Merleau-Ponty (1998) and Writer/director of Experimental Animated Films Including de Anima (1991)

JAN ŠVANKMAJER was born on 4 September, 1934 in Prague.
His studies in
the Stage Design Department at the College of Applied Arts in Prague and in the
Department of Puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts (directing and
stage design) largely predetermined his creative development. He did not study film
and its technology – perhaps this also contributed to Švankmajer’s not being weighed
down by the notion of ‘cinematic art’ with its excessive dedication to the technical
medium and resulting depressive receptiveness. In the Laterna Magica Theatre he
experimented with some film procedures, including special effects, for the first time.
He made his first film in 1964 at the Krátký Film Studio in Prague. The creative
diversity of Jan Švankmajer, however, exceeds the limits of film. The artist is active
in autonomous visual expression, which he has practised since the end of the 1950s.
His literary expression consists mainly of scenarios and tactile poems, while his
theoretical activity has focused on research into the nature of tactile phenomena and
the imagination. A considerable part of the imaginative strength of Jan Švankmajer
consists of blasphemous black humour and a playful viewpoint which, together with
an extraordinary sensibility and a penetrating critical intellect, form the determining
facets of his creative personality. His work, whether film, visual or literary, is connected
with the collective activities of the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists.
STANLEY DALBY (translator) emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Australia in

1949. Over 32 years as a writer/director, he made films for various government
ministries, as well as documentaries in India, Nepal, Papua New Guinea and Pacific
Islands. He now lives in Sydney and translates drama and fiction from Czech to English.
CATHRYN VASSELEU (editor) teaches animation at the University of Technology,

Sydney. She is the author of Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and
Merleau-Ponty (1998) and writer/director of experimental animated films including De
Anima (1991).
TouchingandImagining_FinalPages_v2.indd 1 6/03/2014 10:04 am

1. The Mouth of Truth, Italy

Touching Imaging title page_Layout 1 05/03/2014 15:28 Page 1
Touching and Imagining

An Introduction to Tactile Art
Jan Švankmajer
English translation by Stanley Dalby
Edited by Cathryn Vasseleu

Produced in conjunction with
ATHANOR – Film Production Company, Llc.
Jaromír Kallista & Jan Švankmajer
www.athanor.cz
Published in 2014 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © 2014 Jan Švankmajer

Copyright editor’s preface © 2014 Cathryn Vasseleu
Copyright translation © 2014 Stanley Dalby
The right of Jan Švankmajer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher.
International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art: 1
ISBN: 978 1 78076 146 6 (HB)

978 1 78076 147 3 (PB)
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Printed and Bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall

from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author
To Edith Clifford Williams

CONTENTS
List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgementsxiii
Translator’s Note xiv
Editor’s Preface xv
Introduction to the English Language Edition xix
Tactilismxxi
Touchxxiii
1. Introduction 1
2. Between Utilitarianism and Imagination 3
3. Restorer 12
4. Sources of Tactile Imagination 26
5. Short Anthology of Tactile Art 82
6. Inside 109
Afterword: Tactilism Reviewed 167

Notes172
Bibliography177
Index179

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. The Mouth of Truth. Italy. Archive of Jan Švankmajer. ii

2. Jan Švankmajer: Samizdat edition (five copies with tactile cover) Hmat
a Imaginace, 1983. xvii
3. Jan Švankmajer: New Eroticism (tactile props from the film Conspirators
of Pleasure), 1996. xxi
4. Jan Švankmajer: New Eroticism (tactile props from the film Conspirators
of Pleasure), 1996. xxii
5. Jan Švankmajer: Utilitarian Bondage (tactile chair), 1977. xxiv
6. Touching is one of our basic needs. If we couldn’t use our sense of touch
we would suffer mental deprivation. Under each square centimetre of
the tip of our forefinger are 200 nerve endings; they register cold, heat
or pain, according to the nerve structure. Archive of Jan Švankmajer. 3
7. Meissner’s tactile loop magnified by factor of 150. The oval cluster of
cells of this loop is one millimetre below the fingertip. The group in
the middle represents tactile cells connected to nerve connections. The
spiral nerve transmits a signal to the brain where it is identified. Tactile
sensations are associated with visual ones that manifest themselves
strongly, for instance, in the erotic field. Archive of Jan Švankmajer. 3
8. Lygia Clark: The I and the You: Cloth–Body–Cloth series, 1960 No.
22353. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of ‘The World of Lygia Clark’
Cultural Association. 5
9. Jan Švankmajer: A and B: Tablets of elementary structures for studying
‘colour touch’ (synaesthetic tablets). 6
10. Jan Švankmajer: C. – Mother. 6
11. Jan Švankmajer: D. – Animal: Two Rorschach tactile tablets. 6
12. Jan Švankmajer: E. – Way: Tablet of tactile orientation and tactile
memory. 6
13. Jan Švankmajer: Restorer (tactile object), 1974. 12
14. Restorer at Work (newspaper photograph). Archive of Jan Švankmajer. 13
15. Jan Švankmajer: Uncovered Object, 1974. 15
16. Martin Stejskal: Visualized Impression (before the imaginative phase),
1974. Courtesy of Martin Stejskal. 17

list of illustrations ix
17. Ten Photographs for Analogical Phase of the Experiment. Archive of Jan
Švankmajer. 23
18. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Ohm Mantra, 1993. 27
19. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Wooden Spoon, 1978. 29
20. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Cooking Spoons, 1978. 29
21. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Boards, 1978. 29
22. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Boards, 1978 (view from the reverse side). 29
23. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Tub, 1990. 30
24. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Lids, 1978. 30
25. Jan Švankmajer: New Eroticism, 1990. 30
26. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Rolling Pin, 1990. 31
27. Jan Švankmajer: New Eroticism, 1990. 31
28. Jan Švankmajer: Masturbation (tactile object), 1975. 32
29. Jan Švankmajer: Uncovered Object, 1975. 33
30. Jan Švankmajer: The ‘Roman’ Ipsation Machine (collage), 1972. 35
31. Francis Picabia, Parade Amoureuse, 1917. © Francis Picabia/ADAGP.
Licensed by Viscopy, 2011. 35
32. J. K. Archive of Jiří Koubek. 36
33. F. D. Archive of František Dryje. 36
34. G. D. Archive of Gilles Dunant. 37
35. M. D. Archive of Michel Dubret. 37
36. V. Archive of Vince. 38
37. Eva Švankmajerová: Bat (oil), 1970. 48
38. Salvador Dalí, Hand with Fish (drawing), n.d. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació
Gala-Salvador Dalí/VEGAP. Licensed by Viscopy, 2011. 50
39. Jan Švankmajer: Father and Son (stereophotography for two hands), 1994. 51
40. Illusion (engraving, eighteenth century). Public domain. 53
41. François Boucher: Le Prélude (engraving, eighteenth century). Public
domain. 53
42. Jan Švankmajer: Touch Your Dreams, 1976. 59
43. Jan Švankmajer: Dream about Mountain Climbers (uncovered tactile
object), 1976. 60
44. Jan Švankmajer: Dream about Unwashed Dishes (uncovered tactile
object), 1976. 64
45. Jan Švankmajer: Dream Object of Emila Medková, 1986. 66
46. Jan Švankmajer: Lipstick, 2009. 69
47. Jan Švankmajer: Imagery-Evoking Spaces – Connections (model), 1978. 72
48. Jan Švankmajer: Firmly Hold the Mouse, 2009. 72
49. Jan Švankmajer: Not Dead – Not Alive, 1993. 74
50. Jan Švankmajer: An Unforgettable Meeting (tactile object for two hands),
1976. 75
51. Jan Švankmajer: An Unforgettable Meeting, 1976. 75
52. President Husák and Women (newspaper photograph, Rudé Právo, 1976). 75
Archive of Jan Švankmajer.
53. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Portrait of Mikuláš Medek (casket for monograph), 77
1979.
54. Valie Export: Tap and Touch Cinema, Oberhausen, 1968. © Valie Export/ 83
VBK. Licensed by Viscopy, 2011.
55. Ritual Scarification, Congo. Archive of Jan Švankmajer. 84

x Touching and Imagining
56. Jan Van Eyck: Homage to the Lamb (detail), 1432. Public Domain. 86
57. Jan Van Eyck: Portrait of Arnolfinio Couple (detail), 1434. Public Domain. 86
58. Pedro de Mena: Crying Virgin Mary, second half of seventeenth century.
Public Domain. 86
59. Pedro de Mena: Crying Madonna, Church of The Holy Martyrs, Malaga.
Public Domain. 86
60. Man Ray: L’énigme d’Isidore Ducasse, 1920. © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP.
61. Pablo Picasso: Guitar, 1912. © Pablo Picasso/Succession Picasso.
62. Umberto Boccioni: Fusion of Head and Window, 1912. Public Domain. 88
63. Gunther Uecker: Object Made from Nails, 1962. © Gunther Uecker/
Bild-Kunst. Licensed by Viscopy, 2011. 89
64. Jean Dubuffet: Plastic Art Made from Bath Sponge, 1950. © Jean
Dubuffet/ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, 2011. 89
65. Claes Oldenburg: Soft Washstand, 1966. Vinyl filled with kapok, on metal
stand painted with acrylic 55 x 36 x 28 in. Private collection © 1966 Claes
Oldenburg. 89
66. Piero Gilardi: Pumpkin, 1966. Courtesy of Piero Gilardi. 89
67. Jiří Kolář: A Blind Poem (typed without ribbon), 1962. Courtesy of Jiří
Kolář. 90
68. Jannis Kounellis: Piece Made from Cotton, 1967. © Tate London, 2011. 90
69. Clifford Williams: Plâtre à Toucher chez De Zayas 1916. Courtesy of
Francis M. Naumann (copy of photograph in the Archives of Marius de
Zayas in Seville). 92
70. Ay-O: Tactile Briefcase, 1963. Courtesy of Ay-O. 97
71. J. H. Kocman: Touch Study of My Surroundings, 1971. Courtesy of J. H.
Kocman, 2011. 99
72. Oscar Dominguez: Decalcomania, 1937. © Oscar Dominguez/ADAGP.
73. Max Ernst: Frottage, 1925. © Max Ernst/ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy,
2011. 101
74. Salvador Dalí: The Persistence of Memory, 1931. © Salvador Dalí,
Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí/VEGAP. Licensed by Viscopy, 2011. 102
75. Gala Eluard: Object with a Symbolic Function, 1931. Copyright holder
unlocatable. 102
76. Meret Oppenheim: Fur Dinner Suite, 1936. © Meret Oppenheim/Pro
Litteris. Licensed by Viscopy, 2011. 102
77. Micheline Bounoure: Object, 1959. Courtesy of Gilles Bounoure. 102
78. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí: Un Chien Andalou, 1929. Public
Domain. 103
79. Oscar Dominiguez: Arrival from the Old Times, 1936. © Oscar
Dominguez/ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, 2011. 103
80. Salvador Dalí: Tactile Cinema, c. 1930–31. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació
Gala-Salvador Dalí/VEGAP. Licensed by Viscopy, 2011. 103
81. Frédérick Kiesler: Twin Touch Test, 1943 (VVV Almanac, No. 2–3).
© 2011 Austrian Frédérick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation,
Vienna. 104
82. Marcel Duchamp. Cover of VVV Almanac (detail). © Marcel Duchamp/
ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, 2011. 104

list of illustrations xi
83. Marcel Duchamp: Please Touch, 1947. © Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP.

84. Mikuláš Medek: Cranach’s Sur-Lyricism, 1951–52. Courtesy of Mikuláš
Medek’s daughter, Eva Kosaková. 107
85. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Alphabet, 1978. 108
86. Jan Švankmajer: Avenger, 1990. 109
87. Jan Švankmajer: Hired Murderer, 1990. 110
88. Jan Švankmajer: The Den, 1990. 110
89. Jan Švankmajer: Found Tactile Object, 1984. 111
90. Jan Švankmajer: A Week in Gesture, 1986. 112
91. Jan Švankmajer: The Way, 1989. 116
92. Jan Švankmajer: Reconstruction of Found and Subsequently Irretrievably 118
Lost Object (based on tactile memory), n.d.
93. Jan Švankmajer: Documentation, 1979. 119
94. Jan Švankmajer: ‘Twin Coloured’ Tactile Collage (sandpaper and fur), 119
1978.
95. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Study, 1979. 120
96. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Study, 1979. 121
97. Jan Švankmajer: Man (tactile collage), 1978. 122
98. Jan Švankmajer: Woman (tactile collage), 1978. 122
99. Jan Švankmajer: Welcoming Touch (tactile collage), 1978. 123
100. Jan Švankmajer: Plucking Out, (realized photograph), 1990. 124
101. Jan Švankmajer: Fossil (realized photograph), 1990. 125
102. Jan Švankmajer: Defense (realized photograph), 1990. 125
103. Eva Švankmajerová and Jan Švankmajer: Dialogue Vision – Touch,
1990: 1–12. 126–131
104. Jan Švankmajer: The Reverse of Touch, (tactile drawing), 1978. 132
105. Jan Švankmajer: Suddenly Elsewhere (tactile drawing), 1978. 132
106. Jan Švankmajer: Superstructure (tactile drawing), 1978. 133
107. Jan Švankmajer: Duel (tactile drawing), 1978. 133
108. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Portrait of Eva Švankmajerová, 1977. 135
109. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Portrait of Vratislav Effenberger (uncovered object),
1978. 137
110. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Portrait of Ludvík Šváb, 1978. 138
111. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Quatrain, 1985. 140
112. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Interpretation of a poem by Benjamin Péret: At the
End of the World, 1989. 140
113. Jan Švankmajer: Interpretation of a poem by Vratislav Effenberger: At
Night, 1989. 140
114. Jan Švankmajer: Soft – Hard (tactile poem), 1988. 141
115. Jan Švankmajer: Heraclitus’s Poem, 1988. 142
116. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Poem, 1988. 143
117. Jan Švankmajer: Crushing of Walnuts in the Palm, 1990. 144
119. Jan Švankmajer: Cunnilingus Game, 1980. 146
120. Jan Švankmajer: Cunnilingus Game, 1980: The aim is to push the ball
with the tongue into the hairy hollow as fast as possible. 146
121. Jan Švankmajer: Utilitarianism Under Encirclement, 1989. 147

xii Touching and Imagining
123. Jan Švankmajer: Vacations (gesture poem), 1983. 148

124. Jan Švankmajer: Three Gestures of Anger, 1979. 149
125. Jan Švankmajer: Destructive Gesture I, 1990. 150
126. Jan Švankmajer: Destructive Gesture II, 1990. 150
127. Jan Švankmajer: Animated Gesture, 1990. 151
128. Jan Švankmajer: The Fall of the House of Usher, 1980. 152
129. Jan Švankmajer: Scene from the Film Dimensions of Dialogue, 1982. 154
130. Jan Švankmajer: Puppet of a Woman, 1996. 156
131. Jan Švankmajer: Puppet of a Man, 1996. 156
132. Jan Švankmajer: Gesture Marionette, 1990. 157
133. Jan Švankmajer: Siamese Triplets (marionette), 1990. 158
134. Jan Švankmajer: Gesture Marionette, 1990. 159
135. Jan Švankmajer: Please Touch (homage to Marcel Duchamp), 1989. 165
136. Jan Švankmajer: Dactyloscopy of Desire (tactile homage to René Magritte),
1989. 166
137. Jan Švankmajer: Tactile Novel, 2003. 167

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book involved collaboration between an author, a translator and

an editor who worked together in two languages, across two hemispheres. Such an
arrangement was only made possible thanks to another contributor: Pavla Kallistová,
Office Manager of Athanor Film Production Company, Prague, who worked tirelessly
and with good humour for several years as the linchpin between Jan Švankmajer and
the translation team in Australia. Nor could the book have come about without the
commitment of Philippa Brewster, our editor at I.B.Tauris, London, whose enthusiasm
for the project is sincerely appreciated. Thanks also to Cecile Rault, who skilfully
guided the book’s production at I.B.Tauris. Michael Havas played a key role in
arranging Stanley Dalby’s initial meeting with Jan Švankmajer in Prague, for which
we are grateful. Bruno Solarik, together with Katerina Pinosova, checked the final
manuscript in his capacity as Jan Švankmajer’s bilingual proxy, making an invaluable
contribution in a fine spirit of friendly colleageality. We extend our appreciation in
that regard to all members of the legendary Group of Czech–Slovak Surrealists. We
also thank Annie Parkinson for copyediting a complex manuscript, and Lisa Eady and
Charles Wong at Post Pre-press for preparing the camera-ready copy. A grant from the
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), enabled
us to pay for the permissions we needed to reproduce artworks in the book. Several
people deserve special mention for their assistance in tracking these down: Susanne
K. Whitaker, Reference/Collection Development Librarian at the Flower-Sprecher
Veterinary Library, Cornell University; Francis M. Naumann of Francis M. Naumann
Fine Art, New York; Mihoko Nishikawa, Curator at the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Tokyo; Josephine McGill, Reference Librarian at the Northern Territory Library,
Darwin; and Belinda Layton and Georgette Mackay (Head of Licensing) at Viscopy,
Sydney. On a shoestring budget, we were enormously helped in our task by the many
people who kindly granted us permission to reproduce artworks free of charge. The
same applies to Jessica Caban at UTS Legal Services and several volunteer lawyers at
the Arts Law Centre of Australia, who answered our general legal queries gratis. For
their assistance with all kinds of things linguistic and technical during the project we
thank Debra Fried, Kate Gilroy, Susan Howell and Pip Martin. Finally, thank you to
the author himself, the incomparable Jan Švankmajer, for allowing us to translate and
republish his book.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
When I was initially approached to translate Švankmajer’s book on tactile art I

agreed to undertake the task with some disquiet. I was familiar with Švankmajer’s
films, and some of his artworks and sculptures. However, to translate a largely
philosophical work, describing esoteric tactile experiments by a leading European
Surrealist, was another thing. After reading several paragraphs I realized that my
primary challenge would be to come to terms with the author’s style of writing.
Švankmajer is not predisposed to making absolute statements. To describe, to explain
the idea or phenomena fully he needs to be very precise because he doesn’t want to
misinform or mislead the reader. Consequently he makes much use of qualifying
clauses in his prose; that is how he writes. My role as a translator has been to judiciously
re-phrase the work to make these vital nuances possible to follow in English, yet to
retain his idiosyncratic style. The author’s use of quotation marks, italics and other
punctuation I left largely untouched, even though it sometimes seemed strange. The
use of tenses, different in the Czech language from English, I had to change, of course.
A few sentences I broke up for easier comprehension by English readers. I am grateful
to Cathryn Vasseleu for her probing of many details that forced me to go back to the
Czech original and re-examine them, particularly to improve the flow of ideas.
Translation of a few sections by some of Švankmajer’s Slovak collaborators in the
experiments described in the book was an added challenge for me. The Slovak language
is very similar to Czech, yet the differences are crucial enough to cause me to seek
assistance from a couple of native Slovaks, Judy Dlask and Vladimir Osust. Then there
was the intricate decision to make about texts by famous writers, Freud, Marinetti and
such. Should I re-translate from the Czech translation of the original German or Italian
and so on, or, where there were widely known English translations, should I quote
those? The final editorial decision was for the latter.
There is no easy, lazy way to translate, there is only a laborious one. This was not
the most difficult thing I have done in my life, but it certainly was the most difficult
translation I have attempted. Considering that there are just over ten million Czech-
speaking inhabitants in that small country, the effort will have been worth it if it opens
this consequential work to a much larger English-speaking world of new readers.
Stanley Dalby
Sydney

EDITOR’S PREFACE
Jan Švankmajer is renowned as a Czech Surrealist filmmaker who weaves

his material from the dark side of life. As well as using puppets and live actors,
Švankmajer transforms the most banal objects and substances into living things in
his films, making us believe he can animate anything. Švankmajer also extends filmic
experience to include tactile sensation through the communicative powers of touch.
Throughout his career Švankmajer has worked in many other media beside cinema:
as a scriptwriter, poet, artist, puppet-theatre master, and as a member of the Group
of Czech-Slovak Surrealists. In the mid-1970s, Švankmajer began making objects for
tactile experimentation with the members of this group. He continued his research from
1974–1983. For seven years during that period he temporarily abandoned film directing
after censorship of his work by the then Communist government of Czechoslovakia
(now Czech and Slovak Republics). Instead, he studied the nature of tactile phenomena
and explored the relationship between imagination and our sense of touch. He wrote
a book about his experiments, Hmat a Imaginace [Touch and Imagination], of which
he produced five copies in 1983, all with ‘tactile’ covers. Featuring rabbit fur along the
spine and a hand shape cut out of sandpaper on the front, these copies circulated as
samizdat, that is, works which were clandestinely produced and distributed to evade
officially imposed censorship.1 Hmat a Imaginace has now been translated into English
by Stanley Dalby, and is published here as Touching and Imagining.
Švankmajer’s book is hard to classify. It is not set out systematically, and he says that
to regard the text as a programmatic script for his work ‘would be slightly overdoing
it’.2 The Surrealist artist aligns his work in general with poetry and alchemy – both arts
of metamorphosis. Distilled from psychological experiments on his fellow Surrealists
and from Švankmajer’s own childhood experiences, Touching and Imagining is a
kind of alchemist’s philosophical treatise, not exact in its course but exactly directed
nevertheless. Analogies aside, Švankmajer’s book forms part of his theoretical activity.
Researching into the nature of tactile phenomena and the imagination, the results of
his experiments bore out something remarkable: the existence of a ‘tactile imagination’
and ‘tactile memory’. Regardless of how it is categorized, his pioneering theoretical
work makes a highly original contribution to ways of thinking about the psychical
dimensions of touching.
Few, if any, other artists’ theoretical works include playful, darkly humorous,
occasionally erotic tactile objects, collages, games, poems and scenarios, as Švankmajer’s

xvi Touching and Imagining
book does. These are included neither as illustrative examples nor as a gallery of art
objects. Instead, they have an essential function as experiments with which Švankmajer
sought to prove that tactile memory and a tactile imagination actually exist. Both, he
argues, are prerequisites for the practice of tactile art. Švankmajer first demonstrated
this in a game he devised called ‘Restorer’, the purpose of which was to study the
extent to which touch is capable of stimulating associative thinking and becoming
an imaginative stimulus, as opposed to having a merely identifying or utilitarian
function.
In Švankmajer’s book, theory and experiment are supplemented by history and
archive. Many avant-garde artists and filmmakers have experimented with ‘Tactilism’
(the title of F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1921). Max Ernst, Luis Buñuel,
Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim and Edith Clifford Williams
figure prominently among them. Švankmajer acknowledges their work, and that of
many others, in a short anthology of tactile art, including a subchapter devoted to
Surrealist exponents. His exemplary collection tracing the development of modernist
tactile art also underlines that Czechoslovak Surrealism, developed from Karel Teige’s
and Vítězslav Nezval’s Poetism, has roots that are different from but similar to French
Surrealism.
The circumstances in which the English language edition of Hmat a Imaginace came
about are less dramatic than those of its writing. That two Australians were involved
is noteworthy, if only because the part-antipodean origin of Touching and Imagining is
indicative of the cosmopolitanism of the themes it addresses. The story is a simple one.
I cannot read Czech. Intrigued by the few fragments of Hmat a Imaginace that had
been translated into English, I asked a translator friend, Stanley Dalby, if he would be
interested in translating the whole book into English.3 With some hesitation he agreed,
not being certain that he was up to the task of translating Jan Švankmajer’s complex
prose. In January 2008, on a visit to Prague, Stanley obtained Švankmajer’s permission
to publish the translation, in a meeting arranged by Michael Havas. What a Herculean
task Stanley took on. Not only did it involve translating a book written partly in Slovak
as well as Czech, and associated texts, into English, but also all correspondence between
author and editor (and eventually, publisher) whose respective native language is a
mystery to each other.
The complete text of Hmat a Imaginace is reproduced here, without revision.
I have made only minimal editorial amendments, as has the translator, all directed
towards making the text as accessible to English language readers as the process of
translation allows. In October 2011 Stanley and I met with Jan Švankmajer in Horní
Staňkov, southwestern Bohemia and showed him the manuscript. Bruno Solařik,
whom Švankmajer asked to read over it, amended some Czech details, together with
Kateřina Pinosová. The images are those in the original book, along with a few more
tactile artworks provided by Jan Švankmajer. Stanley Dalby and I are delighted that
Švankmajer also wrote a new introduction to this English translation.
In addition, three published short pieces are reprinted here (also translated by
Dalby). ‘Tactilism’ (1989), one of two that are placed preliminary to the book, and
‘Tactilism Reviewed’ (2003), placed as an afterword, are Švankmajer’s reflections on his
experimentation with tactile art.4 Some minor repetition within these texts is inevitable
given their similar theme. Both are included, unedited, for their value as documents
in which Švankmajer talks about the role tactile memory plays in his films, at intervals
spanning thirty years. ‘Touch’ (1994), written by renowned Czech painter, ceramicist
and writer, Eva Švankmajerová (Švankmajer’s wife and collaborator until her death in

editor’s preface xvii
2. Samizdat edition (five copies with tactile cover), Hmat a Imaginace, 1983
2005), is also included prior to the main translation, both for its razor-sharp wit and
insight, and as an invitation into the book.5
At the time Švankmajer wrote Hmat a Imaginace its Surrealist intentions were
recognizable in connection with the history of artistic avant-gardes. Translated into
English and republished almost thirty years later, Touching and Imagining will be judged
by some readers through the prism of what Surrealism means today. I hope Švankmajer’s
treatise on the interconnected communicative powers of touch and imagination will
also inspire other forms of interpretation – some perhaps tactile.
Cathryn Vasseleu
Darwin

The seemingly playful basis of Švankmajer’s work is not merely an attempt at
sarcasm or negation of negation. The positive aspects are found most clearly in
his experimentation with tactile objects. What might appear to be a frivolous
game suddenly acquires an intellectual function on a level with a surrealistic
phenomenological imagination, approaching the relationship between uncon
sciousness and emerging consciousness.
Vratislav Effenberger, 19796

INTRODUCTION TO THE
ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDITION
My tactile experimentation began somewhat out of spite. My first tactile

object took form shortly after I had to abandon working on the film The Castle of
Otranto (1973–9). I actually refused to do a re-shoot to conform to the orders of the
management of Krátký Film. Since it was not my first confrontation with censorship
after the Soviet occupation, when the ideology became very restrictive, I concluded
that effectively I could not make my own films. That situation lasted for seven long
years during which I occupied myself with an intensive study of touch in relation to
imagination. I turned to a field of creativity that could be regarded as almost an extreme
contradiction to the audiovisual film. Without that prohibition, the experimentation
described in this book would probably have never happened; so much for the idea that
totalitarian systems and censorship act as a brake on original creativity. In a sense they
act in exactly the opposite way. To overcome difficulties and to get around prohibitions
whips up defiance and subversion, which is inherent in all creativity worth that name;
it achieves fine nuances.
At that time the Surrealist Group, which Eva and I were members of since 1970, was
preoccupied with a theme: Interpretation as Creative Activity. The Group was again
languishing in the underground without any chance to publicize itself or to exhibit,
and was relegated to isolation and samizdat. We initiated a number of interpretative
games on that theme. We wanted to demonstrate the priority of the creative process
above the final artefact. We believed that in times when, on the one hand, creativity was
commercialized and, on the other, slavishly followed ideology, there was need for some
alternative – as radical an alternative as possible. Not just a reaction but an ‘absolute
departure’. What we visualized was an interpretative delirium, a trance, a chain reaction
in which the ‘artistic artefact’ would dissolve and lose its value. It would become a mere
excrement of the creative process. The creative process would gain in basic importance
because its realization, its foundation, would be that which carries with it the sense
of creation, the therapeutic influence that undermines, that assists survival in this
prostituted world. Something that is not possible to misuse ideologically or to turn
into cash.
Into this group endeavour I brought the game of ‘Restorer’. A banal picture of
a restorer at work was the start of an interpretative process and the resulting object
comprising waste fragments of reality, furthermore covered by black cloth, could hardly

xx Touching and Imagining
bless itself with the name of ‘artistic artefact’. The meaning was found by uncovering the
creative process, unlocking the symbols and analogical connections, in tactile memories
from childhood, all of which the group found liberating. Firstly our touch, dulled by
manual work, had to be dragged away from utilitarianism and returned to imaginative
childhood experiences, to the discoveries of the original world. It is important to bear in
mind that if, in today’s world, ‘art’ has any purpose it is to liberate us. Liberate us from
the principle of reality, from that pragmatic rope which has regimented us from birth
and return us to the principle of pleasure. Repression is not only a product of totalitarian
regimes, it is in the foundations of all civilizations (as we know from Sigmund Freud). It
starts in earliest childhood: Don’t touch it, phoo, you’ll get dirty, don’t lick your fingers,
it’ll make you sick, go and wash yourself, what have you been sticking your fingers into,
don’t pick your nose, don’t walk in the mud, let go of it now . . .
Jan Švankmajer
Prague

TACTILISM
Since the mid-1970s I have busied myself with tactile experimentation. Initially
it seemed to be an innocent game. I made an object for a collective tactile experiment
concerning interpretation that we were working with at the time in the Surrealist
Group. The results were so encouraging that these experiments filled up the entire
seven years during which I was not allowed to make my own films. In the early 1980s,
when opportunities to make animated films opened up again, I kept wondering how
to utilize my tactile ‘experiences’ in them. At first it seemed to be paradoxical. After
all, film is, foremost, an audiovisual medium. When I started to work on E. A. Poe’s
story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (one of the conditions of working again on films
was that I would not shoot my own themes, but would select some classical fiction)
I found myself struggling in a complex world. In Poe’s work I discovered what an
enormous role touch played in his psychological studies of pathological behaviour. The
3. New Eroticism (tactile props from the film Conspirators of Pleasure), 1996

xxii Touching and Imagining
4. New Eroticism (tactile props from the film Conspirators of Pleasure), 1996
sense of touch, which we are barely aware of in everyday life, at times of psychic strain
becomes hugely amplified (as was shown in my questionnaire on squeamishness). Poe
knew this (most likely even experienced it), which is why his stories are teeming with
descriptions of tactile sensations. For readers these sensations are second hand, not
directly experienced with their own bodies, but the tactile imagination is capable of
re-creating them quite intensely. As evidenced by the results of my above-mentioned
questionnaire on squeamishness, there exists such a thing as ‘tactile memory’, reaching
into the most remote recesses of our childhood. From there it emerges in the form
of analogy evoked by the slightest tactile stimulus or tactile fantasy, thereby making
‘tactile art’ communicative. (For instance Goldstein’s neurological case histories, as
described by Merleau-Ponty, challenged the belief that touch must always involve
direct contact.)
Touch played a significant role even in my older films (for instance the emphasis
on the detailed structure of close-up film objects), but since the 1980s (The Fall of the
House of Usher (1980), Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), The Pendulum, The Pit, and Hope
(1983)) I worked deliberately on evoking these neglected or hidden tactile feelings
and tried to enrich the emotional arsenal of filmic expression. I became increasingly
conscious that to revive the general impoverishment of sensibilities in our civilization
the sense of touch can play an important part, as so far it has not been discredited in
‘artistic endeavours’. After all, we have all been seeking the sense of tactile security since
our birth, through physical contact with our mothers’ bodies. That was our first tactile
contact with the world, before we could see, smell, hear or taste.
Jan Švankmajer
1989

TOUCH
In certain circumstances people who are in a different time and place can
touch each other. Anyone can see with their own eyes that they can touch messages on
a piece of paper, on a document or an ordinary letter.
The tedious, antiquated, bureaucratic ‘sorting’, ranking of events, of relationships,
so futile and dangerous, was meant to purge the mad eroticism of touch; to leave it
to the blind. Our judgements, just like the thoughts of our pupils, are censored: ‘No
touching!’ We call it ‘education’. After all, there are some who get paid for touching,
that is why they are so well paid for it. That is not what the poet meant. Instinctively
he was always ready to escape from such a strait jacket. He probably hoped that we
would warmly welcome him as a sad child reprimanded for an innocent drawing. Why
should he pay? He was simply struggling with human misery, trying to find a way out.
We shouldn’t laugh at him, when we can see some among us weaving their own carpets
or forcing the weaker ones to do it for them. We touch materials. Have you ever seen
women at counters handling rolls of repulsive textiles ‘woven’ by other women (or
children)? Not lecherously – that would suggest a different dimension. But greedily.
Full of desire. To touch and to hold for a moment. In such places, a sign ‘No touching!’
would be meaningless. Similarly, we are afraid of silence and the absence of some fence
along which I ran my finger on my way here. In pleasurable privacy. But you know too,
that touching can be so wonderful that its absence is called imprisonment. I won’t hold
it against you. All the same, let’s be passionate, yet careful!
Eva Švankmajerová
1994

5. Utilitarian Bondage (tactile chair), 1977

1
INTRODUCTION
Please Touch
Marcel Duchamp, 1947
Liberation always comprises of achieving, against degenerate stylistic, cultural and

historical customs, against empty philosophy, abstract logic, withered intellect
and barren tradition, a forever young, forever regenerating, accessible, honest and
truthful vision, which does not violate objects or life but freely surrenders to the
fullness of the moment. I can imagine an artist who would correct an occasion
of corrupted vision with an appeal to honest touch; liberation means not being
afraid of overthrowing the hierarchy of authority and summoning the courage
for honest primitivism in times of perverse, false and illusory cultural and artistic
complexity.
F. X. Šalda, 19011
Our sight is being corrupted on an unimaginable scale. Daily it is drowned and

blunted by a flood of the most banal consumerist culture which, aided by television,
commercial film and advertising, degrades our visual sensibilities. To force the eyes to
‘stop’, to rest on an object and to enable its comprehension by our visual perceptions,
is becoming more difficult with our increasingly superficial powers of observation.
Whenever any of our senses have to deal with issues of art, we need to establish favourable
conditions for this by freeing a specific sense, or its fundamental capacity, from utilitarian
functions. The physical sense, commonly referred to as touch, by its very name implies that
its exploitation happens above all with hands, with fingers. Contemporary technological
civilization is daily liberating our hands from the coarsest of manual labour, thereby
potentially freeing them for ‘aesthetic’ perceptions. The current dilemma facing our
tactile sense is either to let it atrophy, as has happened during our evolution as humans,
along with other senses which became superfluous (the latest one being the sense of
smell), or to cultivate and apply it to functions other than manual labour. It will certainly
require development over a long time. It will be a matter of adaptation, but didn’t the
eye and the ear have to adapt? Precisely because right now we are standing at practically
the zero point of this new function for our sense of touch, I feel justified in believing in a
maximally authentic experience of the tactile world within and outside of us.

2 Touching and Imagining
The physical sense has a special standing among the so-called higher senses. While
vision and hearing are plainly objective senses, taste and smell are subjective. Touch is
somewhere in the middle, partly objective, partly subjective. While touching, we project
a sensation outwardly, outside of us; at the same time we perceive it subjectively, on our
skin. It means that touch can play an important role in overcoming the opposition
of Object – Subject. Perhaps precisely because touch had, of all senses, the longest
utilitarian function it could not for practical reasons become ‘aesthetic’, it retained
primarily a certain ‘primitive’ connection with the world. There is also the fact that the
physical sense plays one of the most important roles in eroticism. This ‘primitivism’, not
yet trivialized by aesthetic codes, and the instinctive experiences of tactile perception,
will always throw us back to the deepest layers of our unconscious. Touch could well
be the very sense most suitable for the functions of modern art. The fact that up to
now touch stood on the sidelines of art history can be put down to its slavery to the
mundane, from which it is slowly freeing itself. The experimentation that I am here
proposing originated in an interpretative play that I prepared in 1974 for my friends in
the Surrealist Group. The results were so thought provoking that, for me, henceforth
touch became a potentially revolutionary class of our sensory life, brutally exploited and
suppressed, supposedly in the interest of culture and civilization.

