One day, I watched a young woman, a recent Polish immigrant to the eastern US, put her young daughter to sleep in a public place.
Night light, 1978, oil on canvas.
Joan Semmel, born 1932, American. MOMA, NY
With the palms and fingers of both hands moving together and in the same direction, she rubbed the little girl’s arms from shoulder to wrist.
Quick, forceful movements up and down, up and down. Repeatedly. First one arm. Then the second.
As above
The child stopped whimpering and fell asleep. When she awoke a few minutes later, her mother repeated the touching. The child fell asleep.
It was a warm day. This was not about warming the little one.
As above
This must have been for comfort. A resounding signal to the child’s brain that her mother and the world would not leave her during the hours of her sleep.
Flesh Ground, 2016, oil on canvas.
Joan Semmel, American born 1932. Private collection loan to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia in 2021
I felt a faint anguish for the child.
The probability is that the child will grow up in a society where touch is so hedged about with taboos and sexual touch so spiked with grenades,
The Impossible, III, 1946, bronze.
Maria Martins, 1894-1973, Brazilian, MOMA, NY
that the touch synapses of her brain will become etiolated for lack of stimulation. She will become deflated like a balloon.
Body as Shell, 2011-2015, sandstone
Alwar Balasubramaniam, Indian born 1971
On display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022 courtesy of the artist’s galleries
Millions of us live in a deficit of touch. We are deflated.
We compensate with the addictions our species is so clever at developing and rationalizing. Eating seems to be one of the most popular: it camouflages the deflation.
We comfort ourselves with the belief that we are in control of our own ‘lives’. That, at least, in a world in which we control little else.
But it is a vast universe of look-don’t-touch in which many of us live.
Untitled (Man and Woman in a Spatial Illusion), 1968, graphite, pen and ink, charcoal, coloured pencil and crayon.
Saul Steinberg, 1914-1999, American born Romania. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Undoubtedly one of the many consequences of our march away from small hunter-gatherer bands and homogenous farming communities to vast cities with strict rules for contact-avoidance to reduce the possibility of conflict.
Straphangers, 1947, lithograph
John Wilson, 1922-2015, American. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
And a consequence of the battles against oppressive societal control over the bodies and life-choices of women. And men. Never ending.
Oppression, acrylic on canvas, 1984.
Luis Cruz Azaceta, born Havana, Cuba, 1942. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington
Now, we have the Chatbot and Claude and the AI transhumans to console and manage us. Who needs touch?
Raising Robotic Natives, 2016, mixed media.
Stephan Bognar, German born 1993; Philipp Schmitt, German born 1993, Jonas Voigt, German born 1992. On exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Museum in 2019/2020
The feeder recognizes his particular ‘feed-me’ cry and, warming up the bottle to the proper temperature, shaking it a little, it activates its arm to maneuver the bottle to the baby’s mouth.
Joan Semmel started painting in the late 1970’s: the years of women’s consciousness-raising in the ‘West’. She continues to paint the body – but not only – and now in glorious colour.
As above
Hers are self-portraits-without-a-mirror. All that any of us would know of the outside of our bodies if mirrors did not exist.
Woman with a Mirror, 1911, oil on canvas.
Frederick Carl Frieseke, 1874-1939, American. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Without mirrors and their modern phone-mirror-camera updates, the derangements with how we look might be less pernicious than they are.
Point of View, 1967, etching.
Edward Staffell, 1933-2015. State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg
The distortions in our behaviours less pernicious also. Perhaps.
La Pesadilla (The Nightmare). “The light clouded their minds”, oil on canvas, 2020
Esai Alfredo Figuero Ruiz, BFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2020. (No other information)
And touch might come permanently into its own (again) for more than a minority of us. And remain queen of our senses.
Vain hope now, probably.
Two Nudes, oil on panel, 2014.
Daniel Sprick, American born 1953. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington
We might love differently then. Perhaps.
We might be very cautious about Claude and Chatbot
and Anthropic’s ever-evolving sirens looking into their own mirrors and finding themselves wise, brilliant and exciting.
In Much Wisdom, 1902, bronze with black patina, sand cast, inlay of stone and gilded glass.
Charles Grafly, 1862-1929, American. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
A mythical form, part Eve and part siren, admiring her image in a mirror.
