Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages
Editors
David Carrillo-Rangel Universitetet i Bergen Bergen, Norway
Pablo Acosta-García
Heinrich-Heine-Universität-Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf,
Germany
Delfi
I. Nieto-Isabel Institute for Research on Medieval Cultures University of Barcelona Barcelona,
Spain
ISBN 978-3-030-26028-6 ISBN 978-3-030-26029-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26029-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
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To Innis, who came with the book.
Fig. 1 Felix Gonzalez-Torres “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991. Candies individually wrapped in multicoloured cellophane; endless supply. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Ideal weight: 175 lb. Image courtesy: Imaging department at the Art Institute of Chicago. Installation view: Contemporary Collecting: Selections from the Donna and Howard Stone Collection. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. 25 Jun.–19 Sep. 2010. Cur. James Rondeau. © Felix Gonzalez-Torres Courtesy of The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation
Preface: What DiD anD Does it Mean to say ‘i toucheD’?
Five hundred years of science, the sum of which is that we still don’t know what light actually is But then I realise. And the answer comes directly from the moonlight on the faces of my twins Light is touch. Peter Høeg, The Susan Effect (2014)
Light is linked to mystical and religious experience, and yet it is part of everyday life. More often than not, it is linked to visual experience. But, as Peter Høeg says through Susan in his novel The Susan Effect, light is touch. The effect described in the title of the novel is that the mere presence of the character makes people trust her, confess their secrets, being affected by her or they are touched by her. In a similar way, any affective or mystical experience, should be understood in these terms. A mystical experience produces the same effect as that of the light in the passage quoted above: it is the light touching the faces of her sons that illuminates them and makes them visible in the darkness and, at the same time, activates an affective response. By juxtaposing what historians of the middle ages call affective piety with affective responses to the artwork of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, in this preface I will explore the role of touching, broadly understood, in the transmission of affects, and the role that perception through the senses plays in this process. This approach allows me to break free of the chrononormative frame, discussed below, and allows me a freer analysis of the role of touching in the medieval sensorium, understood as atmosphere construed both psycho-
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logically and socially, and as a materialisation of affect in different media and discursive formations.
In a corner of a room in the museum there is a pile of candy, wrapped in multicolour cellophane. The visitors are invited to take one and eat it there and then or take it with them. The visitors are given the choice to take one and eat it there and then or to take it with them. The visitors can do just that, or they can read the description of the artwork or listen to it on the audio-guide. The weight of the pile of candy is not random, rather it is defined by an ideal weight: 175 lbs. The audio-guide specifies that this ideal weight corresponds to the person who is represented, bracketed in the title piece: “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991. (Fig. 1). Ross was the partner of the artist behind the work, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and he died from AIDS-related complications. The references to Ross in the bracketed section and the idea of the total weight represented by candy diminishing as the candy is taken has been traditionally understood in correlation with Ross Loycock’s healthy body and the deterioration suffered as a consequence of HIV. It was, however, the artist’s intention that new meanings should develop in tandem with new installations and negotiations of how to prepare them. In fact, 175 lbs. can be considered the ideal weight of a healthy person, and the same weight was used on a similar piece, “Untitled” (Portrait of Dad), 1991. In both cases, the weight is given as an indication of ideal body weight, but the actual weight of the pile of candy is negotiated each time the installation is presented in a different setting. It is my interpretation that this process, this fluidity of the work, changes the subject of the artwork by becoming an object embodied in different interpretations of the beholders, and thereby mirroring to an even greater extent the myriad of opinions, reactions, and behaviours to specific situations. In this context the piece “Untitled” (Public Opinion), 1991, a pile of black-rod liquorice candy presented in different formats, arranged in corners or across floors, in my view articulates the displacement that happens when the audience is confronted with Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy sculptures. Even if the candy sculptures contain references in the bracketed sections, they cannot be simply understood as portraits or representations of a reality, but rather an intentionally ambiguous departure point from which the action or lack off develops and from which specific subjective interpretations unfold without distinguishing between right or wrong.1
1 These candy sculptures and their participatory characteristics were not only a denunciation of AIDS, as they have often been interpreted. At the beginning of the 1990s, GonzalezTorres also ‘began to make sculptures that consisted of stacks of endlessly replaceable paper
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Gonzalez-Torres candy sculptures work in such a way that when ‘inviting viewers to take pieces of candy, he invokes his audience’s desire and pleasures’, encompassing different discursive formations in collective memory and imagery.2 ‘Inviting’ in this context might need further explanation: here it is in fact giving the audience the choice to engage with the artwork, since they are never explicitly requested to interact with the sculpture. If they decide to do so, this can be the sensory experience of touching, unwrapping, and tasting. Perhaps the well-known warning not to accept candies from strangers. The idea of stealing from a museum.3 The search for a particular colour, introducing hands and arms into the pile. The idea of not knowing how the candy will taste, or if it is candy at all, and the risks linked to consuming something that is queer, strange. Gonzalez-Torres said: ‘I’m giving you this sugary thing, you put it in your mouth and you suck on someone else’s body. And in this way, my work becomes part of so many other people’s bodies. It’s very hot.’4 The word ‘hot’ in this context might seem to be used in a superficial way, but the dictionary definitions of the word reflect different meanings that play with the topic(s) that the artwork deploys in a very specific way: ‘having a high temperature’, ‘spicy’, ‘causing disagreement’, ‘exiting’, ‘skilful’, ‘likelihood’, ‘to think that a particular thing is very important and to demand sheets’. These are premised on ideal weights and change according to the installation site. There are several strategies at play here that include the space in which they take place (see S.P. Hudson, ‘Beauty and the Status of Contemporary Criticism’, October, no. 104 (2003): 115–130). It is also worth noticing the way in which these sculptures of endlessly replaceable paper sheets sometimes use the concept of interaction with participants, precisely by not allowing them to remove individual sheets from the stacks.