2
BETWEEN UTILITARIANISM AND IMAGINATION
The history of human spirit, as seen through psychoanalytical research, shows

that all human needs are comprised firstly of material and utilitarian needs and
how the fulfilment of one leads to the fulfilment of the other. Any aesthetic
activities first lean towards the utilitarian functions serving practical life (cave
paintings, Middle Ages trade skills, folklore) and only later becomes independent
of them. Aesthetic activity and impressionability, just like sexuality, comes to life
in conjunction with the most important living, physical and working functions.
Karel Teige, ‘Poetry for the Five Senses or the Second Manifesto of Poetism’,
19281
6. Touching is one of our basic needs. If we could not

use our sense of touch we would suffer mental
deprivation. Under each square centimetre of the tip
of our forefinger are 200 nerve endings; they register
cold, heat or pain according to the nerve structure.
7. Meissner’s tactile loop magnified by factor of

150. The oval cluster of cells of this loop is one
millimetre below the fingertip. The group in the
middle represents tactile cells connected to nerve
connections. The spiral nerve transmits a signal to
the brain where it is identified. Tactile sensations are
associated with visual ones that manifest themselves
strongly, for instance, in the erotic field.

Tactile utilitarianism objects Tactile utilitarianism activities

Comb Manual work
Toothbrush General sexual activity
Face cloth and brush Visit to a doctor (medical examination)
Soap Surgical procedure
Ointments and creams Barefoot walking
Manicure scissors Sunbaking
Clothes, shoes Swimming
Massage equipment Body washing
Working equipment, tools, materials Getting dressed
Condoms Trimming fingernails
Surgical tools Perspiring
Weapons etc.
etc.
Experiments in expanding the utilitarian functions of touch

These experiments take place in the two spheres of our psychological life:
1. Touch; used to enlarge the possibilities of inter-human communication.
2. Tactile therapy.
Research into the fundamental importance of tactile communication, conducted

in the USA in the 1950s by Frank A. Geldard, Professor of Psychology and Dean
of the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, can be
regarded as significant. Even though this research was undertaken for totally utilitarian
purposes (it was financed by the Ministry of Navy) and has little connection with my
experimentation, it is interesting for several reasons.
Science finally took notice of the unrealized potential of touch and commenced its
systematic investigation.2 Furthermore, it pointed to the quantitative range of tactile
sensibilities and technical perspective of its exploitation, which could also have some
bearing on tactile art.3
Although tactile therapy could be classed in some ways among the unconventional
utilitarian actions (attempting relaxation, personal balance, improving of physical and
mental condition and so on), at the same time it fits into imaginative tactile procedures,
reminiscent of a simple nursery rhyme.4
There is no doubt that the application of tactile therapy can have a considerable effect
on the cultivation of touch, thereby serving as a preparatory education of future
tactile ‘audiences’. I regard this as being of major significance for the new tactile
arts. Jerzy Grotowski has attempted expansion of tactile perceptions beyond narrow
utilitarian functions in some para-theatrical projects. Richard Mennen, in ‘Grotowski’s
Paratheatrical Projects,’ describes one such experience:
As with Scierski’s ‘narrow group,’ Cieslak’s was a one-day introduction to a process

that ordinarily takes several weeks. There were more than thirty participants who
waded up streams, jumped in mud holes, danced with flaming torches, caressed
each other with wheat but there were so many experiences that later I could not
recall the precise sequence. By the end I felt a profound connection with the
natural world and that I had begun to search in a very physical way for roots and
sources. One of the most memorable moments was when I found myself digging

between utilitarianism and imagination 5
with my hands into the loose earth of a recently ploughed field full of roots and
asking the roots who I was. I wrote in my journal:
As I dug deeper into the earth, my whole arm in it and the roots, I felt in my body, with
each thrust, something strong, hidden, like birth, like sex, like death; frightening and
necessary. I do not know what it was, but it was something. It was also like a source.5
It seems that the purpose of these experiments is to break with the usual stereotypes of
tactile (and non-tactile) sensory experiences, to divorce them from utilitarianism and
to stimulate the imagination. In that sense it is a pragmatic preparation of sensitivity,
of its sharpening, of freeing it from utilitarian habits, to enable us to perceive the world
and its challenges in a new way. It is comparable to the preparation of tactile perception
of objects – as described by Marinetti in his manifesto. Thus even the para-theatrical
project of Jerzy Grotowski and similarly the tactile therapy of Bernard Gunther can be
included in the introductory phases of imaginative tactile arts.
8. Lygia Clark: The I and the You: Cloth–Body–Cloth series, 1960

In 1980 I made a series of tactile plates to be used in psychological tests at the Children’s
Psychiatric Clinic, Motol Hospital, Prague. Naturally, all the plates were covered so that
the subjects had to rely entirely on their sense of touch.
A. a) yellow b) blue c) green B. d) purple e) orange f) red

9. A and B: Tablets of elementary structures for studying ‘colour touch’
10. C. – Mother 11. D. – Animal : Two Rorschach tactile tablets
12. E. – Way : Tablet of tactile orientation and

tactile memory. (The subject inserts a
finger – or even several fingers – into the
furry ‘nook’ A, and sets out on the road
marked out with iron spikes till he reaches
the ‘nook’ B. Then the subject tries to
‘draw’ the road from memory including all
curves and changes of direction.)

Initial results with tactile stimulative material

First part – stimulative Tablets A and B (‘colours’)
The participants claimed to sense altogether:
– seven standard colours (primary and compound) – red (R), yellow (Y), green (G),
blue (B), purple (P), orange (O) and brown (BR);
– three monochromes – black (BL), grey (GR) and white (W);
– two more colours – ginger (GI) and russet (RS).
Except for the last two, every colour occurred at least five times (the primary colours at
least twelve times).
To ease the handling process it was necessary to arrange the colours into larger
groups because the variety of colours used was too large in relation to the small number
of stimulations. I decided to arrange the colours according to their traditional groups,
‘warm’ – R, Y, BR, O, ‘cold’ – B, G, P and monochromatic – BL, GR, W – without
differentiating them into primary or compound colours. (GI and RS were also put into
the ‘warm’ group.)
Table 1 – Incidence of colour groups in individual tactile stimuli

Colour group Cold Warm Monochromatic
a 7 5 3
b 2 9 4
c 6 7 2
d 3.5 8.5 3
e 5 6 4
f 4 10 1
Totals 27.5 45.5 17
A statistical evaluation is inappropriate, not just because of the small sample but above
all because of the whole nature of the inquiry (for instance there was no prior decision
about the number of colours the subject could use).
Colour characteristics of the stimulative tablets

This is an attempt to analyse colour associations in relation to individual tables.
Tablet a largely cold colours (particularly blue), very few warm colours (red completely
absent);
Tablet b preponderance of dark, monochromatic and warm colours (especially black
and all warm ones), which are strengthened by the occurrence of non-typical
warms (ginger and russet); cold colours are largely absent, blue entirely;
Tablet c slightly colder colours (especially blue) and darker chromatic ones (absence
of grey and white);
Tablet d difficult to characterize, leaning towards warmer compound colours (brown),
otherwise the range of colours is not significant;
Tablet e few compound colours, fewer warm ones and many monochromatic ones
(especially black) side by side with distinctly warm, distinctly cold and
monochromatic ones;
Tablet f many warm colours, absence of darker chromatics (black and grey) and cold
colours emphasise lightness (light blue and green).

Emotional evaluation of the tablets

The tablet named by the subjects as on top of the list of emotional evaluation (the most
sympathetic) was given two points, in the second place one point, in the first place of negative
evaluation (least sympathetic) minus two points, in the second place minus 1 point.
Table 2 – Order of liking of tablet (difference of weighted positive and negative scores)
Positive Negative
1. f +7 points 14 7
2. a +5 points 5 0
3. d +3 points 8 5
4. b –1 point 15 14
5. e –1 point 2 3
6. c –13 points 1 14
In first place is the tablet with the objectively most popular sample (rated by the
subjects – ‘smooth, round, rough’ and similar). In second place is the relatively most
structured tablet (compared with Tablet c, from which it differs by having a smoother
surface) generally characterized by the subjects in a consistent way (‘wavy, wave like’
and similar). In the last place is the clearly slanting, structured tablet with a rough
surface (according to the participants – ‘sharp, scrappy, cutting’). Simple valuation in
terms of positive and negative choices is not adequate because some tablets were chosen
up to six times more often (positive and negative) than others.
Table 3 – Order of tablets according to overall number of votes (positive and negative)
1. b 29 votes 4. d 13 votes
2. f 21 votes 5. a 5 votes
3. c 15 votes 6. e 5 votes
Most noticeable are the emotional valuations of Tablet b. It is valued most equivocally of
all tablets (14 times positive and 15 times negative). Various statements illustrate these
differences well: positive – pointy, harsh, ticklish and similar; negative – scratchy, prickly,
sharp. While in the case of the positive valuation this tablet is valued objectively (oblong,
sharp), in the negative valuation these characteristics are also expressed, but generally
described more subjectively (scratchy, prickly), suggesting fear of injury.
The second most noticeable tablet is f. It attracts positive responses like ‘soft, gently
round, funny, has soft bump’ and negative ones ‘sharply round, rugged’. This tablet,
coming in second place, indicates its relatively positive attraction. Tablet c, in third
place, is to a certain extent the opposite of the previous one, Tablet f. Being almost
singularly negatively valued it is the tablet attracting most negative attention. Also
worth mentioning is the least singular attraction of the second most popular Tablet
a – its popularity caused by a small number of positive choices combined with the
absence of negative choices.
Second part – global stimuli – C and D

The instructions were designed to lead to reactions causing associations and tactile
perceptions, so that the participants would somehow express their feelings towards the
stimulus as a whole. In this sense some kind of interpretation (see later) was achieved by

only eleven participants (74 per cent) for the two tablets, the remainder did not express
any. In practice, all subjects gave an interpretation after some time elapsed while they
re-examined the object. We will demonstrate the phases taken to acquaint the subjects
with the stimulus, their reactions and how we were observing them.
First phase – analysis and recognition of the stimuli

Without exception this occurred in all subjects right from the start. They described
what they were touching – i.e. they identified the materials – for instance ‘this is a
sponge and underneath some hair – from a fur, then a brush, again a cut-up sponge and
something like a face-washer’. In this phase a subject was unable to distance himself/
herself from the recognition of the impulse, even if it was suggested (in this instance
that was premature). Not until this phase was over was the subject capable of attempting
some generalisation and higher level of interpretation, of extending (by abstracting from
the concrete materials he/she was still discovering) beyond the identification he/she was
making with the fantasy or real world. This first phase lasted from several seconds up to
several minutes and some subjects never progressed beyond it.
Second phase – interpretative (classifying – associating – of real or fantasy world to tactile

sensations)
This was not the same for all subjects. When it did happen (and then almost without
exception it came about after some suggestions or direct urging), it seemed that the
subject tended still to remain in the first phase, as if he/she didn’t ‘have enough of it’.
At other times the interpretation reached only a low level as previously described – it
became a matter of identifying materials and objects from the first phase, naming them,
describing their purpose, which was no more relevant to their tactile experience – for
instance the previously recognized sponge and hair in the first phase led to an
interpretation ‘there’s a brush and a sponge – some washing items’. There appears to
be an association with some characteristic objects, as remembered by the subjects from
previous experiences. Interpretation in the true sense of the word, as we are going to use
it, appeared with 74 per cent of participants. In this sense we think of interpretation as
classifying – associating the content of the real or imaginary world with tactile impulses,
rather than associations based on customary usage of objects known previously.
Content of interpretations
In general, the motive is natural and architectural (exterior) for 50 per cent of all
interpretations and then there are interpretations of faces and heads of people and animals,
34 per cent, and concrete objects – complete with their usage or some indication of it.
Table 4 – Overview of contents of interpretation to stimuli C and D

Stimulus C – mother Stimulus D – animal
Nature (lawn; African savannah) x 5 (playground; park) x 3
Architecture (houses; hamlet) x 2 (2 houses) x 4
Animal heads (‘goat head’) x 2 (old beggar) x 1
Human heads (‘devil’) x 1 (‘face of water sprite’) x 4
Concrete description and usage (‘something to wash with: sponges and
(‘items for washing’) x 1 scrubbing brushes’) x 1
Concrete description, no usage (‘brush’) x 2 --

Stimulus C: Appears to be more difficult (more primitive and eliciting weaker

interpretations – ‘concretizations’), suggesting a more diffused impression (more
natural motives).
Stimulus D: Is easier (less concretization), concrete, more structured and inclusive
of interpretation (architectural) and less diffuse (more natural) especially a large
proportion of animate motives (human – imaginary – and animal faces).
Stimulus D seems to be more valuable than C.
Note to the third part of the experiment (Tablet E)

This part demonstrates how it is possible to achieve results contrary to the previous
stimuli. The suggested modification does not relate to the stimulative material itself
but a method of maximising its possibilities. For instance, it was possible to do the
following: to ask the subject to do a parallel drawing with one hand of what he/she
was feeling with the other hand while blindfolded. That would become more of an
experiment in motor coordination of two hands without the benefit of sight. A further
drawing of the same thing (‘a maze’) could be done with the help of sight but without
the parallel tactile sensation or the previous drawing. This would measure recall and
accuracy of memory and movements of the hand in space. A comparison of such two
reproductions would result in interesting findings regarding coordination of hands and
the role of sight and memory in reproduction of tactile spatial perception.
Professor of Psychology Luděk Vrba, Children’s Psychiatric Clinic, Motol 1981
(unpublished notes)
Like many other ‘discoveries’ of modern art, tactilism has its infant imagery in
childhood games. Apart from Blind Man’s Bluff there are others:
Game to recognize likeness

Children stand in a circle and a blindfolded child in the centre attempts to guess
the identity of another child by touching his or her face.
Writing on the back

Using a finger or a stick, numbers, short words or even images are drawn on the
‘chosen one’ whose role it is to ‘read’ them or to guess them.
Such children’s games, unlike most of the suggestions for tactile activities in
Gunther’s Sense Relaxation, have an imaginative basis. I extended them into my
own tactile games.

A visit, 1976
Place a chair in the middle of the room
a small, empty room
it doesn’t have to be in the centre
simply somewhere in the room.
Turn out the lights, blacken the windows.
Total darkness.
Lay down sheets of sandpaper from the door leading to the chair.
Two players.
Firstly, one player places on the seat and the back of the chair various objects that by
their structure and distinctive shape will express an improvised theme (early spring,
pig-on-the-spit feast or vacation, for instance).
Meanwhile, the second player removes all his/her clothes and enters when called in.
He/she tries to feel with his/her bare foot the first sheet of sandpaper on the floor near
the door. From there the player feels for the next piece of sandpaper which is lying
somewhere within a footstep’s reach. In this fashion the player continues until step by
step he/she reaches the chair. The player sits down on the objects on the chair, leans on
the back of the chair, then tries to guess the theme of the improvisation.
The players swap roles.
A game for one year, 1976

Prepare about one litre of fresh starch glue. (In a cup mix a little cold water with several
spoonfuls of flour, then pour boiling water into it, stirring constantly.) In a shoebox
place some hard small balls, peas, beads or pellets. Into another box put some sharp
and cold materials such as nails, studs and drawing pins. Into yet another box place
sand, sawdust or flour. And into the fourth box place soft, pliable materials, small
textile pieces, teased cotton wool, hairballs.
Put on a blindfold.
Place the boxes in various places in a closed room.
Immerse hands in the warm starch glue.
Search for the boxes in the room.
Place the left hand’s palm in the first box, back of the hand in the second box.
Place the palm of the right hand in the third box, then the back into the fourth box.
The winner is whoever does it fastest.
Clifford Williams game, 1976

First wash hands in running cold water.
Then place hands into a pile of wood dust.
Allow to dry.
Rub the sawdust off.
Rub hands with Vaseline.
Put on rubber gloves.
Put hands into the middle of a medium sized baking dish and ask your assistant, whom
during the whole procedure you address as Mrs Williams, to pour some thin plaster of
Paris on your hands.
Concentrate on the sensation of the setting plaster, on the stiffening and warmth
generated by the process.
Pull hands out of the rubber gloves and for the next week suggest to your visitors that,
instead of shaking hands with you, they insert their hand in the glove.

3
RESTORER
Experiment in tactile interpretation

Participants: Micheline Bounoure, Vratislav Effenberger, Albert Marenčin, Emila
Medková, Juraj Mojžíš, Alena Nádvorníková, Martin Stejskal, Ludvík Šváb
A tactile objecT is to tactile sensations like a kind of burrow with malicious,

secluded spaces, secret passageways and traps. It is not only about touching with
fingers, registering harmonious or disharmonious changes of structures but also about
shapes, identified or otherwise; about blending of two or more structures, when we
are searching for something in something else; about the unwitting touching of free,
floating fragments of things capable of arousing reflexive associations; about movement,
passive or accommodating. The perception of a tactile object is like an expedition into
an unknown country of dreams, where nothing is certain, where even clearly familiar
objects assume the appearance of something unreal, where one has to rely on one’s own
ability of association and tactile memories which, however, can always mislead us. The
simple act of inserting one’s hand into the black sleeve of the object is tantamount to
inserting one’s hand into the mouth of truth and waiting for a judgement.
13. Restorer (tactile object), 1974

restorer 13
14. Restorer at Work (newspaper photograph)
Purpose of the experiment

To find out:
1) If touch, as one of the senses, is capable of stimulating associative thinking and
becoming a stimulus for imagination.
2) If individual tactile objects, shapes and structures, arranged in certain imaginative
relationships, after ‘reading’ by touch are capable of producing organization into
a unified whole.
3) To what extent is a subjective tactile perception capable of objectivity.
4) If touch, isolated from other senses, is capable of causing ‘aesthetic’ arousal.
5) If the transmission plays any part in the visualization of the touched objects (and
the associated problems of synaesthesia).
In short, if touch, as a sense, is capable of perceiving an artwork in a way similar to

vision and hearing.
Rules of the game

The participants of the experiment were presented with an object made by me, an
imaginative tactile interpretation of a photograph, Restorer at Work. No one except me
knew the original photograph.
The participants in the experiments were required to:
1) Insert the hand (or hands) into a double-lined sleeve material, to identify and list
the items and their structures and to describe their immediate impressions.
2) Describe the tactile impressions, their consequent associations and analogies, and
an imaginative whole.
3) Try to figure out which of the ten selected photographs was a model for the
author’s tactile interpretation.

Additional questions
a) What were your first feelings immediately before and after the insertion of the
hand (or hands) into the object?
b) Did you sense the felt items in colour, in black and white, or did your tactile
sensations take place ‘in the darkness?’
1974
Restorer Experiment
(My own verbal, imaginary interpretation of the newspaper photograph in relation to
the tactile object.)
A footprint on the face, footprint of the right foot that stepped on the face, chamois
upper of the shoe. Bearded face, shoe with hair and a beard. Gagged mouth, gagged with
the foot – shoe with the strap fastened, shoe with its toe packed with paper. Smooth,
round object, the exact identification of which is immaterial, represents here the
coolness of the professional concentration and the coolness and technical smoothness
of the syringe, its shape reminiscent of the curve of the restorer’s left thumbnail, his
left hand drawing the attention to the centre of the picture. Two tassels hanging free
above the curve of the nail – two skilled hands with deft golden fingers. Two sequin-
covered spheres hanging above the half weight of a pull-down kitchen lamp, two eyes
which, with the curve of the fingernail, represent the curve of the restorer’s intense
concentration – these are the main agents of a sadistic aggression against the head with
its footprint in place of a face, aggression that is directed against the passive martyr,
against the painted masochist who lacks the pleasure of suffering. The sperm-like string
of beads of the corkscrew boring into the shoe without any emotion, as if the shoe were
the cork of a bottle. Bags of arms, free of tension, bags of nuts blindly colliding with
each other like empty thoughts. Ungainly movement of crammed socks that never seem
to be hitched up. Corks, bits of rags, buttons, nuts – these show passivity incompatible
with the aggression of impersonal sadism – the authenticity of pleasure.
Identifying phase of the experiment

Reproduction of tactile objects, collages and drawings has only a narrow informational
purpose, as the reproductions don’t fulfil the same function as reproductions of painting
or sculpture. With the reproduction of a tactile work, sight necessarily becomes a
strong intermediary which, in contrast to touch, is very specific, and the mysterious
traps set for touch do not sidetrack it into a panic of identification. Nor is there any
necessity for gradual ‘reading’ of the object, a characteristic of touch. Furthermore,
sight immediately commences to appraise the aesthetic quality of the work, something
that is irrelevant to tactile art.
Tactile object ‘Restorer’ is comprised of the following fragments of reality

1) Worn, black ladies’ chamois leather right-foot shoe with a strap across the vamp,
fastened by a metal buckle. The toe of the shoe is filled with crumpled white
paper. Around the heel and the point the shoe is covered with black, fine fur.
2) A corkscrew with wooden, red lacquered handle.
3) Nylon, dark grey knitted sock (man’s) with geometric pattern, filled with cloth
wads of wool and cotton and bottle corks (six pieces).
4) Coarsely knitted winter sock, woollen, white, filled with walnuts and buttons.

restorer 15
15. Jan Švankmajer: Uncovered Object, 1974
5) One half of the cream-coloured ceramic weight of a kitchen pull-down lamp.

6) A buckle from a woman’s waist belt made of black and white beads.
7) Two tassels made of gold fibres.
8) Two small balls covered with golden sequins.
Micheline Bounoure
Missing in the description: The bead buckle from the woman’s belt, buttons in the
sock filled with walnuts, paper in the shoe toe. The weight from the pull-down lamp
is incorrectly described as a mould for making Easter eggs (a plastic object, shaped
like a half-egg). Also missing are the two tassels and the balls covered with sequins.
Vratislav Effenberger
Missing in the description: Paper in the shoe toe, buttons in the sock with walnuts,
bottle corks in the sock with wool and cotton wads, balls with sequins incorrectly
described as balls of fabric. Weight of the pull-down lamp mistakenly described as the
back of a toy bug.
Albert Marenčin
Missing in the description: Paper in the shoe toe, the two sequin-covered balls, buttons
in the sock with walnuts. On the other hand he, and he alone, observes the material
from which the shoe is made (chamois leather). He mistakenly describes the buckle
made of beads as a piece of brocade. In the second sock he incorrectly describes the
number of bottle corks as two (there are six), the wads in the sock he vaguely identifies

as ‘something soft’. He progressively describes the weight from the pull-down lamp as
a torso of a doll, a piece of old lacquered furniture, a flask, a crucible, a masturbating
device, without being able to decide unequivocally on any of these.
Emila Medková
Missing in the description: Corkscrew, the bead buckle, the entire content of one sock
(wads and bottle corks) and the buttons in the second sock. The weight from the pull-
down lamp is incorrectly described as a car lamp.
Juraj Mojžíš
Mojžíš omits the identifying phase; he immediately proceeds to the imaginative
perceiving of the object and to giving preferences to certain objects or structures
that for him have the strongest associations. It is not easy to determine which of the
missing aspects of the description are results of inaccuracy and which are subjective
preferences. Missing in the description: the bead buckle, the sock with bottle corks, the
wads of material in the sack with walnuts (in the text there is mention only of walnuts)
the buttons, tassels, even the balls are missing. The weight of the pull-down lamp is
described only emotionally.
Alena Nádvorníková
In the description of the sock with walnuts, the buttons are missing. There are also
inaccuracies in the identification of materials of different items: so in the sock with
bottle corks are not wads of wool or cotton but pieces of rag. The metal half-egg is
half of a ceramic weight for a pull-down lamp. The tassels above it are made of metal
threads, not leather. The bead-covered buckle, although not indicated as such, is
described correctly. The relative placing of the two socks is rather startling: the sock
with bottle corks is described as being at the top and the sock with walnuts to the right,
below, whilst in reality both socks are next to each other at the same height.
Martin Stejskal
Missing in the description: Content of one sock (bottle corks and wads), the weight of
the pull-down lamp is mistakenly taken for ‘part of the face of some puppet’ and the
material is judged to be bakelite. Furthermore one tassel is missing but the description
of the material from which the tassels are made is accurate. There is uncertainty about
the material for the two balls. Paper in the toe of the shoe and beaded strap (in the form
of the description of the structure) appears only in the imaginative phase.
Ludvík Šváb
Missing in the description: The beaded buckle, paper in the toe of the shoe while
knitted socks are incorrectly identified as ‘jute bags’. In the description of the sock
with walnuts, the buttons are missing. In the other sock, the wads become cotton
wool. The lamp’s half weight is described as ‘an egg-shaped object made of bakelite’
(during the progress of the experiment only this participant identified the item
correctly). Instead of two tassels he felt only one. The two balls covered with sequins
are also missing.
It cannot be stated with certainty which of the difficulties in identifying the items can
be ascribed to the communicative limitation of touch (objective and subjective), to the
unfamiliarity with the experiment or to mere inattention. From this brief account of

restorer 17
16. Martin Stejskal: Visualized Impression (before the imaginative phase), 1974
inaccuracies and omissions in the description of the object it is not possible to judge
its quality (by quality I mean preferring certain characteristics of the individual items
that make up the total object, their shape, structure, placing and so on) which depends
heavily on the associative perception of the objects and finally belongs to the imaginative
phase of the experiment.
Even if none of the participants’ topographical description of the object is complete
and correct, it can be said that their ability to resolve the shapes and structures with
touch was for all of them so objective that in this phase of the experiment it did not
engender in them any false illusions (with the exception perhaps of the description
of the pull-down lamp’s half weight), and so did not result in any serious differences
among them.
For conclusive evidence of the informational capacity of touch, it would be necessary
to set up a comparative test in which the description of tactile objects would be
compared with visual description of the same.
In spite of the described deficiencies in topographical description, it did show that
for all participants touch supplied adequate information to arouse associative memories
and opened the door for imagination.
Imaginative phase of the experiment

Associations stimulated in individual participants by tactile perception of the object
and, above all, their connecting and ranking in imaginary wholes, have qualitative
differences.

Emila Medková regarded this phase as a plateau of freely ranked associations: ‘That
disgusting shoe can only belong to Věra Lukášová, the ceiling light comes from a black
Tatra 603 [luxury car manufactured in the former Czechoslovakia], the first sock is a
pešek [character from a Czech children’s game] who just walks around, the other is a
real Father Christmas sock’, that she did not attempt to connect into some imaginative
whole.
Vratislav Effenberger, without giving any inkling of the process of association, had
an imaginative perception based on a static picture of the Holy Family: ‘on the left, the
female symbol, on the right, male and in the middle the symbol of the infant.’
Alena Nádvorníková compiles two different imaginative wholes from the sequence of
impressions, feelings, associations and analogies but is unable to express her preference
for either: ‘on the left is a feminine environment, on the right a rattling male one, at the
moment of amorous confrontation? Muscles like walnuts, rolling masculine sex, even
a pair of balls and two tassels – a virgin and a man – actually the moment just before
the confrontation. But also: masturbation. The centre is the most disturbing, when the
hand softly strokes the half-egg and the fingers gently feel the rough ripples.’ These
imaginative wholes, in contrast to Vratislav Effenberger, are not mere static pictures;
here the emphasis is on the perception of action (meeting, masturbation). Here the
element of a storyline appears, further developed by Micheline Bounoure, Juraj Mojžíš,
Albert Marenčin and, above all, Ludvík Šváb.
Micheline Bounoure: ‘A childhood night visit in the family home, specifically
forbidden to the children. I found equipment made by a sexually perverted uncle
(very sadistic considering that the corkscrew penetrates Cinderella’s shoe). The uncle
delighted in putting his hands on an Easter egg mould as on a woman’s buttocks.’ . . . In
addition to this fabulous interpretation Micheline Bounoure adds a kind of stocktaking
approach to the object (‘Armament of the Little Indian’) that also appears in Albert
Marenčin’s description. In his case, however, it is more like an inventory of a lady’s
boudoir: ‘. . . the corkscrew, two tassels, baubles, which usually adorn old drapes or
sofas, material with a relief pattern, something like that . . . its order and its sum total
dissolves the chaos of ideas and confused associations and leads into their rational order,
even to fabulation: lady wearing a fur coat, in the midst of an old Art Nouveau interior
with heavy drapes and a sofa and so on.’ While Micheline Bounoure’s inventory-like
interpretation is a mere static and insignificant association, Albert Marenčin’s is an
unequivocal fabulation.
Ludvík Šváb, as indicated by the name of his interpretation, ‘A touch of evil’,
experienced, while perceiving the object, one of his favourite film scenarios: ‘I am
locked up in the cellar, in complete darkness. I have obviously been attacked because a
curtain rope with repulsive tassels on the ends binds me. Evidently I was knocked out,
I remember nothing . . . it must have been an assault because in my mouth I even have
a dirty rough canvas gag that is suffocating me . . . I was obviously blinded and my eye
sockets pierced by a cord with tassels. That was obviously the whole aim.’
Martin Stejskal breaks the perception of the object into three independent, imaginative
wholes in this phase: ‘a dark, yawning snout of a wild animal – shoes are pierced with
the corkscrew. In its death throes, the animal is gasping with its brown snout for the
last breath of rancid air. Furthermore, it is stuffed with a paper gag that undoubtedly
contains some important message. Nearby is a light blue mask – a phallus. Above, the
sky – a region of small, shining, coral beads. Also two symbols of fecundity – breasts
filled to bursting with their fruit – Christmas stocking of my childhood.’ So even here
there is a strong inclination to fabulation.

restorer 19
Juraj Mojžíš, in an imaginative analogy to the tactile object, develops a lyrical

meeting between man and woman: ‘the snowman is reminiscing and skeletons of
trees do not tempt him, he doesn’t fear the place where landscape begins. On the
contrary, he loves the clearing where the woman ends. The night is fed by the stars but
he doesn’t know about it and doesn’t want to. He wants to comprehend the woman’s
beginning but doesn’t understand it. He says to himself, thank you so much, thank
you so much, but still doesn’t understand. He recalls the spring days of grace and still
doesn’t understand. The woman feels touched, even though she has not been touched
(why not?) and says: “Excuse me, perfect love?” She laughs scornfully, then wraps
herself in paper and hisses: “Perfect love,” sets herself on fire, burns up and flakes of
ash whisper: “Perfect love.”’
The fact that most of the participants ‘experience’ the perception dramatically – be it
action or a coherent narrative – apparently suggests a technical kind of communication
with the tactile object. It is not possible to grasp the entire tactile object, as it is with a
painting or a sculpture, it has to be gradually ‘read’ by the fingers. Individual perceptions
come gradually, as in the perception of some event. What is more, in perceiving a
tactile object it is not possible to become mired in aesthetic evaluation. Feelings of
liking or not liking always have a concrete basis. Perceiving an object tactilely, touching
individual parts with one’s fingers, is in itself a ‘manual’ function so it is understandable
that it arouses associations of other kinds (a walk through an old attic, knocking on
cellar walls, masturbating, for example).
Similarly, the inventorial interpretation of the object (collection of arms that
belongs to the Little Indian, content of lady’s modern boudoir, list of Emily Medková’s
analogies) needs to be considered as a gradual familiarization belonging to distinctive
tactile specifications, taking it beyond the boundary of creative art (although it does
share common spatial limitations – some boundaries and, to some extent, even the
materials used) and closer to literature, with which it shares precisely the same gradual
perception of the work, the potential visualisation of something ‘read’.
Synaesthesia
Research into the frequency and quality of dual perception would require
experimentation aimed at a specific problem and would have to be done with a larger
number of people. I believe and assume that a synaesthetic touch/vision perception
will not be any more or less frequent than hearing/vision perception. At any rate, in
principle it can be assumed that a human capacity for perceiving objects by touch
equals the capacity to visualize them. Therefore, such capacities would exist on a scale
of tactile ‘blindness’, from tactile ‘short-sightedness’, ‘colour-blindness’ (structure-
blindness, shape-blindness), tactile ‘Daltonism’, etc., to cases of synaesthesia (touch/
vision, touch/hearing) or to a para-psychological tactile capacity.1
These different tactile sensibilities of touch say nothing, or almost nothing, about
the imaginative perception of tactile objects. The extent of experimentation and
interpretation did not allow going into synaesthetic details. Therefore the only question
that was relevant to synaesthesia contributed nothing substantial. It did prove that the
majority of participants in the experiment ‘saw’ the object in colour (with the exception
of Ludvík Šváb). To what degree they saw it identically (mutually, as well as considering
the objective reality of the individual items) was not looked into and would require
further experimentation. Nor was it ascertained whether the individual structures of the
items stimulate some aural sensations. In the instances where the participants specify
some subjects in colours (yellow shoe of Emily Medková, coloured representation of

the objects by Martin Stejskal, etc.) they do not correspond to reality. These have to be
attributed to memory associations.
Some elements of tactile objects stimulated identical or very similar associations in
individual participants. However, when examined more closely it became apparent that
they were due more to evident similarities than to some transcendental communication.
Christmas stocking
Socks filled with walnuts, buttons and bottle corks stimulated a perception of Christmas
presents in most participants (Medková, Stejskal, Marenčin, Nádvorníková) and more
than likely also Effenberger’s ‘Holy Family’, thanks to its ‘Holy’ attribute.
Animal
Touching the fur-covered shoe provoked the image of an animal. Stejskal referred to
the ‘yawning snout of an animal’, Ludvík Šváb to a dead rat, Albert Marenčin to a dog,
Alena Nádvorníková and Micheline Bounoure, in a later phase, to a horse’s mane.
Modern boudoir
Golden tassels suggest an atmosphere of some modern salon (Marenčin, Nádvorníková)
or for Ludvík Šváb the image of modern drapes.
Gag
An image of a gag appears for Ludvík Šváb, where it is associated with a stuffed sock
(cotton bag) object. Martin Stejskal agreed with my own verbal interpretation that it
was the crumpled up paper in the toe of the shoe.
Understandably, the tactile sensations, as confirmed by our experiments, stimulate,

above all, erotic associations. I don’t believe that the unusual character of the proffered
object causes it. Bodily (tactile) sensations play a primary role in erotica, therefore our
associations and perceptions of tactile objects will always steer in the direction of that
area, which is the largest storehouse of tactile memories.
Albert Marenčin: ‘I insert my left hand into the black bag containing a secret, and with
my right hand record my perceptions, feelings and images. The mere insertion of the
hand into the black bag stimulates a number of images, predominantly erotic, which
certainly describe and direct continuation into yet unsuspected associations.’
Vratislav Effenberger: ‘Insertion of the hand into the opening is accompanied by a

certain shyness, or even fear, mixed with previous impressions of erotic or pornographic
moments.’
Erotic associations appear in all participants (excepting Ludvík Šváb and Emily Medková).
Sadomasochistic elements occur to Albert Marenčin and Micheline Bounoure.
Masturbation occurs to Alena Nádvorníková and Albert Marenčin.
Erotic symbolism is perceived by Alena Nádvorníková, Micheline Bounoure, Martin

Stejskal, Vratislav Effenberger and, in a lyrical format, by Juraj Mojžíš.

restorer 21
Half weight of the kitchen pull-down lamp

This item proved to be the most disturbing part of the object and in a number of cases
aroused a thorough associative delirium.
Albert Marenčin: ‘Unfamiliarity made me imagine, at least initially, at the back of
my mind, a round and hard object, which I touched lightly several times; not once
did I manage to identify it and so I left it till the end. My fingers kept sliding over and
over its smooth, cold surface, looking for some analogy. In the context of suggested
associations it reminded me of the torso of a doll made of synthetic material or a piece
of old polished furniture . . . or a part of some item from a ladies boudoir? A perfume
bottle or a small jar? Or some other object from the secret workshop of women’s beauty
and hygiene? Or a masturbation aid, that mysterious apparatus which I have never seen,
and for that reason it so powerfully excited my pubertal fantasy . . . ?’
Ludvík Šváb: ‘Very carefully I grope my way along the wall – with the free hand I
investigate a bakelite shape, egg-like (a large, apparently pigeon’s egg, if an egg at all),
half buried. It is quite smooth, not at all affected by decay in the cellar or dryness of the
other objects. Maybe it is a switch – originally it was perhaps an artificial egg – a weight
on the cord of a pull-down lamp.’
Alena Nádvorníková: ‘A spherical half-egg, cold to touch, half polished part for some
machine, half of a cold, perfect fruit, the top of it disappearing into a sexual crack made
of small pearls . . . most disturbing is the centre: when the hand rests over the half-egg
and the fingers gently caress the roughly shaped groove.’
Micheline Bounoure: ‘. . . the thing made of plastic – the half-egg – in the shape of an
Easter egg . . . Uncle liked to put his hands on the Easter egg as on a woman’s buttocks.’
Martin Stejskal: ‘. . . from the back wall emerges a relief (I almost want to say made
of bakelite) mask. I assume that it is part of a face of some puppet . . .’ and further on
‘Next to it a light, blue mask – phallus, some totemic symbol without eyes, mouth and
nose, with only a shock of metal hair.’ In the analogy phase he compares this ‘antiseptic
bakelite phallus’ with the barrel of a syringe held in the restorer’s hand.
Juraj Mojžíš: Even though he does not directly attempt to identify the object, judging
by the amount of attention he gives to his interpretation, it is evident that he too found
it exciting. ‘I stopped and paused on the cold item in the middle of the object. It has a
lock that he is also closing. He is the designer. It’s possible only to slide down the object,
is the designer inside? Energy of the design? Emptiness of the design? Both tempt me.
Both temptations stay with me, leaving me with a choice to go right or left. Away from
the tenderness, from the coldness under my palm that wants to suggest something,
to convince me of something because I know that time is passing, and hazelnuts are
deceptive. Design reveals the designer. It reveals him, behind him there is only the
graceful passing of a love boat and the regretful rattle of nuts.’
Emily Medková: ‘A car dome lamp originating from the Tatra 603.’
Vratislav Effenberger: ‘The dorsal part of a toy bug (ladybug)’; it is for him a symbol
of a child.’
From the preceding, it follows that to facilitate free associations, analogies and
imaginative thinking, it is best to choose items which are vague, difficult to define
or parts of objects which, precisely because they defy identification, excite with their
strangeness, stimulate elemental, structural, warm and colourful sensations; and
reach those levels of the unconscious which so far could not exercise the imagination
in any other kind of art and only sporadically come to the fore in the form of tactile
dreams.

