Maxine Bristow-Reader in Fine Art, University of Chester
Continuity of Touch - Textiles as Silent Witness

Stream: Repetition and Endurance

My current work explores our bodily engagement with space, and in particular those features of the built environment such as light-switches, handles, handrails, etc., with which we have an actual physical though often unconscious bodily relationship, and which instigate in us routinely repeated patterns of behaviour. These unconscious patterns of behaviour and corporeal habits are echoed in my work through its repetitive form and processes, particularly recently through the techniques of needlepoint and darning which as counted thread techniques concentrate the time and space of routine activity and bring both a private and a feminine intervention into the public realm of architectural space

My practice and provides an external framework for reflection in relation to its development. In particular I wish to consider the way that textile material in both its raw state as cloth, and as the ‘cooked’ textile object of material culture, acts as a silent witness to the repetitive routines of our daily lives.

With the dominance of vision over other senses and the consequent bias in cognition, visual culture tends to be the prevailing theoretical paradigm of contemporary artistic practice. I would like to propose, however, that it is material culture, which as David Howe’s suggests, is ‘the most fundamental domain of cultural expression, the medium through which all the values and practices of society are enacted’, 1 which can provide a useful frame of reference for visual practice that engages with notions of objecthood, utility, or where there is an emphasis on material tactility. It is my intention, through this paper, to investigate the significance of the material dimension by providing some insights into the broad field of material culture and the way that objects, operating on the threshold of the functional and symbolic, provide a fundamental non-discursive mode of communication.

Crucial to the operation of this non-discursive mode of communication is the sensory modality of touch. The paper, therefore, also briefly examines the historical relegation of touch in the hierarchy of the senses and considers what has been something of a sensual revolution within the arts, humanities, and social sciences, suggesting that is the immediacy and continuity of touch in the reciprocal relationship between subject and object that makes it a particularly potent vehicle for both cultural and artistic expression.
 
It does not escape me, however, that there is a fundamental contradiction between the silent but I would suggest very articulate witness that is the title and subject of the paper and the very vocal and declaratory testimony that I now present, indeed, it is the tension and relationship between different modes of communication that is one of the underlying themes of this paper – ‘are the limits of my language the limits of my world’?2 Should the visual be seen as a primary mode of communication, or are there other means of sensing, knowing, and experiencing the world, which in acting as avenues for the transmission of social and cultural values, can play a fundamental role in communicating meaning?

Let me begin, however, by providing some context to the silent witness that is the subject of this paper and its relevance to my work.

The ideas that are currently preoccupying me is our bodily engagement with space, and in particular aspects of the built environment with which we have an actual physical, though often unconscious, bodily relationship. previous work such as,handrail, barrier’ and ‘light-switch’ pieces  continue to be of interest  in the that they mediate between the body and space and instigate in us routinely repeated patterns of behaviour,  which, though anonymous, are nevertheless crucial to the functioning of everyday life. This demonstrates points of transition both in a physical and metaphorical sense - where do boundaries lie and what marks those boundaries; and  how does the boundary or the margin become a site of uncertainty and unpredictability and as such according to Warwick and Cavallaro, present the possibility of ‘contestation, negotiation and redefinition’.?3 I am particularly interested in the way that Textiles mediate between the body and the built environment; the way that textile as skin or membrane provides on the one hand a very real tangible point of contact and material boundary and on the other hand a more ambiguous metaphorical boundary between self and ‘not self’; and also of course, what is crucial to this relationship - the importance of tactility and continuity of touch.
The unconscious patterns of behaviour instigated through repetitive action and routine are echoed in my own work through its repetitive form and processes, particularly recently through needlepoint and darning which themselves become a silent witness( as) their seemingly gentle and controlled neutrality belieing the very physical and mental drama of the work’s production.

Whereas previous work has been largely concerned with gestures of the hand and localised touch, what I am currently thinking about is less focused touch, touch that is not limited to static contact between fingertips and surface but like its corresponding organ of skin, dispersed throughout the body. What I have in mind are the simple, anonymous, non-descript mass produced upholstered pads and panels that constitute the non-spaces of our built environment - the upholstered panels that you find on the bus, tube and train or the upholstered panels of corporate furniture with which we have daily physical contact and which as a neutral stage set for the repetitive routines of our busy lives, silently soak up the clamour of activity in their dense absorbent surfaces. 

