Awareness of Contact

Act without action.
Pursue without interfering.
Taste the tasteless.
Make the small big and the few many.
Return animosity with virtue.
Meet the difficult while it is easy.
Meet the big while it is small.
The most difficult in the world
Must be easy in its beginning.
The biggest in the world
Is small in its beginning.
So, the sage never strives for greatness,
and can therefore accomplish greatness.

 Lao Tzu[1]

Inés Aponte assumes touch as an exercise in meditation. Sensorial awareness allows her to transcend separation, and overcomes the distance between hand and paper, between body and ink, between senses and optics, between who she is and the society in which she lives. The images she produces as marks, blotches, impressions or movements are the product of a conscious experience between sensation and perception. That is, the product of the sensory experience of ink on skin and of the contact between body and paper.

Awareness of contact, repeated contact, contact in motion. Inés touches and sees, listens, feels and senses: “pressure, friction, temperature, humidity.” Because each sense has its own coding or its own language, each sense has its own awareness, and it is our mind that organizes that awareness.

Like an epistemology of perception, the broad series Corporal Traces is an invitation to acknowledge ourselves as a whole, and to overcome the mind-body duality that we have inherited from Western thought. As a result, this theory as a praxis inserts art into an ecology of knowledges nourished by one more experience in the world. A space for re-existence. A space that exposes, validates, and embraces the paradoxical relationship between the concrete experience of the body and the generation of abstract images such as the register of marks, traces, and movements.

As I write, I am one with her images, her intention, her experiences. Yet, accustomed as we are to experiencing separation as spectators, we face the work as something that is outside of ourselves. And we look to the text to explain, to translate what we see into recognizable symbols, to provide context or to organize the ambiguity proposed by this work. But the intention of this text is not to translate. It is not possible to put forward in words that which can only be experienced. The intention of the text is to invite us to enter into contact with the work, in contemplative observation, and to become one with the totality of the images and the experience they propose.

Can art make us aware of our own senses? Can a work of art make us aware of the fact that we are aware? That we are and exist in sensory awareness? The invitation goes beyond contemplation. It is a call to be present in observation, as well as in the desire it produces and in imagination, as a possibility of re-existence.

One of the contributions of decolonial theorist Nelson Maldonado Torres is the relationship that exists between art and resistance. According to Maldonado Torres, resistance as a strategic political act transcends the capacity to confront an oppressive power. Resistance, “as an eruption that involves thought, action, feeling, and perception,” also seeks to create possible worlds as new ways of existing. And that possibility of creating re-existences includes new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in a world constructing itself as a “more human” world to the extent that it confronts modernity as a historical instance of exclusion and domination.

Interestingly, Maldonado Torres points to the body as the concrete and material point where human existence originates that is, also, a territory of re-existence. From that perspective, reclaiming art in relation to the decolonization of the body offers the possibility of a territory that contributes to the search for knowledge, spirituality, and eroticism. Art then becomes a space where the diversity of corporeal experience is affirmed, making possible new forms of life.

From a similar perspective, Portuguese decolonial theorist Boaventura de Souza Santos introduces and develops the concept of an “ecology of knowledges” in recognition of the plurality of human experience that shatters the prevalence of science as the only valid form of knowledge. According to de Souza Santos, “the ecology of knowledges is a counter-epistemology.” That is, it contradicts and fractures the hegemony of Western thought. And, likewise, the ecology of knowledges proposes a way of thinking that is non-linear, where ignorance can be a point of arrival towards new learnings that interact and intertwine with each other. An instance where we do not forget, but rather establish comparisons between what we knew and what we have learned.

Above all, the ecology of knowledges is an epistemology of the praxis which takes into account the diverse and multiple experiential knowledges that each society offers. According to de Souza Santos, the ecology of knowledges establishes itself through “constant questioning and incomplete responses,” which turns it into a prudent knowledge that enables us to have a broader vision of what we know and what we do not know.