Analogical phase of the experiment

There were several ways to make a tactile object for this experiment:
1) To create a tactile object without any regard for visual impressions: Scatter the
most disparate items and parts of them around a room, turn out the lights, then
let the participants decide by touch the items’ suitability for a subjective expression
of unconscious wishes. Then conduct an interpretation of the object and compare
it with the interpretations of other participants.
2) Convert some visual perception (picture, photograph) into the ‘language’ of
touch, as much as possible. Then ask the participants to reverse the process.
3) Capture, in the form of a tactile object, some personal experience, then let the
participants freely interpret such a subject and compare each other’s experiences
and perceptions of it with the original personal experience.
4) Carry out a subjective tactile interpretation of objective visual perception.
The last option, which I finally selected, presented the participants with a difficult task,
since between the object, with which they were presented, and the selected picture, which
they had to find among another nine pictures, stood my interpretation that they knew
only from the final appearance of the tactile object. Additionally, they were allowed
to view the picture only after they finished their own imaginative contribution to the
experiment. Suddenly the concept they arrived at during the imaginative phase of the
experiment clashed with the ten pictures, which were more or less in disagreement, and
they were forced to change their mind, or even abandon that concept altogether and start
anew with the knowledge that there were only these ten options from which to choose.
Alternatively, the majority of participants found some analogy to relate their concept to
the concrete pictures. The embarrassment brought about by the conflict between their
own (experienced) imaginative concept (interpretation of the object) and the ten pictures
presented, can perhaps be attributed to the widening of the response to the task (from
disarming refusal to identification with the author’s interpretation) and to a considerable
disparity in the choice of the original picture. It must also be added that the majority of
participants found it difficult to choose only one picture and also chose additional ones in
which they saw some analogies with their own interpretation of the tactile object.
For Vratislav Effenberger, this confrontation causes plain indecision and refusal to
even attempt to choose the original picture. (Significantly, he refers to this phase of the
experiment incorrectly as identification.)
Juraj Mojžíš, after a great deal of hesitation decides on ‘Men on Beach’, but this
choice does not satisfy him, he feels cheated, frustrated, a victim of a hoax, finally finds
another solution for himself, outside the rules of the experiment. As another, although
equally frustrating possibility, he suggests ‘Blacksmiths’ and ‘Restorer’.
Albert Marenčin, after an exhaustive process, makes analogical relationships between
his concept and all ten pictures, to finally select ‘Stocking Factory’. He explains his
choice: ‘Even if I don’t see any brocade clothes, sofas, drapes, women’s shoes and other
requisites of a secret bag, all the same I have an impression that it best expresses the
unseen, what we suspect when we look at a collective of working women: their mental
world, their ideas of beauty and happiness or, even more accurately, our concept of
their ideas.’ Secondarily, although as an ironical choice, he introduces ‘Men on Beach’:
‘This is how an uninitiated observer can make fun of a bunch of Surrealists seeking a
solution to some enigma and a key to mystery in a black painting.’ He also finds partial
analogy in the pictures of ‘Car Accident’, ‘Cosmonauts’, ‘Decoration’, ‘Dog at Goal
Post’, ‘Blacksmiths’, ‘Baker’ and ‘Restorer’.

17. Ten Photographs for Analogical Phase of the Experiment
1) Cosmonauts, 2) Blacksmiths, 3) Decoration, 4) Dog at Goal Post, 5) Baker,
6) Men on Beach, 7) Car Accident, 8) Footballer, 9) Stockings Factory, 10) Restorer

Micheline Bounoure unambiguously points out as a primary picture ‘Blacksmiths’:

‘The shoe is covered with horse-like hair, the nails have been driven into hooves just like
the corkscrew into the shoe. There is a lot of caring in shoeing a horse – the best horses
for ploughing are the castrated ones.’
Similarly, even Alena Nádvorníková thinks that: ‘The object was inspired by the
picture of men shoeing the horse. There’s this coarse, aggressive, male, rattling element
(the two bags), gentle, feminine resignation of the horse which is just about to experience
some pain (deflowering). In no other picture can I see fine, soft animal fur (in this case
it happens to be the horse’s mane).’ But she finds some analogies to a whole row of
other pictures: ‘Baker’, ‘Men on Beach’, ‘Decoration’, ‘Stocking Factory’ and ‘Restorer’.
Emila Medková chooses as a starting picture ‘Stocking Factory’.
Ludvík Šváb prefers the picture ‘Baker’, then he chooses ‘Blacksmiths’ and
‘Cosmonauts’.
Martin Stejskal, after some consideration of ‘Blacksmiths’ and ‘Decoration’,
decides emphatically on ‘Restorer’: ‘I find in it not only similarity of shape but also
of action . . . the bearded Christ whose mouth is smudged with the dirty shoeprint (I
check with my hand that the shoe is the right one). The obstinate Restorer is attempting
to remove this ornament with the injection. He is evidently not aware of the smudge,
of its shape, he is concerned with getting the job done well. The needle is represented
by the corkscrew, the barrel of the syringe by the antiseptic bakelite phallus. The syringe
seems to come out of his eyes, which for me are symbolized in the tactile object with two
balls. The two tassels on the right side of the tactile object, to me seem to humorously
symbolize the whole complex of his mind, (creative potential) hidden in the old sock.’
When we compare Stejskal’s text above to my text accompanying the tactile
interpretation of ‘Restorer’ we find, apart from some insignificant differences, a
surprising similarity. I suppose based on that similarity with qualitative evaluation of
the experiment, the result can be considered very positive. These two independently
formed interpretations clearly demonstrate that even tactile impressions are capable of
communicating in the area of trans-subjectivity, traversing the boundary of traditional
dualism of objectivity and subjectivity.
When we attempt some kind of statistical summary of this last phase of the
experiment, the table of preferences for individual pictures appears like:
Table 1 – Preferences for individual pictures

Picture (In first place) (As a variation)
Blacksmiths x2 x4
Stocking Factory x2 x1
Restorer x1 x3
Men on Beach x1 x2
Baker x1 x2
The pictures of ‘Decoration’, ‘Cosmonauts’, ‘Car Collision’ and ‘Dog at Goal Post’ were
selected only as variants.
When we carefully examine the reasons behind the preference for pictures ‘Stocking
Factory’, ‘Men on Beach’ and evidently even ‘Baker’, we realize that the contributing
factor was not an analysis of individual elements of the objects, or of their mutual
connection, but an attempt to grasp some global tactile impression from the object. It
is significant that with these selections the participants were not attempting to backtrack

restorer 25
to a new interpretation of the object from the viewpoint of the picture they selected. It
is different with the choice of the picture of ‘Blacksmiths’, where Micheline Bounoure,
as well as Alena Nádvorníková, associated the concrete elements of the object with the
action on the picture. (Bounoure: ‘The shoe is covered with horse-like hair – the nails
penetrate into the hoof like the corkscrew into the shoe . . .’; Nádvorníková: ‘There’s this
coarse, aggressive, male, rattling element (the two bags), gentle, feminine resignation of
the horse who is just about to experience some pain (deflowering). In no other picture
can I see fine, soft animal fur (in this case it happens to be the horse’s mane).’) Here, in
this picture the horse’s hoof is in the compositional centre as well as a meaningful centre.
That the object allows such an analytical interpretation, even in relation to a ‘false’ picture
of the Blacksmiths, is because between this picture and the real initial picture of the
Restorer object is a strong analytical connection. Both represent a ‘sadomasochistic act’,
both parade aggressions against a helpless ‘dumb’ beast, though in both instances it is an
aggression in the interest of the victim (at the same time against nature). The choice of
the picture of the Blacksmiths has to be regarded as an analogical choice. If we examine
the statistical table from that point of view, the result of this phase of the experiment, in
a quantitative sense, is positive.
Concluding notes
Touch, in the sphere of art, is a sense without any convention. It even has the
advantage that it is difficult to imagine its subjugation to purely aesthetic purposes.
For that reason it is capable, ultimately, to bring to our mind authentic material.
Whilst I do not want to consider the results of the experiments described above
as completely conclusive, I am convinced that tactile objects could, for instance in
the sphere of eroticism, result in expression of feelings which until now had to be
described in words, colours or shapes.
Authentic sources for tactile creativity

Erotica
Tactile childhood memories
Tactile dreams
Prague, October–December 1975

4
SOURCES OF TACTILE IMAGINATION
Masturbation – hand serving the imagination

Mimi Parent, Catalogue for Surrealist exhibition EROS, Paris, 1959–1960
How calm does a man become around the sixth hour! Even the most backward of
them begin to comprehend. It starts around the eyes and spreads out from there. A
sight that could tempt any man to lie down under the harrow. After that nothing
much happens. The condemned man tries to work out the inscription, pursing his
lips as if listening. You saw for yourself that it’s not easy to decipher the inscription
by looking at it; our man can decipher it from his wounds. It takes lots of work, of
course, it will take him six hours. Then the harrow impales him and throws him
into the pit where he plops down into the bloody water and cotton wool.
Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony, 19141
Patient L.V., born 1906

Some time in July 1954, she was admitted to the psychiatric clinic for the second time,
and spoke of many complaints. She was discovering mucus and some small ‘insects
with whiskers’ in her faeces. She believed that these parasites were living in her blood
but their main location was in her rectum. She blamed the parasites for sensations of
biting and itching on her scalp, itching along her spine and pins and needles in the
lower extremities. She considered herself to be very ill, very depressed, slept badly and
believed she was being stalked, that she might come to some harm. She was hearing
someone talking from her brain, giving her various pieces of advice, suspected that it
was Pythie again. At other times she heard voices that were abusing her. We carried
out the following examinations: blood pressure 120/80, urine completely negative,
specific gravity 1020. Internal examination: chest X-ray, electro cardiogram normal,
neurological examination, X-ray of stomach and bowels generally within physiological
limits. During her stay in the clinic she complained that the parasites were crawling up
her back and causing itching over her entire body. She was treated with antihistamine
medications and hydrotherapy. She was discharged only partially better, prematurely,
because her mother became ill. About one week after discharge from the clinic, the
itching in various parts of her body recurred. Every now and then she managed to
extract from her skin a tiny stone, a fly or a dead parasite that she took to her local

sources of tactile imagination 27
18. Tactile Ohm Mantra, 1993
doctor. They looked like buckshot, the doctor laughed and told her ‘someone has
been shot again.’ She didn’t seem to have any more problems with her rectum. At
night she felt that she was hypnotized somehow, kept waking up and hearing friendly
or threatening voices. She recorded the conversations with these voices in a special
notebook.
After some time at home the symptoms returned with the same intensity. The parasites
were crawling under her skin and causing itching, leading to insomnia. Occasionally,
she managed to get feathers, little stones or splinters from under her skin.
Patient R.K., born 1896

Several weeks before her second stay in the psychiatric clinic, where she was admitted
in 1955, she complained of itching on the forearms, could not sleep and was unhappy;
about a fortnight before her arrival in the clinic she found a small insect on her hand
which crawled out from under the fingernail, immediately rolled itself into a ball, only
its ‘little jaw was sticking out.’ Soon after that she noticed another sort of insect, which
she called ‘thin cookies’. This second kind she was unable to squash with her finger, so
she was getting rid of them by throwing them out of the window. Tearfully, she related
how futile it was as the insects somehow crawled back, attacked her whole body and
crawled into her eyes and nose. She experienced great pain when the insects chewed
their way through her skin to the surface. Sometimes she conducted hunts for the
insects. She became quite animated, rubbed her palm as she collected the insects in her

hand then showed the empty hand to the doctor with the words: ‘Have a look, I have a
handful of them!’ She cried when told that there was nothing to see.
Patient M.M., born 1889

In 1955 cards told her that she could rid her face of hairs with a strong solution of soda,
then a rinse with an infusion of herbs. In autumn of that same year, through various
circumstances, she had to sleep several nights on a sofa in her daughter’s room, a sofa
where sometimes the daughter’s dog slept. From then on she complained of being
bothered by fleas brought into the flat by the dog. In January 1956, the fleas allegedly
attacked her in droves, jumping all over her body, crawling into every corner of her
clothes. To her own amazement, the fleas were attacking only the right side of her
body. These ‘fowl’ fleas (it was assumed the dog had acquired the fleas from domestic
fowls) were visible only when she caught them and immersed them in a glass of water
where she then could see them, when wearing her glasses. They were tiny, brown fleas
with shiny legs, the females were round and the males had pointy backsides. Studying
their life cycle she figured out that they hatched in seven days and lived for thirteen.
Realizing that they reproduced very quickly she conducted an intensive campaign
against them into which she drew her husband, initially unwillingly, and later on as
quite an active co-operator. She scrubbed the floor repeatedly, she washed her face with
a strong solution of soda. At home she only wore light underwear that could be washed
easily and frequently. She often let her hair down to shake the fleas out. The husband
eventually had to obtain several packets of DDT and several litres of Lysol. At his wife’s
urging, he tore up the linoleum in the flat and flooded the floor with Lysol. He spread
a layer of DDT several centimetres high on the door thresholds. Whilst the patient still
had some contact with the dog, she kept treating it with so much DDT that it started
to cough up blood.
Dr Stanislav Drvota, 19572
The exposed roots of tactile imagination can be traced through the field of pathological
touch, not only in tactile hallucinations, but also in reflexive hallucinations, paraesthesia
and similar.3
Likewise, onanism, which dates back to the infantile sexual organization of the libido,
usually has a strong imaginative component.4 Pain, too, is sometimes experienced
imaginatively (phantom limb, tattooing and so on). However, the least comprehensible
to me are the sources of tactile imagination in respect of loathing, tactile dreams and
synaesthesia.
Hands are the most communicative organs of touch, but far from the most sensitive,
emotive, or most excitable, because they are closely connected with the utilitarian
functions of our other senses. However the physical sense registers and perceives the
world (perceives its stimuli) with the entire surface of the body, with all its cavities,
internal organs and its mucous membranes. It is these ‘passive’ parts of our bodies
that mediate our most intensive sensory experiences. Tactile wooden rolling pins,
breadboards and pot lids are designed for ‘aesthetic’ massages of our bodies. When we
realize that our entire body is one big erogenous zone, waiting for its tactile awakening,
then these articles are the means of that arousal to stimulate these zones, to sensitize
them. Is it a new eroticism or ipsatio totalis [complete masturbation]? Tactile wooden
spoons, pot lids, rolling pins and boards are alchemistic tools and our bodies are the
crucibles for the Magnum Opus of tactilism.

19. Tactile Wooden Spoons, 1978 20. Tactile Cooking Spoons, 1978
21. Tactile Boards, 1978 22. Tactile Boards, 1978

(view from the reverse side)

23. Tactile Tub, 1990
24. Tactile Lids, 1978
25. New Eroticism, 1990

26. Tactile Rolling Pin, 1990
27. New Eroticism, 1990
Arcimboldo’s elements game, 1978

Let’s buy four wooden rolling pins
Cover one half of the first pin with uncooked rice
Cover the other half with scales from pine cones
Cover half of the second pin with sponge rubber 3 cm thick
Cover the other half of the second pin with feathers
Cover half of the third pin with pieces of broken shells
Cover the other half of the third pin with aluminium foil
Hammer small nails into half of the forth pin and cut their heads off
Cover the other half of the fourth pin with molten candle wax
Strip naked
Rub sandpaper of medium roughness over the belly and thighs to sensitize them
Then roll one rolling pin after another over the belly and thighs
Change the order of the pins as desired

28. Masturbation (tactile object), 1975
Masturbation
(Experimentation with pictorial analogies to a tactile object)
Participants: František Dryje, Michel Dubret, Gilles Dunant, Vratislav Effenberger,
Jiří Koubek, Emila Medková, Vince.
The object began with a free association of tactile ideas and was named ‘Masturbation’.
For obvious reasons I limited my own participation in the experiment to verbal
interpretation of the object. None of the participants knew the object’s name or my
verbal interpretation. A photograph of the object, which I show here, was taken before
I covered it with a black cloth, so it was only accessible for tactile perception, nor was
the experimentation known to the participants.
The participants were asked to find a visual analogy for tactile perceptions stimulated
by handling the object.
Interpretation of the object

Through several parallels and analogies the object expresses masturbation. In every
one of these elements a different characteristic feature is emphasised: the smoothness
of a ball of cotton wool clutched with the sharpness of alligator teeth accentuates the
moment of fear of being caught, and also warns of the consequences of masturbation.
The smooth coolness of a can in the bottom left hand corner of the object, filled with
the curve of the thighbone, where the coarse structure of the bare bone marrow
is interrupted by a central clump of fine hair, expresses a certain idiosyncratic
relationship to this activity. A wobbly, cold lightning flash, running like a spinal
cord through a hole of a softly padded vertebra in the shape of a petrified butterfly,

29. Uncovered Object, 1975

licking the delicate coat of a smooth and slippery canary feeding dish, represents the
very act of masturbation. The roll of randomly shaped wire, resembling a rational
crutch, holds this decrepit construction in a vertical position. A regular waviness
of the paper, like the disciplined arrangement of holes in the ventilator of the food
cabinet, is analogous to the stereotypical mechanical activity. The sum total of
these analogies, their reciprocal meeting in the space of the object mediated by a
hand inserted into the sleeve, completes the object in a kind of subjective, irrational
machinery of self-abuse.
1975
First tactile orientation:
In the top left part is a cylindrical, wooden object, open on the right side and clutching
a textile ball. On the top right side is a smaller, bell-like (maybe glass) object, inserted
into another, metal object (in a manner of a water tap). In the centre is another wooden
object giving the impression of a pair of open wings, connected by means of a wire to
a metal can at the bottom left, out of which projects a kind of half-ball, either of wood
or of some synthetic material. Downward on the right hand, the wire ends in a glass
container on the bottom of which is some textile material.
General impression:
An irrational apparatus, reminiscent of Švankmajer’s masturbation machine.
Analogical picture:
Jan Švankmajer: Masturbation machine [Fig. 30].
Analogy:
Water tap in the vicinity of a textile ball which is held in a wooden object; propeller – open
wings; lantern – glass, bell-like object; cylinder in the bottom part – metal can;
connection of meaningful, distant fragments – wires.
Emila Medková
From top left to right:
A piece of old forked timber, at its end, a soft rag ball. Next is a water tap opening
into a shallow container hidden behind a shoulder-bone. Wires project from the base
of the bone and some kind of flat metal zigzags like a carpenter’s measure, ending
in the right bottom corner in a porcelain container lined with shorthaired leather.
In the left bottom corner is a larger tin can, hollow, on top of which is a wooden
ball connected by wire to the bottom of a shoulder blade. The base of the tin can is
structurally damaged.
Everything is a little unstable.
My first impression was of complete chaos, then I started to orient myself among all
the wires and jars and suddenly it occurred to me that the only possible author of some
analogy could be Francis Picabia. So I looked for the painting Parade Amoureuse that,
in my judgement, closely relates to the tactile object and its functions.
Jiří Koubek
The first time I dragged my family to face the tactile box was on 4 July 1980. Then on
15 July of the same year I did the experiment myself. Shortly after that I was told of my
wife’s and daughter’s (two-and-a-half years old) impressions.
Lenka, 4 July: smilingly, she cried out: ‘Some glasses, there are some glasses there.’

30. The ‘Roman’ Ipsation Machine (collage), 31. Francis Picabia: Parade Amoureuse, 1917
1972.
Hana, my wife, 4 July: opined that there was prosthesis of the external male sex organs
installed inside.
15 July, 9.15 a.m. circa five minutes: the first thing that occurred to me – a machine
of some kind, then I elaborated by calling it some distillation apparatus, after Jules
Verne’s fictional writings, in the Secret Island of engineer Cyrus Smith. Compared
to the enclosed drawing [Fig. 32] it could be said that it is about some engineering
reconstruction of an unknown technology.
František Dryje
The enclosed picture [Fig. 33] was not found on any basis of association that
connected it with the researched tactile perception, but as a result of the analysis of
that perception. In the closed space of the ‘tactile box’ my groping hand gradually
identified several elementary components, the shape and characteristics of which I
then looked for in appropriate illustrations. Firstly, there was a definite awareness of
a trichotomy (meaning that the inside of the box was sectioned into top, middle and
bottom parts) that was affecting my selection. In the illustration the trichotomy is
expressed like this: The top part – head of a child and top half of an upside down
chair; the middle and connecting part – trunk and arms of the child, barrel of the
gun; and the bottom part – legs of the child, gun handle and an opened box.
The illustration also contains a number of previously mentioned analogical elements
of the tactile objects, even though they are not, as a rule, spatially distributed in an
equal manner.
They are:
1) Head of a child – analogy to two round shapes – ‘plush pom-pom’ top left and
‘wooden ball with fuzz’ inserted into a smooth ‘cylinder’ at bottom left.

32. J. K.
1. A pressure vessel of a heat reactor. 2. Glass retort for amplification of cooling circulation covered
cloth. 3. Copper piping – heat exchanger. 4. Reactive sublimator – where the reactive material is
stored. 5. Energy generator.
33. F. D.

2) Gun barrel – analogy to variously profiled, evidently metal ‘tower’, top right.
3) Middle and handle of the gun – analogy to the continuation of the ‘tower’ in a
double zigzag shape.
4) The complete gun – analogy to the connecting link between top and bottom
parts, created by some ‘wire’, splitting itself and creating a ‘pear shape’.
5) Chubby arms of the child – analogy to two cylindrical shapes placed (horizontally)
top left and (vertically) bottom left.
6) Opened box – analogy to evidently metal ‘containers’ of cubical shape and thick
walls (‘soft padding’ is missing).
7) The child’s legs remind us – at least in their shape, narrowed from both sides
towards the centre – of the wooden ‘toy boat’, elliptical and ‘hollowed out’ from
both sides, and placed on the top right under the broken handle.
Note: Considering that I did not know about the special orientation of the ‘box’, it
is possible that what I perceived as the ‘top’ was actually the ‘bottom’ and vice versa.
However: what is down is also up!
Vince
It is a perversion of the body, as if the animal skin was turned inside out, the
upper part is of glass, the organs are permanently separated, the interior is dry
like mummified fur. The false delicacy of the praying mantis, like a thermometer,
like an antenna, measures the degree of terror, the start of the circle of unknown
frequencies. One has to look for the source, to follow the direction of the infirm
diviner; it is cold, the twists and turns of the ice-cold blood separate into two
arteries, a thick one and a narrow one. The thick one leads to the organs resembling
a mechanical hermaphrodite; the narrow one to a skull, where the exposed brain
regulates the pulse rate. There is an impression that all this is not only happening
here but that the pulsing leads from monster to monster. Penises and clitorises
are surgically joined by unknown mechanisms. Fondling combines with cubes of
ice and everything is getting bigger, the probing, finger-sized man, marching over
sandpaper, is diminishing with each step. Even the most erotic area, right down
below, is not undisturbed. Is it necessary to extricate one’s self from the genital
organs so that everything opens? The organs are rising up towards our meeting. The
pulsing is weaker but I am getting lost between lust and fear of surrendering to the
desire to touch the mechanism.
34. G. D. 35. M. D.

36. V.
Gilles Dunant
The impossibility of getting through, of the existence that is slowly escaping. Everyone
has a chance. An extreme brittleness of slightest movement combined with implacable
attitude; from the gentlest fireworks to adventurous presentation of fragments of reality.
A multitude of materials opens a world of invisible barriers, tremendous shocks and
aftershocks fading into continual gesture. The human body, ever-present in its constant
metamorphoses, exits from open boxes, sharp, liquid, solid, constantly separating so that
they can exchange their positions. Articulation takes place without circulation, without
moulding the shape of invisibility. Sometime it seems that it is submerging into a compact
moving machine, the contact generating sound which instantly becomes past, becomes
an echo. Deep down fingers signal desire. To reach this stage the object assumes, in its
totality, an erotic certainty and from here on will be able to arouse signs of pleasure, each
internal or external course as similar and as distant as is possible. Without pausing, we
must follow everything in reverse. Now it is a memory slowly being forgotten, like an
enchanted evening when thunder and shadows collide in a confused passion. There is no
support to be found, arrows of darkness are criss-crossing behind closed eyes.
Michel Dubret
The tactile stroll opened slowly, as though damply wandering about without
shipwrecking. Something is cruelly amusing itself here; incessantly it withdraws from
the identification of whatever penetrates, or penetrates itself, until an attempt that
frustrates the aim to spread its own movement. And very quickly we are engaged by
‘hand in the bag’ in hot ovens of sensuality and the grip of empty cramps. With full
hands we touch the desired geography of our own repression. A double-entendre trap is
sprung and opens up as unique encirclement and recapture. The spring is hot and dry
as sand, in spite of the softness of its bed. And to touch it means to weaken through
the fleeting, sleepless night. Proliferation, finally, leads to delusion, when the memory
wanders, becomes fascinated until it is a pale residue in which everything again burns
up in elementary stuttering, when all starts to vanish.
The diffusion of analogical pictures concentrated by the game spans the spectrum
from concrete, topographical ‘reading’, almost identical with the exposed object, to

quite free, abstract, rather emotional analogies. When, however, we combine them with
the accompanying texts, with which the participants in the experiment interpret their
tactile impressions of the object, we discover that almost all of them find associations
with some fantastic erotic machine. Vratislav Effenberger and Emila Medková do so
most obviously in their choice of analogical pictures. Vince and Gilles Dunant do so in
their choice of interpretative text. Jiří Koubek selects as an analogical picture a kind of
complicated construction or structure, (part of a three-dimensional model of a polymer)
but in the accompanying text compares the object to a fantastic machine (see also the
picture), which also suggests an erotic context. Even in Michael Dubret’s analogy, despite
its very abstract position, one can read erotic excitement stimulated by tactile contact with
the object. A noteworthy analogy is one by František Dryje, standing midway between
analogies from concrete to abstract. Even when the verbal elaboration of pictorial analogy
is predominantly topographical, the picture alone expresses the analogy not just of the
basic theme of the object ‘masturbation’ but embraces even the mechanical moment of
the object (a pistol) and further partial interpretation: a sense of instability and danger.
1981
Questionnaire about loathing
In Tierra del Fuego, a native touched with his finger some cold, preserved meat
which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness;
whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his
hands did not appear dirty.
But as disgust also causes annoyance, it is generally accompanied by a frown, and

often by gestures as if to push away or to guard oneself against the offensive object.
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 18725
Questionnaire
1) Are there any circumstances when you feel that your tactile abilities are
hypersensitive?
2) Are there any a) structures, shapes or objects or b) living things that you loathe
touching?
3) Would you characterize loathing more as repugnance (disgust) or fear of touching?
4) Do you recoil from accidental contact with an object that you loathe? (Are there
reactions that you cannot control with your senses: gestures, nausea, allergic skin
reactions or similar?)
5) During erotic play with your partner do you find some touching unbearable or
repulsive? What loathsome experiences do you have in connection with sexuality?
6) Can you recall some experience that temporarily or permanently affected your tactile
relationship to the surrounding environment? Are you able to analyse the origin of
some concrete instance that aroused repugnance or fear of touching in you?
1980
Questionnaire respondants: Emila Medková, Jiří Koubek, Eva Švankmajerová, Albert

Marenčin, Karol Baron, Martin Stejskal, František Dryje, Ludvík Šváb, Vratislav
Effenberger, Jan Švankmajer.

This questionnaire is deliberately concerned only with tactile expressions of loathing and
consequential tactile sensibility. Its conclusions are, in my opinion, about loathing in all its
tactile manifestations. Tactile expressions reveal this whole issue the most, because they are
closest to sexuality, to which they are intimately related. The replies to the first question all
tend to agree that the sense of touch basically intensifies at the same rate as the other senses
under the same circumstances: tiredness, fever, depression, drug intoxication, after certain
psychic trauma and, not least, in erotic play and sexual contact.
Eva Švankmajerová
During a blooming depression. Noise makes me capable of murder, gives me a terrible
headache. Light makes me dizzy and bilious. I don’t touch anything except what I
absolutely must. I head straight for bed, hide under my feather quilt and feather pillows.
Clean, preferably. There, in the soft, dry and warm environment I try to overcome the
aversion. If I am touched in that state – at that time, by a human hand, I feel like I
am going insane with disgust. I must add that in practice nobody dares to do that, but
it has happened and I want to emphasize that any such incident did not result in any
administrative consequences. It does prove my infinite patience and good nature, for
example towards people with whom I share the house and destiny and who have, on a
number of occasions, approached me in my wretched state, tried to drag me out of my
den and put me to some use, for example with pep talks or even caressing. None have
come to any harm. Although they all know that when I am in that state of mind any
tactile contact is negatively hypersensitive.
Jan Švankmajer
I feel a heightened perceptivity to tactile subjects under certain circumstances of
weakened somatic organic functions (tiredness, fever), or, on the other hand, when my
senses are actively aroused (erotic play). In the first instance, the tactile hypersensitivity
is unpleasant (contact with clothes and bed covers is bothersome). In the second
instance, the same engenders blissful excitement and a number of contacts, which
would otherwise be unpleasant or painful, become exciting and desirable. Intake of
alcohol lowers my tactile sensibility.
Martin Stejskal
I recall intoxication with psilocybin and LSD, during which my tactile sensibility
became markedly heightened. In contrast to visual impressions that largely shattered in
pictorial explosions, tactile impressions seemed to be closely connected with recognition
of ‘transcendental’ capability. In that sense it meant pleasant conditions.
Jiří Koubek
Purely physiologically: Sometimes, rarely, during physical environmental change
(heightened temperature or pulse), for instance when showering; as if the skin increased
its perceptivity, the hairs seem to stand up. Psycho-physiologically: at a certain degree
of trauma, stress (apprehension, fear of contact) or during erotic excitement.
Albert Marenčin
I am ticklish under my armpits, in my groin, and in the area of my chest; during erotic
play this ticklishness increases to the point of being unbearable. At the same time my
fingers become more sensitive so that I can ‘relish’ the body of my partner.

I would particularly like to emphasise the heightening of tactile sensibility when touch is
isolated from other senses, especially from sight. It is a matter of whether it is being used for
a professional purpose in familiar surroundings, when it is felt to be quite natural (Emila
Medková), or in unfamiliar surroundings when our orientation in space is dependent on
touch, and so on. It is usually experienced ambivalently (Ludvík Šváb) or accompanied by
fear (František Dryje).
Emila Medková
In my case it is years of practice in the dark room. I can orient myself in the dark with
touch quite well and always considered it normal.
Ludvík Šváb
I would say that my tactile sensitivity (rather than ability) grows, which comes with
learning from experiments with sense deprivation – when other objects are excluded.
Practically, that is when I am in bed at night, unable to sleep. Such sensations are
pleasant and unpleasant, for instance even a crinkled up bed sheet and contact with
coarse material of the sofa underneath can be bothersome, whilst I feel good in freshly
laundered, fine bed sheets. Skin sensitivity also increases with fever.
František Dryje
. . . when I have to move in the darkness. When awake or in one of my recurring
dreams, I walk along a certain street and I can’t open my eyes – when I do open them,
I can’t see, I have to grope my way. The dream is accompanied by fear of going blind,
and also of alien touch.
In most instances the heightened tactile sensibility is felt as unpleasant, or at least ambivalent,
with the exception of erotic play or sexual act when it is considered desirable and increases
the pleasure.
In two cases the answer to the first question was negative.
Karol Baron
I think they don’t exist, if they do I am not consciously aware of them.
I have to admit that my reaction to tactile perceptions and objects is minimal. Naturally
there is a whole list of things that I could touch only with the utmost repulsion.
Conversely, I am not conscious of touching any objects with particular pleasure, with
the exception of a revolver.
In the answers to the second question all participants agreed that excrement in particular
arouses disgust, or objects such as mud, vomit, decaying and decomposing organisms, et
cetera, and dirtiness of all kinds.
Eva Švankmajerová
There are turds and phlegm which we loathe to touch.
Albert Marenčin
Unfamiliar greasy or sticky substances of animal temperature, which inspire feelings of
uncertainty at the same time.