Such reflections have instigated several lines of enquiry, but the essential focus of the investigation has been materiality and material culture. Material Culture is itself a very broad interdisciplinary [and some say undisciplined] field which simultaneously intersects and transcends a range of other disciplines and which as Judy Attfield in Wild Things The Material Culture of Everyday Life suggests ‘is a contradictory project, because although its main focus is on the material object it is not really about things in themselves, but how people make sense of the world through physical objects, what psychoanalytical theory calls ‘object relations’ in the explanation of identity formation, what sociology invokes as the physical manifestation of culture, and anthropology refers to as the objectification of social relations’.4

Material Culture as the name would suggest centres ‘on the idea that materiality is an integral dimension of culture’, and that ‘the study of the material dimension is as fundamental to understanding culture as is a focus on language’.5 As Christopher Tilley suggests in the opening chapter of the Handbook of Material Culture a recently published comprehensive volume dedicated to the field:

Things are meaningful and significant not only because they are necessary to sustain life and society, to reproduce or transform social relations and mediate differential interests and values, but because they provide essential tools for thought. Material forms are essential vehicles for the [conscious or unconscious] self-realisation of the identities of individuals and groups because they provide a fundamental non-discursive mode of communication.6

In a further Chapter where Tilley discusses the concept of objectification he states:

Material forms as objectifications of social relations and gendered identities, often ‘talk’ silently about … relationships in ways impossible in speech or formal discourses…..‘the artefact through its “silent” speech and “written” presence, speaks what cannot be spoken, writes what cannot be written, and articulates that which remains conceptually separated in social practice. Material forms complement what can be communicated in language rather than duplicating or reflecting what can be said in words in a material form. If material culture simply reified in a material medium that which could be communicated in words it would be quite redundant. The non-verbal materiality of the medium is thus of central importance.7

Crucial to the idea of the material object as a non- discursive language is the suppressed modality of touch, a sense that is implicit in Textiles. Similar to material culture and the landscape of the everyday in which it operates, it is the immediacy of touch that makes it paradoxically a potent vehicle of expression but in its resistance to representation and ‘polymorphous diversity’ impossible to pin down and unnamenable to discourse.8 As Henri Lefebre writes of the everyday ‘[it] is the most universal and the most unique condition, the most social and the most individuated, the most obvious and the best hidden’.9
As Susan Stewart suggests in Remembering the Senses, historically ranked in relation to their degree of immediacy - taste and touch, in direct contact with the world were of the five senses deemed to be lowest.10 ‘Modern empirical knowledge, Enlightenment philosophy and the [rationality] of science are all predicated on the shift away from tangible sensory experience towards an abstracted system of visual representation’.11.By implication, then, touch remains subjective and limited, and equated with a lack of conceptual sophistication.

The past few years, however, has seen something of a sensual revolution in the humanities and social sciences with a number of recent publications such as Sensual Relations Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social theory, The Empire of the Senses The Sensual Culture Reader, and The Book of Touch [the latter two publications both within the Sensory Formations series] ‘overturning linguistic and textual modes of interpretation and placing sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis’.12

Philosophy, visual culture, and architecture have similarly seen challenges to the hegemony of vision and a resurgence of interest in sensory values, practices and processes. The postmodern revival of interest in the Baroque’s very conscious address to the senses has provided a useful point of reference for thinking through the concerns of my own work, as has the classic text of Architectural Theory The Eyes of the Skin by Juhani Pallasmaa which has recently been republished as a revised and extended edition. In The Eyes of the Skin Pallasmaa discusses the importance of hapticity and unfocused peripheral vision to the experience of architecture and indeed as ‘the very essence of lived experience’, suggesting that ‘unconscious peripheral perception transforms retinal gestalt into spatial and bodily experiences …while focused vision pushes us out of the space making us mere spectators’.13 The relationship between optical visuality and haptic visuality also finds a context in contemporary painting which explores the sensuous materiality of paint and foregrounds the method of its own manufacture. In a chapter interestingly in this context entitled ‘Threads’ in Unframed Practices and Politics of Women’s Contemporary Painting edited by Rosemarie Betterton, Rosa Lee identifies in her own work and that of the other painters whom she discusses, ‘characteristics that exceed the purely visual and relate to somatic senses of touch, rhythm and gesture’.14 In considering this work Lee makes reference to the critic Laura Marks’ book The Skin of the Film and her description of haptic visuality as ‘the metaphorical caressing of the surface of an object’.15 These notions of haptic visuality and the acknowledgement of a greater interaction of ‘tactile, visual, and symbolic registers’ clearly provide useful critical frameworks for work that employs textile materials and processes.

