere condenses a force seemingly ready to explode—a kind of primordial chaos. Nicola has knowledge of taxidermy and creates her casts from animal cadavers; some of her most famous series replicate unborn animals. Here, a second layer of tension emerges—between life and death—interwoven with the struggle between referentiality and abstraction; there is a sense of birth within this compact death, a latent feeling that something new could emerge from it.
An immediate precedent for this compression series is the sculpture of John Chamberlain, known for compacting industrial elements like car body panels and fuel barrels. Occupying a challenging position in art history classification, Chamberlain’s work straddles Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism. Art historian David Getsy describes his works as “bodies composed of nothing but excess skin.”[5] Costantino’s work shares the aluminum material universe, but the reference to skin is even more direct in her case. This tactile channel is central to much of her production, whether in her compressed animal casts or in Savon de corps (2004), where she produces luxury soap from fat extracted from her own body, or in Peletería Humana (1999/2000), a line of synthetic human-skin garments embedded with sexual stimulation organs like nipples and anuses. The haptic vision of the body permeates her work as she explores posthuman horizons. It is noteworthy that her reworking of Man Ray’s photograph brings together two instances of human representation—the body and its symbolic representation through synecdoche (naming the part for the whole)—in a scene of contact. While in Man Ray’s work the model’s hand is partially hidden behind the mask, in Nicola’s replica her left hand is fully exposed, assuming a starring role as it rests atop the sculpture, crowning it.
Regarding the creative process, English sculptor Barbara Hepworth emphasized the hand as a tool of knowledge. She wrote:
My left hand is my thinking hand. The right is merely the motor hand. It holds the hammer. The left hand, the thinking hand, must be relaxed and sensitive. The rhythms of thought pass to the stone through the fingers and the grip of this hand. It is also the hand that listens. It listens for the basic weaknesses or flaws in the stone; it listens for the possibility or imminence of fractures.[6]
Nicola seems to follow Hepworth’s line. Her left hand rests on the work in a situation of tactile listening. This gesture, holding the spherical roundness of her creation, combined with her serene facial expression, evokes images of an advanced pregnancy. The hand slowly examines the belly to “listen” for tactile indications of that strange presence inside the body. In this series, Nicola investigates representations of the female body while simultaneously occupying the roles of artist and model; the association of creation with gestation is intentional. During the seven years required to complete this photographic set, she becomes pregnant, turning her maternity into an explicit subject of artistic inquiry. Alongside her duplicated art-historical images, she presents a cast of herself as a nanny for her son, Aquiles. Regarding her animal sculptures, Nicola often references posthumanism, understanding existence beyond the human as inclusive of nonhuman agents like machines, viruses, fungi, and drugs. Human representation through the mask—a face whose punctum is the eyes as access to personality and reason—is displaced by the metallic skin of an animal. Skin-to-skin contact opens the possibility of new identifications emerging from challenging the figurative/abstract, life/death, culture/nature, human/nonhuman binaries.
A curious coincidence in the Balanz Collection is the presence of another work exploring the interplay between sculpture and photography in reference to historical avant-gardes: A Vanguarda Viperina (1985/1997) by Brazilian artist Tunga. This work, exhibited in his 1997 retrospective at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, depicts a strange creeping presence in which a cluster of snakes appears to intertwine into a braid until their bodies become indistinguishable. Braiding is a recurring motif in Tunga’s work. He repeatedly returns to this technique, equating industrial cables with human hair and snakes. Like Minimalism, Tunga shows interest in industrial materials, producing a significant portion of his works from steel or copper cables; yet, these adopt organic forms and inhabit exhibition spaces like lurking reptiles. Extensive steel cable braids begin appearing in his shows from 1980 onwards. Tunga adds complexity to the braids, focusing on the knot as a point of containment for energy or the natural course of matter. Giant combs appear, stuck in attempts to restore order to tangled cables/hair. Circulation and energy flow, with the cable as conductor of machinic assemblages, are fundamental motifs in his work.
Tunga, "A Vanguarda Viperina", Negativo:1985 - Impresión:1997
However, as in Nicola’s sculptural work, there is a fusion of the mechanical and the animal, intensified in Tunga’s case through erotic charge. In multiple interviews, Tunga defines eroticism as central to his work. His interest intensifies in braids, artificial material configurations where one cannot help but imagine the hand weaving phallic serpentine symbols. Childhood and innocence are subtly referenced; he adds colored ribbons to braids, emulating female hairstyles. Provocative, Tunga develops his career within the avant-garde tradition of stimulating collective thought through sensory shock: introducing the unexpected into habitual perception. Knots, ties, and tangles signal collective repression of erotic energy that he seeks to liberate. Both in performances and sculpture, the emphasis appears to lie in the eternal search for a new vision, adopting Marinetti’s Futurist axiom: “visual sense arises in the fingertips.”[7]
Popular Spanish is full of metaphors about thinking that revolve around elements of connection, binding, or tying. We speak of “the thread of our ideas,” “tying up loose ends,” “the knot of the problem,” or “the tangle of the matter.” These metaphors reflect the deep interrelation between manual activity and mental activity, showing how ideas have been developed and debated since time immemorial through shared processes of creation or collective action, like weaving. When Diana Drake chooses to work with thread or rope as the material basis of her work, she often does so through entanglement and tangle, as in Condensación III (2012). Like Tunga, she creates a metaphorical statement about the blockage or forgetting of a holistic understanding of the creative process, one that recognizes the mind is not an autonomous organ and that thinking and creation depend on contact with bodies and diverse agents. Drake tangles threads and ropes into different spatial configurations, which she solidifies using crystallized salts that harden these malleable bodies. In exhibition settings, she presents the works openly on tables and display cases, making them accessible visually, and potentially tactically, to viewers.
