.
Sense   of touch
 
Early work
 
Still under de•re•construction 
                   
 
 
 
Clay   An assignment from the 'plastic morphology' class of the Rotterdam Academy of fine arts - where you had to work with clay only - was to practice with 'clay' according to the motto: 'a sense of touch'.
 
The motto had to be applied both to working with the material and to invoke a sense of touch with a spectator.
 
Precedent   In an earlier assignment - float / hover - I already forced something of a precedent to escape the narrow borders of the condition to use clay as a material exclusively. 
With the work-out of 'a sense of touch' I went a little bit further to a more 'conceptual approach'.

I made a small box with contents and accompanying text:
 
PHOTO BOX
 
 
 
'Sense of touch' - basis material: clay, plaster mould, mastic rubber, human pubic hair, wood - 1975
 
Text  
November 15, 1975 
 'A sense of touch' 
  • Ex.1 - Box with a realistic shaped vagina.
  • The box has to be showed in it's open state.
A passer-by or looker-on will eventually recognize the form, which looks very real.
As a logical consequence of the inquisitive mentality of most people - which is stimulated by the object: one wants to know how 'real' it is; how it feels (softness, hair etc.) - the result will be the invocation of a touching impulse.
 
The subject represented in the box - a vagina - has not been chosen to shock people or to be a sexist connotation 'of a heterosexual male', but it's not intended to be 'attractive' to persons (male or female) being afraid of - there own - body parts. 
 
Touch - sense   What is 'a sense of touch' ?
 
Touch: feel; seize; take/get hold of; grab; caress; stroke; flatter; gratify; experience of hard or soft, hot or cold etc.
 
Sense: meaning; mind; intellect; intelligence; wisdom; tactile; taste; lust; sense (organ/faculty), sensory perception etc.

It may be plausible that man has a sense -organ -faculty to touch: coupled to sight (vision), feeling, tasting and hearing, in an arbitrary order.
 
This 'touching sense organ' is clearly apparent in the behaviour of very young children, because the touching sense organ is a necessity to learn and get familiar with the surrounding objects and space.
 
Child   If - for example - a very young child gets an object in it's field of vision, it would smell, taste and feel the object to explore it. The child pinches the object to know if it's hard or soft; it smells if it has a scent; taste it... 
If the child is just a little older it would try to smash it by hitting other materials and proposing the object would break, the child would visually conclude that fact; feel the - sharp - edges of the fracture; perhaps smell the scent - of the air - of the former enclosed area and taste it. 
 
Hearing play it's part also, because when the child hits the object or materials with it - i.e. utter/emit sound with the object - it creates patterns of sound properties of the materials to distinguish them.
 
Coupled   In the 'touching sense organ' five components of sense organs are coupled in an arbitrary order:
  1.  > sight / vision
  2.  > hearing
  3.  > taste / sample
  4.  > feeling
  5.  > smell
Children will have to use combinations of multiple components, because they have very much to learn.
 
Older people often need no more then one component of the touching sense organ: mostly recognition or identification occurs instantly. In fact they can do without 'the touch' (feeling) in many circumstances.
 
Artificial   In order to be certain to invoke 'a sense of touch' with an 'artificial' object, one would have to create an object 'never seen before'; never heard; tasted; felt or smelled.
However, if an object is to be completely unrecognizable it is doubtful if a (sense of) touch impulse would be achieved anyway: it still has to appeal to a present mental structure (at least with adults).
 
An object with a certain acquaintance can also be very powerful for a sense of touch to arouse, but it has to be in a totally different or unexpected environment to alienate the object from it's original context.
 
Curiosity   The sense of touch invoked with this structure is merely one of 'confirmation' or curiosity.
 
 
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