Embodied Sculpture

Sculptural practice, because of the connection between the hands and the material, has often been associated with the sense of touch. This perceived closeness to touch seems to assign more embodied qualities to sculptural practice than other art forms. Indeed, even the verb itself ‘to embody’ seems to indicate the sculptural process, as its definition is “to give a tangible form to an idea, principles or thoughts”.¹⁰

De Bruyckere trained as a painter and widely uses paintings as a source of inspiration;

however, she found the medium inadequate to express her concerns and feelings. As the artist explains:

When I was a painter I was always gluing materials to the paper – the surface of the painting was never sufficient for me. There is no possibility of touch, no softness in the material to give you hope” (De Bruyckere, B. 2012 in Coghlan, A.)

Alex Potts notes that sculpture’s potential for imaginative touch “activate[s] a more directly physical and bodily engaged response from the viewer than a painting” (Potts, A. 2001b: ix).

The embodied quality of sculpture, which gives it mass, volume and the ability to overcome the limitations of the two-dimensional, has a long history and has contributed to the extensive dispute between painting and sculpture.¹¹

This connection between sculpture and touch, although it is an essential point of disagreement in the ‘paragone’, has more far reaching implications. To begin with, the experience of sense of touch coming into direct contact with the external object has been considered to be more real, reliable, immediate and unmediated than that with any of the other senses.¹² Additionally, the historical attitude towards touch, with regard to its unmediated status in relation to all the other senses, has been contradictory (Dent, P. 2014: 14).

10 English Oxford Dictionary, available from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/embody [Accessed 10.10.2014].

11 During the Renaissance, for instance, in the work of some artists, such as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Nicoló Tribolo and Agnolo Bronzino, the interest in tactility exceeded the interest in representational theme and was intended to be a contribution to the debate on the relative stature of painting versus sculpture (Johnson, G.A. 2014: 91).

12 The Evangelist Thomas asks to touch the wound in order to believe in Jesus’ resurrection: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25, New Revised Standard Version).

The privileging of sight over the other senses may be retraced back to Plato through the presumed connection of vision to reason and thought. Indeed, the sense of sight, with its direct link to light, seems to offer a direct link to knowledge, as expressions like: to have a vision, to have insight, to be enlightened or simply to see, indicate the act of understanding.

The valorisation of vision and hearing was also due to the possibility of them controlling and transcending the body. The body, deemed more primitive, was the site of the ‘contact senses’, which were considered to be distant and separate from rational thought (Blackman, L.

2008: 85, Marks, L. U. 2013: 144; Papenburg, B. 2013: 159).¹³

Recent psychological and philosophical studies seem to disagree on the total number of senses a human being possesses, their rank and their interconnectedness. Some scholars even argue that human beings may have an infinite number of senses working together (Duncum, P.

2012).¹⁴

Culturally, the sense of touch has been endowed with ‘transgressiveness’, as from an early age; children are allowed to look but not to touch, going against their intrinsic compulsion to explore the world through touch and taste. Touching is often endowed with possible dangerous physical, unmediated and sexual properties, which may foster a link to disease, germs, sin, vice and perversion.

These contradictions and inconsistencies in the way we understand the senses and their roles in our lives, can also be observed in the fact that the sense of touch, although considered a contact sense and, therefore a secondary sense, seems to be the one invested with more emotional significance. Touch, through its ability to engage emotional reactions, is believed to have played an essential role in the intellectual development of the human race. As Aristotle claimed, touch, the most “human sense”, is the one that separates humans from animals (Gallace, A. and Spence, C. 2014: 107-109).

A more synesthetic approach would also inevitably increase touch’s standing among the other senses. The sense of touch could then be viewed as a basic sense upon which all other senses may be dependent, through physical contact (taste) and physiological processes (taste,

13 In Western philosophy knowledge was separated from the senses, even though this knowledge may have been gathered trough the senses. Philosophers, such as Kant and Hegel believed that only distant senses (vision and hearing) were invested with the possibility of aesthetic experiences. For Hegel, for instance, “aesthetic is a transcendent rise from a sensuous particular to a universal truth, and was only possible through the distance senses” (Marks, L.U. 2013: 145).

14 Nonetheless, today the senses are still taught as being separate entities, demonstrating that the supremacy of vision is still perpetuated to the present day. The way the senses are taught still assumes the Cartesian dualism, where mind and body are considered as two separate entities, with the mind being the only path to true knowledge, doing all the logical thinking, and the body, reduced to its physiological processes that are controlled by the mind. In this binary system the importance of an individual sense is determined by its perceived relationship to the mind.

hear). Vision too, has been rationalised as an extension of touch (Descartes, R. 2001: 67).

Moreover, to ‘be touched by’ an artwork can also mean to feel, in this way linking touch to expressions of emotional states of sympathy / empathy. This ‘bi-directional’ haptic quality of sculpture, originates from the fact that we can physically touch the object and we are ‘touched’

by the object at the same time (Paterson, M. 2007: 94). It is this ‘being touched by’, this more abstract form of touching, rather than the physical manifestation of touch in sculptural practice that may contribute to the discussion of De Bruyckere’s sculptures. Gottfried Herder, for instance, already highlighted in 1778 the direct link between sculpture and the sense of touch, arguing that the spectator employs the imaginative touch rather than the physical touch when confronted with a three dimensional work (Zuckert, R. 2009: 285, 287).