Diana Drake, "Condensation III", 2012
Condensatión III is particularly notable because the coiled rope configuration resembles the morphology of the brain. Its placement in an acrylic box recalls a laboratory specimen, organ, or animal preserved in formaldehyde, similar to Damien Hirst’s iconic The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991). However, Drake’s work undeniably presents a scene of contact between diverse agents, where the layer of salts transforms a mundane object, like a rope, into a precious object for contemplation, simultaneously calling forth the hand that carries the tactile memory of everyday manipulation. In contrast to the thread architectures of American minimalist Fred Sandback, Drake does not offer a finished or pristine work; instead, she presents raw material in its full transformative potential, appealing equally to the eye and the hand.
Direct references to Minimalism recur in the work of Valentín Demarco. The Buenos Aires-based artist transforms Dan Flavin’s cold neon tube aesthetic into a provincial souvenir in Radiografía de la pampa (2013), and pushes this experiment to the limit in his exhibition Regionales Minimal (2015), where he converts Minimalist seriality into a strategy for deploying provincial memories, inflected by artisanal tradition contaminating contemporary art’s ascetic will. Trained in goldsmithing in his hometown of Olavarría, Demarco turns this working strategy into a defining feature of his production, where the body prevails as a territory of symbolic dispute through contact and tactile stimulation. In a reworking of a Florencio Molina Campos artwork, he appears nude, defiant and provocative (wearing only a gaucho hat) reclining on a horse. Later, he produces a series of engraved mates that function as anal plugs, displayed alongside a video showing everyday scenes of people drinking and preparing mate with these inserts.
The relevance of the tactile dimension in Demarco’s work is evident from the title of his series Mi puñado de esplín (2020), borrowed from a famous tango lyric. “Esplín” is an archaic noun referring to existential boredom—a precise definition for a body of work created during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, amid long stretches of social isolation. Demarco crafts small chiseled and pierced bronze icons, a handful of self-referential images condensing his life, interests, and desires during confinement. The set includes items ranging from a face mask and an autumn leaf to an issue of Artforum or the hashtag symbol. These disparate elements are reduced in size, becoming malleable objects that fit inside a closed fist. Through this series of contemporary amulets, Demarco returns to what English critic Herbert Read considers one of the two origins of sculpture as a discipline: “Regardless of the monument, there was from the beginning another form of art that fused with sculpture, but had a separate origin and use, never confused with the monument. It was the amulet, a small portable talisman carried for protection against evil or to ensure fertility.”[8] Arranged on the wall in a grid via nails, the charms appear as mere points from a distance, demanding close, intimate attention. They invite proximate, tactile-like contemplation, a form of engagement Hildebrand calls haptic, opposed to the more critical and interpretive vision requiring optical distance in gallery spaces.[9] Thus, in a period when proximity to other bodies became a source of collective anxiety, Demarco produces artisanal work of remarkable manual dexterity, where intimacy and the desire for contact play a central role in both production and exhibition.
This small selection of works in the Balanz Collection reveals alternative approaches to the body and artistic creation, offering highly stimulating points of access for studying touch in art history. They expand new research horizons related to feminism, sexual dissidence, and posthumanism, challenging modern notions of the monadic subject and the primacy of reason and the individual mind observing the world from optical distance. These artists propose scenes of contact among diverse bodies, or, in the words of French philosopher Michel Serres, a philosophy of intertwined bodies based on the skin as a site of contact between soul and world: “Metaphysics begins with, and is conditioned by, gymnastics.”[10] Through the training of strategies for contact with other bodies across time and space, infinitely more complex forms of subjectivity emerge than those offered by the flat surface of the screen and the repetitive gesture of swiping a finger again and again.
[1] Horkheimer, Max. “Traditional and Critical Theory” in Critical Theory. Selected Essays. New York: Continuum, 1982, p. 201. Translated into Spanish by the author.
[2] The exhibition was organized by Di Donna Gallery in New York in collaboration with Donald Ellis Gallery, an internationally renowned specialist in Native American art, with major loans from the Calder Foundation, the Charles and Valerie Diker Collection, the Lucid Art Foundation, the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, and important private collections.
[3] Camnitzer, Luis in Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, "A Case for Ethical Cynicism: Dialogue with Luis Camnitzer," in Artwurl, 2005. Available at: http://thisandthat.site/projects/luis-camnitzer-interview
[4] For those wishing to explore the relevance of tactility in the work of women artists in the 1960s and 1970s, I recommend Huhtamo, Erkki, “Twin-Touch-Test-Redux: Media Archaeological Approach to Art, Interactivity, and Tactility,” in Grau, Oliver, et al., MediaArtHistories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
[5] Getsy, David. Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015, p. 104. For those interested in debates around opticality and tactility in modern sculpture, I also recommend Getsy’s essay: “Tactility or Opticality, Henry Moore or David Smith: Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg on The Art of Sculpture, 1956.” The Sculpture Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, 2008, pp. 75–88, https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.17.2.7.
[6] Hepworth, B. BARBARA HEPWORTH: A PICTORIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Illumina ARTbibliographies Modern - Unstructured, 1985, p. 79. Translated from English to Spanish by the author.
[7] Marinetti, Filippo T.: “Tactilism” (1924), in Marinetti, Selected Writings, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972, pp. 109–112.
[8] Read, Herbert. The Art of Sculpture. [2nd ed., Bollingen Foundation] New York: Pantheon Books, 1961, p. 5.
[9] Hildebrand, Adolf von in Jacques Aumont, The Image, trans. Claire Pajackowska. London: BFI Publishing, 1997 [1990]), pp. 77–78. Translated from English to Spanish by the author.
[10] Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: a Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (I). New York: Continuum, 2009, p. 23. Translated from English to Spanish by the author.