2 Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves. Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 196.
3 This was, for example, the experience described by Sandra Umathum, who wanted to take a candy but before doing so was scanning the space looking for surveillance cameras. She also states that it is not obvious that the candy installations made their availability clear to would-be participants, and she introduces the concept of seduction, rather than of offering. However, I argue that affect is the force that moves the visitor to participate in the artwork. They are propelled by the aesthetics of the form, which is defined by aspects such as the colour of the cellophane and the arrangement of the candy, and by playing with discursive formations. Sandra Umathum, ‘Given the Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Case: The Art of Placing a Different Idea of Participation at Our Disposal’, Performance Research 16, no. 3 (2011): 94–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2011.606032
4 Quoted in Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves… 197.
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that it is done well or correctly’, ‘being angry’, and ‘sexually attractive’.5 What lies beneath the surface, what is only found beyond the cellophane, are different materialisations of that word and its role in the AIDS epidemic: disease, disagreements about how to address the issue, anger for the loss of loved ones and the discrimination by and lack of action on the part of governments, and the very affect that works as a carrier of the virus: desire. ‘Hot’ can also be used to define an atmosphere, a shared space, public or private, and individual experience that can be shared in the course of small talk in elevators about the weather: at any level it is a participatory act: ‘One enormous collaboration with the public. (…) The pieces just disperse themselves like a virus that flows to many different places—homes, studios, shops, bathrooms, wherever.’6
In my interpretation of Gonzalez-Torres’s artwork and its meaning enacted by inter-action if the visitor passes by the pile of candy and does not even interact with it, the sculpture becomes a performance of the indifference of the public to the AIDS epidemic, perhaps as one of those people who considered the disease to be punishment for immoral desires, those of gay people and those of drug addicts.7 If another person decides
5 All definitions from ‘HOT | Meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary’, Dictionary. Cambridge.Org, 2019, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hot
6 ‘Feeling the atmosphere’ is defined by Teresa Brenan as the space in which the transmission of affects happens, and, I would argue, equals the idea of the sensorium that is unpacked in the following pages. See below for how touching plays a role in the completion of this transmission. For Brennan’s analysis of the transmission of affect, see Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). For the concept of sensorium see below and Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, Henning Laugerud, and Laura Katrine Skinnebach, The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2015). Quotations from Felix GonzalezTorres are taken from Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (repr., New York, NY: Guggenheim Museum Publication, 1995), 58.
7 This association was contested, in my opinion, by David Wojnarowicz in his artwork ‘Untitled (Genet after Brassaï)’, as well as in other artworks. The art piece features at its centre a portrait of Jean Genet used on the cover of one of the editions of Funeral Rites, a 1948 novel that explores a love story across ideological, political, and social divides. In the background, there is a bombed church, on the altar of which an image of Christ shooting-up has been placed. The interplay between different temporalities guides my interpretation, by liking different moments, symbols and imagery. Firstly, showing Jean Genet and what he represents for a gay imagery that is indebted to works like Querelle. Secondly, the plot of the novel Funeral Rites, for which the photo was used, seems to parallel the divisions and conflicts among the gay community during the AIDS epidemic. Thirdly, the image of the Christ shooting-up detail reminds us that this epidemic was targeted both the gay community and drugs users. The artwork is dated to 1979, but context matters: for many years it was only
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to take a piece, and does not read the description, or does not listen to the audio-guide, s/he becomes accomplice of the silence by being part of the consumer and capitalist society, merely enjoying the sweetness of the candy without acknowledging its context—a person who never addressed the issue properly, for example by allocating more funds to prevention than to researching a cure, aligning with the interests of the pharmaceutical industry. The audio-guide at the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, reveals that the pile of candy is a portrait, that the gesture of taking one piece parallels the weight loss experienced as consequence of suffering from HIV, and that Felix Gonzalez-Torres stipulated that the pile should be continuously replenished, thus granting perpetual life to a work that memorialises the loss of a loved one.8 However, somehow this is a misleading interpretation and a simplification of the complexity of affective reactions and operations. The sculpture, as it has been noted above, is not a portrait, and the gesture of taking one piece of candy making the weight diminish is one interpretation among many. In my analysis, the departure point in which by objectivising the subject the meaning of the artwork remains open. Moreover, it is the decision of the owner of the art piece, or its borrower, whether or not to replenish the pile of candy, and how often and to what extent to do so, thus transforming curators, owners, and institutions in an essential part of the process of generating new meaning. Perhaps, in my interpretation, if visitors stop, participate, and listen to the audio-guide, they will be affected by becoming aware of a series of issues that were not—and are not—at stake in the public arena and it would drive them to do something, to act. But affect is by definition something that cannot be put into words, that cannot be driven by any specific message, and that acting itself can relate to other things chosen by the affected person. If the person knows nothing about the specific context or the references in the title, does not listen to the audio-guide, but is affected all the same, the consequent action will depend on how the subject returns to his original standpoint after this experience of displacement.
