Rethinking contact: the haptic in the viral era

The current pandemic emergency due to Covid-19 has profoundly changed our sensory habits. What role can be assigned to a synaesthetic perceptive modality like the haptic in this no touching pandemic period (Žižek 2020)? This paper argues that the haptic specificity could go beyond the dialectic between touch and vision to focus on its phantasmagorical potentiality. In an attempt to grasp the relevance of this perceptive modality in the pandemic and post-pandemic scenario, this contribution will proceed in two directions. First, starting from an etymological premise and an iconographic excursus, it will highlight the motility and the potential in absentia as the proprium of haptic perception. Secondly, we will hypothesize the configuration of a synaesthetic and intermedial “haptic feeling” shaped by the accumulation of images of everyday pandemic life — phantasmata, eidolons and pictures — can disclose an infra-subtle space, substantially affective, which precedes and exceeds the contact itself.

Foreword

Foreword

Distance: Closeness/Remoteness in Kim Boske’s Photographs

The work Moving Flowers #1 by the internationally known Dutch artist Kim Boske (born in 1978) was published in the first cover series HOU VOL (“Keep Faith”) of the periodical Het Parool on 30 May 2020. Following the aim of the newspaper to help cope with the disastrous consequences of COVID-19, the artist focused on how our perceptions had changed during the pandemic. If previously the content (or what is being represented) was the element that dominated in photography, then during the pandemic, the representational harmony of the content was replaced by the structural features or the way how something is being represented. The article aims to reflect on the artworks created by Boske in 2020 and to show the circulation of ideas contained in them, and with this case study to highlight more general trends in the recent art photography.

Alteration of the Touch Into a Gaze - Reading Through the Drawing

Studying the touch as a sense developed by contact, and the necessity to redefine it, due to the global pandemic and social dissonance that occurred is the topic of this text. Questioning the approach to drawing under the influence of remoteness addresses the need to look closely, to get personal with the drawing, a manifestation of experience. Drawing of intimacy, evaluate concepts of encounter and isolation posing the question of whether we can experience the closeness of the other through the embodiment of the experience in the drawing. Re-examining tactile sensation observed through the obstacle of corporeal distance, a reflection of intimate experiences and spaces opens up for a new interpretation - of touch without the touch. Can this obstacle transform touch into gaze; and can an image in its making, construct a tactile sensation? Intertwining theoretical and practical approach, this text witness drawing and its visual consumption in space of violated closeness.

Pandemic and the Fairy Tale Narrative

The article considers how the narrative of the pandemic has been developed, especially with regard to literature. The case study analyzed is the Italian novel L’assemblea degli animali, written by an anonymous author, whose penname is Filelfo. The article shows that the wide range of classical, literary and artistic references recognizable inside the text corresponds to a precise attitude of the ecologist culture, which is in search for traditional and elevated models to assert their ethical and political objective. The novel brings this directory to the point that it evokes an esoteric dimension of ecology. The article states that this stance is not serious, but ends into a literary game and feeds the needs for entertainment by the cultural industry, rather than giving any real contribution to the ecological question.

Vaccine Selfie. The double face of self-representation in Covid-19 era

If at its beginnings the Selfie was interpreted as an expression of the narcissism of contemporary culture, at the time of Covid-19 not only does it become the ordinary mask of the show performed on the stage of social networks, but it acquires the power to act on the social body. The Selfie, therefore, can be characterized as an iconic two-faced act with contradictory and ambiguous intentions and outcomes. The contribution examines the case of the Vaccine Selfie, in this particularly emblematic sense.

A noble anarchy. Musil and the metaphor between Spengler and Rilke

This paper aims to examine the relationship between stupidity and massification in Robert Musil’s thinking moving from the speech Über die Dummheit (1937). According to the definition of stupidity as a historical epidemic associated with emotions, I take into account the essays of the earlies twenties of the XX century, in which the author interrogates the connection between the “non rational sphere” and the nationalist identity in the context of civilization (Zivilisation). To explain this connection, I highlight the centrality that Musil ascribes to the method of “analogy” in criticizing Spengler’s thought to clarify how the welding of the dimension of “feeling” (Gefühl) and the abstract idea of “national identity” occurs. Based on Musil’s essay dedicated to Rilke (1927), I illustrate the different type of bonds produced by “metaphor” (Gleichnis) to define an alternative concept of community based on the common lack of quality and foundation.

To Brecht and Back. Notes on Clement Greenberg’s Avant-Garde and Kitsch

Clement Greenberg’s international reputation is partly due to the success of one of his first and most perceptive essays, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, published in the Fall 1939 issue of “Partisan Review”. Despite its unsurpassed importance, the article still requires a broader comprehension of its origins: according to Greenberg’s personal papers, the essay’s main concepts began to take form during the Winter 1939, when the author was involved in the drafting of a new essay on Bertolt Brecht, still unpublished today, at that time submitted to the “Partisan Review”’s editorial board but rejected. A second document enables to trace back Avant-Garde and Kitsch’s roots even further: according to a letter by Greenberg, one of the editors, Dwight Macdonald, plagiarized the rejected script as his last essay, Soviet Society and Its Cinema, clearly seemed to prove. The varied topics articulated in the letter, as well as in the draft on Brecht, would be at the basis of Avant-Garde and Kitsch, becoming crucial and early components of the editorial process of the well-known essay.

The COVID-19 War in Ceramic Arts: Navigating Aesthetic and Symbolic Expressions

This paper reports on the production of a ceramic installation artwork that explores the story of the COVID-19 pandemic experienced by people throughout the world. The work is a symbolic expression in the form of a set of ceramic art models that portray the story of the battle between positive and negative values, expressed through a 3-dimensional visual ceramic installation consisting of an arrangement of statues that portray an imaginary battle between COVID-19 troops and Lord Krishna. The method used in the process of creating this work was a creative approach that combined appreciation and interpretation of the object of the creative idea. The artwork was made of plastic clay taken from the southern area of Malang regency, East Java, Indonesia, which was formed using a manual technique of direct hand massage and fired at a temperature of 900 °C. The COVID-19 phenomenon is imagined and visualized as a ceramic installation sculpture consisting of the imaginative figures of COVID-19 troops, led by the king of COVID-19 who is shown fighting with Lord Krishna. The result is a visual expression of the COVID-19 troops and their king, in several imaginative forms, carrying various weapons of war, in combat with the imaginary figure of Lord Krishna. The distinction of this work is its portrayal of a battle between positive and negative forces that have become a part of human life during the COVID-19 pandemic, expressed in a symbolic visual narrative through the arrangement of a set of ceramic sculptures.

Coronation

The lyric "Coronation" of Michel Deguy and its translation by Fabio Scotto