Jeffrey Schiff

  

Sole Contact
 
   

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Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah NY
Year: 1996
Materials: high-density polyethylene, painted steel, rubber, vinyl, gravel, and alabaster
Dimensions: 5' x 13' x 12'

VHS available (8 minutes)

Touch is constantly operational, but rarely experienced...one is attentive to touch only when it is extracted from the stream of living as a rarefied event, as in explicitly sexual contact...can one build an erotic relationship with an environment through intimacy, through touch?...how do touch encounters with a site confederate to form a relationship between body/self and site?...moments of contact are isolated in time and location, but as a compendium form a body of knowledge and a narrative flow...

The Katonah piece sets the terms of a ritual action surrounding an act of touch, rarefying the moment of contact between "viewer" and environment... locating the sensation of touch in the midst of the full sensate field, and positioning it in a cultural context...mixing metaphors between cultural categories, the ritual makes reference to existing forms of mediation: sexual guide, medical procedure, fitness program, spiritual practice...instruction, discipline, performance...sets privacy of touch in the public arena, in the cultural field...ritual as a means to structure actions and sensations in a field of symbolic relations...the action propogates specific objects, specific cultural forms...as in Tea Ceremony, a commonplace action is fetishized in form...like exercise machines, a mechanical contrivance is necessary to encounter the natural...to exercise the senses...

The sculpture consists of a platform, an abstract plane, built above a gravel ground and around a towering pine, upon which are organized the necessary props and devices for a prescribed, ritualized experience of touch...structures accommodate the participant, designating specific places for removed articles of clothing, supports for specific body parts, and designated zones of contact with the "raw" site, orienting the body to enable it to take the indicated positions...the ritual concentrates on the two components of the body most critically engaged in this contact yet most egregiously unaware -- the soles of the feet...I mean to organize a set of elements that are inscrutable as a code to the eye's intelligence, yet when enacted by the body are entirely practical as operations ...the logic is revealed through the physical enactment...

The project centers on two distinct experiences of touch -- that of the sole of the left foot against the gravel ground, and the sole of the right foot against the trunk of the tree. In the first instance, the viewer, after removing left shoe and sock and placing them in the designated box, steps over to the structure to the left. The left hand grasps a rail, the right foot steps up to a stop, and the left (bare) foot steps through a hole to the gravel below. As the left foot descends, the right hand is placed in the bowl to feel the smoothed rocks (gravel from the site "tumbled" until smooth) therein. To enact the right foot experience, the right shoe and sock are removed and placed in the right box. The bare foot is gently rubbed against the smooth stone dome, and finally the viewer lies down upon the padded platform with right foot dangling off the end, left leg bent, left foot flat. The viewer grasps the handles with both hands, and pulls, propelling the wheeled platform forward, so that the right foot passes through an opening in the wall which "masks" the tree trunk, and comes into direct contact with the tree bark.