known by a photograph that appeared in the catalogue for the artist’s 1990 retrospective at Illinois State University, Tongues of Flame. It does not seem coincidental that the image makes its first appearance during the years of the AIDS epidemic.
8 The audio-guide explanation can be listened to online at the institution website: ‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) | The Art Institute of Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2019, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/152961/untitled-portrait-of-ross-in-l-a
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‘Affect’ and ‘being affected’, that is the transmission of affects, are concepts that need further clarification, especially because they are, I argue, entangled with the senses and specifically with touching. ‘Affect’ is a curious word; it means ‘to do something that produces an effect or change in something or in someone’s situation’ or ‘to make someone feel strong emotions’.9 The word comes from the Latin verb afficere, meaning ‘to influence’, ‘to do’, and became integrated in the vernacular languages in the Late Middle Ages (possibly as a result of the use of the term in theology), but was integrated with a twist in the way it was used. For Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), affectus is a dimension of experience and love so overwhelming that it ‘simply cannot contain itself within the bounds of mundane speech’ after the experience of mystical union with God.10 Words matter: union implies contact, the satisfaction of desire by touching, either physically or metaphorically. For Bonaventure (1221–1274), affectus ‘plays at the boundary of body and spirit and names a force that is more fundamental than the distinction between corporeal and incorporeal’ in mystical union and longing for God’s love.11 His development of the concept draws in the concept of eros as a way of affecting and as effect as a union, that is, of desire, and in its conception the body appears as a boundary, suggesting that affect is neither self-contained nor restrained by it.
These conceptions of affect are in fact related to our understanding of the term, articulated in the dichotomy between cognition and feeling or emotion, echoing that of intellect and affectus. It is not by chance that one of the most influential books on affect theory, written by Charles Altieri, uses the word ‘rapture’ to define an aesthetics of the affects.12 More to the point, Ernst van Alphen opens his article ‘Affective Operations of Art and Literature’ with the reaction of Felix Gonzalez-Torres to the sculpture Gold Field by Roni Horn in Los Angeles.13 Van Alphen contextualises the
9 “Affect | Meaning of Affect in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English | LDOCE”, Ldoceonline.Com, 2019, https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/affect
10 Philip Liston-Kraft, ‘Bernard’s Belching Bride: The Affectus That Words Cannot Express’, Medieval Mystical Theology 26, no. 1 (2 January 2017): 57, https://doi.org/10.1 080/20465726.2017.1321201. See below for a more detailed discussion of the term.
11 Robert Davis, “The Force of Union: Affect and Ascent in the Theology of Bonaventure.” (PhD, repr., Harvard University, 2012), ix. See below for a more detailed discussion of the term.
12 Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
13 Ernst Van Alphen, ‘Affective Operations of Art and Literature’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53–54, no. 1 (2008): 20–30.
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artist’s reaction as shifting from the ‘sloganeering art that appropriated the media towards a more personal voice’ as new ways of contestation.14 A closer examination of how Gonzalez-Torres described his reaction and what happened in that exhibition room might be needed:
1990, L.A. The Gold Field. How can I deal with the Gold Field? I don’t quite know. But the Gold Field was there. Ross and I entered the Museum of Contemporary Art, and without knowing the work of Roni Horn we were blown away by the heroic, gentle and horizontal presence of this gift. There it was, in a white room, all by itself, it didn’t need company, it didn’t need anything. Sitting on the floor, ever so lightly. A new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty. Waiting for the right viewer willing and needing to be moved to a place of the imagination. This piece is nothing more than a thin layer of gold. It is everything a good poem by Wallace Steven is: precise, with no baggage, nothing extra. A poem that feels secure and dares to unravel itself, to become naked, to be enjoyed in a tactile manner, but beyond that, in an intellectual way too. Ross and I were lifted.15
The first thing to note is the questioning with which the description of this encounter begins, doubting its own ability to transform what has happened into language. A description of the space and of the piece follow together, expressed almost as if a camera were navigating over the surface of both the environment and the artwork, which matches with the description of ‘haptic’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the smooth space.16 That is, a space in which we move by continuous reference to the immediate environment: ‘[I]t seems to us that the Smooth is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile).’17 By continuously referencing the context and surroundings, the object and the subject touch, the space becomes a lived space, permeating memory, inspiring change. Gonzalez-
14 Van Alphen, 21.
15 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ‘1990: L.A., “The Gold Field”’, in Julie Ault (ed.) Felix Gonzalez-Torres (New York and Göttingen: The Felix Gonzales-Torres foundation, 2006), 150.