Among the structures, shapes and objects that I loathe to touch belong faeces, vomit,
soft dirt and so on.
František Dryje
Excrement, mud (for instance at the bottom of the swimming pond), decomposing
bodies of animals or people (when accompanied by visual perception).
Martin Stejskal
Decaying objects, especially of viscous composition, mixed with hair. Strangers’ teeth.
Jiří Koubek
Certain microstructures – such as maggots, insects, single cell organisms (micro-
photons), then decaying, decomposing organisms, perhaps rashes, visible pimples and
boils on people and farm animals. More loathing in relation to animal organisms than
to vegetable ones. Non-organic objects in general do not arouse such feelings in me.
Emila Medková
I specifically dislike the touch of unwashed hair, even my own. Contact with all
synthetic matter, cups, bags or plastic repulses me.
Jan Švankmajer
I have an unbearable repulsion to boiled onions – not just because I have never seen
them but because I find them highly repulsive even to touch, similarly the skin on
milk. I loathe cigarettes, not only the butts, but even unsmoked cigarettes I can touch
only by overcoming my repulsion. I dislike mud, especially in contact with feet, I
dislike the fat from dishwashing, other people’s underwear, regardless of whether it is
used or clean. I have a certain ‘value scale’ of loathing; there are objects that I can touch
after some mastery of the revulsion. Some objects are unpleasant, but I do touch them
(always conscious that I am touching them), then there are some that I cannot touch
under any circumstances: other people’s snot, semen, urine, faeces. Towards my own
excretions I also feel a certain disgust, which I would characterize as surmountable.
In the above answers there are only a few items that are not generally regarded as repulsive
(synthetic matter – Emila Medková, cigarettes – Jan Švankmajer, strangers’ teeth – Martin
Stejskal). With these objects it is not a case of ‘deep’, essential repulsion but of ‘pseudo-
repulsion’ (as characterized by František Dryje) because it is acquired later than the true
repulsion and usually for different reasons. It is usually connected to concrete events or specific
persons, or analogous to the actual cause of repulsion (for instance my attitude to cigarettes
relates to my pubertal rebellion against my father who was a smoker).
Jiří Koubek
Around the age of my puberty, when I believed I was being stifled by my parents but
was too cowardly to leave home, I began to find both of them repulsive. That attitude,
since I have moved away from them, has passed, or, perhaps it is more appropriate to
say, has been submerged. At the time it was perhaps my mother, in her underwear or
my father, who did gymnastics. Because he used to exercise in the morning, at around
five, and I started school later, it used to wake me up. His masochistic health ritual, his
panting while straining muscles, his jumping around and so on used to drive me crazy

with repulsion. I used to put a pillow over my head, wishing that he would die. All that
exercising was revolting and embarrassing; so public and anti-social. (I didn’t develop
a hatred towards sports, as the above description might suggest, merely towards that
blatant exhibitionism.) This image of the father exercising in front of the children,
propagated in Spartakiads [premier sporting contests in the Czech Republic] and on
television (parents exercising with their children) fills me with disgust to this day.
František Dryje
I believe that repulsion about touching can be overcome in most cases (not just with sex)
and eventually eliminated altogether. Often it is a case of overcoming the initial disgust
(fear) and, so to speak, taking the first step. Experiences of medical undergraduates
overcoming repugnance (often an actual physical reaction) during dissection are well
known. It must be acknowledged that such a thing as ‘insurmountable repulsion’ does
exist, perhaps best described as a ‘neurotic symptom’ and more than likely, this has
deeper, unconscious roots. Perhaps it is only that kind of repulsion that is a true one, as
distinct from the one that is ‘surmountable’.
Similarly there is a substantial agreement about living organisms that we find loathsome.
Firstly there are snakes, maggots or earthworms and similar animals (Albert Marenčin,
Jan Švankmajer, Emila Medková, Ludvík Šváb, Vratislav Effenberger, Jiří Koubek, Martin
Stejskal), then insects of all kinds, spiders especially (Eva Švankmajerová, Jan Švankmajer,
Emila Medková, Martin Stejskal, Jiří Koubek, František Dryje), mice, rats, bats (Albert
Marenčin, Eva Švankmajerová, Jan Švankmajer, Emila Medková, Ludvík Šváb), also fish
and other sea creatures, frogs, snails and so on (Jan Švankmajer, Emila Medková, Vratislav
Effenberger, Martin Stejskal) and birds (Ludvík Šváb, Jan Švankmajer).
Replies
Emila Medková
With me it is the experience of touch. I can tell the difference between the fur of a rabbit
and a rat, although even the rabbit is not very pleasant to me. If I see a mouse, frog,
snake or a spider I give them a wide berth or even run away. I am even repulsed by dead
animals, but not by the stuffed ones. In one case, something which did happen to me,
when a mouse found its way into my hair which I had left untied for sleeping (it was on an
agricultural brigade in Southern Bohemia), I mercilessly chased it and killed it. Equally, I
will kill even a large spider that petrifies me even though I would never touch it.
Martin Stejskal
In the case of insects, it is a deep loathing (disgust) aroused by even a mere image of
touching them. In case of some sea creatures, it is a more ambivalent attitude – fear
of contact and urging towards it. Squeamishness towards spiders is psychoanalytically
regarded as fear of the female sex. ‘Dreaming of a spider is a symbol of the Phallic
Mother, of which one is afraid and so fear of spiders expresses fear of incest and terror
of female genitalia’ (Abraham, 1922). In my childhood, I had a major conflict over the
spider versus cat issue. The delicious furriness of cats, of which there have always been
plenty in our household, contrasted with the repulsion towards ‘hairy’ spiders. (The
more hairy the spider, the more repulsive.) To this day a cat, to me, represents a female,
a kind of archetypal mother. Once we had a kitten named Cobweb, which I was very
fond of. Without any warning my mother had it destroyed, just before the birth of my
sister. I remember that it put me into a deep shock.

Living beings whose surface is slimy (snakes, snails, fish); then also animals which
appear deformed (frogs, toads) . . . If I remember correctly the only concrete tactile
revulsion I experienced was towards fish, namely the Christmas carp kept in the bath.
In my childhood I was tempted to overcome the revulsion and touch that stupid
creature, immobile against the side of the bath, with a snout that every now and then
opened lazily, as if shouting some pathetic curse. Its slimy immobility was just pretence,
it took only the slightest touch with my hand and the whole carp body leapt into action
with lightning speed, as only the angriest desperation is capable of. In a second, the
repulsion to touch the slimy thing was overtaken by terror and panic and prevented
any further aggression towards that dangerous monster.
Karol Baron
More than twenty years ago I saw a dog in a village somewhere in eastern Slovakia,
some short haired mongrel, it was a relatively large dog, with several bare patches on its
skin, the patches were infected, in places showing raw, rotting, fly-blown flesh. It was
standing about six, ten meters at the most, away from me. Looking at it I felt absolute
revulsion, my stomach turned as if it suddenly was in some fluid and started to swim
in it, and parallel with that I felt indescribable, unconscious fear that even now I could
not specify accurately. Altogether, for several seconds I felt paralyzed, unable to move;
maybe it was only a dream.
Albert Marenčin
Rats and snakes. As a boy I enjoyed catching fish, my favourite way was to blindly
search with my hand under rocks and tree roots. Once I felt something hairy and
slippery; as I touched it the strange animal moved sharply, stirred up the water and
with a splash disappeared. Startled and terrified I jumped out of the water. A sense of
revulsion and panic increased when my uncle informed me that I probably touched a
water rat and that I could, fishing in that manner, disturb a snake. Since that day I
didn’t dare to catch any fish in that way. A similar feeling now overcomes me when I
hear of likewise situations. To put my hand into some cavity into which I cannot see,
into a hollow tree, a gum boot, any kind of a hole, and find something there that is
alive, warm, hairy or slimy is the most revolting thing I can imagine.
František Dryje
Snakes, earthworms, maggots, insects that swarm (ants), mangy animals, people
infected with skin diseases (rash, pimples and similar – probably accompanied by
visual perception). I was about ten years old when for the first time I saw two snakes
in a forest. They were white (probably blind worms, not really snakes) and crawling
across a rocky bottom of a dry creek. I felt terror, revulsion, fear, and disgust. These
feelings were certainly aroused by visual perception, but I do remember that the mere
thought of physical contact amplified them. I have similar experiences even now. The
psychoanalytical symbolism, in this case, undoubtedly offers an excellent aid to such
a repulsion, but for me, at that time it was a substantive fear (an inner, conscious,
conditional revulsion) of snake bite, which I was conscious of for a number of years
since my childhood, nourished by stories (from parents), and later by reading, of deadly
consequences, of first aid (applying tourniquet above the bite), of prevention (carry a
stick) in the spirit of simplistic aids like ‘Doctor talks with children’ and similar. I
know that I was always terrified by the thought of how easy it is to step on a snake,

to be bitten and die helplessly in a deep forest. I dare to say that the above experience
was primary and it still defines my attitude (and even the tactile perception) toward
snakes to this day. (Most likely it is a case of ‘pseudo-revulsion’, considering that when
I observe snakes in a terrarium, snakes that cannot do me any harm, I look at them
without any fear at all.) I have never held a snake in my hands, I would not recognize
its skin by touch. However, several times I have had to overcome my revulsion towards
earthworms or maggots. The most unpleasant was not the actual touching of their
bodies but the fact that they were moving, ‘wriggling’. I always feel that maybe they
will bite me. So perhaps it is fear. Dead specimens worry me less.
Ludvík Šváb
Squeamishness is aroused in me by all textures, shapes and objects that remind me
of living creatures, mice, reptiles and birds – and particularly so when I touch them
without seeing them – in the dark, in a bag, in Švankmajer’s arrangement of tactile
objects. I must have been afraid of mice and birds for a long time. I remember how
once, on a Sunday, when I was a small boy I had to go and collect something for my
father from our shop. I only had keys to the back entrance, to get into the storage,
into complete darkness. The light switch was on the other side of the room. I turned
the light on, found what I was looking for, then turned to go home. As I turned the
light out, I was overcome with fear that a rat or something might jump at me in
the darkness. Today I don’t remember if I only imagined it but I felt that something
jumped on my foot. With a scream I shot out through the back door and trembled with
terror and revulsion all the way home. I doubt if I would have been able to differentiate
between a touch of the rat, rabbit or some other animal. A rat gives me a feeling of
moistness, probably something to do with my mother’s favourite expression: ‘I’m as wet
with sweat as a mouse.’
Eva Švankmajerová
There are insects and rodents that we loathe to touch. There are many public places
where we wouldn’t touch anything. There are many households where we despair if we
must visit, eat, drink and touch objects or hands of the occupiers.
Jan Švankmajer
Of all the animals I loathe most to touch are insects (flies, spiders, bees, caterpillars and
even butterflies), then mice, frogs, snakes, and bats. Birds’ claws repel me, otherwise I
don’t mind them, in dogs I don’t like the hairless patches on their bellies, in tortoises
I can touch only their shells, etc. I don’t like touching people, above all people with
whom I have no emotional connection, even children. I loathe men kissing men.
Jiří Koubek
Cripples, deformed people, dwarfs, obvious pathological abnormalities . . .
Then continues with squeamishness into psycho-social field:
. . . notorious lying, cheating, obsequiousness, and even certain modes of existence:
military service (because it is homosexual by nature), policemen.
I was about six years old when early one morning I sneaked into my father’s study, next
to the bedroom, took from his coat a loaded revolver and quickly returned to bed. No
sooner did I pull out the magazine when I heard a door opening and my father going into

the study; I had no time to return the revolver. Quickly I concealed it under the quilt,
anxiously hoping that he would not notice his coat. On the contrary! He went straight
to his coat and reached into the pocket on which my eyes were riveted. Fear swept over
me. Father, concerned, reached into the other coat pocket, then started to rummage in
his desk. I lost my courage and confessed that I had the gun in bed with me. It gave
father such a fright that he didn’t even scold me over it. Instead I was given a lecture on
the danger of what I did. Little did he know that, whenever I was sure he was away from
home for some time, I used to get his army pistol out of the cabinet, in comparison to
which the pocket Browning, which I was shamefully returning to him, was a mere toy…
The excitement (which persists today) I felt when holding the gun in my hand,
undoubtedly has some unconscious sexual motivations. This excitement is reinforced
by the tactile feel, by the hand gripping the cold metal so perfectly shaped to wrap
fingers around it, as if it was an ideal ending for the right hand. Perhaps some role
is played in the psychosocial plan by the fact that the history of humankind is the
history of a forceful triumph where the killing blow is the final argument. Certainly this
excitement is not connected for me with any repulsion or fear.
The replies suggest that pleasant tactile sensations have conscious (Albert Marenčin, Jan
Švankmajer) or unconscious (Vratislav Effenberger) sexual motivations. Whence do the
motivations for unpleasant tactile sensations come? It seems as if specific things or creatures
from times immemorial have repulsed us, and we cannot imagine the origins of it. Are
they based on some early childhood experiences that have long gone from our memories or
is it a case of some archetypal structures and shapes of fear and repulsion, common to all
humankind and simply inherited in our genetic code, similar, for instance, to the schemata
of the mother’s face? Or is Roger Caillois correct when he writes: ‘. . . true, certain creatures
seem so hideous or repulsive – bats, spiders, octopuses, snakes. But they are not ugly. They
arouse fear and terror in us, sometimes justifiably, more frequently because some superstitions
make them fearsome. Mythology seems more important than their appearance. It is not their
disproportion that terrifies but mysterious notions of associations, or completely imaginative
prejudices that we become victims of as they arouse panic, surge of repulsion, almost physical
reaction which does not come from aesthetic considerations. They seem to come from some
other field of sensibility, from animal depths.’ 6
(It is interesting that the position of these creatures in myths and fairy tales is quite ambivalent.
Snake is a symbol of wisdom on one hand, on the other a symbol of treachery. Mouse is a symbol
of cowardly hypocrisy and also a form of endearment for a beloved woman ‘a little mouse’. A
toad – an insult for an old ugly woman – a frog is a reference to a young girl and so on.) When
recalling some initial experience of squeamishness, the memory often deceives us.
As to the origins of feeling of disgust and revulsion, perhaps because they are so
common, I cannot recall a single concrete case of how they came about.
Karol Baron
I don’t have any concrete examples or maybe I have forgotten them.
Jiří Koubek
That is a question that provokes some deep thinking. In my childhood I was either
very dumb or very tolerant of things and people around me. Or the barriers don’t let
me go there.

Ludvík Šváb
To think of some primeval, essential repulsion, I consider that a kind of method
with which I can make myself to imagine some doubtful images, false memories, or
distorted interpretations . . .
Jan Švankmajer
It seems that the origins of all my repulsions are disappearing into the fog of
childhood and are hidden by a curtain of amnesia that I am unable to draw
back.
The instances that are being investigated by the questionnaire have their roots in the times
when the sense of repulsion was established and has since then been transferred through
analogy to other subjects or objects.
Emila Medková
An experience from the age of eight: A girl of the same age as myself, living in the
basement of our apartment block, invited me to her home. She let me wait outside
the door and when, after a while, she returned, we went to play outside. She
asked me to reach into her pocket, said that there was something very good there.
I felt some vague substance that immediately stuck to my fingers and smelled
repulsive. The girl told me to taste it, that it was very good peas. I trembled with
repulsion, my stomach was heaving, I ran home to wash it all off. This one
occasion of contact with peas resulted in many years of repulsion to them in any
form.
To a complementary question: What did she think was in the girl’s pocket, Emila Medková
replied: ‘I only know that I was trembling with repulsion, most likely I was terrified that
she had a turd in her pocket.’
Similar to the occasions described above, be it František Dryje’s white snakes, Vratislav
Effenberger’s fish or Ludvík Šváb’s and Albert Marenčin’s rat, are the memories of
concrete experiences of revulsion, not the actual experiences which created it. Revulsion in
sexuality: From a number of answers to that query there seems to be above all repugnance
to homosexual contact (in any form – Karol Baron, Jiří Koubek, Jan Švankmajer,
František Dryje, Ludvík Šváb). Otherwise, revulsion in sexuality is not experienced
by the majority of those who responded (excepting specifics such as one’s partner’s cold
feet – Jan Švankmajer).
Jiří Koubek
I’m disgusted by the thought that I should be making love to a woman who has not
washed herself. What is interesting is that this revulsion doesn’t apply out in the open.
It is only fixated to ‘home, room, bed’.
František Dryje
I’m not very keen on having my ear kissed. I wouldn’t call this feeling one of revulsion,
since kissing, as such, does not revolt me. Perhaps it is a case of ‘ear revulsion’.
Intolerance of tickling and stroking during sexual contact (Albert Marenčin, Ludvík Šváb)
is difficult to regard as revulsion. From that point of view two answers are interesting:

37. Eva Švankmajerová: Bat (oil), 1970
Martin Stejskal
I can’t regard any sort of touching from one’s partner during erotic play as unbearable
or even repugnant. I have an ambivalent attitude to cleanliness. Grubbiness excites me;
at the same time it repulses me.
Jan Švankmajer
During sexual excitement I lose all taboos about repulsion, on the contrary some of the
sources of repulsion become exciting precisely because under normal circumstances
they are taboo. I even get excited by the thought of having sex on top of boiled onions.
When asked if revulsion is felt as disgust or fear of contact, all participants agree that they feel
both, disgust and fear. It is interesting that disgust, with most of them, feels like some primary
instinct, and fear arises in cases when in some way there is a direct contact with an object or
a creature that has been made ‘taboo’ by repulsion or when imagining such a contact.

Jiří Koubek
When the question is put so directly, I prefer to characterize revulsion as repugnance
and springing out of it, secondarily, sub-dominant cases such as, for instance, the cited
fear of contact. They are interconnected.
In a similar way Vratislav Effenberger, in a direct answer, characterizes revulsion as

repugnance (disgust), but in his childhood experience with the Christmas carp describes
the resulting feeling of fear after the actual contact: ‘The repulsion to touching the slimy
thing was overtaken by terror and panic and prevented any further aggression towards that
dangerous monster.’ A connection between the feeling of disgust and fear, and the source of
revulsion, also affirms the answers to the control query (question 4). The described defensive
reflexes during the chance contact with the object of revulsion do not after all, depart from
the characteristic disgust and fear posited by Charles Darwin. It seems (as the answers to
the sixth question of the questionnaire suggest) that the defining experiences originated in
early childhood, up to five or six years of age, and then were shrouded over by amnesia
which, according to Freud, hides all our pre-sexual experiences and represses them into the
unconscious.
All other experiences described (František Dryje, Emila Medková, Vratislav Effenberger,
Karol Baron, Albert Marenčin) are from later years and clearly show that by then the
revulsion was well fixated, that they were not the establishing experiences. Our parents force
our revulsion to excrement on us in early childhood, in the interest of hygiene. Leaving aside
the psychoanalytical explanation of such interest, little children do not have this kind of
revulsion; on the contrary, behind their parents’ backs the excrement is often a welcomed toy.
Because we are not receptive to rational arguments at that early age, it is understandable
that our upbringing by our parents regarding cleanliness is achieved by emotional means,
emotional pressure. And so gradually we develop revulsion with a strong emotional content,
which is often not easy to overcome rationally.
Likewise, with a whole spectrum of revulsions: one sexual symbol after another (for
instance Martin Stejskal’s spiders, not to mention snakes, earthworms, maggots and fish),
this revulsion later emerges in early genital organization of the libido when the first
parental censures against masturbation appear, and this is a product of the castration
complex. Revulsion is a reaction to unconscious excitation of repressed infantile sexuality.
A question then arises whether revulsion is more like repugnance (disgust) or fear of
touching. The majority of participants connect the two feelings, or perhaps more accurately,
feel both. It is obvious that beneath the guise of fear is a memory of punishment for
forbidden touching, not so much for touching but of punishment that might follow. Some
support for this explanation is the ambivalence towards the objects of repulsion that some
describe, and that repulsion recedes into the background during erotic play and the sexual
act, disappears altogether, or even contributes to the excitement. ‘Essential’ revulsion has
several tiers, closely related to Freud’s partition of childhood sexuality. The deepest tier is,
for instance, the repulsion towards milk skin, originating in traumatic weaning from the
mother’s breast.7
The next section deals with our repugnance to excrement that is the basis of all our eventual
squeamishness regarding cleanliness. Revulsion to excrement is then obviously the result
(product) of repressing the libido’s sado-anal sexual organization. The internally repressed
remainder of the sado-anal stage of childhood sexuality simultaneously carries with it a
condition of overcoming it. The zodiac of squeamishness, originating in the early (childhood)
phase of genital organization of the libido, quite obviously relates to the castration complex.
Here this squeamishness is expressed mainly by emotional pressure (threats that masturbation

38. Salvador Dalí: Hand with Fish (drawing), n. d.
or attempts at it will be punished by castration) even though arguments against pre-pubertal

and pubertal development lose their effectiveness and are replaced by moralizing.
In spite of this the initial squeamishness, accompanied by fear of punishment does retain
certain energy, certain unconscious effectiveness, where the original source is buried in
childhood amnesia and for which it is necessary to find a new explanation and to rationalize
the feeling. And here starts the fear of snakebite, fear of infection etc. That such fear is a
secondary processing of the original effect is evident from the fact that fear of dangerous
animals is usually not accompanied by disgust. František Dryje provided another indirect
proof with his answer to the questionnaire. What does his fear of above all, wriggling
maggots, earthworms and caterpillars mean? Is it not a fixated fear of erection caused by
manipulation of the penis while masturbating? Alternatively, ‘dead specimens worry me
less’ means touching the penis when urinating or other non-sexual activity (washing) was
not condemned and punished by the parents. It seems that even Ladislav Klíma, when he
considered it mandatory in his ‘My Own Biography’ to boast that, in the extreme days of
his egotistical experiments, he ‘devoured a mouse, pelt and bones, like a dumpling’. He saw
the overcoming of squeamishness as a liberating act. Squeamishness can be regarded as some
PREPHASE OF SUPEREGO or INFANTILE SUPEREGO. In every case, squeamishness
is an unconscious part of the repressive apparatus of our psyche.

I am aware that this psychoanalytical explanation of squeamishness is here dealt with

very briefly and demands a deeper, more detailed examination; it does not explain all aspects
of squeamishness, only peripherally touching on the later rationalization or on the ways
it develops into morality, and how it leaves aside its relationship to shame and similar
feelings. As my questionnaire was not seeking any scientific or therapeutic goals, but goals
relating immediately to my tactile experimentation, it was sufficient for me to extract certain
conclusions regarding fundamental questions about the existence of tactile art.
There is no doubt that the primary reason for squeamishness is played by touch; other
senses contribute later, not just smell and taste but also sight. The questionnaire also showed
that there is a tactile memory that is essential for the existence of tactile art, and that this
‘memory’ reaches into the remotest regions of our unconsciousness. It also showed that all
people have repressed primary tactile experiences.
All this has an important significance for objectifying the subjective tactile beginnings
incited by tactile art, and generally for communication of tactile art. Secondly, tactile
feelings, pleasant and unpleasant, have a strong emotional content which, coming as they do
from early childhood, cannot be controlled by reason. It is a major input into the tactile art
heritage that should guarantee its anti-artistic foundation. As our pleasant and unpleasant
tactile feelings spring from one source, eroticism, they create ambivalent experiencing of
tactile objects (represented by tactile art, not by utilitarian practice), which warrants certain
‘depth of perception’, since it creates in our tactile feelings a dialectical tension.
Some answers again confirmed that touch, isolated from other senses, sensitizes
automatically. On the other hand, the questionnaire indicated that a strongly developed
squeamishness can, in tactile art, become a barrier. It also appears that in some people one
has to count on a certain tactile insensitivity or that tactile contact on any basis other than
utilitarian will be difficult for them because it will assume an inner consciousness of touch
as a separate sense. It may be necessary to tear touch away from its utilitarian dependence on
other senses, above all on sight – to ‘un-civilize itself ’.
1981
39. Father and Son (stereophotography for two hands), 1994

Tactile dream
In dreams, as in our waking hours, the referring nerves signal to us every

deviation from the normal function of organs; in dreams, as in waking hours,
the brain centres reacts to such signals with images associated with feelings,
which in turn cause other feelings; in dreams, as in waking hours, such images
announce either their organic causes or their purposeful directive to a motor
reaction, or both of these, causal and final, in a variously graduated relationship;
in dreams ‘the signal’ normally remains only with the notion, exaggerated in its
sensory elements, graded on a scale into expressions of intensity that hallucinate
into living visuals, whilst in waking a much less visual notion normally belongs
to a temporary, much more adequate and transient mechanism, activating the
motor reaction.
Záviš Kalandra, The Reality of Dream, 19478
So far as we have hitherto analysed the material of dreams, we have seen it as a

collection of psychical residues and memory-traces, to which (on account of the
preference shown for recent and infantile material) we have been led to attribute
a hitherto indefinable quality of being ‘currently active’. We can foresee, then,
without any great difficulty, what will happen if fresh material in the form of
sensations is added during sleep to these currently active memories. It is once
again owing to the fact of their being currently active that these sensory excitations
are of importance for the dream; they are united with the other currently active
psychical material to furnish what is used for the construction of the dream.
Putting it another way, stimuli arising during sleep are worked up into a wish-
fulfilment, the other constituents of which are the familiar psychical ‘day residues’.
This combination need not occur; as I have already pointed out, there is more
than one way of reacting to a somatic stimulus during sleep. When it does occur, it
means that it has been possible to find conceptual material of such a sort to serve
as the content of the dream, that it is able to represent both kinds of source of the
dream – the somatic and the physical.
The essential nature of the dream is not altered by the fact of somatic material
being added to its physical sources: a dream remains the fulfilment of a wish, no
matter in what way the expression of that wish-fulfilment is determined by the
currently active material.
I am prepared to leave room at this point for the notion that the operation
of a number of special factors which can lend a varying importance to external
stimuli in relation to dreams. As I picture it, a combination of individual
factors, physiological and accidental, produced by the circumstances of the
moment, is what determines how a person shall behave in particular cases
of comparatively intense objective stimulation during sleep. The habitual or
accidental depth of his sleep, taken in conjunction with the intensity of the
stimulus, will make it possible in one case for him to suppress the stimulus so
that his sleep is not interrupted and in another case will compel him to wake
up or will encourage an attempt to overcome the stimulus by weaving it into a
dream.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 19009

40. Illusion (engraving, 41. François Boucher: Le Prélude

eighteenth century) (engraving, eighteenth century)
Tactile dreams can be characterized:

1) As dreams wherein we experience or feel tactile and touching sensations.
2) As dreams wherein a sensory dream impulse (stimulus) is visualized and modifies the
manifest content of the dream.
1. Dreams with strong tactile feelings

It is generally known that the individual senses are not represented in dreams equally.
Statistically, tactile dreams come third, after ‘visual’ and ‘aural’ dreams. Tactile perceptions
occur in about a quarter of our dreams. Visual perceptions occur in almost one hundred per
cent of all dreams, aural perceptions in sixty-to-seventy per cent, smell and taste in only five
per cent of dreams.
Morning. At home. A room not dissimilar to mine but getting larger. It is still
dark. From my bed I see two girls in the left corner, about two and six years
old, getting ready to play. I know that I have taken some hashish and that their
existence is a complete hallucination. Both girls are naked, creating a white, moving,
harmonious whole. It’s a pity that I was asleep, the effect of hashish will probably
soon wear off. I talk to the children and invite them to get up onto my bed, which
they do. What a strange feeling of reality this is! I am pointing out to someone,
who could be Paul Eluard, that I am touching them (and indeed I feel that I am
grasping their forearms near their wrists) that it’s not at all like a dream, when
the sensation is more or less veiled, when there is an undefined element missing,
something that has a specific quality of real sensation, when it is never as if we
‘truly’ prick or pinch ourselves. On the contrary, here, there is no difference. It
is reality itself, an absolute reality. The smaller child, sitting astride of me, presses
down on me with her full weight that I can estimate quite accurately. She really
exists. As I become aware of it, I succumb to a magical feeling (the most intense
feeling I’ve had in any dream). I am not at all sexually aroused by what transpired. A
sensation of warmth and moisture on my left brings me to full consciousness. One of
the children has wet herself. At the same time they both vanish.
André Breton: ‘Fragment of a Dream, 5 April 1931’10

1 November 1981
I am on a riverbank, fishing. I have a feeling of happiness. The sun is shining, I feel
warm and fresh. Everything around me is exceptionally green. On the fishhooks hang
policemen and I wait. I pick up some river stones in my hands, feeling their smoothness
and accumulated warmth from the sun. I notice that a policeman on the fishing line
has suddenly moved, I grab the rod, pull hard and start winding in. Out of the cobalt-
blue water emerges a large glistening carp, with a wavy, light red line across the centre
of the body. I pull it out of the water and grab it. I am afraid that it might escape me,
I hold it down, feel it thrashing under me, and I try to grasp it firmly in my hands. I
feel the carp’s body, its scales which are digging under my fingernails, its slipperiness
and sliminess. I stand up and realize that there is no carp. My hands and chest are
completely covered with thick chocolate sauce, it’s dribbling out of my hands. I rub my
hands together, they slide – I say to myself ‘so that’s it’ and begin to dance.
Karol Baron
Among the dreams in which distinctive tactile feelings of the dreamer appear and which are
not brought about by external stimuli, one ought to, in the first instance, include dreams that
are lucid. In the ‘waking’ part of the dream the evidence of ‘I am not dreaming’ can be proof
of its non-visual character (pinching one self, to realize that we are not dreaming or simply
expressing tactile or some other sensual quality of our behaviour).
19 May 1976
I am visiting a friend of mine who now lives in Switzerland. Verunka is with me. I
dream that my friend is describing a cabaret item to me that he is supposed to direct,
and that seems to him quite stupid. On the stage lies a woman with long, blond hair,
dressed in a seventeenth-century costume. Around her runs a lion that suddenly loses
its head; however, underneath there is a tiger’s head. The lion’s head sneaks up on the
tiger and bites its head off (I dream all this as related by my friend, as if I already saw
it all happening on the stage). The tiger’s body, minus head and tail, creeps to the
lying woman. From the tiger’s rectum emerges a snake and winds itself around the
woman. At that moment the item is to end with an unexpected event – the doorbell of
the woman’s apartment rings and guests arrive. In that moment my dream ends in a
dream. I ‘wake up’ and look for a pencil and a notebook to write the dream down. The
pencil and the notebook, however, are not where they should be. I swear profoundly
and search my friend’s apartment. Verunka is laughing at me. I have woken up the
friend’s entire family. Desperately, I continue searching for any piece of paper on which
I could record the dream while I am quietly memorizing it for myself so I won’t forget
it. All I am finding are papers already used. My friend tells me that I am unlikely to
find a blank piece of paper in his place. I despair, fearing that unless I do find a piece of
paper I will forget the dream. Then I am searching for a piece of paper on some train. I
keep opening and closing the window and looking for some paper in its frame. I worry
that the train will start moving with me on it. I wake up, exhausted.
Jan Švankmajer
Under certain circumstances reproduction of sounds occurs in dreams, sounds that up to that
time were dormant in some tactile unconscious. It often happens that till then an indifferent
part of the body (which clearly doesn’t belong among the erogenous zones) finds itself at the
intersection of excitement, in a dominant position, sometimes representing sexual organs (for

example the fantastic coitus in the film Barbarella) and reproduces hidden tactile sensation.
Examples of another kind are ‘oral dreams’ in which the main role is taken by tactile sensations
on tongue and teeth. From my experience they belong to the most archaic dreams and are often
accompanied by fear of being gagged by meat and overcome by lack of space.
A dream, which repeatedly came to me, had a very simple theme. I was struggling my way
through ‘massive quilts’, as if I was in the innards of some body. After each ‘quilt’ another
one appeared, and another one again. The dream was accompanied by great anxiety. Every
evening, before I went to sleep, I feared that I would dream it again and maybe just
because of that, it kept coming back. Later on, I interpreted it to myself as an echo of the
birth trauma. Later still, I realized that there was some relationship between this dream
and pre-sleep pressure of the tongue against the roof of my mouth and teeth.
Martin Stejskal, 1977
To this category of tactile dreams, except for the dreams evoking infantile oral experiences and
lucid dreams, belongs also the majority of erotic dreams. Understandably, since the physical
sense plays a dominant role in eroticism.
25–26 January 1960

I don’t recall the first part of the dream that brought me into some room I did not
remember. I am standing here, feeling small, but with a massive, erect penis and some
naked youth, whom I cannot adequately identify, although he has very distinctive
features, is crawling towards me on his knees. I feel very excited and am unable to
move. The more I feel that I am closer to ejaculation the more I fear that it will happen
before the youth gets to me, and with this growing feeling the dream is becoming more
and more concrete and three dimensional. The youth’s eyes betray that he is nearing
me precisely because he knows of my imminent ejaculation. The tension is increasing
second by second. In the nick of time he reaches me, grabs my penis into his mouth
and at that moment I feel the painful delight that accompanies the onset of ejaculation.
It can be assumed that a part of such dreams (dreams with strong tactile feelings) perhaps
falls into the following category of tactile dreams (dreams affected by sensory impulses), since
it cannot be excluded that at the origin of the dream there was some objective tactile impulse,
which was not noted on waking or disappeared during the dreaming.
2. Dreams brought about by objective, more or less accidental stimulation of physical sense
About twenty years ago, I used to read aloud to my mother and frequently I started
to nod off at the pauses, after each paragraph. I came to very quickly, so much
so that mother only noted that I sometimes read somewhat slowly. During these
seconds of sleep, which no sooner started than they were interrupted by the need
to continue reading, I had quite extensive dreams, mixing them up with usually
decreased comprehension of the book. I shall relate an occasion that to me appears
decisive for the speed of dreaming and confirms, in my eyes, that a mere moment
is enough to allow an extensive dream to take place. I was somewhat unwell,
lying in my room and my mother was at the head of the bed. I dreamt of the
days of terror; I was present at bloody scenes, I faced the revolutionary tribunal,

saw Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier-Tinville, all the terrible persons of that awful
epoch; I carried on discussions with them, then eventually, after many incidents
which I recollect only imperfectly, was tried, sentenced to death, transported
in the execution cart through the throngs of shouting people to the Place de
Revolution; I ascended the scaffold, the executioner assisted me to lie down on
the board, released the guillotine, the blade fell and I felt my head being separated
from my body. I woke up in utmost apprehension, feeling an iron rod, a part of
the bed, which suddenly came loose, resting on my neck as if it was a guillotine.
All that happened in a fraction of time, my mother assured me; it was the external
sensation which became the impetus to all the above, the first moment of the
dream which was followed by a number of other events. The moment when I was
struck brought the recall of that terrible machine so well represented by the rod
and initiated the images of that time, symbolized by the guillotine.
Alfred Maury, Sleep and Dreams, 186111
I was riding on a grey horse, timidly and awkwardly to begin with, as though I were only
reclining upon it. I met one of my colleagues, P., who was sitting high on a horse, dressed
in a tweed suit, and who drew my attention to something (probably to my bad seat). I
now began to find myself sitting more and more firmly and comfortably on my highly
intelligent horse, and noticed that I was feeling quite at home up there. My saddle was
a kind of bolster, which completely filled the space between its neck and crupper. In this
way I rode straight in between two vans. After riding some distance up the street, I turned
round and tried to dismount, first in front of a small open chapel that stood in the street
frontage. Then I actually did dismount in front of another chapel that stood near it. My
hotel was in the same street; I might have let the horse go to it on its own, but I preferred
to lead it there. It was as though I should have felt ashamed to arrive at it on horseback.
A hotel ‘boots’ was standing in front of the hotel; he showed me a note of mine that had
been found, and laughed at me over it. In the note was written, doubly underlined ‘No
food’, and then another remark (indistinct) such as ‘No work’, together with a vague idea
that I was in a strange town in which I don’t work at all.
It would not be supposed at first sight that this dream originated under the
influence, or rather under the compulsion, of a painful stimulus. But for some
days before I had been suffering from boils that made every movement a torture;
and finally a boil the size of an apple had risen at the base of my scrotum, which
caused me the most unbearable pain with every step I took.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 190012
Volket quotes a dream of a young woman who inadvertently managed to get

a corner of her coverlet between her teeth and ‘lo, a whimsical god graced the
sleeping one with a huge apple strudel into which she was biting with insatiable
appetite.’ From my own collection, for instance, I can describe a dream wherein,
after a skirmish with an enemy infantry, my back was heavily injured by a
bayonet – I wake up and in that very same place I feel a light pressure from the
corner of a pillow. A sleeper is dreaming of holding a revolver by the side of his
body. He tries to shoot with it. The revolver does not work. Two or three rounds
drop out of it to the ground. Behind a wooden fence a pretty girl is observing the
dreamer. On waking he finds that he is holding onto his erect penis.
Záviš Kalandra, The Reality of Dream, 1947