It is from these reflections on decolonizing thought that I approach the series Corporal Traces by Puerto Rican artist Inés Aponte. The series is divided into Marks, Movements, Combinations, and Activities, and has been developed as a multiplicity of works with an abstract and organic character crafted in small and medium scale. Conceived from the perspective of drawing and executed in India ink and Sumi ink on watercolor paper, the outward appearance of each of these works collects and documents a broad and detailed register of sensations produced by the exploration of the non-dual aspect of reality. The series introduces us to the possibility of entering into contact with a Praxis that integrates mind, body, sensation, perception and awareness. As a form of re-existence, the artist proposes a stance before reality from which art and life inhabit the same space. Sensorial awareness inhabits the boundaries imposed by modernity between body and reasoning, between awareness and perception, between the practice of art and living and feeling as static and creative practices in themselves.

According to philosopher Arthur C. Danto, modernity was a period of boundaries. And in art, modernity implied a period of manifestoes in which media and their practices were differentiated, while what was or should be art was being determined. At the same time, each manifesto attempted to impact and reorganize the society in which that art would live. According to Danto, the artist Marcel Duchamp delimited a prophetic posture. His interest in everyday objects allowed him to overcome the bounds between art and those objects as experiences of daily life. From that perspective, Duchamp’s contribution was to de-aestheticize art while at the same time “good taste” and the “technical skills of the artist” became irrelevant approaches. From that moment on, according to Danto, Pop art dissolved the boundaries between art and media images; and minimalism vanquished the boundaries between art and industrial objects.

The contribution made by Inés Aponte and her Corporal Traces series is to erase the boundaries between creation and sensory awareness as a possibility for resisting and re-existing that is part of a vast and millennial ecology of knowledges. In a direct dialogue with artists like Agnes Martin and Ana Mendieta, among many others, Inés Aponte generates marks, traces and imprints produced by feeling as a meditative act that integrates the body, awareness, and senses from a position that defeats the rules of drawing and painting but broadens the experience of contemplation by involving the spectator’s sensory experience. In integrating these experiences to everyday life, the images also document creative processes with a high sensory value that re-aestheticize everyday activities such as kneading flour or biting into bread, activities that modernity overlooked in its demarcation and definition of art.

In the month of December 1973, while an archaeological team excavated Han tomb number 3 at Mawangdui, two copies were discovered of the book by Lao Tzu, considered to be one of the great philosophers of Chinese civilization who lived at some point between the 4th and 6th centuries BC. His book, titled Tao Te Ching, which could be translated as “The Book of the Way and its Virtue,” is one of the great manuscripts of oriental philosophy which—built upon paradoxes—explores the possibility of a wisdom contained within the depth of a universal nature with broad and enigmatic meanings.

Several thousand years ago, Lao Tzu asked: “Carrying body and soul and embracing the one, can you avoid separation? Attending fully and becoming supple, can you be as a newborn babe?”[2] An approach to Inés Aponte’s proposal in Corporal Traces does not intend to settle these questions, but rather to suspend the question entirely and reaffirm Lao Tzu when he also asks: “Understanding and being open to all things, are you able to do nothing? Giving birth and nourishing, bearing but not possessing, working yet not taking credit, leading yet not dominating, This is the Primal Virtue.”[3]

References:

Alfaguara, eds. (1996). Lao zi. Aguilar, Altea, Taurus, Alfaguara S.A.

De Souza Santos, Boaventura. (2010). Descolonizar el saber, reinventar el poder [“Decolonizing knowledge, reinventing power”]. Universidad de la República, Ediciones Trilce-Extensión universitaria.

Jacob, Mary Jane and Baas, Jacquelynn, eds. (2009). Learning Mind. Experience into Art. School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2017). El arte como territorio de re-existencia: una aproximación decolonial [“Art as a territory of re-existence: a decolonial approach”]. Iberoamérica Social: Revista-red de estudios sociales VIII, pp. 26-28.

[1] Translation by Stefan Stenudd.

[2] Translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English.

^[3] Translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English.