However, to return to the notion of the silent witness; if touch or imagined touch are the means of communication, what is it that is being communicated?

In her article On Stuff and Nonsense: the Complexity of Cloth,16 Claire Pajackowsa provides some insights into ‘the complex and multidisciplinary significance of textiles in culture’ suggesting that this complexity derives from the fact that ‘textiles are culturally situated on the threshold between the functional and the symbolic’.

In terms of their functional dimension, like a second skin, the absorbent and ephemeral surfaces of textiles literally provide material evidence, bearing witness to the continual and repetitive contact with the body, accumulating a patina of use and revealing the wear and tear of routine activity. Caught within the supple striated surface of warp and weft or soft cut pile are the invisible yet incontestable indexical traces of the reciprocal relationship between subject and object. Maybe I have watched too much CSI but I can only imagine the complexity of the stories that the upholstered panels of our transport system would yield if subjected to forensic investigation.

Similarly (within my own work,) through the laborious working of row upon row of stitching, the hand turning of buttonholes and cracking of gesso encrusted cloth, every centimetre of the surface within my work, bears the trace of my own DNA trapped within the fibres of the cloth. Again only through forensics would the true extent of the continual accrual of this bodily material become apparent.

In terms of their symbolic function, the significance of textiles in the formation of identity and subject relations has been well documented. ‘Because clothes make direct contact with the body, and domestic furnishings define the personal spaces inhabited by the body, the material which forms a large part of the stuff of which they are made - cloth - is proposed as one of the most intimate of thing-types that materialises the connection between the body and the outer world’.17 Like the skin to which it is often equated, cloth as a mediating tissue or membrane, or what Michael Serre’s calls a ‘milieu’,18 is often seen as an ambiguous boundary and it is this ambiguity that produces the complex relationship between subject and object. In The Skin Ego19 the French theorist and psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu notably explores relations between the experience of the skin and the formation and sustaining of the ego, identifying its nine functions as: supporting, containing, shielding, individuating, connecting, sexualising, recharging, signifying, assaulting/destroying.20 As Steven Connor suggests in The Book of Skin, ‘It is not only individual psychological life but also cultural life that is lived at the level of, and through the intercession of, the skin, and its many actual and imaginary doublings and multiplications’.21. From Winnicott’s baby’s blanket as the exemplary metaphor of subject individuation to the role that dress plays in simultaneously revealing and concealing our personal and collective identities, textiles perform a fundamental role in negotiating the changing relationship between our inner selves and the world that we occupy.

As one of the largest categories of material culture, Textiles also play a fundamental role in structuring social rules and interactions. In addition to the ordinary and mundane routines of our busy everyday lives, they perform both a material and symbolic role as they bear witness to the rituals and rites of passage that accompany us through our passage from birth to death. As essential accoutrements of cultural practice they operate like a language written into the structure of society materialising and expressing otherwise immaterial or abstract entities and ‘speaking to us through the memories we associate with them’.22
Similar to the paradoxical function of repetition itself, the role that Textiles play in the routines of our everyday lives is both one of reinforcement, affirmation and cohesion and one of negation, differentiation, and fragmentation. …

This paradox is played out in my own work that through a self-imposed regime of repetitive activity articulates as it simultaneously silences. The work clearly draws on the somatic sensuality of cloth and the social and historical connotations of the textile techniques employed in its production; and in its form through subtle reference to function and utility, it also consciously draws on the imaginary narratives that surround the busy objects of material culture. Yet the subjective narratives evoked through the materials, processes and form of the work are silenced as it adopts the autonomous and authoritative formality of a minimalist aesthetic.

Employing material strategies of geometric form, the grid, and repetitive non-relational composition, what we are presented with is the suppressed embodied subject as the sensuality of the materials and reality of the very physical and mental endurance required to create the work is hidden behind its coolly detached disinterested façade.