Mouthful of mouse blood – dream 14 December 1971

I see myself peeling pieces of paint under which are petrified spiders. Everything’s
falling onto a large heap on the ground creating an unpleasant pile of rubbish.
Presently I see a live mouse (of a very strange shape) forming out of that pile. I pick
up a sword (?) and cut it into half. Suddenly, as if everything loses its gravity, I feel
the blood flowing from my hair – it is quite revolting. To top it all, my mouth is full
of blood from that mouse, mixed with small pieces of mouse meat. I am overcome
with unbelievable disgust, I run to a wash basin where I spit the blood and wash my
mouth with water, but it keeps filling with more blood, it keeps dribbling out, I am
quite desperate that there is no end to this horror. As I wake up, I find out that my
teeth are biting with all their force into the sheet that is red with blood, then for a
long time I feel pain in my mouth.
(The dream contains fragments of reality from the previous few days: painting of a
dirty cupboard, a previously unknown to me reproduction of Magritte’s painting of a
woman eating a bird.)
Martin Stejskal
I am taking a walk and suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself in a shady peripheral

secluded spot, near the ruins of some old castle. Odd corners are teeming with copulating
couples, triples and masturbating men, all as if intertwined with trees and various
creeping plants. They inject each other with hypodermic syringes; otherwise they have
vacant, dull faces and carry on their activity with a certain apathetic stubbornness. One
of the lone men notices me and approaches me with a poised hypodermic. I start to
run, they all follow me. In the end they catch up with me, poke me with sticks and
prick me with needles so that I can barely breathe with pain. They strip me naked, put
me into a drum and laughingly roll me down a steep slope. I can just hear the shouting,
panting and groaning of a renewed, wild orgy, then the rattle of the drum, pain and
finally a fall from the bed that wakes me up.
Alena Nádvorniková
Dream of women’s running race – 15 September 1978

The pan-European athletic competition is in progress. The final of the women’s 400
metres race is about to be run. The organizers are desperate, there are not enough
competitors. They are running around the sports grounds, searching to find someone
willing to run. They don’t care, they’re willing to accept even men. Martin Stejskal and
myself let them talk us into it. As we are, in our street clothes, we position ourselves
on the blocks, next to the other runners in shorts and singlets. The woman with the
starting gun is getting ready to start the race when she is informed that there is a phone
call for her in a nearby cabin. She walks away. The competitors on the blocks relax. I
urgently want to go to the toilet. I tell Martin that I am going to have a piss and ask him
to make sure that the race is not started without me. I walk away behind some wooden
wall and start urinating. It’s taking a long time and I am still not finished. I can’t see
the starting line and it makes me nervous. I worry that they will start without me. I
hear the gun go off and it is clear to me that I missed it, the race is being run without
me. At last I finish. I run out from behind the wall and full of rage start abusing the
starter, how could she think to start the race without me, that I would certainly have
won, how is it that she could go off during her working time to answer the telephone
while I couldn’t even go to the toilet. I follow the race as a spectator and am convinced

that since I am not running, Martin, at least, will certainly win. However, a small
tubby girl in a Manchester costume gets to the finishing line first. Martin is finishing
among the few last ones. I can’t comprehend that and ask Martin how is it possible that
he didn’t win. Martin, completely exhausted explains that it wasn’t possible. I wake up
with an urgent need to go to the toilet.
Jan Švankmajer
Into this category of tactile dreams belongs even the ‘Experimentally aroused dreams on the
basis of tactile stimulus’
According to Robert Macnish, Giron de Buzareingues already conducted such
experiments. By leaving his knees uncovered, he dreamt that he travelled during night
on a mail coach. He remarks that travellers will no doubt be aware how cold one’s
knees become in a coach. Another time he left his head uncovered at the back and
dreamt that he was taking part in a religious ceremony in the open air. It must be
explained that in the country in which he lived it was the custom always to keep the
head covered except in circumstances such as these.13
Meier, according to Hennings (Regarding Dreams and Sleepwalkers, Weimar 1784,
page 258) on another occasion tightened up his shirt collar and dreamt that he was
being hanged. Hoffbauer dreamt in his youth that he fell from a high wall and woke
up to observe that the bed had collapsed and he really did fall.14 Dr Gregory relates
that having occasion to apply a bottle of hot water to his feet when he went to bed,
he dreamt that he was making a journey to the top of Mount Etna, and that he found
the heat of the ground almost insufferable. Another person, on having a hot poultice
applied to his head, imagined that a party of Indians was scalping him; while a friend
of mine who happened to sleep in damp sheets, dreamt that he was dragged through
a stream. A paroxysm of gout during sleep has given rise to that dreamer supposing
himself to be under the power of the Inquisition, undergoing the torments of the
rack.15
Maury relates new observations of dreams that were aroused in him (many other
attempts were unsuccessful).
1. Being tickled on the lips and nose with a feather – dreams of terrible torture.
2. Someone puts a mask made of resin on his face, takes it off, at the same time his
skin comes off!
3. Being pinched on the neck – dreams that a mustard poultice is being applied, and
thinks of a doctor who attended him in childhood.
4. A hot iron is held near his face – he dreams of chauffeurs (bands of robbers in
the Vendee who used this kind of torture), who have infiltrated the house and
demanded money from the inhabitants by putting their feet into braziers of red-
hot coals. Then the Duchess d’Abrantes, to whom he is a secretary, appears.
5. A drop of water drips on his forehead. (He is in Italy, perspiring, drinking Orvieto
wine.)16
Disregarding that Freud regards the sensory stimuli themselves as immaterial to the dream,
he does not deny that such stimuli affect the dream’s function. Dream is a great improviser,
reacting to sensory stimuli that occur during sleep by gently and fluidly including them into
the scene development (manifest content of the dream) without interrupting the story line.
Sensory objects, even without changing the latent content of the dream, distinctly affect its
metaphor, thereby co-creating its imaginative shape. Under certain circumstances, as in the

instance of Marquis d’Hervey,17 it is possible for the sensory objects to influence even the
latent content of the dream, presuming that conscious experiences combined with pleasure
come to bear on it, as shown by André Breton in Communicating Vessels:
Much happier than Huysman’s hero from the novel À Rebours (Against the Grain),
d’Hervey, was, I presume, so privileged socially that he didn’t attempt to escape
anything, and, without any emotional harm, went ahead to procure – outside
the real world – a number of clear satisfactions that were in the sensory sphere
no worse than des Esseinte’s drunkenness, but didn’t cause any depression or
reproaches. Sucking an ordinary psychedelic plant root with which, in a normal
state, he carefully associated a certain number of pleasant images that all originated
in the myth about Pygmalion, he achieved seductive adventures in his dream as
the hand of a co-adventurer slipped the root between his lips. When I evaluate this
result properly, and without any astonishment, I gladly rate it as the pinnacle of
poetical achievements of the last century, right next to those for which Rimbaud
is responsible, celebrating the poet’s application of the principle of necessarily
arousing a complete and considerable disturbance of one’s senses.18
42. Touch Your Dreams, 1976

43. Dream about Mountain Climbers (uncovered tactile object), 1976

Touch your dreams

The moment we isolate touch from the other senses and throw tactile experiences to
the mercy of speech, a precarious situation arises; we realize that words do not suffice
to describe our feelings unambiguously. As we search through dictionaries we find very
few words expressing tactile sensations. Additionally, most of such words simultaneously
also express the visual experience. In practice, all words indicating the shape or structure
of objects rely on the dual perception TOUCH – SIGHT. Only when describing quality
are there several concepts reserved exclusively for touch: Hard, warm, supple and so
on. If we want to express with words a direct bodily experience we are immediately
thrown back into the realm of poetic language. From the point of view of scientific
positivism, this lack of touch is unforgivable, and as it does not seem possible to jump
this identity barrier into the free space of imagination, the preoccupation with touch
reverts to the sphere of statistics, concerning itself, in the best circumstances, with the
differential ability of skin. It never concerned me – and now when my interest has
turned to the consumerist culture’s least deformed sense, even less so – whether the
human skin registers the prick of a pair of compasses, arms of which are separated by
three millimetres, as two pricks or one. From the standpoint of the experimentation
that I follow, I see that what initially appears to be a scarcity, causing difficulties, on the
contrary is a guarantee of the authenticity of descriptions of tactile experiences.
Experimentation with the tactile object ‘Restorer’ showed that the majority
of participants regarded the object as a fictitious happening, in spite of it being an
interpretation of a static picture. This narrative activity of the tactile object is caused by
technical communication with the object. A hand inside the sleeve is unable to encompass
the entire space of the object with one gesture, and so is forced to discover individual
parts of it gradually. Sensory impressions, associations and ideas come gradually and
make up a sequence of ‘events’ combining into a scene. In the interpretative texts about
tactile objects, and in the experiments so far, I have discovered certain similarities with
descriptions of dreams: their story line, the visualization of something that we don’t see
in reality, the combining of rationally incompatible ideas and the utter reality of the
experience (physical reality, as distinct from reading something).
When we sleep, dreams develop in our inner vision independently of any real visual
perception. In tactile dreams the inner vision’s ‘development’ is mediated by touch. A
blow to the neck by a broken iron bed rod motivates a story from the French revolution
finishing with guillotining of the dreamer (Maury) or a fall from the bed motivates a scene
of sadistic orgies (Alena Nádvorníková). Similarly, with the perception of a tactile object,
the immediate tangible object produces associations and analogous images. With such
characterizations, the tactile object can become an ideal interpreter of our dreams. Not
just a static motif of a dream taken out of context as an inspirational basis of creativity
(for example with Jindřich Štyrský), but the entire dream with all the twists of its story.
With the experimentation that I am offering here, I tried to allow you to experience your
dreams once more, and moreover, to make it possible for you to touch them.
Dream about mountain climbers 8 October 1976

Vratislav Effenberger demonstrates, as part of the questionnaire on eroticism, his
masturbation experiences when young. We all stand at the base of a sheer sand cliff.
From top to bottom the cliff is drilled with pairs of holes. ‘Each pair represents one
masturbation’, explains Vratislav Effenberger. On one of the pairs, about one metre
above ground, he demonstrates the technique of masturbation. He also shows that
wherever the holes are, the other side of the wall is hollow. The holes go right through.

Vratislav Effenberger explains that during masturbation warm milk was injected into
one of the holes from the other side.
Jan Švankmajer
The dream is based on several real events: The erotic moment of the dream is
accompanied by an anthology worked on by a group. Vratislav Effenberger plays the
main role in the dream, just as he does in the organization of the group. The sand
cliffs provide the environment for the dream because several days preceding that, I
was shooting a film in Prachov Mountains. The cliffs became an erotic context for
several reasons. A member of the film crew declared that one of the cliffs reminded
him of female genitalia. During the filming, a group of climbers was scaling an almost
perpendicular needle nearby. Observing them, it occurred to me that they looked like
Swift’s tiny people climbing up Gulliver’s erect penis. Their silent activity seemed to me
to be one of the most stupid sublimations. Small and large depressions are hollowed out
of the sandstone, creating bizarre structures on the surface of the stone. Pairs of holes,
each signifying a single masturbation in the dream, evidently have their origin in the
drawing Eva Švankmajerová did (on the theme of eroticism and automobilism) for the
abovementioned anthology. Examining the drawings I discerned a certain similarity
in all automobilisms – penises. All of them have two openings in their ‘glans’. These
openings are placed below each other as in a vagina. (To my surprise at this anatomical
nonsense, I received an answer worthy of an innocent virgin: ‘Isn’t it right?’ Behind that
feigned naivety hides a quite obvious provocation originating in the castration complex.)
Warm milk squirting into the rock holes during masturbation has two sources:
1) warm milk fills rubber balloons in some openings (during orgasm sperm
substitutes for milk);
2) for a year now, during the night, I am disturbed early in the morning from my
sleep to warm up some milk for my son to assuage his hunger.
1976
Interpretation of the object

Small rings covered by thread, quite pleasant to touch, transmute the coarse structure of
a stone into an object worthy of affection and so invite our fingers to rest on them, not
just to rest but to make a circular motion of their circumference without fear of being
injured. The lowest ring is threaded on a nylon thread, as if inviting us to a game; this,
after the initial overcoming of identifying embarrassment, overtakes our senses so much
that we force ourselves to further exploration of the object with difficulty. At any rate,
we don’t have to go far. Our fingers stop, face to face with the mountaineer’s cold penis,
which, owing to its lifeless slipperiness, is impossible to climb, and which is meanwhile
held in check by the bridle of sublimation. For how long? The direction of its glans does
not leave us in any doubt, any more than the elasticity of the bridles. An ordinary clothes
hanger weighed down with snails’ shells in the form of a dead woman (mother?) secures
these prohibitions from childhood. Similarly, the brush handles, worn smooth by hands’
touching, and ending in clumps of bristles hardened with dried lacquer, do not allow any
deeper penetration into the heart of delight. In spite of that it signals its future. Even if up
to now our descriptive perception has been, and will continue to be, condemned to the
infinitely stretched-out darkness of the black sleeve of a postal employee, our real vision
is starting to witness a reconstruction of childhood.

Dream about unwashed dishes

The house where I was born had a large, square kitchen. The old building has an
architectural peculiarity and novelty, with which my parents endowed our household; it
meant that visitors had to enter the house through the kitchen. The kitchen was neither
a hallway nor a corridor, it was simply a kitchen entrance. In that entrance I used to
wash the dishes. Dishwashing is the most disgusting work I have ever undertaken. It
was repugnant to me not only because during that activity my feet were always cold,
my scalp was itching and I perspired a little, but chiefly because I was reaching with
my hands into smelly, lukewarm water with grease floating on top to reach objects
which often inflicted bleeding cuts. My mother had a habit of teasing and humiliating
me while I did the washing up by testing my knowledge of multiplication tables. On
two occasions I fled, I ran away from home, partly because of that beastly washing
up. In my dream about the kitchen, H. F. in her knitted striped dress with a flowing
skirt from Denmark, was standing, or rather, lying down. She’d just come in. I kept
running away from that repulsive work, I ran to her and reached under her skirt. Each
time she said something, I took my hands out of that dirty water and in place of a reply,
I did what I wrote above.
Eva Švankmajerová
Interpretation of the dream

The greasy circles from the rinsed plates unwittingly slide over the skin on the hands
like the ‘Danish’ skirt. If you insert the hand into the object you must become aware
that it becomes the hand of the dreamer, that it becomes a part of someone else’s dream
and simultaneously an intermediary between reality and dream. Consequently, even
you do ‘what I wrote above’. Not here, but there in the dream, in Eva Švankmajerová’s
dream, but the unwashed dishes are yours, even the Danish skirt, because you too have
your own unwashed dishes and your own Danish skirt and you carry on this tactile
dialogue between them. And the elastic around the elbow is a borderline between
dream and reality. Don’t be afraid, immerse your hand into the dream water with pools
of grease on the surface and fulfil your wish.
Dream object of Emila Medková

How do we hold the fingers (of the left hand or right hand or both) before we immerse
them into a shapeless material of clay?
Is there an aggressive gesture that discharges tension with one brutal touch?
Or is there, on the contrary, a repeated, desperate digging of the earth?
Or just a light touch with the palm that leaves a barely visible mark of the lines of fate?
Does it seem easier now than, say, half a year ago?
But is it really so?
I am leaving some house (perhaps it is the house on Na Královce street in Vršovice

where we used to live). The main door opening onto the street squeaks, I fear that I will
wake up everyone in the whole house. Gently I press down the door handle and try to
lift the door up a little to minimize the squeaking, but the handle seems to have gone
soft, it changes its shape to the shape of my hand and it’s impossible to lift the door
up or push it down. The handle moulds itself to my hand and is getting softer. Now
it is sticking to my hand and the door, whose inertia never stopped it from opening,
squeaks terribly. I run out on to the street, try to wipe my hands that are clammy from

44. Dream about Unwashed Dishes (uncovered tactile object), 1976

the door handle on my trousers, but it doesn’t seem to work. They keep being sticky. I
run towards Grébovka. I run past the vineyard. Some women there are digging around
the vine roots. I am sitting in the kitchen at Stankov, Emila walks in through the door,
there is a clean white handkerchief stuck to her face. The handkerchief is damp and so
pressed to her face that it copies the shape of her face (it reminds me of the head of a
statue of the memorial to J. Zeyer in Petřín). Emila: ‘Wipe your hands! You can’t eat
with hands like that.’ I get up and with great anxiety reach with my clammy hands for
the handkerchief on Emila’s face. (I wake up in horror.)
21 February 1986, morning
Is it really the same in a tactile dream as in an experiment with tactile objects, where
touch, in an effort to identify unknown tactile object, paradoxically leaves the safe
ground of identity and begins to express it imaginatively? Why is it that in an effort to
identify an object, or its parts, touch descends (if facing an object or structure that is
hard to identify) into an interpretative delirium, where there is precisely the feeling of
non-ambiguity in using a sequence of freely ordered associations and analogies to try
and grasp the object; in a dream the tactile object ‘identifies’ quite clearly, even though
it is evidently about unusual objects (Maury’s bed rod) and the ‘identification’ of the
object in the dream is usually quite ‘fantastical’, going beyond the sensory experiences
of the dreamer (Maury’s guillotine, Alena Nádvorníková’s capture in a keg). How is one
to understand the difference between the dependence and helplessness of touch when
facing unfamiliar objects while fully awake, and its sovereignty in judging the exciting
sensory objects while dreaming? Freud maintains that the dream sorts out disturbing
sensory impulses during sleeping, in a similar way to the remnants of reality from the
previous day, and fashions that material into various combinations thereby creating
the manifest dream content. Of course the remnants of reality from the previous day,
or days, offer a relatively large number of variants and possible combinations, as this
material comprises impulses that we experienced in the last twenty-four or forty-
eight, sometimes even more, hours. A tactile sensation, or some other sensory impulse
which appears to be disturbing, is usually very short or without possible variants, one-
directional, and for that reason it is certainly difficult for the dream to incorporate it
convincingly into the context of an already happening dream – moreover the impulses
are sometimes quite rapid (Maury’s bed rod, fall from the bed) so the inclusion into
the already happening dream is not simple. It is possible that Kalandra and before him
a number of others (A. Krauss, R. A. Scherner, L. Strumpell, A. Maury) were correct
when stating that it is only this tactile (sensory) subject that is the impulse for the dream,
the centre and the axis of it, denying the dream its psychological dimension. Even so,
the sovereignty with which the dream manages such unusual situations is perplexing.
Is it somehow related to the disposition of the dreamer to imaginative thinking, or is it
merely a matter of circumstances, of accident?
Maury quotes the dream about the guillotine as proof that a dream takes place in
a very short time frame, that it must develop as some parallel perception of a clump
of notions which become sorted out into a narrative sequence as the dream develops.
He describes the guillotine dream as a long, very complex one in which everything
logically leads to the guillotining of the dreamer. However, the dream, or the psychic
phenomenon that brought it about, could not assume that at the conclusion of it a bed
rod will fall down and end it. Would Maury dream that he was being guillotined even
without that distinctive tactile object?

45. Dream Object of Emila Medková, 1986

It is interesting that in a dream motivated by a tactile object, that object, although

imaginatively changed, is again experienced in a tactile way. Between the object and
its imaginative adaptation there is always some tactile relationship, the tactile feeling
remains, the dream never completely transforms it into any other sensory plane.
Additionally, during the metamorphosis of the original subject, in most cases an
exaggeration of that subject takes place. What causes such an exaggeration? It will
be difficult to find satisfactory answers to these questions. Perhaps we can get some
inkling through experimental dreams (dreams influenced by artificial tactile or sensory
subjects). During a dream, touch escapes the utilitarian functions and is freed not only
from its slavery to other senses but above all from the supervision of the super-ego, it
reverts to its infantile experiences and tactile fantasies, the pre-utilitarian phase of its
development:
1) The pre-experiences of tactile contact with the mother’s body (especially oral
experiences) when the mother’s body must have seemed something huge, un-
bounded, at the same time bringing bliss, but also fear and anxiety (of being
trapped by flesh).
2) Tactile sado-anal experiences and the first contacts with objects, and an attempt
to subjugate them. But also, there is the infant’s first exaggeration of these objects
and tactile fantasies (childhood fantasies that the toys harm them).
3) Masturbation experiences accompanied by erotic phantasies and also exaggerations
(even though there is no metamorphosis to another plane). In this phase of erotic
life the first realization of sexual symbolism (hand – vagina) occurs.
4) It seems that even among dreamers the ‘artists’ are better equipped than others
for imaginative experiencing, and that this ‘talent’ of theirs, expressing itself in a
dream, need not be evident in a waking state.
The answers to the questionnaire on squeamishness showed that a strong emotive
reaction exists in some cases even with just a notion of touching; experimentation
with tactile objects confirms that to a large degree this happens in reverse as well.
With a mere sighting of certain structures or animals an emotional effect occurs, as
if we were touching the object (animal; see also reflexive hallucinations), sometimes
connected with an urge to touch (Martin Stejskal), but also fear and disgust, at the
same intensity, as if we were already touching. Here, sight can be of assistance in tactile
art; sight arouses tactile imagination and resulting emotions. With tactile objects it
is the reverse, a tactile object arouses a visual image and resulting emotions. In the
first instance, the tactile perception is only latent (notional), in the second, the visual
perception, brought about by a tactile object, happens in front of our inner vision,
as a visual notion. There exists, however, one other tactile imagination, of which
we are aware from our tactile dreams, where the sensory, tactile object in the dream
changes into another object, also tactile. Here it is a pure, tactile metamorphosis,
usually exaggerated (as pointed out by Kalandra). No matter that the tactile subject
is visualized; the fact remains that the metamorphosis of the object takes place in the
tactile imagination, as a real experience.
1981

Synaesthesia
Vowels
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels
One day I will tell of your latent birth:
A, black hairy corset of shining flies
Which buzz around a cruel stench,
Gulf of darkness; E, whiteness of vapours and tents,

Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, quivering of flowers;
I, purples, spit blood, laughter of beautiful lips
In anger of penitent drunkenness;
U, cycles, divine vibrations of green seas,

Peace of pastures scattered with animals, peace of the wrinkles
Which alchemy prints on the heavy studious brows;
O, supreme Clarion full of strange stridor,

Silences crossed by words and angels:
– O, the Omega, violet beam from His Eyes!
Arthur Rimbaud, 188319
Evolution of the whole culture based on a healthy artistic instinct was interrupted
by naturalism, technology and civilization that have come to the world’s fore.
A healthy instinct for the times gone by can nowadays be replaced only with a
systematic education towards recognition of what the individual senses have in
common. Research into the inner relationship of individual senses will therefore
become a logical necessity for further progress.
A. Hošek, Relationship of Colours and Tones, 192620
In 1840, Dr Augonová studied a girl (14-year-old G. L.) who became dyspeptic

and anorexic as a result of a fit of remorse. In a somnambular state she could
identify coins laid onto the back of her neck and later even her sight and hearing
transferred to her stomach regions, so that with a blindfold she could read a
book from a distance of several steps. It was one of the interesting examples of a
transposition of senses. In another case the patient, (14-year-old C. S.), who lost
her eyesight (No. 7 on Jägrov’s scale) was able to see with the tip of her nose and
the left ear lobe, the sense of smell shifted to her chin, later to the soles of her feet.
We have to admit the possibility that in abnormal circumstances the sensitivity
of skin and nerve centres can be so heightened that a new universal surface sense
arises that receives the finest differentiation in wave frequency oscillations upon
which known kinds of energy depend.
Dr V. Forster, Occult Phenomena and Their Psychological Explanation, 192321
Nations have quite often achieved a spiritual harmony at the smallest of costs.
How much damaging exhaustion, how much unnecessary irritation could we save
ourselves if we were willing to accept realistic conditions of our human experience

and the fact that it is not in our power to free ourselves completely from its
scope and rhythm. Space has its specific quality, just as sounds and smells have
colours, and feelings have a certain weight. This searching for correspondence
is not a poetic play or mysticism (as someone dared to write about Rimbaud’s
sonnet about vowels: a classical case for today’s linguist who does not know the
causal basis of the colours of individual phonemes – which changes for each
individual – but only the relationships which connect colours and phonemes,
allowing for only a limited number of possibilities). A completely new territory
opens up for a scientist where research can achieve rich discoveries. Like artists,
fish differentiate light or dark smells and bees perceive differences in light intensity
as differences in weight – dark shade feels heavy for them and light shade is light
in weight. And so the work of a painter, poet or musician, just as the myths and
symbols of a primitive man, should appear to us as being, if not a higher form of
recognition, at least the fundamental form which is individual and universal. In
relation to this knowledge scientific thinking represents only a sharp edge: it is
penetrating because it is sharpened on the stone of facts but at the cost of losing
its tactile fullness; its effectiveness lies in its ability to cut sufficiently deep so that
the substance of the tool is subordinated to the human mind.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sad Tropics, 195522
. . . the aim is the achievement of mechanism of passions or series of groups,

a tendency to harmonize the five sensory areas (1. taste, 2. touch, 3. vision,
4. hearing, 5. smell) with four affective areas (6. friendship, 7. ambition, 8. love,
9. family instinct). This harmony is possible to achieve through three little known
and discredited passions that I refer to as: 10. cabalist (trickery), 11. papillon
(sensory and spiritual delight), and 12. composite (mania for diversity).
Charles Fourier, The New Industrial World, 182923
46. Lipstick, 2009

Perversion for five senses, May 1978

(Synaesthetic game of analogy)
It would seem that in the course of analysing chromatic hearing, we arrive at a deep
universal law, valid for various other phenomena and forms of human thinking.
Psychological experiments have shown that even such sensations as smell, taste,
touch as well as bodily well-being and pain, can be translated into optical images;
that one can award colours to numbers, the days of the week, vowels (Rimbaud),
and other systems. It has in fact been demonstrated that oneiric (dream-like)
visual images can be aroused by aural or tactile sensations that yet again point
to a certain correspondence, to a certain functional supplementing of sensory
equivalences.
Karel Teige,
‘Poetry for the Five Senses or the Second Manifesto of Poetism’24
1. HOMOSEXUALITY
Colour: Light ochre.
Tactile analogy: Cut onion into two halves and holding the pieces in the hands rub on
bare chest with a circular motion. At the same time stand barefooted on very rough
sand paper and gently move the toes of both feet.
Smell: Hot asphalt.
Taste: Freshly burned butter.
Sound: Amplified sound of hair being combed.
2. LESBIANISM
Colour: White.
Tactile analogy: Wrap naked body in warm polythene and roll down grassy meadow.
Smell: Dried camomile.
Taste: Salt.
Sound: Steam escaping from pressure cooker.
3. SADOMASOCHISM
Colour: Black orange.
Tactile analogy: Gently cut into finger balls of both hands so that they bleed lightly,
then caress oneself over the whole body.
Smell: Wet dog.
Taste: Simmering jasmine tea.
Sound: Birdseed ground under foot.
4. PAEDOPHILIA
Colour: Azure blue.
Tactile analogy: Hold a still warm, plucked chicken under each armpit and kneel onto
over-ripe apples.
Smell: Doors, freshly painted with oil paint.

Taste: Flour.
Sound: Amplified sound of spilling beads.
5. VOYEURISM
Colour: Dark grey.
Tactile analogy: Immerse hands into cooling glue, after a while slowly pull them out.
Smell: Old mouldy paper.
Taste: Antacid.
Sound: Absolute stillness.
6. FETISHISM
Colour: Pink.
Tactile analogy: In an overheated room, sit naked on an eiderdown and roll a rolling
pin covered with fine fur firstly up and down the back (from buttocks to as high as one
can reach), then from top of the head down to the end of the toes.
Smell: Freshly plucked feathers.
Taste: The kind felt when pressing tongue to the metal of a street lamp in winter (at
minus five degrees Centigrade).
Sound: Undoing seams on clothing.
7. BESTIALITY
Colour: Lemon yellow.
Tactile analogy: Very lightly tickling inside the ears with feathers from a wild duck.
Smell: Steamed man’s hat.
Taste: One’s own blood.
Sound: Loretta bells.
8. GERONTOPHILIA
Colour: Periwinkle green.
Tactile analogy: Sitting naked astride a branch of an old pear tree (branch must be at
least twenty five centimetres in diameter) and digging fingernails into palms of hands
in a regular rhythm (about five minutes).
Smell: Crushed cardamom.
Taste: Infusion of porridge oats.
Sound: Stick being run past picket fence.
9. NECROPHILIA
Colour: Purple.
Tactile analogy: Lying down bare-backed on scattered, dried peas, weigh down the
shin bones with a block of ice and put palms of hands, previously warmed in a fur
muff, on the forehead.
Smell: Sweaty pillow.
Taste: Saccharine.
Sound: Kicking against the door.

47. Imagery-Evoking Spaces – Connections (model) 1978
Connections
Sound of a starting gun. They thrust forward. Eyes staring. With a pouch on
each hip, and a number on the back. In the left pouch the olfactory organ of Des
Esseintes, in the right pouch the cookbook of Salvador Dalí. At the goal a tactile
chair is waiting for them, which, like a central telepathic communication connects
the convoluted brains of these racing thought fanatics with an unbroken chain of
short-connected erections. Who will be first? Who will be first to taste the delight
of ipsatio totalis? The entry controls, in the form of elbow sleeves, can, at any time
during the race, check the sensations (in the central nervous system as well as in
the crotch) of the participants in the children’s game of ‘Sit Down’. I saw without
looking, I smelled without smelling, I heard without listening, I tasted, without
putting anything into my mouth, I felt, without touching anything; that is the
law of synaesthesia.
Text for the exhibition of the collective project of the Surrealist Group in
Czechoslovakia, 1978
48. Firmly Hold The Mouse, 2009

Morphology of fear, 1980
SIGHT
Fear, for me, does not have any colour, at least not in the visible part of the spectrum.
The strongest feelings of fear I experienced were always situated in darkness that is
impenetrable to me, darkness that does not make me disappear, on the contrary makes
me into a visible and obvious target. This helplessness in the dark, apprehension of
not being able to hide, became even stronger when I found out about the existence of
infrared binoculars. The most fearsome is the darkness that I must step into. Darkness,
for me, is space that is never empty; on the contrary it is, in its way, very dense, danger
threatens with every step. It is full of precipices to fall into, ferocious beasts ready to
attack me, devils, demons and evil persons about to strangle me. The building where
I spent my childhood was an apartment block in Vršovice. It was three-storied, with
a staircase in the middle and pockets of dark corridors on every level. We lived on
the third floor at the end of one such dark corridor. Our door was at the end of the
corridor. From the staircase, the door disappeared in the darkness. To get through that
corridor to our door, I always moved sideways with my back pressed against the wall. I
could not rid myself of the idea that at the door to our apartment stood a soldier with
a pointed bayonet which I would most certainly impale myself on if I walked straight
up through the middle of the corridor. The soldier wore a red uniform.
HEARING
Sound of a warning siren. My mother gave this fear to me. I didn’t fear the sound of
the siren because of what might happen (during any of the air raids nearby nothing
terrible ever happened, anyway 99 per cent of alarms were false) but because my mother
panicked through every alarm with fear and terror, which also affected me. When the
siren sounded I wasn’t afraid of the aircraft (rather than being bearers of the destructive
bombs they brought with them, to me they were the deliverers of shiny silver streamers
which we all searched for afterwards) but I feared for my mother, whom I loved; I was
concerned that she would again be experiencing her unbearable fear and I would be
unable to help her. Fear of another kind was a state of absolute silence, in the forest
or at night when at home, alone. I am afraid to move, so as not to interrupt it, not to
bring attention to myself, or not to miss some other sound that might be a precursor
of some danger.
SMELL
I fear being in the cellar. A cellar, for me, is like a cemetery. And the door to the cellar
is a gateway between the world of the living and the hereafter. Every time I descended
there for coal or for potatoes, I identified with Orpheus. The worst part of it was to
overcome the first whiff of mustiness that rushed at me from the open cellar door. I
always felt it with my whole body. In vain, I tried to breathe shallowly and limit my
breathing to a minimum. The stench of an opened grave. For my first film, I needed
some large black beetles. One of my friends took me to his home, to the cellar, where
large cockroaches reputedly lived. In spite of the fact that he lived in a relatively new
block (one of the tiled places in Letná, a suburb of Prague), where the cellars don’t look
like the ones from my childhood, where instead of sparse wooden partitions dividing
individual tenants’ sections there are almost liveable rooms with lacquered doors, where
the narrow passageways with blinking, naked globes are replaced with normal well-lit
corridors, in spite of that I was overcome with fear, so intimately remembered from

my childhood, a sensation motivated by that familiar odour of a freshly opened grave,

which after a while is created even in these modern buildings, perhaps to preserve the
magical continuum of fear.
TASTE
Fear tastes of boiled onions. Even as a child, I avoided invitations for lunches or dinners;
when I couldn’t avoid one, I was full of anxiety that I would be served some boiled
onions on my plate. For that reason, whenever visiting, to the great annoyance of my
parents, I insisted that I was not hungry and refused to have anything to eat (including
sweets, just to be on the safe side). Only once did my father try to ‘teach’ me to eat
boiled onions, but the experiment ended with dreadful retching, vomiting, gagging
and fever, such that mother feared I would die. After that, they never again forced me
to eat boiled onions, though it never ceased to annoy them.
TOUCH
Firstly pain. A scalpel, cutting into my body. Real, physical pain I basically did not
experience till my adult life. From childhood, I recall fear of being kissed by older
people, especially men. Birthdays and name days were happy occasions for me only
after my parents’ kisses were over (and eventually uncles’ and aunts’), till then I was
nervous, taciturn and full of apprehension about whether I would manage to live
through it, without giving away the fear and repulsion it aroused in me. If I had to
write a description of fear it would be something like this: They tie me down with live
snakes to a dirty bunk stained with old men’s semen and alternately pour boiled onions
and cold vomit over me, tap cigarette ash into my mouth while slowly cutting up my
body. Swarms of flies and bees are crawling in my open wounds, toads and mice are
drinking my blood while simultaneously relieving themselves into the festering cuts.
During the whole thing, all the relatives from mother’s and father’s side keep kissing
me.
49. Not Dead – Not Alive, 1993

50. An Unforgettable Meeting (tactile object for two hands), 1976

An unforgettable meeting
(Tactile Object for Two Hands)
This object came into being as a free play of tactile images. It is not a tactile interpretation
of a visual perception or an analogical expression of a picture. On the contrary, the
pictorial analogy was found to match the completed object. The interpretation is the
result of perplexing relationships. Eroticism of a kitchen range, with the clitoris for
hanging up a tea towel. Mussels, age-old symbol of the vagina, used for lobster baking,
with the bristles of a boot-polishing brush. A religious view of the holy penis of dreams,
stuck between two coconut breasts, while the reality is a small rubber penis for watering
pansies.
Coarse, sandpaper hand anticipating unforgettable, limp handshake, draining
the inevitable erection with strange tubes, all connected with rinsing tubes against
unwanted conception. She will really have to control her bladder when excitedly telling
the neighbours about her meeting with the president.
51. An Unforgettable Meeting, 1976 52. President Husák and Women (newspaper
photograph, Rudé Právo, 1976)
TouchingandImagining_FinalPages.indd 75 3/03/2014 12:06 pm

An imaginary portrait of Mikuláš Medek

(First step)
I have never met Mikuláš Medek in person. In the days when it was possible for
me to do so, ‘visiting Medek’s’ or to ‘going to Medek’s’ had already become too
fashionable among the Prague snobs for me to want to. I only regret that I did not
meet him earlier, if for no other reason than the opportunity to observe the creation
of a myth . . .
Lacking personal experience, when constructing an imaginary portrait of him, I
had only two things to work with: the myth and Medek’s paintings. Myth is very
unreliable (like any other product of collective hysteria) and creative output, without
the personal commentary or interpretation of the author, is merely a collection
of artefacts the perception of which tells us more about ourselves than about its
creator.
So what have we got at our disposal?
1. Myth.
2. Paintings.
3. Medek’s very few interpretations of his paintings.
4. Testimonies of his friends.
As the ‘most objective’ basis (the first step) for an imaginary portrait of Mikuláš
Medek I decided to firstly analyse his work in terms of his appeal to our senses (not our
emotions).
Notes for the future synaesthetic portrait of Mikuláš Medek

Colour
The most used colours:
1. Red
2. Blue
3. Yellow (bright gold-yellow)
Many of his paintings are basically monochromatic:
Red Venus, Celebration, 21,870cm² red
Blue Venus, Action I – egg, 21,000cm² blue micro-illusions
Black Gambit
Almost absolute absence of green
Red is the colour of Mars, the ruler of the scorpion (Mikuláš Medek was born on
3 November. Ascertain where the ascendant lies and the position of the moon)
Prerequisite: Ascendant: In the Scales or in the Bull, eventually in the Sagittarius or
Pisces
Moon: In the Lion or in the Twins, eventually in the Virgin
Esoteric symbolism of colours:
Red: Love, shyness, joy, martyrdom, health, strength, courage (produces warmth,
encourages aggression)
Blue: Loyalty, moderation, asceticism, grief, morality, illusion, youthfulness, cleanliness
(promotes meditation, is of an electrical nature)
Yellow: Envy, falsehood, betrayal, ambition, miserliness (calms the nerves, favours
inspiration)
Green: Hope
The green colour appears in Medek’s work exclusively in borderline paintings, creating
transitions between individual creative periods.

