Please Touch
For the Please Touch: Body Boundaries exhibition catalogue
April 29th, 2018
© Dana Ben-Ari
As a woman and cultural consumer, I am still surprised by the ambivalence and apprehension around THE BREAST and MOTHERHOOD. CHARGED.
Whereas I had come to accept certain realities as obvious, further investigation proved me wrong.
Engaging with today’s climate of accusations, denials, bodies, and borders, Please Touch: Body Boundaries is an extension of my film Breastmilk: The Movie, where I examine the female “problem” — the implications of biology on women and on all of us — and again daring to explore the possibility of a biological feminism.
Breastmilk: The Movie emerged from my own experience as a new mother trying to make sense of my own situation, especially a new and unexpected lack of agency, and coming up against “agencies” themselves. In the process I learned these experiences are the norm, and I wanted to expose, validate, and share them, and participate in nothing less than a long-simmering revolution. Breastmilk: The Movie became a feminist critique that was surprisingly less dogmatic than one may have expected.
Since the film was released in 2014, I have been searching for a way to further explore these questions of contested femininity and identity, which have only become more urgent. I am sometimes surprised by how disconnected both women and men can be around these issues, and how many contradictory visions of feminine and maternal identity crop up in everyday life, not to mention in art. A crucial conversation with Ysabel Pinyol led to this exhibition; I am grateful for her encouragement, and then her gentle shove.
The title of this exhibition is indebted to Duchamp’s Please touch (1947), a catalogue for an exhibition of Surrealist works that, with a hand-painted foam-rubber breast on the cover, and the invitation “Prière de toucher” on the back, became a work in itself. Duchamp and his collaborators André Breton and Enrico Donati were playing with issues of permission, titillation, and objectification, using the sense of touch. Over half a century later, touch remains the most contentious and conflicted sense of all.
Along the same lines, for this exhibition I wanted to address how out of touch we’ve become, politically and socially. As is clear from the many women speaking out as part of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, there is a surfeit of touching going on. At the same time, there is less human contact among the innumerable touchscreens of everyday life and, in many cases, dwindling empathy toward those who are left behind in the era of globalization and inequality.
Of course, there is also an element of the untouchability of art. Duchamp said, “No, we cannot touch the art but don’t we wish we could?” As art increasingly involves performance and social practice, touching the art would mean approaching bodies. At the same time, the rise of participation in art means being “touched” by the art in a different way.
But perhaps nothing challenges female identity like breastfeeding and motherhood. Young mothers often feel overtouched; their bodies are newly unfamiliar, no longer their own, and the demanding intimacy of motherhood can generate a number of confusing identities.
So as much as the works in Please Touch: Body Boundaries pose critical questions of selfhood and sexuality, expectations and presumptions, and role playing, they also comprise an examination specifically of the breast as a motif used by artists to illuminate different gazes and competing experiences.
Our goal was to explore ways to celebrate biological feminism and women’s altogether, without reducing women to simply a body. Instead, we aim to evoke the reality and complexities of the body as an element of shaping women’s individuality.
My heartfelt thanks to the artists, who transform their “obvious” subjects — femininity, maternity, sexuality — into complex and insightful visions that are controversial, literal, sensual, vulgar, painful, confusing, and so much more.