16 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘1440: The Smooth and the Striated’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 474–500.
17 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 493.
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Torres continues his description with the aftermath of the encounter: ‘Ross and I always talked about this work, how much affected us. After that any sunset became The Gold Field.’18 The encounter took place in 1990, when the imminent death of Ross triggered a series of reflections that were first published in 1996.19 These notes make clear that the experience became entangled in memory and experience allowing a further discursive formation: to be affected by something means to do something, to react, even if these are not shown and remain in the thoughts of the affected person. When considering affect, a much-used buzzword in different fields of research, I do not mean personal or subjective affect, but rather the dialogue between the personal and subjective and the social or the context that contributes to the atmosphere or space in which one is affected by something. In this regard, I adapt and follow what Laura U. Marks calls haptic criticism: ‘The haptic critic, rather than place herself within the “striated space” of predetermined critical frameworks, navigates a smooth space by engaging with objects and ideas and teasing out the connections immanent to them.’20 I understand these connections as not only defined by the intention of the artist or the user, but also by social reality, rather than the critical reality, in which the object was created, and extend that idea to the present in which the subject interacts. In fact, ‘affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and to be acted upon’, which implies that specific contexts matter in the formation of the atmosphere in which affect happens, both psychological, physical, and social: ‘affect is in many ways with force or forces of encounters’.21
Having taken into account the multitude of meanings that these candy sculptures can generate, in the remainder of this preface I want to focus specifically on one. Imagine that the person interacting with the sculpture belongs to a community that the AIDS epidemics hit, if they know someone who died, or simply if other people are standing by the artwork and show their feelings, then s/he would probably be affected in that particular direction. The affect will produce an outcome: it will be integrated in their memory-discourse, and will in fact break chrononormative practices of
18 Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ‘1990: L.A., “The Gold Field”’, 150.
19 In Amanda Cruz et al., Earth Grow Thick by Roni Horn (The Ohio State University: Columbus, 1996), 65–69.
20 Laura U Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xiii.
21 Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–25.
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memory and collective memory. I use chrononormative in a double sense. The first sense is the parcelling of history into periodisation in such a way that deems any attempt to treat events that are distant to an understanding of time as linear and anachronistic. This privileges a narrative of progress indebted to applications of Darwinist theory, although out of context and benefiting views that align with the normative and power structures. The second sense follows Elizabeth Freeman’s definition of the term as ‘the use of time to organise individual human bodies toward maximum productivity’ or the imposition of rhythms through calendars, schedules, or even the tendency to feel collectively at certain events.22
The transmission of affects has to do with atmosphere, setting, and space, and can put objects and subjects of different times in touch. This creates affective modes that escape organisation by time, not only in the domestic sphere as Freeman suggests, but also when decontextualising and recontextualising what Ernst van Alphen calls affective operations.23 A good example of this can be seen in the way in which Felix GonzalezTorres names some of his works: pieces untitled ‘with subtitles that, when strung together, constitute a sort of linguistic portrait juxtaposing the deeply personal and the actively, anonymously political context in which such events occur’.24 I would add that this naming strategy allows the piece to be decontextualised and recontextualised in affective ways by linking two moments in time and out of line with the chrononormative. In making it timeless, it becomes affective. In my interpretation of “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA), the bracketed section of the title refers not only to the moment of the encounter with the Gold Field, but also to the last days of Ross’s life. This makes the alterations in the weight of the pile of candy by virtue of the participation of the public acquire a new meaning. But this new meaning can also be generated in the decision of where to place the sculpture, and in the negotiations taking place to that particular end. In both cases, these actions create a kind of intimacy that falls outside of a timeline and allows instances of interaction with the artwork to be linked to or distanced from the first time the piece was displayed or with the time this chapter was written or is read.
22 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3–7. For the shared time in events as performative, Freeman follows Homi Bhabha and refers to how these events can be linked to narratives of belonging, for instance in a nationalist way of watching the Olympics.
23 Freeman, xxii–xxiii. Van Alphen, 22.
24 Hudson, 126.
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We aim for a similar disruption to the chrononormative in the pages that follow by the experience of reading through a detailed analysis of that affective atmosphere, one that needs to be understood and connected to the sensorium, devotional practices, and visionary experience of the Late Middle Ages in what has been defined as ‘affective piety’.25 Both the artwork of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and some of his experiences show that the transmission of affects materialises in textures, as an intermedial category between the smooth and the striated, lived or imagined, and linked to memory and discursive formations.
