Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

they find out the partner they have chosen. Perhaps something would have
changed if their choice had been visual. The three dishes of the menu are: 1. Polyrhythmic
salad, 2. Magical viands, 3. tactile-garden. They look there for the taste
surprise - elements that visually and tactilely seem identical, with totally different
tastes inside -, the simultaneous intervention of aromas, and the direct contact of
flavors and vegetables on the skin.
The second aspect is then the role of the hand. For the first course, the guest
rotates the crank of a box with his left hand while with his right hand directly takes
food to his mouth. Cutlery does not exist. The last course, consisting of raw and
cooked vegetables without any sauce, can be eaten without using the hands,
submerging the face in the plate and feeling the taste and the contact of the food
on the cheeks and the lips. Food transmits to the mouth the sense of taste as well
as the sense of touch. However, we usually take food to our mouths by means of
the indirect touch, placing cutlery between us and the food, and also with a whole
series of social conventions that vary from one culture to another. This is a clear
aspect that futurism attempts to question.
The criticism for the responsibility of Tactilism or for Marinetti's approach to tactile
perception, soon arrived. In the representation of Tactilism in the Théâtre de
l'Œuvre (15 January 1921), Dadaists tried to boycott the event -although they
could not - with shouts of "futurism has died. Of what? Of DADA". In 1921, an
article written by Francis Picabia and published in Comoedia, replies Marinetti on
the authorship of tactilism. According to Picabia, a similar attempt had already
been experienced years ago (1916) in New York, by artist Edith Clifford-Williams.
In an ironic tone, Picabia recriminates Marinetti that he wants to be acknowledged
as inventor of something that had been researched before.
I like Marinetti very much because he has the air of a good lad and I am desolated
to upset him by reminding him that tactile art was invented in New York in 1916 by
Ms. Clifford-Willams … It is absolutely impossible that Marinetti had not been
informed of this new research because he has some friends in America. Marinetti
boasts about having given birth to each thing, I believe that it is only hysterical
pregnancy."
With respect to this fact, we have not been able to find any type of information to
confirm Edith Clifford's contributions. It seems that the reason for the controversy
could be due to the picture of a tactile sculpture, published in a magazine in 1917
in New York. This was enough for Picabia to attack the proposal of the futurist
artist. However, this fact does not allow us to reject Marinetti's work, and his great
creative inventiveness, whom we owe the attempt to systematize tactile values,
the proposal of tactile boards, the vindication of an education of the sense of
touch, and the influence that Tactilism had on the futurist movement.
But the criticism did nod finish with Picabia. Unlike Marinetti's tactilism, Raoul
Hausmann - one of the most active artists of the Berlin Dada group - proposed in
Manifesto PREsentism: against the puffkeism of the 1921 teutonic spirit -,
haptism. "WE CLAIM HAPTISM, AS WELL AS ODORISM! Let us expand the
haptic sense and let's base it scientifically beyond the mere current chance! (…)
We want to refine our most important body sense: long live the haptic emanation!
Down with the superficially understood tactilism, haptism is the differentiation of
modern sensibility! Let us build haptic and telegraph and broadcasting stations.
Haptic theater will reach, shake and dissolve the atrophied vital energies of that
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bourgeois class of gravediggers, (…)
The real shout of Hausmann against Marinetti is more an artistic positioning that
an insurmountable disparity of concepts on the sense of touch. He is claiming
touch for the same fields -for life and for the theater. Both vindicate the recovery
and renovation of sensibility for men but from different positionings. Hausmann
criticizes Marinetti and indirectly futurism because he thinks that he pursues
unattainable ideals, he maintains individualism and disregards the working class.
"From Italy we receive news from Marinetti's tactilism! He has conceived the
problem of the haptic sensation in a not very clear way and he has deteriorated it "
What seems striking of the attack on Marinetti is the referent to the scientific basis
of the sense of touch. There is an appreciation, certainly stricter, scientifically
speaking, in the term haptism ,that assumes a specific knowledge of Hausmann
in this sense. He was interested in science and physiology, which he attacked as
he considered that they carried out a compartmentalized study of human
perceptions, extols the sinestestic fusion of all the sensations. According to the
artist, the Manifesto of PREsentismo is influenced by the work of Ernst Marcus
who deals with the problem of perception. Hausmann considered it was
necessary to believe that the sense of touch is closely related to the other senses.
"It is necessary that we believe that the sense of touch is combined with all our
senses, which is almost the decisive basis for all of them; if we are not aware of the
haptic sense, whose emanations -as eccentric capacity of sensation - are
projected like a glance sent through the 600 kilometers of the earth atmosphere to
Sirius or the Pleiades, we will not understand why we do not convert the most
important of our perceptions into new type of art."
However, in spite of the enthusiastic aggressiveness of his words, he approaches
the topic vaguely, which although he claims the haptic sensation, he does not
clarify his view of "haptic art", and he does not describe in detail the elaboration of
a practical proposal. He was an intellectual provoker and the ferocity of some of
his writings led to new topics and interests. The consideration of Hausmann to
haptism has a maximum reflection, and this is peculiarly the image. Jean-
François Chevrier notes the following regarding his photographic work: "In
Hausmann, the perception of nature is an approximate vision, similar to the sense
of touch. His landscapes do not participate so much of a show as of a
phenomenological experience that leads to physical relations and describe until
the end what we could call a sensorial microphysics of nature and image. The
resulting arrangement of associations does not display any systematic
character."
The closest continuity of Marinetti's tactile experiences can be found in Bruno
Munari's plates and tactile boards from the 1930's, and from a surrealist view, the
Czech artist Jan Švankmajer, who recovered the term tactilism and continued
further research in its applications to the cinema image, where spectators are
brutally referred to their own body through visual touch and sound.
Luigi Russolo
"The Art of Noise. Futurist Manifesto "(1913) Milan, 11 March 1913.
Dear Balilla Pratella, great futurist composer,
In Rome, in the Costanzi Theater full of people, while I was listening to the
orchestral performance of your overwhelming FUTURIST MUSIC, with my
futurist friends Marinetti, Boccioni and Balla, a new art came into the mind: the Art
of Noise, a logical consequence of your wonderful innovations.