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the touch* of my sculpture
   * " the quality of an object as perceived by the hand that touches it "

    Moulding earthenware, carving a marble, chiselling a bronze … in every single sculpture it made, my hand more or less experienced the touch of a body. But what of that experience once those sculptures are on public display ? In these parts, touching them is forbidden, in a museum, while in other parts, some saints’ statues have been worn out and apsaras’ breasts have been turned black by dint of being caressed. Indeed, if those sculptures have a rather sensual corporeality, if they provide a body to be felt, the intense and irrepressible urge to touch them so much surpasses the appeal for a daring touch of paintings and photos. It could therefore account for the forbidding, yet at the cost of a highly repressed desire, since, intrinsically, sculpture, in its attractive corporeality, appeals both to the delights of the sight and of the hand, contrary to images. But in fact, things are a bit more complicated : between the sight of a body and the touch of it lies a threshold of decency that we allow ourselves to cross or refrain from crossing; this very reserve applies to corporeality in sculpture –and that too could account for the forbidding. Does it mean that touching a sculpture, that caressing the apsara’s breast, would result from failing touch or caress of a real body, or that it would bring it about ? Besides, could that forbidding be understood as the double meaning of the interdiction of idol worshipping in its two-fold dimension : refrain from the deceptive image of the god and/or of that of your beloved one as a substitute for it ? In the entrance of my studio I have billed the following invitation : “Your fingers and your hands may caress the marbles”. Visitors are greatly and pleasantly surprised, but utter astonishment is always provided by children as they immediately and entirely start tackling my sculpture in such a different way : a groping way, in which they seem to feel, by touch, rather than look at them, thus proving the corporeality of my sculpture. And proving too that among the five senses that were awakened with their birth, touch, awakened in them since they lay in their mothers’ womb (see Catherine Dolto’s work on haptonomy), still retains a very vivid palette of sensations, though, with the end of childhood, it may fade and become embers under ashes whose concealed wildness will, perhaps, be aroused again with the ardour of love. How lucky for my sculpture.

    Touch is probably the most carnal of all senses, and the one that will remain beyond the power of education, apart from its being slapped a ban on. Touch, caresses are the remains of childhood and its restoration to life; furthermore, to a child immersed in his mother’s womb and fulfilled with love as soon as he came to life, those caresses have been an element moulding him in love, and turning him into flesh and love. For, need I remind you, the word caress comes from carus, what is beloved and costly, loved and precious, and comes from caro too, what is carnal, since a caress is conveyed from flesh to flesh. What is more, speaking of flesh and love, caresses tune themselves to the body (corpus, the material part of living beings) and to the heart (cor, the seat of emotions and feelings, and an organ of flesh as well). We there stand in the middle of a stunningly rich convergence in which, as far as the West is concerned, biblical and Greek forms meet and collide. The former feeds dualism between matter and spirit, body and soul, devaluating the one and overestimating the other while placing it far from the lowness of touch and caresses; the latter holds as one the flesh and the spirit, the whole of a being -whether it is considered from an inside or an outside point of view.     Needless to say it would be useful to thoroughly debate non-figurative watchwords in 20th century art (see appendix, page 6) : the sculptor’s specific discrepancy -exceeding the painters’ one- between working on the body as an issue and being forbidden to express the body –the contradiction between having to tackle real life, grappling with it with both hands, and being told the “touch-not” injunction typical of painters whose canvasses can never been brought nearer to them than what the length of their brushes allows. But examining sculpture, comparing it with painting and images, founding upon the issues of touch and caresses, would that not lead to exploding the whole house ?
(Translated by Michèle Bustros)