Despite this seeming autonomy, however, I see the work as having, as Robert Rosenblum described the early paintings of Frank Stella, ‘the persistent aura of some private drama that must lie behind their solemn monkish presence’.23 Any attempt at rational coherence and neutrality is continually disrupted, by the sensory and signifying potential of the textile materials and processes which awaken in our imagination both the process of the works making and the wider personal and collective narratives with which Textiles are associated.

Finding analogies with Julia Kristeva’s interaction between the semiotic and symbolic ‘Like the repressed the semiotic can return in/as disruptions within the symbolic… representing possible transgressive breaches to any symbolic coherence. The semiotic is both the precondition of symbolic functioning and its uncontrollable excess. It is used by discourses but cannot be articulated by them’.24

The expressive potential of the work is not, however, realised outwardly through Baroque tactile fluidity or through overt references but is deeply embedded and embodied, realised through nuance of gesture, slow repetitive rhythms, and a dense accumulation of subtly modulated surfaces that silently speak of the process of their making.

Placed in direct proximity to the body, Textiles are perfectly positioned to both physically and symbolically bear witness to the patterns, rhythms, and routines of our daily lives, and though silent, their testimony is nonetheless undeniably articulate and incontestably reliable.

References

1.         David Howes, Sensual Relations, Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory, University of Michigan, 2003, p.xi
2.         Patricia Spyer, ‘part II, The Body Materiality and the Senses’ in Handbook of Material Culture, Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susan Kuchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer [Eds]. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, p.125.
3.         Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro, Fashioning The Frame Boundaries, Dress and Body. Oxford, New York: Berg, 2001, p.7.
4.         Judy Attfield, Wild Things, The Material Culture of Everyday Life. Berg: Oxford, New York, 2000, p.1.
5.         Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susan Kuchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer [Eds], ‘Introduction’ in Handbook of Material Culture, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, p.1.
6.         Christopher Tilley, ‘Part I, Theoretical Perspectives’ in in Handbook of Material Culture, Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susan Kuchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer [Eds]. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, p.7.
7.         Christopher Tilley, ‘Objectification’ in Handbook of Material Culture, Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susan Kuchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer [Eds]. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, p.62.
8.         David Howes, [Ed], ‘Historicising Perception’ in Empire of the Senses, The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford, New York: Berg, 2005, p.56.
9.         Henri Lefebvre, 1987, The Everyday and Everydayness p7-11. Yale French Studies, Volume 73, Fall, cited in Judy Attfield, Wild Things, The Material Culture of Everyday Life. Oxford, New York: Berg, 2000, p.9.
10.       See Susan Stewart ‘Remembering the Senses’ in Empire of the Senses, The Sensual Culture Reader, David Howes, [Ed]. Oxford, New York: Berg, 2005, p.62.
11.       See Fiona Candlin, The Dubious Inheritance of Touch: Art History and Museum Access, Journal of Visual Culture 1006; 5; 137.
12.       See David Howes, ‘Introduction’ in Empire of the Senses, The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford, New York: Berg, 2005, p.56.
13.       Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin Architecture and the Senses. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2005, p.13
14.       Rosemarie Betterton [Ed.], Unframed Practices and Politics of Women’s Contemporary Painting. London, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2004, p.6
15.       Rosa Lee ‘Threads’ in Unframed Practices and Politics of Women’s Contemporary Painting, Rosemarie Betterton [Ed.]. London, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2004, p.126
16.       Claire Pajackowsa, On Stuff and Nonsense: the Complexity of Cloth, Textile The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Volume 3, Issue 3, Fall 2005, p223.
17.       Attfield, op. cit., p.124
18.       See Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, Reaktion Books Ltd, 2004, p26
19.       Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, Trans Chris Turner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989
20.       See also Steven Connor, A Skin that Walks, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/English/skc/skinwalks/
21.       Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, op. cit., p48
22.       For a useful study on the tactile and tangible components of memory and how we use objects to give continuity to and meaning to human experience, see Marius Kwint, Christpher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley [Eds] Material Memories Design and Evocations. Oxford, New York: Berg, 1999
23.       Robert Rosenblum, Penguin New Art 1, Frank Stella, Penguin 1969, p.21
24.       Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p.125.