53. Tactile Portrait of Mikuláš Medek (casket for monograph), 1979
Sounds
No music is to be heard, only live sounds, shouting and, above all, silence.
Names of Paintings: Cry, Blue Cry, Golden Cry, Rustling and Silence, Noise of Silence.
Silence, however, is expressed by other paintings that do not have it in the title: Head
that Sleeps the Imperial Sleep, Sleeper, Swallower of Fetters, and others.
Likewise, shouting is present in some paintings: Very Heavy Sleep, Grief of the Fourth
Inquisitor, Feast I, Spring and others.

Rustlings:
Egg (breakfast) – crackling of frying
Chicken-eating I – sound of tearing at a chicken with teeth
Emila and Flies – buzzing of flies
Action I (egg) – sound of cracking egg shell and squelch of an egg breaking
Crackling of dry thistles
Tactile values
Physical pain, caused mainly by: stabbing, cutting, piercing, chopping.
Tools: Forks, knives, arrows, hatchets, fishhooks, glass fragments, thorns, tightening
ropes, insects.
In the sixties, the canvas itself had become a masochistic object to be tortured,
scratched, torn. In the fifties, it was a case of the author picturing the sadomasochistic
act, not taking part in the process, and being only a mixture of arranger and spectator;
later, in the sixties he becomes an intermediary of the creative process, directly, as an
active participant. The act of torture is between the painter and his tools (the palette
knife, sharp point of the brush, knife, fingernails) as a sadistic component of the
creative process, and the ‘tortured painting’ becomes the masochistic victim. Medek
does not illustrate anymore, but participates – thereby the process becomes tactile.
Touch becomes more important than the potential visualization of the inner model,
because it provides more delight (Suffering of the Red 16,000cm²). In the last period of
Medek’s work a new compromise is achieved, a compromise between tactile and visual
components (inner model – Holy Naked in Thorns, Seven Thorns in the Lip).
Taste
At first glance it seems that Medek is one of a few painters who was trying to suggest
to the viewer a number of taste sensations with his paintings, especially during his
‘existential’ period.
The paintings’ titles already seem to give away this ‘intention’:
Egg (breakfast)
Feast I and II
Chicken-eating
Action I – Egg
Big Feast
World of Onion
But what quality of taste is it about?
It is about taste without ‘taste’ or even arousal of non-taste (disgust), for instance Egg
(breakfast) and Emila And Flies.
Both Feasts are, above all, an act of aggression
Chicken-eating (even here the physical aggression dominates the ‘taste’, it is more
about the sound of tearing flesh with teeth than the taste element).
Likewise, with Big Feast.
In the paintings from the 1960s this ‘taste element’ disappears completely, and is
replaced by direct tactile feeling.
Smell
One can smell the smoke and burned flesh.
1981

If we start to concern ourselves with analogies between tactile and visual perception we
cannot avoid the problems of synaesthesia. There are no definite ideas about the origin
of synaesthesia but there is a prevailing opinion that it is ‘a condition caused by long
forgotten associations that are constantly recalled with a certain stimulus, with such an
intensive clarity that the sensory notion becomes visual or aural’ (V. Vondráček). Many
psychologists regard synaesthesia as being a remnant of evolutionary development,
before the senses were completely separated and isolated with no overlap from one to
another. The most frequent cases of synaesthesia have been observed between Vision
and Hearing. Less has been written about synaesthesia between Vision and Smell
and Vision and Taste. Galton’s experimental subjects also maintained that, like J. A.
Rimbaud, vowels and numbers aroused sensations of colours.
For comparison:
Galton’s experiments: J. A. Rimbaud’s:
A – white A – black
E – red E – white
I – yellow I – purple
Algelander (1927) examined synaesthesia experimentally and concluded that in fact

all perceptions have a certain synaesthetic component.
Teige, in his ‘Second Manifesto of Poetism’, mentions the relationship between
colours and tactile sensations but does not refer to any concrete source of information:
‘Psychological experiments demonstrated that even the sensations of smell, taste, touch,
well being and pain can be transposed to visual images.’ Even though I don’t assume that
synaesthesia between Touch and Vision would be any more unusual than, for example,
between Smell and Vision, the situation is somewhat more complicated. Quite a special
relationship exists between Touch and Vision that is not found among the other senses,
at least not in the same measure. In the course of the working process, Touch has
become significantly dependent on Vision. It established a kind of perceptual unity
that could be regarded as a false synaesthesia. False, because the real synaesthesia, as
we understand it for example from double perception Vision–Hearing, is based on an
analogical bond between visual and aural perceptions, while the ‘false’ one is a mere
confirmation caused by distrust of the differentiation capacity of Touch.
It seems that this double identification emerged because it speeded up orientation
in the working process. Teige even states that: ‘Vision, in its movement, contains the
function of two senses: Vision and Touch, perception of time and space’ (‘Second
Manifesto of Poetism’). In this symbiosis Vision usurped the leadership and Touch
became the sense for doing the ‘dirty work’. All ‘higher’ experiences were denied to
it and Touch had to be satisfied with the role assigned to it in eroticism. Between
Touch and Vision there is no equal relationship. Vision does rule over the other
senses (psycho-technical tests show up to ten times the number of visual types among
the human characters compared with others, for instance acoustical) but nowhere
is this superiority so marked as in the connection with Touch. And yet ‘Touch is,
after all, the primary sense, all other senses have evolved at different stages from
it over a long time.’ (Ladislav Novák, Tactile Poems: introductory notes [see next
chapter]). However, if there does exist one aspect of human perception where Touch
still has a position dominant over all other senses, it is in the field of eroticism,
though even here we witness formalization of this sensibility and an ossification into
an unimaginative stereotype.

It is in eroticism that the sensibility of Touch is capable of blossoming into an

utmost intensity of which no other sense is capable. This specific relation of Touch
and Vision does not prevent us from differentiating colours into warm (red, brown,
black, orange, etc.) and cold (green, blue, lemon-yellow, purple, etc.), proving that
there exists a synaesthetic connection between physical sensations and vision which is,
in its way, more objective than, for instance, the connection between colour and tone,
where subjective variations in sensory analogies are considerable. Correspondingly,
we differentiate materials into warm and cold even though the actual measurable
temperature does not play any role in such description. We are talking about feelings of
warmth or cold which various materials and their structures arouse in us. For instance:
wood, leather, velvet all feel warm. Glass, metal, synthetic materials arouse a feeling of
cold. Shapes of objects can also cause feelings of warmth or cold. Objects with round
edges, balls, cylinders create feelings of warmth and those with sharp edges or objects
with sharp points feel cold.
It also follows that tactile objects made from ‘warm materials’ should arouse warm
colours and vice versa, ‘cold materials’ evoke a scale of cold colours. Of course it doesn’t
always have to be so; in the case of exceptions, when we follow through the origin
of such ‘untypical’ analogies, we will find that deep down there is some conscious,
permanent or temporary conditional association.
Recent experimentation proved reliably that the primary endeavour of Touch is to
deal with the tactile object firstly on the level of identification, then with objects hard
to comprehend, by comparison. I don’t think the fact that the submitted objects were
comprised mainly of, more or less identifiable (real), objects or their fragments, played
a large role in this experience. I am convinced that we would not arrive at too different
a conclusion with the objects whose materials (structures) are hard to identify. In the
first phase of perception of the object, we will attempt to identify what we are actually
touching, although we will probably come up against verbal problems. This is the result
of the utilitarian traditions of Touch that can be difficult to confront.
One of the ways of getting around this problem is not to hide the tactile objects but
to leave their identification to Vision, and not to connect tactile sensations with inner
visualization. This was obviously the way chosen by Marinetti in his experiments. In
this case, Vision, retains the supremacy of the experience and inevitably becomes the
intermediary of tactile perceptions, thereby delegating to Touch a minimal independence
in the creation of associations and analogies; in short, vision squeezes Touch out of
the imaginative process. Another way is to directly involve this identification phase
in the strategy of perceiving the object. The third, and most circuitous way is the
cultivation of Touch. The main prerequisite for success of such cultivation is the
necessity of freeing Touch from its dependence on Vision. As tactile sensation was given
a largely utilitarian function throughout time, Touch was forced into the role of being
a dependent sense, one might say a complicated sense. The fact remains that in some
instances, the discriminating capacity of Touch is superior to Vision. In spite of that,
the superiority of Touch’s ‘responsibility’ over Vision is the greatest barrier to freeing the
kind of perception that is essential to tactile art. It seems that Marinetti was also aware
of this, since he recommended a complicated procedure for preparing fingers for the
perception of tactile tablets. His instructions remind me of the preparations of novices
for some magic ritual and in that I see the main purpose of this, at first glance, absurd
preparation, allegedly for the purpose of heightening the sensibility of Touch; inwardly
it frees one of utilitarian habits to be able to approach the tactile concepts with an
awareness of totally different functions of Touch.

Perhaps it is first necessary to take into consideration these and similar tricks, which
liberate Touch from identification conventions and clichés. The concentration that the
perceiver directs to identification obscures the more substantial aspects of perception.
A very open attitude is necessary to ‘experience’ a tactile object, to allow associations
and analogies to resonate. A strenuous, rational concentration blots out the primary
impressions and imagination becomes a matter of combination and speculation
with identified objects or structures, albeit on the level of an inner model. It is,
however, important to stress that this identification phase of perception has its special
characteristics. As we touch even the most banal but invisible object, and visualize it
with our inner Vision, it takes on a fantastic form which we instantly invest not only
with elements common to all similar objects (if it wasn’t so, we wouldn’t be able to
identify the object), but also a whole number of subjective associations, permanently or
temporarily dependent. For instance, the same shoe will have a different effect on every
perceiver that touches it and in a much larger measure than if it was pictured.
This phenomenon was on my mind when I spoke of connecting this identification
phase directly into the strategy of perceiving a tactile object. Every object, once hidden,
instantly becomes only an idea to which the hand of the perceiver gives a concrete
shape, content and colour. Every tactile perceiver endows the outlined object with his
own characteristics, which will be different to the characteristics of another perceiver of
the same object; the only common aspect will be the imaging of these characteristics.
This does presume, however, a consistent hiding of the tactile object from Vision. It
may not be the purest form of tactile sensations, but given the present non-cultivated
sensibility of Touch, it is one of the most feasible possibilities for making tactile art now,
when Vision and Touch are frozen in a traditional utilitarian symbiotic for most people.
1978

5
SHORT ANTHOLOGY OF TACTILE ART
Touch has undergone a most remarkable modification. Its impressions were

tardily received, but more tenaciously retained, and resulting always in the highest
physical pleasure. Thus the pressure of your gentle fingers upon my eyelids, at first
only recognized through vision, long after their removal filled my whole being
with an immeasurable sensual delight.
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’, 18411
The point of my experimentation, as must be obvious, is to find out if touch is

capable of penetrating (as an independent sense) the realm of art, and to what degree
is it able to influence and enrich it. If, up to now, my experimentation brings a positive
response to these questions, then this stance of touch is unlikely to escape the attention
of other creators. At a certain stage of experimentation, it behoved me to glance at
the prophets, predecessors and contemporary proponents of tactile art. This short
anthology attempts a critical evaluation of the role of touch in the current history of
tactile art. Since, up to now, no one has addressed this issue, and previous material is
comprised of inaccessible work, or of trivia struggling on the periphery of creativity,
or of projects abandoned too soon, or of work that is part and parcel of work by less
known or unknown authors, it was difficult to collect this material together and I can’t
make any claim to having included it all.
I intentionally didn’t include works created by artists for blind people although I
am aware of their existence. I didn’t include them for a simple reason: they are in
direct contradiction to the thrust of my experimentation. My tactile experimentation is
aimed at the Touch–Vision relationship (even though it is largely concerned with inner
vision). That is a factor one can’t reckon with in the art for the blind (at least not with
those who were born blind). My tactile experimentation is paradoxically aimed at the
healing of Vision and, in its final analysis, at analogical connections between individual
senses, thus striving towards synaesthetic poetry. And Vision simply cannot be excluded
from this process. Perhaps there also exists something like an essential, purely tactile
‘imagination’; at least, experimentation with tactile dreams seemed to point that way.
With tactile dreams (and even dreams brought about by all the sensory impulses) the
primary stimuli, which, as we know from Freud, moulds the dream to its manifest
content, is usually exaggerated, as was also brought to our attention by Záviš Kalandra

short anthology of tactile art 83
54. Valie Export: Tap and Touch Cinema, Oberhausen, 1968
in The Reality of Dream. Nonetheless, even in this exaggerated metamorphosis it is

not possible, I think, to do without the experience of Vision. I hope that in time this
anthology will become more complete, with further work and authors.
Tattooing in primitive societies without doubt belongs to the purest ancient forms
of tactile art. It doesn’t serve merely as decoration or as some indication of belonging
to a specific tribe; its significance is above all magical. The tattooed person is thereby
dedicated to a certain god or ritual, and at the same time is protected against illness,
pain and evil spirits. The pain associated with being tattooed is metamorphosed via
imagination into a strong psychic experience, in a kind of re-birth on a higher level. It
has a reincarnating significance. There can be no doubt about a powerful imaginative
rush during the metamorphosis of a painful experience. It is understandable that
tattooing is a tactile art in the full sense only for the one being tattooed. The tattooing
artist doesn’t use an object for his work, but a subject who suffers pure tactile sensations
on his body. The effect of the completed work, the tattooed body, on the viewer is
overwhelmingly one of visual emotion. The tactile emotion can only be felt through
the medium of vision, although for a fellow tribesman it can evoke a certain physical
empathy associated with his own experience of tattooing – the rite of passage.
Jan Van Eyck belongs to the first group of painters who, beside visual perception,
also invested their paintings with other senses, in particular touch. In picturing objects,
humans, animals and nature he generally puts emphasis on faithful representation
not only of shapes but also of structures and materials. Thus, the previously idealized
Gothic reality, which was solely the domain of vision, takes on further dimensions,
thanks to him, above all one of tactile sensibility, even though this is still through the
intermediary of sight.

55. Ritual Scarification, Congo
‘Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t he beautiful,’ said Eliante enthusiastically. ‘Oh! It is

unique! You can’t imagine anything more charming. One can believe that when
struck by light, there’s spirit in it; that a heart is burning in this alabaster urn!
You talked to me of pleasure? That’s something altogether different! It is love
secreted in some unknown matter, the insanity of mute delight. It never says

anything. It is very old, it stayed young for many centuries because it never
screamed its secrets to anyone.’ (She wrapped her arms around the amphora.)
‘Have a good look and try to see it for a moment . . . through my eyes! Come
and touch it. I give you permission . . . Go gently, too heavy a touch will tarnish
it.’ (She grabbed the young man’s hand and carefully ran it over the unblemished
whiteness of the vase, over its virginal hips.) ‘Tell me, do you feel the hopeless
sweetness of the distinctly marked out form? It will remain so, because it has
reached perfection. It will not grow or diminish, it is immutable in its beauty. Oh!
I truly want you to spend at least five minutes in ecstasy over this perfect shape
and immortal object. You’re not laughing any more? It makes you afraid, it makes
you ashamed! I knew that you were intelligent . . . because pleasure turns you
pale with delight. This magical vase is pale with delight over itself!’ (Her eyelids
trembled and Leon Reille thought that he was hearing the sound of wings.) ‘It
has no history. I obtained it through the usual intermediaries, I almost wanted
to say: slave traders! They sold it to me in Tunis, as though they were selling a
slave . . .’
Eliante, now standing erect above the neck of the amphora, stretched herself
like a bow from her neck to her heels. She wasn’t offering herself to a man; she
was surrendering to the alabaster vase, an unfeeling shape of clay. Without making
any indecent move, her arms chastely crossed over the body of her slender form,
not a maiden, nor a boy, she clenched her fingers, remaining still, then the man
saw her closed eyelids opening, her lips parting and he thought that the starlight
fell from the whites of her eyes and the enamel of her teeth; a light shudder went
through her body – more like a light breeze moving the mysterious wave of her
silk dress – and she gave a small gasp of imperceptible joy, the very breath of
orgasm.
Rachilde, The Juggler, 19002
The general psychiatric profession would obviously rate Rachilde’s Eliante among the
sexual aberrations along with statuephilia, while Bohuslav Brouk would not hesitate
to classify her satiation as a total derangement. I include Rachilde in this anthology
because Marinetti mentions her novels La Jongleuse and Les Hors – Natura in his
manifesto as foreboding dispositions of touch. The following text of Albert Marenčin
also works with tactile senses in the reader’s mind and appeals to his tactile experience
and imagination. Naturally, it’s not possible yet to talk about tactile art, but just as in
a painting, even words are capable of inducing a tactile notion, and precisely in this
inner train of thoughts is hidden one of the potential possibilities of tactile art. Besides,
connecting words with tactile sensations seems to be more appropriate than with a
painting since both (word notion and tactile notion) are acted out before our inner
vision, where our normal ‘corrupted’ vision has no access.
Naturalistic elements of Spanish Baroque (gluing glass tears or real hairs on

polychromatic statues) were meant to emphasise the emotional effect on the believers.
The ‘realistic’ statue was designed to affect human sensory perception in a global sense.
This exalted art was evidently capable of bringing about identification with the models
presented by the church; to experience, vicariously, the suffering or holiness of the
pictured witnesses, as if in ‘one’s own body’. Naturalistic elements, with their tactile
values, played the main role in the possibility of such identification.

56. Jan Van Eyck: Homage to the Lamb (detail), 57. Jan Van Eyck: Portrait of Arnolfinio Couple
1432 (detail), 1434
58. Pedro de Mena: Crying Virgin Mary, second 59. Crying Madonna, Church of The Holy Martyrs,
half of seventeenth century Malaga

The Secret, 1980

Albert Marenčin
I prepared a washing powder cardboard box, to put a secret in.

I wrapped it up in a newspaper, so as not to see it; I wanted to hide it within a fragrant,
multicoloured box.
To tell the truth, I could easily have looked at it but I didn’t: I wanted it to stay a secret;
after all, everyone has some secret, why not me?
I wrapped it up with my eyes closed, so I couldn’t see it, even by chance.
‘If I see it even for an instant,’ I thought, ‘it will lose its magic power, it will cease to
be a secret.’
And I wanted it to stay a secret forever.
Although I tried, I didn’t succeed to keep it the way I wished.
I always imagined it to be small and delicate, able to arouse giddy notions, even desires.
But, as I was wrapping it up in the newspaper, not looking at it, I touched it, not
wanting to, and realized that it was entirely different: it was as large as a piano, even
had keys on its side, but they were organ keys. When, while wrapping it, I accidentally
touched one of them, it gave out a wailing tone.
‘Organ again.’ I thought.
It disturbed me.
My fingers revealed what till then I was so anxiously averting my eyes from, and I was
disappointed.
It was so large that both ends of it were sticking out of the newspaper in which I was
blindly wrapping it: one end felt very grand, it reminded me of a Corinthian marble
column’s capital, the other end was furry and round like an apple.
I didn’t want to uncover any more but my fingers were somehow sliding over it and I
felt a moist and slippery fold at the round end.
My heart pounded: I knew that with the slightest movement the secret could be out.
If even a tiny part were uncovered all would be lost.
I also knew that in its place I would receive something else, unexpected, but perhaps
equally mysterious.
The magical attraction of this double secrecy was greater than my fears and defences
and so my hand, instead of pulling away, closed tighter around the secret object and
grasped it.
At that moment the fold opened like a pair of lips and my middle finger slipped into
its soft and warm moistness.
Ah, the sweet secrecy!
Ah, the dizziness of knowledge!
I could feel exciting, perfumed liquid running down my fingers, down my whole body,
and its delicious vibrations were carrying me away with it.
The organ pipes sounded, the earth trembled under the hooves of Teutonic horse riders,
the Corinthian column crashed thunderously into a chasm.
When all became still, I opened my eyes and saw your face, white in the moonlight.
But the secret was lost.
Forever.
In vain did I search for it – never again did I find it.

60. Man Ray: L’enigme d’Isidore Ducasse, 1920
61. Pablo Picasso: Guitar, 1912 62. Umberto Boccioni: Fusion of Head and
Window, 1912

63. Gunther Uecker: Object Made from Nails,
1962
64. Jean Dubuffet: Plastic Art Made from Bath

Sponge, 1950
65. Claes Oldenburg: Soft Washstand, 1966 66. Piero Gilardi: Pumpkin, 1966

67. Jiří Kolář: A Blind Poem (typed 68. Jannis Kounellis: Piece Made from Cotton,
without ribbon), 1962 1967
During the period of hermetical cubism (1911–1914), cubist experimentation turns its
attention to the fragments of raw reality (mainly to so-called papiers collés), which they
incorporate into the painting’s composition.3
Similarly, Umberto Boccioni at that time produces his plastic ‘Fusion of Head and
Window’ made by combining iron, porcelain and female hair. With such steps, a way is
opened for a sort of ‘creative tactilism’. At the time, this is presumed to act as a refreshment
or a deliberately provoking degradation of classical creative advancement. (Picasso, at that
time, with provocative humour, declares that the epoch of painting has ended.) In contrast
to the Spanish Baroque, it frees the naturalistic structures from their realistic context and
allows them to be effective purely with their tactile values. These materials and structures
are not designed for a direct tactile contact and are arranged largely from a creative point
of view, or are used to renew elements of other creative techniques (drawings, paintings).
Even so, their tactile values are in the use of real materials (sand mixed with paint, various
structural pieces of paper and glue, textiles, feathers, twine, wires, straw from a mat,
etc. Freed from their utilitarian context, their tactile values are adequately able to prove
their value against imperialistic sight, even though still through sight’s mediation. This
‘tactilismus’ is in many cases not deliberate, it is unconscious, unintentional and, in the
majority of cases, without a psychological background. The form of ‘creative tactilism’ was
again revived by neo-Dadaism, pop art, new realism and soft art.
Tactile art
Guillaume Apollinaire
I am honoured and pleased to announce the birth of a new form of art that can be,
without any misgivings, included in the category of ‘creative arts’.
This new art is tactile art.
I thought of it last year as I was writing a short story titled, ‘My Dear Ludovic’, which
was included in the Almanach des Lettres et des Arts published by Martine.
This is how I defined the new art’s parameters.
My dear Ludovic, I wrote, had discovered the new art of touch, contact, tactilism.
I won’t go into a detailed description of how dear Ludovic was touching us, how he

tickled us, hit us with blows of various kinds and intensity to experiment with this new
art, and how we patiently tolerated it . . .
Nevertheless, I intend to impart to you that this art, the rules and techniques of
which are now rapidly developing, rests on the principle that each and every object
affects us differently, according to its special qualities and the sense of touch: dryness,
dampness, wetness, various degrees of cold and heat, stickiness, coarseness, smoothness,
softness, hardness, springiness, oiliness, silkiness, velvetiness, roughness, graininess
etcetera, randomly combined or contrasted, become the rich material from which my
friend Ludovic derives witty, grandiose combinations of tactile sensations, that silent
music that stimulates our nerves . . .
My dear friend Ludovic insisted that all kinds of tactile contacts, felt simultaneously,
result in a sensation of emptiness, because, as he said, it is well known that nature
abhors emptiness, and what we consider emptiness is, in reality, solidity itself.
This is what I wrote, among other things, in my short article; but now tactile art that I
had only forecast, announced and speculated about, has been born. One proof of it is
a photograph, printed in a special undated magazine bizarrely titled RONGWRONG.
It was published in New York sometime between 5 May 1917 and August of the same
year. The photograph shows plaster for touching at Zayas’s. ‘Plaster for Touching,’ is the
expression used by the artist himself. The author of this first tactile work is the artist
Clifford Williams and I leave you to choose what special title you want to give him; I
myself, in my short article, didn’t consider, a priori, what to call the creators who practise
the art of touch and, from the moment I first saw the reproduction in RONGWRONG,
I was vainly searching for some neologism that would properly describe the character
of this new kind of creativity. Whichever way, what I am writing here is true. And so,
thanks to Mrs, Miss or Mr Clifford Williams, a new field of aesthetics has grown to a
degree beyond our imagination. Someone once said that to discover a new recipe for
a meal is of greater significance for humankind than to discover a new star. I think
that to discover a new form of art is more significant than to discover a new ragout.
Our descendants, with their refined taste, will be grateful for many delicate joys to my
friend Ludovic and, above all, to Clifford Williams who was allowed to exhibit the
first plaster for touching in the year 1917 at Zayas’s. Let us not be dismissive of these
modest beginnings; film, which these days is such a great public art, started even more
modestly. In its beginnings, which were not so long ago, it was child’s play. Likewise,
what my friend Ludovic and Mr Clifford Williams invented and created with their own
hands became a truly poetic work, since poetry is nothing but creation.
Guillaume Apollinaire, 1917–184
Apollinaire’s Ludovic is already a tactilist of his own volition. It is not just about
high blood pressure, about an exceptional disposition towards tactile perception,
not even about the revival of a traditional creative arsenal, but it is about conscious
experimentation. This is already the attitude that opens up a way towards the kind
of real tactile art that I am thinking of. But Apollinaire is making a mistake when he
places tactile art in the category of creative manifestation. My own experimentation
to date is more in agreement with Marinetti, who defends the specificity of tactile
manifestation and on the contrary emphasises its difference from creative art. Besides,
even the experimentation of Apollinaire’s Ludovic evidently stands apart from the field
of creativity.

69. Clifford Williams: Plâtre à Toucher chez De Zayas, 1916
Clifford Williams belonged, more-or-less, to the circle of New York Dadaists. Her
Plaster for Touching is without a doubt the first tactile work worthy of such a name, as
it is the first object designed for direct tactile contact with the perceiver. Even though
her tactile plastics are, without doubt, too influenced by Dadaistic destruction of
the advance of traditional classical art for her to be aware of the new form of artistic
communication, nevertheless, Apollinaire was the only one of his time who guessed this
was a truly original act by Clifford Williams. Tactile art was born.

Tactilism
F. T. Marinetti
Futurist Manifesto
. . . read in Theatre de l’Oeuvre (Paris), during the World Exhibition of Modern Art
(Geneva) and published in Comoedia, January 1921.
Futurism, founded by us in Milan in 1909 gave the world a hatred of museums,
academies and sentimentalism, active arts, protection of youth from all senility,
celebration of illogical and insane innovatory genius, the artistic sensitivity for
machinismus, speed, music halls, contemporary social enterprise of modern life,
liberated speech, creative dynamism, rumblings and synthetic theatre. Nowadays,
Futurism doubles its creative endeavour. This summer, in Antignano, where Ameriga
Vesupucci Street, named after the discoverer of America, turns to run along the ocean,
I discovered Tactilism. Red flags were flying above the factories occupied by the
workers. I was naked in silky water torn by the cliffs – frothing scissors, knives and
razors – among the seaweed cushions full of iodine. I was naked in the supple, steely
sea that had a masculine and fecund breath. I drank from the chalice of the ocean,
full to its shores with genius. With its long, sharp flames the sun vulcanised my body,
colliding with the keel of my forehead that held its sails against the wind. A young
woman, smelling of salt and hot stones smilingly regarded my first tactile tablet:
‘You amuse yourself by building tiny boats?’
I replied:
‘I am building a vessel to carry the human spirit to unknown shores.’
And here are my thoughts as a swimmer:
The roughest and the most primitive majority of men emerged from the World War
with one preoccupation, how to achieve greater material wellbeing. On the other hand, a
minority, comprised of sensitive and discerning artists and thinkers, betrayed symptoms
of a deep and secret illness that is probably the result of a massive, tragic body blow
that the war dealt to humanity. This illness is manifested as sullen weakening, female-
like neurosis, hopeless pessimism, feverish indecisiveness of lost instincts and a plain
lack of will. The roughest and the most primitive majority of men throw themselves
into the revolution to achieve a communist paradise and, with a final attack, rush at
the problem of happiness with a conviction that it will be achieved by satisfying all
material needs and tastes. The intellectual minority ironically disdains this rush, and
since they no longer find delight in the ancient joys of religion, art and love on which
they based their privileges and sanctuary, lead a ruthless process against life itself, that
they cannot enjoy, and give themselves up to strange pessimism, sexual perversions and
artificial paradise of cocaine, opium and other drugs. This majority and this minority
are declaring themselves for progress, civilization, mechanical power of speed, comfort,
hygiene, Futurism; in short, all that is responsible for their past, current and future
misfortunes. Almost all of them favour a return to primitive life, to slow and solitary
meditation, far from the repugnant cities. As for us, the Futurists, we have courageously
accepted the dramatic fight and we agree with all revolutionary attacks that the majority
attempts. To the minority of artists and thinkers, we shout with all our might: Life is
always truthful! Your artificial paradises with which you want to destroy it are useless!
Stop dreaming about the nonsensical return to a wild and primitive life! Desist from
judging higher forms of society, miracles of speed and hygienic comfort! Surrender
rather to the cure of post-war illness by offering people living joy. Instead of destroying
people’s conurbations, improve them.

Strengthen the contacts and harmony between people, abolish their distancing and
the obstacles that prevent love and friendship. Grant wholesomeness and beauty to the
two chief manifestations of life: love and friendship. In the careful and non-traditional
observations of all erotic and emotional expressions of friendship, I now understand
that people talk to each other with their mouths and their eyes, but do not achieve true
sincerity, owing to the insensitivity of their skin which remains a mere conductor of
thoughts. While the eyes and the voices communicate what is substantive, the touching
between two individuals with their jolts, clasps or frictions relates almost nothing.
Wherefrom, then, the necessity to convert a handshake, a kiss and a contact into a
permanent exchange of ideas.
I started with submitting my contact to a deliberate care by excluding troublesome
expressions of will and thoughts in other parts of my body, particularly on the palms
of my hands. Such training is slow but quite easy and every healthy body can, with
its help, achieve surprising and clear results. By contrast, people suffering unhealthy
sensitivity that causes irritability and apparent weakness in their bodies, achieve such
a high tactile effectiveness less easily and with less continuous certainty. I contrived
the first training scale of touch, which also happens to be a scale of tactile values for
Tactilism, the art of touch.
First scale – surface

With four categories of various contacts:
First category:
contact reliable, abstract, cold
sand paper
tinfoil
Second category:
contact without warmth, reliable, convincing
smooth silk
silken crêpe
Third category:
contact exciting, tepid, nostalgic
velvet
combed wool
silken crêpe
Fourth category:
contact almost excitable, warm, capricious
granular silk
latticed silk
spongy cloth
Second scale – voluminous

Fifth category:
contact soft, warm, humane
chamois
horse or dog hair
human hair or whiskers of African Marabou (bird)

Sixth category:
contact warm, sensual, intelligent, ardent
this set has two branches:
rugged iron plush
light brush surface of skin or peach
mushroom birds’ feathers
wire brush
With the aid of these various tactile differences I was able to create:
1. Simple tactile tablets that I introduced to our audience during the experiments
or presentations about the art of contact. I laid them out into complementing
or contrasting combinations of various tactile values described above.
2. Abstract or suggestive tactile tablets (to be explored by hand).
These tactile tablets have combinations of various tactile values that enable
hands to rove over them while searching for colour trails, whilst realizing
development of striking feelings, their rhythm, alternately weak, pacing or
tempestuous, being regulated by precise instructions. One of these abstract
tablets made by me, bearing a title: Sudan – Paris, contains in its ‘Sudan’ part
rough, tender, uneven, sharp, burning (spongy material, mushroom, sanding
paper, brush, wire brush) contact values; in its ‘sea’ part it contains slippery,
metal-like cold and tin foil values; in the ‘Paris’ part the values are tender, very
tender, caressing, warm and at the same time cold (silk plush, feathers, tufts of
hair).
3. Tactile tablets for different genders.
These tactile tablets enable an investigation of tactile values by four matching
hands of a man and a woman, to follow and evaluate their tactile passage.
These tactile tablets are very different and the delight that they offer will
unexpectedly enhance the two competing emotions that will attempt to better
experience and better comprehend the complementing feelings. These tactile
tablets have a purpose of replacing a dull chess game.
4. Tactile pillows.
5. Tactile sofas.
6. Tactile beds.
7. Tactile shirts and clothing.
8. Tactile rooms.
In these tactile rooms, the floors and the walls would be made of large tactile
tablets. The tactile values of ice, running water, rocks, metals, brushes, wiring
carrying a low current, marble, velvet and floor rugs offering the naked feet of
the dancers the greatest number of sensual and spiritual pleasures.
9. Tactile street.
10. Tactile theatre.
We will have theatres adapted for Tactilism. The sitting spectators will rest their
hands on tactile belts that will go around creating harmony of tactile sensations
in various rhythms. The belts could also be fitted onto small revolving wheels
with accompanying music and lights.
11. Tactile tablets for mobile improvisation
A ‘Tactilist’ will express vocally the various tactile feelings that are enabling
him to travel with his hand. His improvisation will be free of any rhythm,

syntax and basic and synthetic improvisation, as far removed as possible from
human ‘Tactilists’. A ‘Tactilist’ improviser could be blindfolded but it would
be better to enclose him in the light beam of a projector. Novices, who have
not yet adequately developed their tactile sensitivity, would be blindfolded. As
for the real Tactilists, the full light of the projector is preferable since darkness
tends to bring about the likelihood of feelings becoming more abstract.
Training of touch
1. It is necessary to keep gloves on the hands for a few days during which the
brain will concentrate on developing a desire for various tactile feelings.
2. Swimming under seawater and distinguishing different currents and
temperatures by touch.
3. Counting and identifying every evening, in full darkness, all objects in one’s
bedroom. This experiment I conducted for the first time in a dark underground
trench in Gorice in 1917. I never had any intention to discover the genial
forms of tactile sensations evident in Rachilde’s novels La Jongleuse and Les
Hors – Natura. Other writers and artists had a presentiment of Tactilism,
which is why the creative art of touch has existed for a long time. My great
friend Bocchioni, the Futuristic painter and sculptor, experienced Tactilism
when, in 1911, he created his fusion of head and window, from materials that
were totally different in respect of weight and tactile values: iron, porcelain and
female hair. My own Tactilism is realized art, totally different from creative
art. It has nothing to do, nothing to achieve and in comparison to painting
or sculpture, it can disappear. As far as possible, it is advisable to avoid usage
of motley colours and coloured arrangements in the tactile tablets, as they
arouse impressions characteristic of creative arts. Painters and sculptors, who
are naturally inclined to subjugate tactile values to visual ones, will find it
difficult to create any significant tactile tablets. It seems to me that Tactilism
is especially the province of young poets, pianists, writers and all fine and
strong erotic temperaments. Tactilism has to avoid cooperation, not only with
creative art, but also with unhealthy eroticism. Its aim should be only a tactile
harmony. In addition, Tactilism will serve the perfectibility of spiritual contact
between humans via the skin. The classification of five senses is not by any
means decisive and one day it will be possible to discover and classify many
other senses. Tactilism will assist such discoveries.
F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Manifesto of Tactilism’, Milan, 19215
With the Manifesto of Tactilism, Marinetti wanted to revive the flagging interest in
Futurism that at the time was already overshadowed by the Dadaist movement. The
Manifesto was meant to be a document heralding the renaissance (the second post-war
wave) of Futuristic activity. However, for the Paris avant-garde, Marinetti was already
a faded celebrity and Futurism had become a ‘classic’. That was why, without even
taking any note of the substance of his ideas, they booed at him in the Theatre Oeuvre.
Picabia accused him of plagiarism by referring to Clifford Williams’ experiments and
called Marinetti’s Tactilism a ‘hysterical pregnancy’. This total failure evidently ended
Marinetti’s excursion into the field of touch. In spite of all that, Marinetti is, without any
doubt, the first theoretician of tactile art. His Futurist Manifesto, in spite of its bombastic
Futurism and superficial view of problems of the tactile imagination, is in many ways

70. Ay-O: Tactile Briefcase, 1963.
remarkable. In particular, the description of the object ‘Sudan – Paris’ (the object itself,
which Marinetti circulated during his presentation as an example of Tactilism, has not
been preserved) stands as an analogy between subjective feelings of a specific reality
(desert, ocean, life in Paris) and tactile sensations expressing this reality. The object
‘Sudan – Paris’ was not only about tactile harmony, which according to Marinetti was
the chief aim of Tactilism, but reaches into the deeper levels of imagination.
Tactile poems
Ladislav Novák
(Introductory notes)
The sense of touch is the most ignored, most uncultivated of all the senses, although
it is in fact the primary sense, all the others have developed from it over a very
long time. Lovers’ caressing cannot be considered as cultivation of the sense of
touch, because it comprises experiences of a very narrow register, usually with little
invention, superficially perceived and without any further development. As a remedy
for our audiovisual, over intellectualized, neurotic culture I propose an expansion
of tactile Poetism, a return to the fundamental substance of being. Two people
generally practise tactile Poetism, an active person (A) and a passive person (P).
During the course of the action, P is usually completely disrobed, eyes closed or
blindfolded. For documentary purposes, P can describe and record the experiences
but an absolute stillness is really preferable. Person A, as far as possible, also proceeds
in complete silence or with only the briefest necessary instructions. The majority of
contacts are made gradually, lightly, punctuated by longish pauses. It is important to
avoid anything that may suggest sexual connotations. Under certain circumstances

and in some activities it is possible for one person to fulfil the functions of A and P,
to become a tactile hermaphrodite. Clearly, it is also possible for A, in some activity,
to be two persons.
1
A puts on two gloves, one made of rough bagging, the other of velvet, caresses P
simultaneously with both hands over the whole body.
2
A inserts a rubber balloon between P’s hands (armpits, thighs) blows into it till it
explodes. Repeats several times.
3
A puts an icicle into P’s hand. P holds the icicle till it melts.
4
P cups the hands. A inserts a live beetle into the space.
5
A puts P’s hands onto the trunk of an old cracked pear tree and instructs P to feel the
trunk up and down. At head height is an ant trap of sticky tape around the trunk.
6
P lies down on the chest. A puts a one-centimetre steel ball between P’s shoulder blades.
Very slowly A rolls the ball down the spine to the space between the buttocks, without
touching the skin. Repeats with four or five balls, some can be warm, cold or even hot.
7
A leads the barefooted B over fine sand, gravel, mud, fine grass, thistles, freshly
ploughed field, stubble field, concrete, soft asphalt, etc.
8
A gently caresses P’s lips with a razor blade. Hands the blade to P, suggests that P does
it herself.
9
A hands a live guinea pig to P. It is assumed that P will become acquainted not only
with the fine hair, body warmth, beating of the heart, but also with the sharp teeth of
the animal.
10
A spills about a dozen ladybirds on P’s back (belly, lap).
11
A, holding a burning candle, drips wax onto P. Then onto slits between closed fingers,
completely closing them with wax. (Can do the same with eyelashes, ears.)
12
A blows soap bubbles onto P so the bubbles explode on contact with skin.

