Article

Surface Tension

On the haptic dimension in the works of Matthew Weinstein
By Mark Gloede

The era of the post-photographic film has arrived, and while it is clear that for the animator, the computer is essentially 'another pencil', it is also clear that animation and its aesthetics will be affected by the production enhancements afforded by CGI.
-Paul Wells, Animation. Genre and Authorship 

Touch me. 
How can it be? 
Believe me.
The sun always shines on T.V.
-A-HA

It will always fall short if one tries to subsume the works of Matthew Weinstein under one theme. The use of very different forms alone - reaching from computer-generated animation, to painting, sculpture and installation - makes it hard to pin down the field of Weinstein's oeuvre without reducing it. Nevertheless it is remarkable to acknowledge while experiencing this heterogeneous field of works that there seems to be something one could call a hidden agenda of Matthew Weinstein, a ground tone or a resonating space which is a key element in all of his works. It is something that is related to the sleek surface of his digital film images, as well as to the glossy surfaces of his pig sculptures, or even can be found in the smooth color textures of his paintings on canvas. What is common in all of these works is something that can be called a profound haptical experience or with a term that Laura Marks has coined, a "Haptical Visuality". How is this sensual cross-over, this momentum of synaesthesia to be understood in relation to Weinstein's works?
Hapticallity is per definition a perceptual experience which results from the exploration of objects by touching them. Since most of Weinstein's works are not supposed to be touched and are mainly set in the terrain of the visual experience, it seems strange to shift towards the haptic sense to describe this profound momentum. But one needs to see that in recent art history as well as in media theory, "haptic is a term that has come to articulate the perception of touch through any experiential means. So one may have a haptic experience through vision, sound, taste etc., without any exclusive use of the touch sense itself. Haptic visuality (...) or viewing, detaches this sense of touch in order to focus exclusively on that which is experienced via vision. In other words one can experience the sensation of touch through vision alone. This application of the term has its basis in art history (Gandelman 1991, p.5) but has more recently also been adapted to apply to the moving image and cinema theory." 

It is specifically in the field of new aesthetics or in fields where our perceptive apparatus is struggling and insecure in its way of functioning that we can see this reactivation of a sensorium. It seems that the more we are losing in these works our everyday strategy to decode and optically see, the more we are reactivating other strategies to perceive. In doing so, we allow our bodies literally to come back to their senses. We begin to touch, smell and hear again with a new intensity. And by perceiving films, paintings or installations in this way, we have to realize the main agency for this process is our body or as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has put it: "My body is the field within which my perceptive powers are localized." In other words, experiencing the sleek surface in works by Matthew Weinstein often means failing in our known ways of approaching artworks, but on the other hand offers us the opportunity to get to know something about our own strategies of visual perception and our body in general. It is important to emphasize this complexity in the bodily dimension, since the almost pristine surfaces involve us differently. Walter Benjamin has noted this connection of the senses and pointed out how we intuitively use this potential, especially in moments of crisis, in his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility". He writes: 

"For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise."

The task that Benjamin was referring to in the early 1930s is an increasingly growing number of intense moments (he uses the word shocks) that brings our sensorium to its limits. At this point our body often can't use visual strategies alone to deal with the momentum of a crisis. And it is, following Benjamin, often the haptic dimension that offers us ways through this difficulty. Here the visual is no longer the dominating sense and separated from the other senses. On the contrary, we (re-)discover a connectedness of our senses, and it becomes necessary to rethink our understanding of them. In a way the mode of thinking and experiencing the world through a divided sensorium shows its restrictions. Furthermore we have to understand how the senses interact. As we see: hapticallity is not only referring to the direct touch of our fingers – we have to acknowledge that our eyes are capable of touching as well. 

Eighty years after Benjamin's essay, Weinstein now seems to have a quite comparable focus, since we can experience this connectedness of the senses in his works. We understand that it is no longer the moving image in general that creates a momentum of shock. It is not even the unbelievable amount of images that we are digesting on an everyday basis: It has more to do with the categorically different quality of the images, that creates a moment of crisis and shock – the shock of our reappearing sensuality. The shock that our senses are fundamentally connected and that our perception is usually always a multi-modal process. It is, for example, that the surface of Weinstein's digital images works different on the sensual apparatus. With this in mind all of a sudden we can understand the title of his film 'Cruising' not only as the strolling around of our eyes in the space of the image, or a reference to gay/queer culture, but as a process of strolling around between the senses. In the framework of this idea it becomes evident that it is the relation between image and observer that needs to be readdressed. Jonathan Crary has precisely formulated this in his highly acclaimed book Techniques of the Observer: 

"The rapid development in little more than a decade of a vast array of computer- graphics techniques is part of a sweeping configuration of relations between an observing subject and modes of representation that effectively nullifies most of the culturally established meanings of the terms observer and representation. The formalization and diffusion of computer-generated imagery heralds a ubiquitous implantation of fabricated visual 'spaces' radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography, and television […] Computer-aided design, synthetic holography, flight simulators, computer animation, virtual environment helmets, are only a few of the techniques that are relocating vision to a plane severed from a human observer."