Touching, 2012-16

Digital Projection Slideshow

Touching emerged from a small collection of images from newspapers, featuring artworks being taken to auction. Noting that the artwork was always held theatrically by an art handler - who is asked to pose for the photographer - these images began an investigation into touch, and the regular depiction of the touching of artworks found across platforms online. It is a strange coupling of the digital and analogue, that the circulating photograph seems to depict a proliferation of haptic encounters. Adding to the theatricality of the image destined for auction or museum display, these images provide a variety of insights - into the installation of exhibitions, conservation, interaction with public works, and the many apparatuses, to paraphrase Craig Owens’ From Work to Frame essay, that the artwork is threaded through. Touching also gave rise to a collection of images of museum visitors posing like the artworks they stand in front of, in a work entitled + You (named after a LACMA Facebook ‘LACMA + You’ page, encouraging pictures of museum-goers visits) in which these posing pictures constituted a regular strand. Both projects give rise not only to observations about how we interact with art, but how also how we photograph these interactions simultaneously. In Touching, a digital projection of images from the web of visitors, museum specialists and artists touching artworks can be seen by stepping in front of the projector, which is focused at a short distance, so that an image can only be viewed by an intervening viewer, who breaks the projection.