‘Sensorium’ is here understood outside of any specific theoretical frame that prevents the application of other theories or ideas. If the Middle Ages can be understood as an ‘age of the medium’, as Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen suggests, ‘medieval practices offer a plentiful reservoir of strategies for combining, blending, and fusing media modalities into rich and abundant wholes not forced into a priori categorisations’.26 The tactile plays a fundamental role as an intermediary between the senses and the perception in both devotional practices and in visionary experiences. Jacqueline Jung in her pioneering essay about the tactile and the visionary points out not only the relationship between visionary experience and sculpture, but also the role of touching in devotional practices that frame the visionary experience of Hedwig of Silesia or Gertrud of Helfta, showing how these are ‘rich in their evocations of multisensory modalities of divine communication, and sometimes explicitly reflect on the tensions between visual and tactile perception’.27 This is a tension similar to that created by the encounter of anonymous visitors with ‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) and with Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Ross’s encounter with the Gold Field in the ways in which these deploy affect and reposition in both subjects and contexts.
25 For a reflection on the misuse of this term, see my essay ‘Inside the Frame: the Making of Queer Visionary Discourses’ below.
26 Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, ‘Into the Saturated Sensorium. Introducing the Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages’, in The Saturated Sensorium… 9–10.
27 Jacqueline E. Jung, ‘The Tactile and the Visionary’, in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams and Insights in Medieval Art & History, ed. Colum Hourihane (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 203–240.
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This exploration of touching and being touched, of affect and perception, frames the essays that this book includes. The volume explores theoretical frameworks, specific visionary experiences, and devotional practices, and tries to dig holes in history to permeate and change preconceptions and to expose new perspectives for future research.
Bergen, Norway David Carrillo-Rangel
references
artWorks
Gonzalez-Torres, Felix. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991 Horn, Roni. Gold Field, 1980–1028.
Wojnarowicz, David. Untitled (Genet after Brassaï), 1978–1979.
seconDary sources
Altieri, Charles. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Castiglia, Christopher and Christopher Reed. If Memory Serves. Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. Reprinted, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Cruz, Amanda, et al. Earth Grow Thick by Roni Horn. Columbus: The Ohio State University, 1996.
Davis, Robert. ‘The Force of Union: Affect and Ascent in the Theology of Bonaventure’. Reprinted, PhD, Harvard University, 2012.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. ‘1440: The Smooth and the Striated’. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Perverse Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Gonzalez-Torres, Felix. ‘1990: L.A., “The Gold Field”’. In Felix Gonzalez-Torres New York and Göttingen: The Felix Gonzales-Torres foundation, 2006.
Hudson, S.P. ‘Beauty and the Status of Contemporary Criticism’. October 104 (2003): 115–130.
xvii PREFACE: WHAT DID AND DOES IT MEAN TO SAY ‘I TOUCHED’?
xviii PREFACE: WHAT DID AND DOES IT MEAN TO SAY ‘I TOUCHED’?
Jørgensen, Hans Henrik Lohfert, Henning Laugerud, and Laura Katrine
Skinnebach. The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2015.
Jung, Jacqueline E. ‘The Tactile and the Visionary’. In Looking Beyond : Visions, Dreams and Insights in Medieval Art & History, edited by Colum Hourihane. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.
Liston-Kraft, Philip. ‘Bernard’s Belching Bride: The Affectus That Words Cannot Express’. Medieval Mystical Theology 26, no. 1 (2 January 2017): 54–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/20465726.2017.1321201.
Marks, Laura U. Touch : Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’. In The Affect Theory Reader, 1–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Spector, Nancy. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Reprinted, New York, NY: Guggenheim Museum Publishing, 1995.
Umathum, Sandra. ‘Given the Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Case: The Art of Placing a Different Idea of Participation at Our Disposal’. Performance Research 16, no. 3 (2011): 94–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2011.606032.
Van Alphen, Ernst. ‘Affective Operations of Art and Literature’. Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53–54, no. 1 (2008): 20–30.
online resources
‘Affect | Meaning of Affect in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English | LDOCE’. Ldoceonline.Com, 2019. https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/affect.
‘HOT | Meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary’. Dictionary.Cambridge. Org, 2019. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hot
‘Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) | The Art Institute of Chicago’. The Art Institute of Chicago, 2019. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/152961/ untitled-portrait-of-ross-in-l-a
acknoWleDgeMents
This book has been some journey. It has survived disease, changes of country, and other misadventures which have now become oddkin. Many people have helped in many ways during this process.
We would like to thank our editors at Palgrave Macmillan for their infinite patience and professional manners shown at all times, especially Molly Beck and Maeve Sinnott, and also to Oliver Dyer, Carmel Kennedy, and Emily Russell. We also want to express our gratitude to the anonymous readers at Palgrave for their invaluable feedback and constructive reviews, and of course to all of the contributors of this volume whose enthusiasm has matched our own as editors. We have discussed this project with many colleagues in one way or another and each of them has made our work better: Sabrina Corbellini, Liz Herbert McAvoy, David Morgan, Henning Laugerud, Vincent Gillespie, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jeffrey Hamburger, Eva Schlotheuber, Hildegard Elizabeth Keller, Sarah Brazil, Juliette Vuille, Jonas Wellendorf, and Sergi Sancho Fibla.
