Word of the Week: Haptic

By Kari Schmidt

There are two contexts in which I've encountered the word haptic recently. Firstly, in an essay by Adam Jolles entitled The Tactile Turn: Envisioning a Post-Colonial Aesthetic in France ((Yale French Studies 109, 2006: 17-38). This article discussed the 'tactile turn' in French avant-garde art of the 1930s, with leftist artists producing increasingly tactile work to anti-imperialist ends. Without going into this argument too much, we see an example of such work in Meret Oppenheim's Luncheon in Fur - the fur on the cup, saucer and spoon is so anomolous to what you'd expect on usually functional objects, and so rich in texture, it immediately evokes a sense of touch and touching, even when seen in a photograph. 

 

Secondly, Geoffrey Batchen used the word haptic to describe the resulting aesthetic of many camera-less photography processes - because the photographic paper is in immediate contact with the object it is representing, there is a sense of intimacy in the work between object and viewer, created in part by the ostensible tactility of what is represented. Batchen referenced the 'Vegetages' of Bela Kolarova as one example, her works consisting of onion peelings and (as below) peach pits placed on photographic paper and exposed. Through simply looking at the image we experience something of the rough texture and the feel the pits' indentations.

This is what is meant by the haptic - it is a way of perceiving artworks through touch or rather, given that a literal touching does not occur in such works, through the sense or perception of touch.