Addendum only for the true experts of tactile poetry:

Both persons are active, and passive, both are completely naked, have eyes closed and
are silent. They can touch any part of the partner’s body but only with hands, any other
contact is strictly outside limits. Duration of the tactile dialogue must be limited in
advance (use alarm clock).
Additional note:
The author of the above admits that in his youth he used to have terrifyingly sweet
dreams in which he was caressed by slim, unknown hands covering his whole body
with eerie frost. Where are those hands, where is that eerie frost? If only its distant
reflection would light up again with the recitation of these tactile poems!
23–24 November 1971
The tactile work of Ay-O can be regarded as an implementation of Marinetti’s tactile

environment; Ay-O implemented and also created a number of other objects while
seeking harmony of tactile sensations. Kocman’s tactile experiments are directed above
all to the documentation of certain tactile situations. Even though these experiments
have no direct relationship to imagination, they lead to an awareness of routine actions,
and thereby to the sovereignty of touch as a sense and experience of its sensibility.
Such experimentation, in its character, is closer to Gunther’s therapy, even though
the precise moment of documentation is qualitatively significant. The generally anti-
aesthetic leaning of the ‘situations’ that Kocman creates is sympathetic to tactilism, he
does not seek any harmony of structures and – sadly – not even of imagination. All the
same, it counts as one of the authentic possibilities of non-imaginative tactile art. It is
a given that he, of course, falls outside the field of our interest. The tactile poems of
Ladislav Novák go beyond Gunther’s tactile instructions with certain aggression and
latent eroticism. Thus they achieve much greater proximity to the imaginative tactilism
towards which we are striving.
71. J. H. Kocman: Touch Study of My Surroundings, 1971

Tactile imagination in surrealism
Second Manifesto of Poetism

Karel Teige
(Fragment)
To realize this total and universal Poetism, a synthesis for all senses, which has been
an unreachable absolute, a far away utopia of past history, it is necessary, above all, to
accurately formulate its conditions, to research and examine its mode of expression
and to look into the multifaceted response of the observer’s psyche, in short to base
it on solid scientific foundations. It is then necessary to forgo the imperfect historical
and mechanical materials and techniques, to create new tools, to discover and realize
new modes of expression, and to that purpose, take possession of all implements and
devices made available by the current science and technology. It is indeed possible to
document that the history of art and society does not merely record a sequence of styles
and movements, but also engenders real progress. It is quite conceivable that a person
who masters the means of production as well as Rembrandt did is capable of producing
works of far higher emotional potential, simply because the means are a thousand
times better.
We have relinquished the historical forms of painting and verification. Having
given up the vocabulary of concepts we’ve grasped the vocabulary of reality. We’ve
pointed at the possibility of poetry without words, at recitation with materials more
reliable, constructive and scientifically controlled: poetry of colour, shapes, light,
movement, sounds, smell, energy. Poetism evokes the proposition of new poetry that
can poetise the whole cosmos with all the means today’s science and industry can offer,
a proposition that wants to grasp the whole universe of human spirit and emotions
through all its senses. The sacred and healthy thirst of our modern senses and nervous
systems, the hunger of our personalities, the desires of the body and spirit, the life’s
fire burning within us – élan vital, libido or tropisme vital – are not satisfied with what
the current arts offer. Our sight yearns for other spectacles than what is offered by the
tedious paintings in exhibitions and galleries, our touch wants to be cultivated and
enchanted by rich sensations, the current music does not satisfy our ear, our taste finds
satisfaction in perhaps the best cuisine of the world, the cuisine of France (which,
not by accident, has been the land of the liveliest civilization and culture). We search
for poetry that addresses all the human senses, saturating the spectators’ sensibilities,
inwardly entertaining and enlightening them. We want to base this new poetry on a
sensory, physiological alphabet, on the infinitesimal quiver of senses and nerves, these
‘strings of the soul’. Poetism wants to address all senses.
Karel Tiege, 19286
When Karel Teige declared the position of the Second Poetist Manifesto, so close
to the one taken by the French Surrealists with their Second Manifesto, and shifted
Devětsil’s [Czech avant garde movement 1920–30] Poetism to the Surrealist camp, he
certainly was right as far as the fundamental ideological position went (the affiliation
of Surrealists and Poetists with the Marxists). However, in terms of sectional interests,
for instance from the point of view of poetry, Poetism never took as radical an anti-
aesthetic stance as Surrealism did. It was a pity that the project of Poetry For the Five
Senses (just freed of certain aesthetic, defensive clichés and a belief in the omnipotence

of scientific progress) which was by its nature fundamentally rooted in the surrealistic
demands of universal poetry, was left by the wayside. As for tactile poetry being one
of the component poetries for five senses, Teige did not cross swords with Marinetti’s
aesthetic ideas of Tactilism. Furthermore, he reveals considerable reservations towards
the possibilities of touch, at least in the form it was left after thousands of years of
subordination to utilitarian functions.7
S
As soon as I dragged the bowl for paints out from somewhere, where my pre-
romantic childhood placed the ruins of castles and palaces, as soon as I put
down on paper, worthy of better things, the first starry tear of black mournful
fermentation, as soon as I added to this flooded, muddy space a new sheet of
paper and commenced to peel it off, after I smoothed it down with the back of my
hand and saw the two flowing images, I was overcome with such fever that I had
to put the thermometer outside the window and let the sunset sink on the lifeless,
sturgeon-like skin of my bathers hanging over the foot of the bed, I dragging out
the manic activity into the darkest night, which I would prefer to compare to
amorous gymnastics, for which I used all my extremities (all of them), to provoke,
with greatest intensity, the craziness of the universal painter’s genius, this time
sloshing through the mud of chance.
Vítězlav Nezval, Decalcomania, 19378
72. Oscar Dominguez: Decalcomania, 1937 73. Max Ernst: Frottage, 1925

74. Salvador Dalí: The Persistence of Memory, 1931
75. Gala Eluard: Object with a Symbolic Function, 1931
76. Meret Oppenheim: Fur Dinner Suite, 1936 77. Micheline Bounoure: Object, 1959

78. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí:

Un Chien Andalou, 1929
79. Oscar Dominguez: Arrival from 80. Salvador Dalí: Tactile Cinema
the Old Times, 1936
I have invented and worked out to the last details a tactile cinema, whereby a
spectator could, via a completely simple mechanism, in a synchronised way,
touch everything that he sees; silk, furs, oysters, flesh, sand, dog, etc. Objects
destined for the most physical and psychological delights. Then there are the most
banal objects worthy only of being thrown angrily against the wall and smashed
into thousands of pieces. Other objects would have hard edges and their spiky
appearance would cause a sense of desperation, gnashing of teeth, etcetera, the
kind of experience we have against our will when a fork is scraped along the top
of a marble table.
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 19419

81. Frédérick Kiesler: Twin–Touch–Test, 1943 (VVV Almanac, No. 2–3)
82. Marcel Duchamp: Cover of VVV Almanac (detail)

Twin Touch Test, 1943

Place your hands on top of either side of the wire screen: run both hands simultaneously
gently down, fingers and palms remaining in close contact. Repeat and repeat until you
can answer the following question: is it an unusual feeling of touch?
If so, can you write an analysis of your experience in no more than one- hundred
words. Give also your explanation of the phenomenon.
Five Prizes will be given for the best solutions: each one a full year’s subscription to
VVV.
– if you don’t have a large piece of chicken wire approximately two by two feet – you
can use for the test the back of this copy.
– Put the magazine flat on the table, lift back cover into vertical position, join hands
on both sides of the wire-screen. Fingertips touch each other and slide gently along
screen towards you.
– Repeat experiment ad libitum.
This also applies to a team of two persons:
a) put magazine flat on table
b) lift back cover vertically
c) both persons stand or sit next to each other
d) the one at the left holds the bulk of the magazine lightly down on the table
e) the person on the right grips the edge of the cover gently
f ) the two remaining hands now join across the wire screen, fingertips touching
g) proceed as indicated above
Frédérick Kiesler, VVV Almanac, No. 2–3
If some surrealistic objects provoke touching, it is, undoubtedly because their tactile
values are not used in a creative sense, but on the contrary, the anti-aesthetic function
of the use of different materials acts on the deeper levels of our consciousness and thus
arouses tactile emotions, albeit on the level of mediation by sight. They are able to
stimulate in our touch extra-utilitarian memories and associations that are inexpressible
thus far. There I discern a fundamental difference from ‘creative tactilism’, as well as
Marinetti’s Tactilism. Surrealistic objects are undoubtedly, through their anti-aesthetic
employment of different materials and structures, anchored in psychic functions, one
of the main sources of imaginative tactile art.11
Apart from that, Surrealism works even with the metamorphosis of structures
(Ernst’s Frottage) and the metamorphosis of their state (Dalí’s Persistence of Memory).
These metamorphoses, although still via the intermediary of sight, cast some doubt
on the utilitarianism of our touch, thereby not only heightening our sensibility but
directly leading it into interpretative panic, which is, paradoxically, the mother of tactile
imagination. Duchamp’s clear tactile gesture Please Touch, likewise Dalí’s drawing of
tactile cinema, but above all Kiesler’s tactile experimentation Twin–Touch–Test take us
directly to the hot grounds of tactile imagination. Even though such works stand on the
very edge of the oeuvre of these artists, they are the evidence of the veracity of the dictum
that substance often arises as a by-product (Ludvík Šváb). It is a matter of regret that
the results of Kiesler’s tactile texts were not published, nor were they further developed.
Gathering this material caused me many ambivalent feelings: on one hand a
disappointment that I was not the first person who discovered Touch as art, on the
other a satisfaction that I was not alone in setting out on this road. This anthology, as
much as my experiments, are proof of an exceptional range of possibilities which touch

83. Marcel Duchamp: Please Touch, 1947
Objects would say more to us if we were to touch them in the darkness, or half-darkness.
Text above an exhibition of Surrealist objects, Paris 1936
Claude Cahun: ‘Beware of domestic objects!’10

offers to art, not only in the area of techniques, but also in approach: from working
with tactile imagery to direct tactile contacts. Drawing, collage, poetry, tactile action,
travel writing, portraiture, theatre, film, documentation, architecture, furniture, all
now exist in more or less latent forms, which makes the idea of mining these places full
of novel ideas all the more exciting.
1978–83
84. Mikuláš Medek: Cranach’s Sur-lyricism, 1951–52

85. Tactile Alphabet, 1978

6
INSIDE
I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that
I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know
it. I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me – that
I understand.
Albert Camus, 19421
Ready-mades
Tactile ready-mades can be found everywhere. It is enough to close one’s eyes and
the first thing in our vicinity that we lay our hand on suddenly separates itself from
its utilitarian context and becomes a secret object the use and sense of which we can
only speculate about. And then it is possible for us to perceive these new things only
in harmony with our desires. If, for instance, we were to invite the visitors to come
to the Museum of Czech sculpture in Zbraslav at night, in complete darkness, and
suggest that they feel the exhibits with their fingertips, tongues, naked feet, noses and
foreheads, bare chests and backs, we would become new creators of these works. We
would merely need to re-name and re-describe them.
1989
86. Avenger, 1990

87. Hired Murderer, 1990
88. The Den, 1990

inside 111
89. Found Tactile Object, 1984
When I first saw one (there was a whole row of them hanging on nails driven into
the stable door frame), I felt that it was a waking dream in which some manifestation
of tactile objects was projected into real life where they finally achieve some, to
me unknown, rational function (the wear and tear of these objects stood as a clear
testimony to their frequent usage). The local farmer, however, gave me an entirely
different explanation: They were ‘dummies’ for the calves.
Instructions for use:

The ‘dummy’ is placed in the bucket with milk so that it floats on top; the calf will suck
the milk through the dummy. How rational and simple.

90. A Week in Gesture, 1986

inside 113
From the tactile diary

1 March 1982
I decided to write a tactile diary. It seemed that it could have a meaningful purpose.
On one hand it should lead to greater self-awareness, on the other to an immediate
experience of the most banal actions, on an unaccustomed and unconventional sensory
level. To become aware of what exactly the body is experiencing. I am aware of the
difficulty of the task because a man’s intellect normally doesn’t concern itself with such
things; the vocabulary of this field is woefully poor and is further degraded by old
women’s litanies of their medical problems. Perhaps Bernard Gunther’s tactile therapy
could be a guide, though I certainly wouldn’t be interested in tactile meditations, at
least not exclusively so.
3 March 1982
I thought that I would start first thing in the morning, while making breakfast, but
that wasn’t practical. It appears that I am not adequately prepared for such an exercise.
I tried to concentrate on the cold metal of the coffeepot, on the antiseptic smoothness
of the porcelain cup, the roughness of the bread crust, but it didn’t seem to be powerful
enough. Then the telephone interrupted me as well as the aroma of ground coffee
freshly infused with boiling water. My concentration was gone.
6 March 1982
I came close to giving up the whole project as utopian, but last night I had a tactile dream
and that gave me encouragement. I have been hoping for such a dream right from the
start of this experiment but except for some micturating dreams, I didn’t have any other
tactile ones. Not till last night. Nothing as grand as Maury’s guillotine dream but at least
it was something: I am playing tennis, but instead of hitting the ball with the racquet I
must hit a live wasp. I keep chasing the wasp with my racquet, but I keep missing. At
the same time my effort is making it angry. It keeps circling me and tries to attack my
ears. The wasp’s dives are progressively wilder and angrier. I am unable to hit it. It is now
touching the underneath of my ear lobe. Fearful that I will be stung any moment, I wake
up. I find that the corner of my pyjama top is turned up and is rubbing my ear lobe.
Encouraged, I immediately embark on tactile self-consciousness. I experiment by getting
dressed with my eyes closed. First, try to touch the chair that my clothes are on. I have a
problem with finding the socks. In the end I find them inside the trouser legs. Am unable
to tell the difference between the inside and outside of the singlet. I try to really experience
every touch. To be aware of it, at the same time to search for any associations with some
hidden touches. I am watching out for the visualization of the whole action. Initially it
all seems very ordinary, all this preoccupation seems to be a childish nonsense. After a
while, I have a strange feeling in which this banal activity becomes a novel experience.
As if this utilitarian activity suddenly acquired a new dimension. Suddenly it became a
ritual. (Getting dressed has always been a ritual, it only became a practical activity in
our modern times.) Dressing as a tactile art. From this almost mystical experience, I
am disturbed by the suppressed laughter of my son Vašek who has just got out of bed,
evidently observing my activities and, not understanding, has burst into laughter. I don’t
feel like explaining anything. In future I will be more discreet.
7 March 1982
Everybody is asleep. I am in the room with Ťiapka, the dog. Caressing the dog assuages
erotic desire.

16 October 1983
Something smooth, velvety, warm, something with gentle waves, with rounded peaks.
A soft edge, submissive to fingers, lightly salty to lips, swollen, recurring, supple on
the tongue, another curve, gently fuzzy. Larger than the previous one, something ring-
like, with fine hair, held between two soft cylinders. Something warmly damp, beyond
reach, inundating, above immediate tactile experience, something like a boy’s trouser
pocket full of glass marbles, like the touch of ripened wheat on naked groin, something
like a sloping bank leading from the river, as when we grab a tuft of grass to get out of
the water. Something without obstacles, like a muff, a hand under a stone. Rhythm of
warmth and cold, poppy seeds on the palm of the hand . . .
11 February 1984
What do you call a person who is interested in tactile art, not just the art, but also the
tactile perception of the world? Sight has its spectator, hearing – a listener, taste – a
gourmet, smell is not so easy: a sniffer, but that smacks of toluene necromania; then
there is a word like hound, but that belongs to another field. Touch comes out the
poorest. The only word that seems to have a tie with it is groper, but that, too, seems
to indicate an entirely different activity than what we are thinking of. It does indicate
how tactile sensations are undervalued in our lives, how they are relegated to an inferior
role. Yet etymologically, grasping something is derived from the word to grasp, that is
to touch it, to grasp it, to hold it, to take possession of it with one’s hands. If we want
to find out the substance of something, first we must take it into our hand. And yet for
this action, in relation to a person who does it, we don’t have a suitable word. What a
shame.
14 February 1984
Heraclitus differentiated two basic, dialectical pairs of tactile values: warm – cold,
wet – dry. Aristotle expanded this to include another five: heavy – light, hard – soft,
tough – brittle, rough – smooth, dense – thin. It could perhaps be made even broader
by inclusion of compacted – loose, then a further, but not so clearly defined pair, with
a certain emotional colouring: pain – pleasure and then some singular, descriptive
expressions, velvetiness, prickliness, sogginess, glutinousness, liquidity, gelatinousness,
jelly-likeness. With such a threadbare arsenal it is not possible to express the richness
of our tactile life.
15 February 1984
Today I resolve to conduct a small tactile experiment. I decide to follow one of
Marinetti’s directions for the sharpening of tactile sensibility. Vašek is at school, Eva
still asleep. I put a blindfold over my eyes, strip naked and set out from the bedroom
door to my study on the ground floor. My final goal is to find my typewriter, put in
a sheet of clean paper and type: ‘Touch is a sense equal to the others’. I tread lightly
on the carpet. It ends. Wooden floor. With my bare foot I feel for the threshold and
my hand searches for the banister leading downstairs. Suddenly, there is the sound
of breaking glass and something rolling down the steps. I freeze and quietly swear to
myself. I forgot that we put used crockery on the shelf near the banister to be taken
down by whoever goes down to the kitchen. Luckily the noise doesn’t wake Eva up.
The descent downstairs will now be considerably more difficult. I will have to tread
very carefully, to avoid stepping on the broken porcelain and injuring myself. I hesitate,
considering interrupting the experiment and sweeping the mess up. But I decide to

inside 115
continue. It will be riskier but fear of injury will force me to sharpen my senses. Very
lightly, I put my foot on the first step. I know that the dangerous area starts on about
the fifth step but all the same I put my foot down very carefully – first the big toe, then,
with a cradle like movement, the rest of the foot. Finally I transfer my weight onto the
heel. So I progress step by step. The ‘dangerous steps’, surprisingly, go quite smoothly.
I’ve worked out a system. I put the edge of my foot down as close as possible to the wall
then ‘sweep’ the step towards the centre to clear it for both feet. With this ‘sweeping’
method I conquer the whole staircase without, I assume, any injury (without feeling
any injury). I reach the bottom. If I turn right I’ll get to the kitchen, but I must walk
through the hallway, then a small lobby to reach my study. The tiles are cold. I still
tread very carefully. There could be some broken pieces even here, in the hallway.
With my hands I reconnoitre the space ahead of me. All the time, I must hold onto
something because I have to stand on one foot while the other foot is reaching out and
feeling the floor ahead. It’s hard to keep my balance. My foot bumps against a chair
standing in the hall. I sit down to have a rest. In my mind I estimate how many more
steps before I reach the door to the small lobby. I conclude a maximum of three to four
steps. I get there. I trip over a pair of shoes. (The lobby is square, one and half by one
and half metres. There are four doors: to the hall – where I entered – straight ahead is
the door to my room – where I am heading – on the left is the door to the bathroom
and on the right out to the street.) The doorbell makes a shrill sound. Automatically
I reach for the door, undo the lock and open it. There is a scream. I tear my blindfold
off. In front of me, with a terrified expression, stands the mail delivery woman. Only
now do I realize that I am naked. Quickly I put my hand on my crotch and stammer
some apologies about having just gotten out of the bath. I grab a letter from her hand
and quickly shut the door. The doorbell rings again. I throw a coat over myself and
open the door again. The letter is a registered one and I have to sign for it. As I return
the pen to the mailwoman I notice her looking down with astonishment. My feet are
covered in blood. At that moment I feel like a vampire.
1 January 1985
A tactile object is the only work of art which can become more substantive, more
emotional, the more often it comes into immediate contact with its ‘perceiver’ and
can, dare I say, to a certain degree even change his or her sense of it (content, meaning,
emotive capacity). Every artwork, with a change of social circumstances, undergoes a
change in the field of its actual interpretation. But that’s not what I am thinking of. I
am not thinking of a change in utilitarian substance, a re-actualisation of the work, but
a change in the emotive capacity of the substance. Looking at a painting or listening
to a musical composition, the observer or listener does not ‘add’ anything to the work,
his communication with it takes place on the level of subjective experience. After the
departure of the observer or the listener, the painting or composition remains objectively
the same, ready for the next observer and listener. (Similarly a meal or a fragrance – I
am referring to the non-changeability of taste or smell.) It is different with a tactile
object. With every touch the object changes, it enriches the emotions of everyone who
touches it. Not only visibly (with covered objects), where after a while the fingers leave
on the object, or on some parts of it, visible traces (dirt, grease, surface wear and so
on) but also on an emotional level. Every sensory touch necessarily ‘charges’ the object
emotionally. A tactile object acts as an accumulator into which those perceiving invest
their emotions at the moment of touching. Of course, they also reciprocally drain off
the emotions that have been invested into it, firstly by the maker and secondly by all

the others that have touched the object since then. I venture to state that the emotional
content of a tactile object constantly changes; that we touch the same, yet at the same
time an altogether different, object. It is this emotional and permanent metamorphosis
that is one of the fundamental characteristics of tactile art.
3 March 1985
It’s Saturday. Eva went to visit Verunka. I am at home with Vašek. I am initiating him
into my new plan. I want to experimentally bring about a tactile dream. At first, he
thinks that I have gone crackers but gradually he starts to comprehend or, at least, he
thinks that it might be fun and agrees to participate. I shall try to go to sleep, then
Vašek (analogically, like the co-operator of Marquis d’Hervey) will put a scrubbing
brush on my forehead and a minute later will spill out a bagful of dried peas on my
bare belly. After another minute he will wake me up (providing I have not woken up
already). We’re getting the props ready, putting them on a chair next to the bed. Vašek
hangs my ‘film’ stopwatch around his neck. I put on my pyjama trousers. I wash down
two Rohypnols with tea left over from breakfast. I lie down on the bed fully expecting
that I will go to sleep within several minutes. Vašek sits at the foot of the bed and
waits, holding the stopwatch. But sleep is not coming, on the contrary I feel a kind of
euphoria. Perhaps it is my excitement about the expected result of the experiment or I
took the wrong pills. The situation is becoming embarrassing. The more I try to go to
sleep, the more awake I am. I try to will myself into it, I try, yoga-like, to relax all my
muscles, but sleep is eluding me. After half an hour Vašek gets bored with it all and
goes outside, leaving me at the mercy of my uncontrollable agitation.
91. The Way, 1989

inside 117
Travel diary
First I took my shoes off and stepped with my bare feet onto the bath mat (terry cloth).
I took my clothes off. I threw them away from me as far as possible.
It is 14 July 1979.
Place: Forest in Truby, in Kostelec Upon Black Forest.
I put on a black blindfold.
In my hands I hold two woollen socks (for documentation). It is ten in the morning.
I put cotton wool into my nostrils and ear canals.
I spin around and around in one spot.
I lose my orientation (but I don’t fall over).
I stop spinning (my head keeps spinning, but I don’t lose my balance).
With my right arm I reach out in front of me.
I have stepped into an experiment in one of the blankest places on the map of our
sensibility.
I step off the bath mat, the last vestige of tactile civilization. Carefully I put my foot
down on the ground. Even before the skin touches the soil, I register around the hand
of my outstretched arm (but also around my groin and crotch) a light air current. Yes,
I am moving. The contact of my sole with the ground is of course, more ‘touchy’. Even
though I know that I am in the forest, in fact I remember the immediate surroundings
from the view I saw before I started on this journey; the first isolated contact with
forest ground is unexpectedly intense. The signal of contact with the tense skin of
my sole runs through my whole body. I savour the novelty of this feeling. Suddenly I
realize that my right foot is still on the bath mat. I concentrate on the parallelism of the
two contacts. Then the right foot leaves the mat and is set down next to the left foot.
The tactile experience is repeated with the right foot, but doesn’t feel so new. Gently
I flex my toes. I transfer my weight from one foot to another. I bend down and from
under the left foot pick up a handful of forest humus. I run it through my fingers:
it contains slightly prickly pine needles, dry leaves and decomposing peat. I also feel
three somewhat more compacted pieces of something woody (bits of roots, or piece of
decaying pine cone or tree bark). I put it all into one of the woollen socks. Next step.
The layer of dry leaves is deeper. Strange, it’s not a visual image that intrudes, more an
aural one – the rustle of leaves. Under the right foot I feel a small piece of a branch. I
put it into the sock. I take another several careful steps. The novelty of contact is slowly
wearing off, is changing to fear. I am obviously out of reach of the close vicinity that
is still in my memory from before tying the blindfold. My hand is anxiously trying to
feel for the closest tree. I hold the other hand, holding the socks, in front of my face.
I fear the branches. Under my feet are still only leaves and pieces of twigs. Finally the
outstretched hand catches a springy end of some tree branch. I am nearing a tree. The
ends of my fingers feel its coarse structure. I get closer with my whole body. Slowly I
press against it, my legs lightly around the trunk, arms embracing it. I press hard against
the tree and feel the pattern of the bark pressing into my skin. Into my left thigh, about
twenty centimetres above the knee, a stump is pressing into my flesh painfully. The pain
is not unpleasant, I find myself pressing more into the trunk. I am overtaken by some
masochistic pleasure.
I stay like that, in the tree embrace, for about one minute, then the excitement dies
away, the skin gets used to the pressure and the immediate tactile sensation loses its
intensity. I ease off the embrace, feeling stickiness on my belly, probably some fresh
resin. It can’t be wiped off. It is an unpleasant, squeamish feeling, now it is on my
hands as well. I try to wipe it off on the tree trunk. Finally I get rid of it by rubbing

my hands in the soil. With mixed feelings I continue on my way. I collect all objects
that I feel with my feet. Several pinecones, small rocks, one deformed tin (from pâté),
twigs, pieces of bark – it all goes into the woollen socks. Now there is something hard,
it scrapes my sole. I try to identify it, loosen the pressure on my foot, then lightly rub
it to and fro with the sole; it doesn’t seem to be a rock, that would be colder; nor is it a
pine cone – I already have my experiences with those. One end seems to be fashioned
by human hand – or a machine? Some kind of smooth ball, with a sharp, protruding
spike in the middle? I can’t identify it. My imagination forms a certain shape, but it
doesn’t remind me of anything concrete. I can’t get rid of a feeling that I have touched
something like that before and that it was associated with pleasure. No, it’s not a natural
object, at least not completely. It’s as if one end of it is warmer, or is that mere illusion?
No, there, where it has been ‘worked on by human hand’, it is evidently warmer; I
confirm that with the other foot, although possibly it is an illusion caused by the fact
that the ‘natural’ end is rough, whilst the ‘man-made’ end is smooth. Another discovery:
the object is not complete. I can clearly feel ‘ragged’ (as if caused by breakage) ‘splinters’
in one part of the ‘natural end’. With my toes I try to grasp the object to deliver it to
the hands for more thorough identification. I lose my balance and fall into a sitting
position. An unpleasant, slightly painful feeling. I get up quickly. As I was falling, my
toes lost the object. I feel with my foot all around me but can feel only dry leaves and
twigs. I search with my hands, I am possessed by a desire to find that mysterious object.
Nothing. I lose control. Hysterically, I dig through the leaves. I tear the blindfold off
my face and keep rooting through the leaves in a ten-metre radius. I crawl on all fours
and dig through the leaves and broken branches. I advance systematically. I find several
pieces of bark, even strangely shaped remains of decaying tree stumps, several cones,
but nothing resembling my previous tactile experience. I collect the woollen socks filled
with documentation from the ground where I dropped them during my fall and return
disappointedly to the bath mat. Several times over the next few days I return to the
same location hoping that my feet would find the mysterious object, but all in vain.
92. Reconstruction of Found and Subsequently Irretrievably

Lost Object (based on tactile memory), n.d.

93. Documentation, 1979
94. ‘Twin-Coloured’ Tactile Collage (sandpaper and fur), 1978

95. Tactile Study, 1979

96. Tactile Study, 1979

97. Man (tactile collage), 1978
98. Woman (tactile collage), 1978

inside 123
99. Welcoming Touch (tactile collage), 1978
Tactile collage
The materials for classical collages are images of objects, or their parts, taken out of their
logical context. Tactile collages are above all structures of reality and their emotional
value. Touch, which is weighted down with utilitarian habits due to its initial lack of
cultivation, attempts identification, but in a material structural collage it misses the real
shape of objects. It is not used to identifying things merely on the basis of structure.
In practice its identifying function is, in the majority of cases, only a subsidiary to
the function of vision. That is why the information that touch alone can supply to
our brain, has a confusing and quite subjective character. In a traditional collage, two
seemingly unconnected realities are brought together, and the contact is made in an
unorthodox place. A spark of irrational beauty leaps out from these contacts. In a
tactile collage, there is a connection of structures that can quite happily take place
in real life. For instance the structure of fur and the structure of wood – a woman
sitting on a park bench or a dead fox lying on the floor of the forester’s hut. Since for a
complete identification, touch misses the sense of real shape, it is not possible to decide
from the structure if it is about a shot fox sitting on a park bench or a woman wearing
a fur lying on the floor of a forest hut. The structure in a tactile collage is defined by
shape, the realization of the author’s desire and a product of analogical thinking. Touch
gets lost in the labyrinth of mystification, its stubborn desire for identification going
against its will in the service of imagination. The tactile collage ‘Man’, ‘Welcoming
Touch’ and ‘Woman’ make a meaningful triptych. The collages ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’
are created from identical structures symbolising unity of connection. The shape of
these structures, their mutual proportions, preferences and contacts characterize their
diversity. ‘Welcoming Touch’ is a kind of ‘two coloured collage’ of a supple, warm
handshake with a cold unfriendly border.

100. Plucking Out (realized photograph), 1990
Dialogue between the right and left hand

Right hand: Left hand:
Something sandy
gritty Something porridge-like
adhering
Something very sharp
Something muddy
squelchy
Suddenly resisting
our will
resisting our handshake
Something yielding
shape-changing
randomly formatted
Perhaps feathers
Yet suddenly rigidified
into one of many borderline forms
Coldness
Something we can’t get rid of
Touch of one’s fingers on one’s palm!
1979

101. Fossil (realized photograph), 1990
102. Defence (realized photograph), 1990

Dialogue Vision – Touch (Eva Švankmajerová – Jan Švankmajer)
103 (1). Question (Eva

Švankmajerová):
‘This dreadful habit of
observing from the
outside or inside, is
really called portraiture?’
103 (2). Reply (Jan Švankmajer):

‘No, because to portray
someone means to
capture the skin in a
certain state of repose.
In better instances it
attempts to demonstrate
an outer manifestation
of the spirit, a bit like
when an actor tears up
the scenery in which he
performs, to indicate
to the audience that
he is angry. For me,
this kind of play means
the overturning of the
senses. The dramatic
characters are of course
not interchangeable, but
the senses are.’

103 (3). Question (Eva
Švankmajerová):
‘People who were not
sufficiently perceptive
to the common spirit of
times, phenomena and
place, would be unable
to express themselves
to whoever they would
be talking to? Why then
do you insist here that
dramatic characters are
not interchangeable?
And that senses are?
Is it possible with the
sense of “touch” to
comprehend a spirit so
eccentric that it is a
wonder that anyone can
put up with it?’

‘It is a mistake to say
things face to face, change
from hand to hand and
even to live from hand to
mouth. On the contrary, one
ought to say things from
nose to nose, change from
ear to ear and altogether
live from mouth to hand
(similarly from hand to
ear, from nose to eye etc).
It is also possible to catch
mice with the face, or to
put breasts into shoes.
Such are the laws of
synaesthesia.’

103 (5). Question (Eva Švankmajerová):
‘The events to which I’m now referring are, after all, something
general in essence? It appears that those whom they didn’t touch
have been deprived of something?’

‘Of course, and not only deprived, because misunderstanding is
always on the horizon.’

‘Those who don’t participate in the happenings can’t be deceived
by them, or could they be? And how, damn it, would that error
proceed?’

‘An error begins the moment the rubber hands of the first
hours touch us. Then we are formed by other hands, and
others and still others. And at the same time we use our
own hands to collect “documents” with which we stuff old
stockings. However, I may be wrong.’

‘Do you also think that this is my
grandest clothing?’

‘Yes. Clothes represent the most bestial
obstacle, they are the civilising condom,
preventing tactile conception. But even
nudity needs to be formulated.’