In the following pages the reader will find a wealth of images, and we would like to thanks artists, individuals, and institutions for making this possible: Holly McHugh, at The Felix Gonzalez-Torres foundation; Diana Zilotto at the Archivio fotografico e dei restauri Servizi e concessioni Beni Culturali; Alexandre Brodard and Daniela Lurman Lange; Marie Finsten Jensen at The Royal Danish Library; Lee-Anne Wielonda at The Art Gallery of Ontario; Anne Mette Hansen, at The Arnamagnæan Institute; Dulce Estévez López at agefotostock; Erinç Seymen and everyone at Zilberman Gallery; Liz Kay at Brasenose College in Oxford; Ji Mary Seo
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at Walters Art Museum; Samantha Sherbourne and Emma Stanford at the Bodleian Library in Oxford; the Imaging Service staff at the British Library; and Giacomo Floris, who mediated between us and the Italian archives in many occasions.
Special thanks go to the English proofreaders for non-native speakers for their professional work at all times, even when pressed for time, specifically our fellow editor Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel, who also organised a workshop that allowed editors and contributors to meet and discuss the volume. This would have not been possible without the support of the Monastery of Sant Cugat del Vallès, and especially Lluís Campins and Alba Rodríguez.
A lot of our work as editors consisted in reading and exploring previous research on the senses and the sensorium. In that regard, we would like to thank the Biblioteca/CRAI of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, who diligently acquired the essential bibliography we needed, especially to the head of the Unit of Social Sciences and Humanities (Biblioteca/CRAI de la Ciutadella) and his director (cap de unitat) Xavier Brunet Sahún for his work and availability regarding our enquiries.
This project was born as a spin-off of the Second ARDIT International Congress of Medievalists, Senses and Sensuality in the Middle Ages. We would like to thank its organiser Carme Muntaner Alsina, and all those involved in editing a volume out of that event: Pau Castells Granados and Anna Fernàndez Clot for their generosity in allowing us to pursue and touch new directions.
This is an independent project, completed in our free time, without any funding. In that regard, we are greatly indebted to the Swiss National Science Foundation (FNS). As the funding body of the project Medieval Convent Drama (FNS grant no. 100015_165887), they made it possible for the chapter ‘Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent and Beyond’, by Elisabeth Dutton and Olivia Robinson, to be available as Open Access.
When we were designing this project, we realised that as an edited volume, it needed to work as a monograph, coherently linking the different essays of which it was composed. We believe we have achieved this, but regardless, we, as editors, would also like to give our thanks individually.
Pablo: This book has been a long and enriching road and, as every real journey full of ‘adventures and knowledge’ it contained all the elements listed by Constantine P. Cavafi in his immortal poem. First of all, I want to also thank my co-editors, David Carrillo-Rangel and Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel, and I appreciate their invitation to participate in this project which has been
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both challenging and rewarding; this book would have never been possible without their hard work. I have discussed this project with different colleagues, whose help has been precious: Victoria Cirlot (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), José Antonio Ramos Arteaga (Universidad de La Laguna), Eduardo Carrero Santamaría (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Mercedes Pérez Vidal (Heinrich-Heine-Universität-Düsseldorf), Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Eva Schlotheuber (HeinrichHeine-Universität-Düsseldorf), Hildegard Elizabeth Keller (Universität Zürich), Sean L. Field (University of Vermont) and Gorka López de Munain, among others; my gratitude goes to all of them. I would also like to thank the Associació d’Amics de la Biblioteca Haas and its Research Group (2017 SGR 276) and the research project ‘La conformación de la autoridad espiritual femenina en Castilla’ (FFI2015-63625-C2-2-P, MINECO/FEDER); they greatly supported me in completing and discussing the necessary list of readings required to write the introduction to this volume. Finally, I would like to deeply thank the never-ending support from my family and friends. I’m particularly indebted to two irreplaceable women in my life, Olga Serra Pujol and Carmen Luz Acosta Martín. Thanks for the hours.
Delfi: I would also like to thank Louisa A. Burnham (Middlebury College), Claire Taylor (University of Nottingham), Justine Trombley (University of Nottingham), and David Zbíral (Masaryk University) for their continued support, and Sean L. Field (University of Vermont), Cecilia Gaposchkin (Dartmouth College), Walter Simons (Dartmouth College), Anne E. Lester (Johns Hopkins University), and Lester K. Little (Smith College) for their invaluable feedback on my work.
This book has come at a very special time in my life. While we were working on it, I finished my dissertation, I was hit by a car, and also gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, who will hopefully grow up knowing that women in academia are not an oddity any more. Needless to say, this would not have been possible without the help and kindness of my fellow co-editors David and Pablo, to whom I feel deeply indebted. Finally, I would like to thank my most staunch supporter, Carlos López-Arenillas, for always believing and going through thick and thin with me.