However, this synesthetic perception of artwork must be as old as art itself, so it seems appropriate to ask what might have driven the interpretative framework to move from a mostly visual to a more synesthetic approach to art. In fact, although the legacy of modernism, with its emphasis on the visual, may still influence art criticism, there has been a noticeable shift in visual studies, where more attention is devoted to the embodied experience generated by an artwork. In recent studies, the importance of experiencing art, through the totality of the senses has been repeatedly emphasised. Writers in different fields have outlined the importance of senses close to the body such as touch, smell and taste in the formation of knowledge, positioning them as communicable and sharable and therefore, as “agents of aesthetic and ethic” (Marks, L. U. 2013: 145-147).

By setting up relations between the object and the space in which it has been directly placed, between presence and absence and between inside and outside, De Bruyckere’s work takes advantage of the embodied connection between art object, body and senses. Her

sculptures mobilise several senses rather than the disembodied gaze and can be seen as accentuating this difference between a vision-centred perception of the artwork and a body-centred one.

In sculptures of flayed bodies, as in The Pillow (2010) (image 3-1), or Liggende I and Liggende II (image 5-3 and 5-4), the spectators’ sensorial experience is activated through the use of the casting process that represents very accurately the ‘lived body’, and through

exploiting the acquired knowledge of tactile materials like fabric and wax. Acknowledging the role played by a combination of several senses when confronted with De Bruyckere’s work, shifting from optical visuality to a more synesthetic experience of it, changes the mode in which the relationship between viewer and artwork is understood. As will be discussed in

chapter five, in a purely visual model the connection between spectator and artwork is more likely to be one of mastery, as the viewers can separate themselves from the object in order to rationalise the representation. Recognising the importance of all the senses in the perception and interpretation of De Bruyckere’s artwork, the separation between the spectator’s

perception and the artwork becomes more difficult. Indeed, the knowledge obtained through the haptic cannot be obtained through a mere scientific, detached and rational gaze, but is based on a close, sensual bodily connection with the represented object. As Marks points out, in a more embodied visuality the relationship between viewer and artwork is one of mutuality.

For her, “haptic visuality” makes the spectators more vulnerable and open to the artwork

“reversing the relation of mastery that characterises optical viewing” (Marks, L. 2000: 184-185). The spectator, in order to achieve an embodied understanding, has to give in to the work of art and, for an instant, become part of it.

Acknowledging the importance of the close senses in the ‘understanding’ of De Bruyckere’s work, may place similar emphasis on both the shared and the personal

knowledge, which may cause a certain loss of ‘objectivity’, but on the other hand, will enrich the “shared experienced that is art” (Korsmeyer, C. 1999: 94-98). This fact may open the possibility of sharing experiences and emotions, even though elements of the artwork will always remain individual and difficult to communicate.

This propensity of De Bruyckere’s fragmented figures to mobilise several senses, seems to capitalise on the ‘first impact’ of the work, before the spectator’s symbolic understanding of it really begins. During this ‘pre-conceptual’ phase, affect is present as an ambiguous force.

Affect is the energy of the in-between and, although it may be felt immediately, its meaning often escapes ‘signification’. In fact, Best observes that on the affective level an artwork can be felt quickly, even though its meaning may escape the viewer (Best, S. 2014: 7). One could argue that, there is a sense of immediacy during the first few moments in which viewers begin to take in De Bruyckere’s artwork. This physical, sensorial, and often emotional engagement, which may temporarily precede the conceptual understanding of the artwork, creates

‘immediate sensations’ in the spectators that involves ‘the haptic’ and with it, the role played by our skin. If experiencing an artwork in a haptic way involves all the senses, then the act of looking also becomes an experience of imaginative touching (Sobchack, V. 2004: 67-70). The sense of touch, even if just imaginative, is always connected to our skin.

The skin, the delicate membrane, which separates our insides from the outside, is often thought of as the location of subjectivity formation, as it is where the first experiences of the

world are shaped. Playing an important part in the perception of pleasure and pain, the skin is also understood as the surface on which much of human suffering is felt. Indeed, Tomkins points out how torture and sexual seduction play out on the surface of the body (Tomkins, S.

2009: 190). In De Bruyckere’s fragmented bodies, then, the flayed skin may be seen to relate metaphorically to the capacity for empathy, for suffering with someone and for being inside their skin, the place where feelings are sensed through touch.

Didier Anzieu stresses the importance of skin as a sense organ, because we can survive without the other senses, but we can’t survive without skin. For him, the skin is also “the basis for … the exchange of signals with other people” and therefore functions as a boundary between the inside and outside and between the body and psyche hence making it the interface, the main place of contact between the self and other (Anzieu, D. 2016: 16). As an instrument of communication, the skin lets us sense and feel the world. His discussion of touch, through the concept of skin Ego, which assumes a biological basis for the development of an independent, healthy psyche, accentuates this relationship and the entanglement between the psyche, the body and the world (Anzieu, D. 2016: 16-17).

However, one should not reduce the spectator’s responses to De Bruyckere’s fragmented figures exclusively to the immediate physical and sensorial effects, as her intriguing artworks always invite viewers to form interpretations through a cultural and intellectual process as well. Although the interaction between the spectator’s body and the environment definitely plays a defining role in experiencing art, the definition of the body as exclusively sensory may be problematic, as the perception of artwork depends on the convergence of emotions,

memories and knowledge (Minisale, G. 2013: 183). For this reason, De Bruyckere’s artwork should be seen as both conceptual and embodied; art that is capable of setting in motion the spectators’ senses, emotions and reason. The integration of different ways of knowing is a defining characteristic of De Bruyckere’s artwork that contributes to the intensity of the aesthetic experience.