David: First and foremost, I want to thank my parents, Antonio Carrillo and Josefa Rangel, because after every manifestation of the tempest, they have been there supporting me. Delfi and Pablo, the co-editors of the volume, have done a wonderful job both professionally and personally; it is not always easy to be caught on fire. I have worked in many waiting
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rooms of clinics and hospitals; my gratitude for their kindness and help to doctors, nurses, and staff. I have been away from home many times, and I’m lucky enough to have friends who have hosted me and have listened to my circular monologues while working on this project; a thousand thanks to Vincenzo Piscioneri, Alberto Valdivieso Vico, and Christoph Baumann. Extra gratitude and love to my friends Patricia Méndez Ávila, who rescued my computer when I forgot it at security in Barcelona Airport, Karo Moret Miranda, for our discussions over coffee and jazz, Araceli Rosillo-Luque, for the conversations over dinner, and the many friends who through their kindness have made things easier in a very difficult time. I would also like to thank Aidan Keally Conti, Pål Bjørby, Roberta Magnani, Åslaug Ommundsen, and Mieke Bal for their support and feedback. And finally, I owe thanks to my favourite person, Helen Leslie-Jacobsen, for being there, always.
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xxiii 1 A Clash of Theories: Discussing Late Medieval Devotional Perception 1 Pablo Acosta-García Part I Unbinding the Body 19 2 Touching the Page and Touching the Heart: Manuscript Culture and Affective Devotion in Late Medieval Flemish Communities 21 Barbara Zimbalist 3 Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent and Beyond 43 Olivia Robinson and Elisabeth Dutton Par t II Wounding the Spiritual Self 69 4 Sacralising Perception: Rosary-Devotion and Tactile Experience of the Divine in Late Medieval Denmark 71 Mads Vedel Heilskov contents
xxiv CONTENTS 5 Haptic Prayer, Devotional Books and Practices of Perception 95 Laura Katrine Skinnebach 6 Skin Christ. On the Animation, Imitation, and Mediation of Living Skin and Touch in Late Medieval Contact Imager y 123 Hans Henrik Lohfer t Jørgensen Part III Seizing Nothingness 149 7 The Making of Queer Visionar y Discourses 151 David Carrillo-Rangel 8 Queer Touch Between Holy Women: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Birgitta of Sweden, and the Visitation 203
Saetveit Miles 9 ConTact. Tactile Experiences of the Sacred and the Divinity in the Middle Ages 237 Victoria Cirlot and Blanca Garí Index 267
Laura
notes on contributors
Pablo Acosta-García is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at the HeinrichHeine-Universität-Düsseldorf, where he is developing his project Late Medieval Visionary Women’s Impact in Early Modern Castilian Spiritual Tradition. In his PhD thesis he analysed the devotional culture of Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls, and additionally, he has edited the marginalia of its manuscript tradition (2017). His latest book is the edition and Spanish translation of Angela da Foligno’s Memoriale (Siruela, 2014). He has been a professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain).
David Carrillo-Rangel is a PhD fellow at the Institutt for lingvistiske, litterære og estetiske studier, Universitetet i Bergen. His dissertation is titled Performing Visions: Queer Visionary Discourses, Materiality and Authority in Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations in the 14th and 15th Centuries, in which he applies queer theory to manuscript studies. He has published various articles on medieval spirituality, comparative literature, and circulation of manuscripts as circulation of knowledge. He has co-edited the volume Sensual and Sensory Experiences in the Middle Ages. His research interests range from Medieval Latin, cultural analysis, manuscript studies to queer studies. He has a special interest in research dissemination and has been involved in different activities to engage with both the contemporary culture and a broader audience.
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Victoria Cirlot is Professor of Romance Philology. Her research focuses on Arthurian romance, Late Medieval women mystics, and comparative studies between medieval and twentieth-century aesthetics. She is a founding member of the Institut Universitari de Cultura (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), a founder of the research team of the Bibliotheca Mystica et Philosophica Alois M. Haas (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), and editor of the collection ‘Árbol del Paraíso’ (Siruela). She has authored numerous books, critical editions, translations, and papers.
Elisabeth Dutton is Professor of English Medieval Language and Literature at the Université de Fribourg, and heads, with Liv Robinson, the Medieval Convent Drama Project (www.medievalconventdrama.org), as well as Early Drama at Oxford (www.edox.org.uk): both projects combine literary and historical approaches with performance research. Her published work includes a range of books and articles on medieval women’s writing and early theatre.
Blanca Garí is Professor of Medieval History at the Department of History and Archaeology at the Universitat de Barcelona, and a member of the Institute for Research on Medieval Cultures. Her scientific interests mainly lie in the history of mysticism and female monasticism. She is the author of numerous publications, including books, critical editions, and papers.
Mads Vedel Heilskov is a medieval historian with a background in visual culture. He obtained his PhD degree from the Centre for Scandinavian Studies at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2018. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Centre de recherches historiques at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, with a project called ‘Animated Materiality in the Medieval Catholic West’, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. His work focuses mainly on medieval religious practices and experiences, and the role played by materiality in medieval Christianity features prominently among his research interests.
Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, PhD, is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Aarhus Universitet. His research focuses on developing a theoretical and historical model of animation for various visual media in the Latin Middle Ages. Relevant publications include The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages (2015); ‘Live Matter and Living Images: Towards a Theory of Animation in Material Media’ Journal of Art History (86/3, 2017); ‘The
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Image as Contact Medium: Mediation, Multimodality, and Haptics in Medieval Imagery’, The Locus of Meaning in Medieval Art (2019).
Laura Saetveit Miles is Associate Professor of English Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages, Universitetet i Bergen, Norway, with a PhD from Yale University. She researches religious literature in medieval England, with publications on women’s literary culture, visionary and devotional texts, the manuscripts of Birgittine and Carthusian monastic communities, and modern feminist, gender, and queer theory. Her monograph The Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England is forthcoming from Boydell & Brewer. She is embarking on a project examining St. Birgitta of Sweden’s influence on medieval English culture, with the support of a Young Research Talents grant from the Norwegian Research Council for 2019–2023.
Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel holds a BSc in Physics, a BA in History, an MA and a PhD in Medieval Cultures from the University of Barcelona. Her dissertation was entitled Communities of Dissent: Social Network Analysis of Religious Dissident Groups in Languedoc in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. She is an associate researcher at the Institute for Research on Medieval Cultures of the University of Barcelona and has spent research stays at St Andrews University (UK) and at the Centre for the Study of Religions in Brno (Czech Republic). She was selected as one of the 2018 Fellows of the Dartmouth Historical Institute on New Directions in Religious Studies. She has extensively presented her research on dissident networks in several international conferences. Her published work on this topic includes several book chapters, and she has several book chapters in preparation.
Olivia Robinson is Lecturer in Late Medieval Literature at the University of Birmingham and Senior SNSF Researcher at the Université de Fribourg, where she is part of the Medieval Convent Drama Project (www.medievalconventdrama.org), researching the performative and theatrical cultures of medieval women religious through archival and performance-based methodologies. Her published work focuses on medieval Anglo-French literary interrelationships, cultures, and exchanges. She is the author of a forthcoming monograph on Franco-English translation and the Chaucer canon (Contest, Translation and the Chaucerian Text, Brepols: forthcoming 2019), in addition to a range of articles and book chapters on drama in the medieval convent.
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Laura Katrine Skinnebach is a research assistant at Department of Art History, Aesthetics & Culture and Museology at Aarhus Universitet. Her main research interests are medieval and early modern devotion, materiality and the sensorium, as well as theories of images, perception, and interaction. She has recently received a research grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation in Denmark to work on medieval animation and images in collaboration with Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen from Aarhus Universitet. She is a member of the international research network European Network on the Instruments of Devotion. Her published work includes ‘Transfiguration. Change and Comprehension in Late Medieval Devotional Perception’, in The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe. Images, Objects and Practices, edited by Salvador Ryan, Henning Laugerud and Laura Katrine Skinnebach (2016, 90–103) and ‘Devotion. Incorporating the Immutated Sensorium in Late Medieval Devotional Practice’, in The Saturated Sensorium. Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages, edited by Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, Henning Laugerud, and Laura Katrine Skinnebach (2015, 152–179).
Barbara Zimbalist is Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature and Culture at The University of Texas at El Paso. She works on the intersection of gender and religion in late medieval England, France, and the Low Countries. Her project traces the evolution of Christ’s speech as a literary trope in women’s visionary literature from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries.
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list of figures
Fig. 3.1 Triptych of St Wilgefortis, central panel, 104 x 119 cm, inv 76109. © Archivio fotografico G.A.VE su concessione del Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali. Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia 45
Fig. 3.2 Image of 2017 Fribourg performance of Huy Nativity play, showing female performer playing Joseph in a drawn-on beard. Photo: © Alexander Brodard
Fig. 4.1 Beginning of the rosary, Anna Brade’s prayer book, Denmark, 1497, AM 75, 8, 71v. The Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen. Photo by Suzanne Reitz
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Fig. 4.2 Maria in Sole, Aarhus Cathedral, Denmark, c. 1500. Photo by author 82
Fig. 4.3 The rich and the poor man’s prayer, Tingsted Church, Denmark, fifteenth century. Photo by author
Fig. 4.4 Mary and Elisabeth, Marine Jespersdatter’s prayer book, Denmark, 1514–1517, AM 421, 12 MO, 44v-45r. The Arnamagnæan Institute, University of Copenhagen. Photo by Suzanne Reitz
Fig. 4.5 Prayer-nut with Queen of Sheba Visiting King Solomon; Adoration of the Magi, 1500–1530, boxwood with metal fitting. Overall Closed: 54.9 mm × 63.6 mm (5.5 × 6.4 cm). The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. AGOID.29458. Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo taken by author at the exhibition Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures at The Met Cloisters
Fig. 5.1 The Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, Thott 553, 4°, fol. 9r. Photo: The Royal Danish Library. The illustration shows the first
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Pablo Acosta-García