‘Clothes too? To me it seems that the
obstacle to agreement, followed by
possible comprehension, is not just the
skin, fat and muscles or hair. Perhaps
truth rests with the most direct idea, that
is the skeleton?

‘Something is always like something
different. The fragrance of uncertainty.
The skeleton as the covering of flesh and
skin as an envelope for clothes; like a
wardrobe. Even the shoe brush fits in (or
is it not a shoe brush?). And somewhere
in the corner the forgotten pine cones
from the vacation. And all that is the
truth. Naked truth.’

104. The Reverse of Touch (tactile drawing), 1978
Instructions for touching:
First have a careful look at the drawing. Select a place from which to begin and start
touching. Select also the direction of movement of your fingers. Gently place fingers
on the starting point, close your eyes and set off on the journey from memory. For the
whole time keep repeating in your mind: ‘I will never see this again.’
105. Suddenly Elsewhere (tactile drawing), 1978

inside 133
106. Superstructure (tactile drawing), 1978
107. Duel (tactile drawing), 1978
In the cellar, 1978

Something rough, something cracked Something recognisably coarse
Falling Something like metal, slippery
Crumbling Slippery
Something cold as metal Something loose, piecemeal, hard
Somewhat greasy Something flourlike
Something smooth, rounded Something loose, piecemeal, heavy
Lightly resisting Something piecemeal, hard, flourlike
Something coarse Something soft, lithe
Nothing Cooling
Something coarse Something greasy, gluey
Nothing, something coarse Drying
Nothing, something coarse Something sharp
Nothing Hurting
Etc.

Imaginary portrait of Emila Medková

(Written with regard to her tactile values)
In 1921, when Marinetti was putting together the ‘Educational scale of touch’ Emila
Medková was not yet among the living. Perhaps that is the real reason why Emila
Medková used neither of the two tactile scales (logarithmic or exponential) in her tactile
evaluation. Perhaps there is a little of the third group of the logarithmic scale:
‘contact exciting, tepid, nostalgic
velvet
combed wool
silken crêpe’
We won’t get very deep though, even if we take the sixth exponential scale:
‘contact warm, sensual, intelligent, ardent

plush
fuzzy surface of skin or peach
birds’ feathers’
My instructions:
Insert hands into tepid water and, without losing a single drop to the floor, hit
a doorframe with the palms. And now, when the palms are swollen with a blazing
feeling of pain and the fingers are feeling somewhat numb, slowly, as if we were gently
exhaling, reach out to touch Emila Medková: Water everywhere:
Water everywhere
Water everywhere
Heating up
Heating up
On fire
Preliminary notes on the tactile portrait of Eva Švankmajerová, 1976

At the centre of the object, where the hand inserted in an elbow sleeve first touches with
the fingertips ‘the face’, it is necessary to place something pleasantly soft, covered in
places with fuzz, preferably of circular shape, so that the initial tactile impression will
be pleasant and will overcome any shyness and fear of the unknown. It will embolden
the hand and make it easier to slip into the trap. The direction of touch is usually into
the left corner, where we are used to finding the beginning of everything, and there we
also have to start with our own portrait. From the smooth, slippery peak a cold, metal
spike must protrude, to which a nylon slope is fixed, ascending through the whole
object so that in the opposite corner it changes into a tied descent. It is important that
the back of the hand, traumatized by the contact with the ascending spike, is freely
stroked by the hanging tuft of lion’s fur, and in this ambivalent state slides on the taut
diagonal to the point of descent, to which two inflated fish bladders should be fixed,
or at least two plastic bags, inviting manipulation. In the top right corner, I nail a
metal hasp and secure it immediately with a wooden peg. In the bottom left corner, a
woman’s stocking filled with crumbled tinfoil, clothes pegs and largish pieces of broken
glass, will cause you to promptly leave the tactile portrait of Eva Švankmajerová with
the feeling that you have sustained an injury.
1976

108. Tactile Portrait of Eva Švankmajerová, 1977

Tactile portrait of Vratislav Effenberger, 1978

If anyone ever hesitated in front of the elbow sleeve of a tactile object, then this
feeling of shame, fear and tension is here multiplied a hundred times and only forced,
liberating laughter will free us enough to be able to insert our hand into Vrastislav
Effenberger. That proposition is correct, since the purpose of my tactile portraits is
not to engender the feeling of a darkened room full of friends, on the contrary it is an
attempt to touch the inner structures and aspects of the portrayed on a bright day, with
eyes wide open. The hand that awaits us inside only seems ready for a handshake, it is
really another one of my tricks to entice the ‘spectator’ into a trap, to pacify him and
take the weight off his shoulders. When you find out that the hand doesn’t respond
to you but just lies coldly in your palm, doesn’t beckon to you to sit yourself down
comfortably, it is too late, because the contact with the object has been established
and to back out would be embarrassing. This feeling of frustration is precisely the
right feeling from which to perceive the Portrait of Vratislav Effenberger. The space
of the portrait is defined on its sides by a cold grater whose surface doesn’t allow too
close a proximity to the outer edges for fear of injury. This rough surface is one of the
positions available to the portrait. Under the limp hand, your fingers will rest on a soft
surface of a ‘cheesecloth’ structure that will rebound as you put pressure on it. This
absorbent surface that creates a counterpoint to the side graters, a ‘bandage’ for possible
injuries suffered while examining the portrait, is of course only a camouflage. Under
the bandage you will find further graters that should come into effect if the side traps
fail. Now, your fingers, in hope of escape, descend into the ‘mouth’ of the portrait
where they at least have something to get hold of, something to grab, which is quite a
lot. Now you are holding it. Savour that feeling. You will very rarely experience such
a feeling with the conventional art of portraiture. You will never be able to truly value
this gift of tactilism, to grasp something and hold onto it. Such a gift should not be
wasted. So hold on, for at least five minutes. It is encouraging. Grip the hand really
hard, don’t be afraid – what you’re gripping is solid and can take it. After gripping
for five minutes, you will comprehend the meaning of ‘German faithfulness’. Then,
as you let go of this ‘pommel of faithfulness’, you will feel that you have decided your
fate. Symmetrically arranged, artificial butterflies, will confirm this, the forms of your
future life – pastries as butterflies. I have always been disturbed by the artificiality of
nature (artificial stumps of my childhood years), this authentic non-authenticity of
fallen mannerism. And the eyes – if a hand is a nose and a ‘pommel of faithfulness’
with forms of butterflies for a mouth, then keys hung on bathroom hooks are eyes.
However, in tactile art the eyes are not the most important part of a portrait. Eyes
defend themselves from touching by shutting their lids. They beg comparison: eyes as
a key to the personality of the portrayed. Don’t believe it. Touch it, an ordinary key.
Better return to the mouth. Stay five minutes more. It is not fitting for the author to
advertise his own object but if you do want to touch your superego don’t hesitate to
insert your hand into my tactile portrait of Vratislav Effenberger.
1978

109. Tactile Portrait of Vratislav Effenberger (uncovered object), 1978

110. Tactile Portrait of Ludvík Šváb, 1978

inside 139
Tactile portrait of Ludvík Šváb

One should not be fooled by the fact that at the first touch the tactile portrait of Ludvík
Šváb retains some semblance of a real portrait. As if ‘something’ was eyes, ‘something’
nose, ‘something’ mouth. This confusing topography is meant to create a recognizable
situation and to make the first impression bearable. The ornamental cushion-like
structure of the portrait’s foundation, as the lowest layer of his secret wishes, forms
the base of his alimentary tract, leading through the centre of the object. Maybe it is
through this elastic tunnel that those frequent sorties into my dreams start. The thing
that, in the first tactile impression, can be mistaken for a mouth because it is located
where, in a portrait, we expect the mouth to be, is in reality that place in the spirit from
where his precisely formulated aggressions emerge, so obviously inappropriate to his
corpulent type. From this small jar originates bile distilled a hundred times and with
a touch, as we might squeeze lemon into tea, remnants of dried plaster peel off from
the elastic inside of a halved children’s ball, to fall without announcement into their
proper places. Only touch is capable of using an analogical shortcut to come close to
this aggressive mechanism of humour. All the other things that you can touch in the
object are structures and aspects of infantilism, as random witnesses to the process of
touching Ludvík Šváb.
Touchable Wellbeing, 1978

(Tactile poem)
Slice two pieces of Christmas bun

Change into boxer shorts
Rub the bun on your naked thighs till it completely crumbles
Collect the crumbs and put them into your wellies
Pour some good table oil into the wellies
Insert your naked feet into the wellies
Walk to the nearest metro station
(Concentrate on each step)
Light a small fire in the underground
Throw one hundred single crown coins into the fire
Feed the fire with the oil and crumbs of the bun
After quarter of an hour, stamp the fire out
Throw the coins into an appropriate hole
(Concentrate on the contact your fingers make with the warm metal)
Enter
Walk from carriage to carriage and with both hands
Caress all clothes made of fur
(Fur coats, fur collars, hats, shoes etc)
Exit at Peace Square
And face the wind
1978

111. Tactile Quatrain, 1985
112. Tactile Interpretation of a poem by

Benjamin Péret: ‘At the End of the
World’, 1989
113. Interpretation of a poem by Vratislav

Effenberger: ‘At Night’, 1989

inside 141
114. Soft – Hard (tactile poem), 1988
Economical suicide, 1978

Dedicated to Eva Švankmajerová
Spread your fingers as far apart as possible

Place between them pea seeds
Endure
Pinch your nose shut with a clothes peg
Endure
Kneel down on a grater
Endure
Slip a sucking sweet into your mouth
Suck
Press your back against the smooth concrete of a laundry
Endure
Press your heels into the drain of the bath
Just as the plug has been pulled
Endure
Paint your calves with egg yolk
Let it dry
And endure
Run water into the basin
Take shoes off
Dip your face in water
Endure

115. Heraclitus’s Poem, 1988

116. Tactile Poem, 1988

117. Crushing of Walnuts in the Palm, 1990


119. Cunnilingus Game, 1980
120. Cunnilingus Game,

1980
The aim is to push the
ball with the tongue
into the hairy hollow as
fast as possible.

121. Utilitarianism under Encirclement, 1989

123. Vacations (gesture poem), 1983

inside 149
Gestural sculpture
Unlike the gesture painting here, the impression of the gesture is not made by means of
an instrument (brush or scraper) and in its emotional expression it is a pure statement
of the creator’s psychic state. Gesture, an expression of our emotions, is transposed
by its impression into a fossilized form without losing its authenticity through some
aesthetic transformation. So it is a kind of fossilization of our emotions. It is a diary of
our emotions. During the creation of a gesture sculpture, there should be a discharge
of accumulated tensions. Gestural sculpture is a pure form of tactile art, since the
hand does not combine or search out analogical structures that would best correspond
to our feelings, but creates these structures directly, by not investing them with any
intermediate emotions. It abolishes the exterior and the interior model; subject and
object do not find any place for antagonism. In perceiving a gesture sculpture, it is
important not to rely on sight, because sight immediately makes aesthetic judgements
and seeks out random shapes of the sculpture for ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’. It is better to
perceive with touch, which in this case is more competent. The perceiver is then forced
to perceive the sculpture not as an artefact, but instead allow himself/herself to be
affected by the immediate emotion of the author. If we are prepared to believe what
the old, hermitic books try to persuade us of, then a strong emotion leaves an indelible
imprint on the objects touched, that can in turn be passed onto sensitive persons and
even allow them to visualize it. An analogical contact should be possible between the
author of the gesture sculpture and its perceiver. The tension existing at the time of the
making should, through touching (impassioned by a gesture identical with the author),
pass into the psyche of the perceiver and arouse visual associations. The whole process
of perception should take place in our inner vision, which is still the domain of our
psyche and is not subservient to aesthetic conventions.
1979
124. Three Gestures of Anger, 1979

125. Destructive Gesture I, 1990
126. Destructive Gesture II, 1990

127. Animated Gesture, 1990
In my own film The Fall of the House of Usher (1980), inspired by the story by Edgar
Allen Poe, I used the technique of tactile gesture pressed into clay for part of the story,
the interpretation of the poem ‘Magic Castle’. The poem analogically expresses the
spiritual change of Usher’s state. It is a poem that evokes the beginning of insanity. It
demonstrates that Usher subconsciously feels what is happening to him but is unable
to face it. This is why the poem has such an important role in the story and in my
conception of the film. It is an analogy of an analogy. While animating this sequence
of the film I attempted a kind of ‘tense interpretation’ of the poem. It was doubly
hard, as the gesture calling for tension all the time had to be held back by animation
techniques, it could not be done in one go, in one free action. On the other hand,
applying a brake on the tension amplified these emotions, they became cumulative,
even leading to cramping of the fingers. That piece of animation led to a considerable
mental exhaustion.

128. The Fall of the House of Usher, 1980

129. Scene from the Film Dimensions of Dialogue, 1982
Like the Touch of a Dead Trout, 1978

Tactile poem – scenario
Medium shot – A duvet is billowing, tossing about, rolling over.

Close up – A finger runs across the teeth of a comb.
Long shot – The duvet is calming down, until it becomes lifeless.
Medium shot – A tabletop. On the table lies a slice of bread. Pieces of bread break off,
mould themselves into balls and start rolling around.
Close up – A human nose seen from below. Balls of bread roll into the nostrils and
disappear up them.
Close up – A human ear. Balls of bread roll into the ear and disappear into it.
Long shot – A bare back:
cool
supple
slippery
slimy
Running naked in ripe barley!
Long shot – The duvet covers the bare back. It moves like an animal devouring and
digesting the body.
Close up – Teeth being cleaned. The movement of the brush speeds up:
slightly sticky
against the direction of the hair
pleasantly unretainable
pliable
Chew off the nails of both index fingers!
Long shot – A heap of dresses chafing against each other, climbing over each other,
they buttoning and unbuttoning themselves, etc.
A montage:
Close up – An armpit covered with soft hair:
lumpy
disintegrating
injuring
masticated
Sweat between the toes!
Long shot – The duvet climbs off the bed exposing the bed sheet full of cake crumbs.

inside 155
Touch and humour

If we only paid attention to the physiological aspect of this subject then tactile humour
would merge with tickling. But humour is, above all, a psychological phenomenon
and from that perspective the same rules should apply to tactile humour as they do to
poetry, painting, and such. This means that tactile arousal has to touch not just our
skin but firstly our ‘psyche’, if we want to regard it as true tactile humour. Certain
characteristics ensue from the visualization of tactile arousal. Such visualization, the
basis of tactile imagination, is also a prerequisite of tactile humour. Without it, the
tactile excitement would stay on the level of a pleasant or unbearable physiological
impulse. From the history of ‘tactile humour’ I would like to single out Duchamp’s
Please Touch and Dalí’s painting of tactile cinema.
Programme of the first collective, public contactorama on the theme: ‘Touch and
Humour’ (First introductory verse), 1984
Purging lobby
The participants undress above the waist, take off their shoes. The lobby is equipped
with:
1) Feather brushes. There are objects fixed to the walls made of goose and duck
feathers. Some of them are controlled from the back by simple mechanisms that give
them a certain movement (circular, vertical or horizontal). The participants approach
these objects delicately, frontally or with their backs, and allow themselves to be tickled
by the moving feathers, eventually responding to them with movements of their bodies.
2) Underarm twirling sticks. Ordinary wooden kitchen twirling sticks, covered with
lambskins and horsehair that can be rotated around their axles. These sticks project
from the wall and enable the ‘participants’ to position themselves so that the ends of
the sticks twirl in their armpits.
3) Tickling mats. These mats will be made from latex fingers (in the shape of a tickling
index finger). The participants will walk along the carpet to the door leading to the
‘Hallway of Quips’. During the walk, a soundtrack of lewd jokes will be played. Sharp,
metal spikes will outline the way on both sides so that they will have to pay attention
to avoid injury. The path will commence from a fur rug and wind its way along the
lobby around several bends, ending on the threshold (also covered with fur) of the
‘Hallway of Quips’. The entrance into the hall will have no door. Instead, large foam
rubber buffers will fill the doorframe and the ‘participant’ will have to push through
these into the hallway.
4) Hallway of quips. The walls of the hallway will be reserved for the results of the
interpretative games dedicated to tactile interpretation of verbal and drawn jokes.
Games workshop
From the ‘Hall of Quips’ one enters the ‘The Games Workshop’ where there will be a
collective tactile game prepared on the theme ‘A Peaceful Life is a Happy Life’.
Rules of the game:
The participants divide into four groups:
Mechanics fishing
Women at home
Managers of brickworks
Coal merchants

1) Mechanics fishing
First they put their bare feet into a hot oven (carefully, so that they don’t burn themselves
on the walls) then they allow their toes to be sucked by hungry carp in a tub of water.
2) Women at home
They throw flour over each other, then clean themselves up with a vacuum cleaner.
3) Managers of brickworks
First they tread in ordinary mud with their bare feet (maybe in a wash basin) then they
stand on warm bricks (heated from below by electrical elements) and remain standing
till the remnants of the mud on their feet dry.
4) Coal merchants
From out of a heap of coke they pick out piece after piece and rub the back of their
necks with it. Then they beat themselves with the skin (turned inside out) of a freshly
skinned rabbit
Later, the activities are switched around so that, for instance, Women at home, after
the flour activity, let themselves be beaten with the rabbit skin, or Managers of the
brickworks, after they have trodden the mud, are cleaned up with a vacuum cleaner, etc.
While this is going on a soundtrack is being played:
‘Blue, blue, bites
pricks, pricks, red
raining, raining, green
sliding, brown, brown’
And the sound of branches breaking.
130. Puppet of a Woman, 1996 131. Puppet of a Man, 1996

inside 157
Exit of gestures
From the ‘Games Workshop’ the participants will go to a small room where around the
walls is a long counter with small piles of potting clay. Above each pile hangs a piece of
paper with some joke or anecdote. Each participant puts a hand or both hands on the
pile and starts reading. At the point of climax the participant grips the clay with the
fingers. Thereby a gesture print of the laughter will be created. They then take a step to
the next pile of clay and repeat the action. Everyone circulates around the whole room
till they all reach the exit.
132. Gesture Marionette, 1990

133. Siamese Triplets (marionette), 1990

134. Gesture Marionette, 1990

In the Pocket, 1982

Tactile play in one act
Characters:
Bernard Gunther
Unhappy Pile of Flesh
Sex Maniac
Victim
Art Historian
Choir (four men)
Set: A monstrously large tactile object covers the whole back of the stage. It is
hidden by a black elbow sleeve with its opening closed by a rubber band. During
the performance the spectators crawl, one after another, through the hole into the
object to physically acquaint themselves with the tactile scenery.
Theatre programme: There are eight pages. The first has rabbit fur glued to it, the
second fine sand, the third rough bagging, the fourth has various buttons sewn
onto it, the fifth has a plastic bag affixed containing equal volume of drawing pins
and feathers, the sixth is made of tin, the seventh is a bath sponge and the eighth
has velvet glued on one half and last year’s peas on the other.
Above the scenographic object is a light table where numbers will be projected
during certain scenes, indicating to the audience which page of the programme
they should be touching.
Mid stage stands the Unhappy Pile of Flesh. It is complaining.
The black cloth covering a tactile object up-stage starts to wave a little. The hole
with the rubber band pulsates. It opens and closes like a mouth, as if it was
declaring some silent message. Suddenly it seems to be choking and throws up
Bernard Gunther.
Gunther: (who is naked, wears a white bed sheet so that only his legs from the knees
down are showing): It’s not possible that you don’t know it, you’ve just forgotten it.
You carry it inside you like an unsatisfied desire. (He walks around the stage with
outstretched hands, groping his way.) After all, the tactile sense is the first sense which
an infant, when born, feels – the touch of the mother’s body. That can’t be so easily
forgotten, as if it never existed. It is always with us, it remains with us all our lives. We
need to sense it again, to live it, maybe only as a memory and we’ll be happy, healthy,
the whole civilization will become well. We will be happy, happy again. (He touches the
Unhappy Pile of Flesh that shudders under his touch and shakes itself.)
Unhappy Pile of Flesh: In spite of being only an abstract model or symbol, if you
wish, I am very ticklish. Please, don’t touch me. What’s more, strangers repulse me.
And I don’t know you.
Gunther: No need to be afraid of me. I am a doctor, a therapist. I’ll cure you, you’ll
be as happy as a child. Besides, ticklishness and repulsion are the two greatest curses
of humankind. We are organisms comprised of organs. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin:
five sensory organs. Little children perceive vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch
directly, without any preferences. We lead them to the domination of vision. Under our
influence they dominate their organism. To see is to believe, to look after one’s own;

inside 161
great men are visionaries. When we part from someone we say: ‘See you later!’ Never
‘We’ll touch, taste, smell each other later.’ You see what I mean?
Choir: (recite together as they brush their hair): Manginess, mouldiness, faeces, urine,
milk skin, snake, slimy, hollow cavity, rat, hairless dog belly, boiled onions, rotting
peas, Christmas carp in the bath, vomit and so on.
Gunther: I’ll just knock on your forehead with my fingers. Don’t be afraid, they are
quite sterile. Knocking and slapping stimulates the nerves, increases blood circulation,
opens up every part of the body to become more sensitive. Follow me! I’ll bend my
fingers at the knuckles and I’ll knock with a movement like jumping up and down,
I’ll lift my fingers up one to two centimetres high. I’ll use both hands, I won’t be too
hard, but I won’t be too gentle. When I finish knocking, that part of the body will feel
slightly hot.
Unhappy Pile of Flesh: I have no forehead. I’m shapeless, rugged, an Unhappy Pile
of Flesh.
Gunther: Try, concentrate, relax, everyone has a forehead.
Unhappy Pile of Flesh: In my infanthood they threw me away, didn’t tell me how I
should grow. I’m an infantile, Unhappy Pile of Flesh.
Choir: (All pick up a piece of sand paper and rub their foreheads till they bleed,
making pleasurable noises.)
On the light table the number ‘one’ appears (fur).

While Gunther is helping Unhappy Pile of Flesh to find its forehead, out of the
sleeve of the tactile object climbs Sex Maniac, followed by Victim.
Sex Maniac: Once, purely by accident, something fell into my eye. I rubbed the eye
desperately. Suddenly, an immense pleasure overtook me, I continued rubbing the eye
but the irritation slowly changed until it reached a plateau where the pleasure didn’t
stop but increased till a liberating flow of tears washed away the irritation and the
orgasm ended.
Victim: More!
Sex Maniac: Of course, I don’t rely on chance. Recently I stood naked on an anthill
and with my own urine washed down the ants attempting to climb up me.
Victim: More!
Sex Maniac: All insects can be a source of unexpected delights. Come springtime, on
the first sunny days I lie down on fresh new grass. Naked. I cover myself with grass.
All over. Only my erect penis rises up from the ocean of greenery. My penis is smeared
with a thin layer of honey. Then, impatiently, I wait for the first bee to fly by. Then
another and another one and more. And I try to hold back the coming ejaculation so
as not to frighten the poor things starving after the long winter.
Victim: (agitatedly): Never again will I allow myself to be de-flead.
Choir: (One of the men from the choir stands up, blindfolded; the others approach
him, slap his face, kick him, tear out his hair, punch him in various places. After each
blow he calls out some colour: red-yellow, olive, Van Dyck brown, ash, white, etc.)
With each blow another number comes up on the light table: 5, 8, 2, 1, 6, etc.
(plastic bag with drawing pins and feathers, velvet and peas, sand, fur, tin).
Gunther keeps examining Unhappy Pile of Flesh and pokes into it here and
there, slaps it, but only very timidly.

Unhappy Pile of Flesh: I feel nothing, absolutely nothing. It’s no better, the depression
goes on, it gets deeper and deeper.
Gunther: It’s only the beginning. Do you want to borrow my bed sheet?
Sex Maniac: (dreamily): Yes, the bed sheet. I remember, it was in ’73. Couldn’t go to
sleep, I kept turning over in bed, crumpling up the sheet till it crumpled into a ball
which I then kicked somewhere under my hips. That’s when it happened. A wave of
delight overtook my whole body. The folds of the crumpled up bed sheet found a new,
until then unknown, erogenous zone on my body. A space to the left of my coccyx,
two-by-two centimetres. About the size of a five-crown piece.
Victim: My friend Dr Zemek, a sex therapist, told me once that he was treating a
patient with a peculiar aberration who, while he was masturbating, was hallucinating
about a male wrist strapped in a leather belt.
Sex Maniac: (scornfully) Masturbation, how primitive!
Unhappy Pile of Flesh: Can I call you Gunther?
Gunther: If you like, but my first name is Bernard.
Choir: (Throw fistfuls of flour at each other, then rice, peas, then they progress to
throwing of pieces of crusty old bread and finally stones at each other.)
The light table shows numbers 3, 4, 6, 7, and 1 (rough bagging, buttons, tin, bath
sponge, fur).
Gunther: At a certain time we stop touching our children, we even teach them to keep
their own hands off, to stop exploring even themselves. Under our tutorship they learn
to stay away from others, to keep their distance. Quickly shake the hand and prevent
a real contact.
Sex Maniac: I never developed a liking for children.
Gunther: Sex is the only opportunity where we can touch each other.
Sex Maniac: That’s overdoing it.
Unhappy Pile of Flesh: Beat me, Bernard, please, beat me! I don’t deserve anything
else.
Gunther: Is it strange that we are tense? That we suffer from anxiety, that we are
estranged? That, because we don’t touch our own bodies, we are disintegrated,
disorganized? That we need to regain our equilibrium? Even small monkeys who lack
physical contact with their mothers’ body suffer from autism.
Sex Maniac: Man doesn’t have to try everything.
Gunther: (to Unhappy Pile of Flesh): Come on, we’ll start again. We won’t keep
looking for the forehead. (Starts knocking on the Unhappy Pile of Flesh’s body folds.)
Choir: (Tickle each other on the soles of their feet while quietly relating lewd anecdotes
to each other.)
On the light table appears number 7 (bath sponge) and after about 30 seconds
number 3 (rough bagging). The hole in the black sleeve of the tactile object opens
up and out comes Art Historian.
Art Historian: Even Epicurus was already interested in touch. Wrote a whole book
about it. Unfortunately it hasn’t been preserved. Christianity can credit its world-wide
growth to the latent tactilism of masochistic provenance. All those martyrs . . .
Unhappy Pile of Flesh: Push, Bernard, hit harder (turns to Art Historian) and you,
continue!

inside 163
On the light table number 5 lights up (plastic bag with drawing pins and feathers)
and alternates in regular intervals with number 8 (velvet and peas).
Art Historian: Earlier religions were based on the sadistic components of the human
psyche. The masochistic component was frustrated. This fault was cleared away by
Christianity; at least initially so. And so this bliss, repressed for long centuries, finally
found its master.
Unhappy Pile of Flesh: (agitatedly, to Gunther): Be my master.
Choir: (One of the choir men is cradled in the arms of the other three. They sing a
lullaby to him, giving him sleeping tablets. As soon as he is asleep, they put him on the
ground and one of them hits him hard on the head with a stick. They are all over him
and keep asking him to tell them what he dreamt about. But the abused man keeps
crying.)
On the light table appears number 6 (tin).
Sex Maniac: As a pre-school child I contracted scarlet fever. I will never forget the
delight of peeling skin from my body.
Victim: Teach it to me! Or do you know what? We’ll fuck!
Choir: (They are applying camomile poultice to the head of the man who was hit but
the wound keeps bleeding. They then proceed to apply poultices to their own bodies
and mutually discuss where to put them, where would be most emotive.)
On the light table appears number 2 (sand).
Art Historian: All those martyrs . . . However, I don’t believe that tactile art has
any future. How many great men of modern art have tried to stir it up: Apollinaire,
Marinetti, Duchamp and all in vain. The purpose of art is beauty. Tactile beauty is
nonsense. A beautiful dig in the back, fingertips rubbed by sand paper! Moreover, it’s
unhygienic. And money comes only to those who are fastidious about cleanliness.
Gunther: Arousal of the senses is one method of returning to relaxed thinking, to
easing chronic tension, to strengthening our direct sensory reality here and now: Take
an orange, for instance, examine its shape and colour, its upper and lower parts, any
marks on its skin. Smell it. Close your eyes and roll the orange in your hands, listen to
the sound it creates. Roll the orange against your face. Note how, where and what your
face feels. Open your eyes and look at the orange. (Takes out a pocketknife.) Cut the
skin into thin sections. Examine the juice coming out of the skin.
Unhappy Pile of Flesh: Yes.
Gunther: (continues): Gently peel off the skin. Listen to the sounds, observe the
peeling of the skin. Observe if it is possible to peel the skin in large pieces, and if so,
does it tear out the flesh from the orange.
Unhappy Pile of Flesh: I’m already feeling better.
Gunther: (continues): Concentrate for a while on the sounds. Look inside the peel and
smell it.
Unhappy Pile of Flesh: I’m starting to feel happy.
Gunther: Examine one of the orange sections. As slowly as possible, break the peeled
orange into halves while observing the halving. Slowly separate into small sections. (He
opens the knife.)
Choir: (all rub each other’s back with scrubbing brushes and recite together):

Something hard,
heavy,
unliftable
like scales of a snake
like stinging by nettles.
Sex Maniac: (dreamily): To shove a pinecone into the arse!
On the light table appears number 4 (buttons).
Art Historian: (to himself ): No, that won’t take root.

Gunther: Close your eyes and eat (angrily attacks the Unhappy Pile of Flesh with the
knife).
Unhappy Pile of Flesh: (Screams with pleasure.)
End
S
Problems with the distribution of tactile art
Touch has not gone through a long cultivated development the way Vision has, and
so the manner of communication with a tactile object is altogether different from that
with a painting or sculpture; for that reason the form of an exhibition is not quite
satisfactory. For instance, a tactile perceiver needs more time to examine an object than
does a viewer at a conventional exhibition of paintings. Additionally, he needs absolute,
uninterrupted relaxation, a kind of freeing of introspection, sharpening of the inner
eye. Each perceiver will need, at least initially, as we are dealing with an unusual form
of communication with art, a new kind of preparation of Touch for arousal, so that
the perceiver will become receptive to tactile messages. It is not possible for more than
one person at a time to be occupied with one object. Some objects are designed to be
in contact with parts of the body other than hands, so it is not reasonable to expect
the visitors to disrobe in the presence of others. Still other tactile works are comprised
of instructions for tactile behaviour and demand a specific atmosphere that may not
be possible to arrange in an exhibition hall. One of the ways of bringing tactile art
close to its audience could certainly be through collective contactivity, as suggested
previously by Marinetti, where under the guidance of a tactilator, tactile rites or games
could be arranged in which a number of people could take part. Similar collective
séances, of therapeutic benefit, are also described by Bernard Gunther in his book Sense
Relaxation. Another method of distribution could be some kind of lending institutions
of tactile poesy (poetry), where for a modest fee one could borrow and take home
some tactile plates, objects or collages and devote an evening to individual tactilation.
When we consider the undemanding nature of producing tactile objects and collages,
where no great quality of artistic calligraphy or craftsmanship is required, merely good
trade qualifications, it seems to us that their reproduction would not be inaccessible to
many people, therefore duplication of tactile objects by hand would make possible even
private tactile collections, tactilographies.
1979

inside 165
135. Please Touch (homage to Marcel Duchamp), 1989
The magic ritual of tactile initiation

Isolate the novice in a dark chamber
His hands must be submerged for a whole week in black ichthyol ointment
Cover his back alternately with compresses of finely chopped nettles or goose fat
The sole of his left foot touches the surface of hot water
The sole of his right foot touches the surface of icy water
After three days the water is swapped around
A fan blows a gentle warm breeze in his face
His penis is inserted into a rolled up emery paper and bandaged
His kneecaps are gently tapped with a golden hammer
Thrice daily an appropriate dose of mescaline is injected into his left arm
After a week of such preliminaries the initiate is taken to the Great Tattooist who will
tattoo a large image of the initiate’s thumb on his back while intoning:
Make the cold warm and the soft hard!
Make the loose compact!
Make the course slimy!
Make the hurtful pleasurable!
And vice-versa!
So that the eye will not perceive and give touch timely warning, constantly confuse his
utilitarian habits of touch by disorientation, mystification and panic!
Bear in mind that our entire body is a unified erogenous zone!
Do not smooth down the crumpled sheets!
In winter kick off the bedclothes!
On hot summer nights crawl under the heavy quilt!
Do not scorn masturbation!
Do not have your old shoes re-soled!
Do not urinate before going to bed!
Be repulsed by all objects yet touch them all!
Learn to love insects!
Tire yourself out!
Only when Touch is freed from its utilitarian context, not constantly forced into a
self-conscious moment, will it reach the point where it transmutes the barrier of its
identifying existence, and without being aware of it, becomes the language of the poet.

136. Dactyloscopy of Desire (tactile homage to René Magritte), 1989
And now go
and make tactile art!

AFTERWORD
TACTILISM REVIEWED
137. Tactile Novel, 2003
When I made my first tactile object back in 1974, as a basis for the collective
interpretative game Restorer with the Surrealist Group, it never occurred to me what a
chasm I was opening into my sensory life. Today, over thirty years later, I feel compelled
to make some kind of a review of these experiments.
Firstly: it turned out that tactile memory exists. This was made evident not only
from the questionnaire about revulsion but also from a number of collective games
that revealed clear childhood tactile memories. Even though it could be expected that

something like tactile memory existed, it had to be proved; without tactile memory,
tactile art was not possible.
Vratislav Effenberger: ‘If I remember correctly, the only concrete tactile repulsion
I experienced was towards fish, namely the Christmas carp kept in the bath. In my
childhood I was tempted to overcome the repulsion and touch that stupid creature,
immobile against the side of the bath, with a snout that every now and then opened
lazily, as if shouting some pathetic curse. Its slimy immobility was just pretence, it took
only the slightest touch with my hand and the whole carp body leapt into action with
lightning speed, showing it was capable of the angriest desperation. In a second, the
repulsion to touch the slimy thing was overtaken by terror and panic and prevented any
further aggression towards that dangerous monster.’
Emila Medková: ‘An experience from the age of eight: A girl of the same age as myself,
living in the basement of our apartment block, invited me to her home. She let me
stand outside the door and when, after a while, she returned, we went to play outside.
She asked me to reach into her pocket, said that there was something very good there.
I felt some vague substance in there that immediately stuck to my fingers and smelled
repulsive. The girl told me to taste it, that it was some very good peas. I trembled with
repulsion, my stomach was heaving, I ran home to wash it all off. This one occasion of
contact with peas resulted in many years of repulsion to them in any form.’
Obviously, it was about the discovery of the relationship of touch to other senses,
about its synaesthetic potential. In this instance, the results are not so clear-cut and
leave lots of room for experimentation. In practice, the connection between vision
and touch is quite evident, however this connection is not derived from analogy, as
for instance in case of synaesthetic ‘colourful music’. The relationships of touch–smell
or touch–taste are totally unexamined. Likewise touch–hearing, even though this
connection is probably more common, chiefly through the medium of dance. All of
this experimentation is challenged by a lack of expressions to describe authentic tactile
feelings. Tactile vocabulary is uncommonly poor: wet–dry, heavy–light, rough–smooth,
firm–loose, hot–cold, and that’s about it. If a little more complex description of bodily
sensations is required, one cannot do without poetic analogy. On the other hand, this
communicative scarcity encourages tactile poetry.
Synaesthetic week
Leather Monday, with bad breath, blue as the sky or the ocean, one hand in the pocket
and the other, a finger moistened with saliva, up in the air testing the wind’s direction.
From the nostrils hang two strings impregnated with linseed oil. A dog’s barking in the
distance blends into the sound of a machine gun. Monday is hungry. Feed it.
Cuddly Tuesday, wearing running shoes, shyly painting itself with yellow paint. Starts with
the hair and systematically works its way down to the feet. Lastly it paints the toenails. All
the while farting terribly. From the radio comes non-descript music. Goulash is burning on
the stove.
Ephemeral Wednesday, lying on the freshly cowhide-covered sofa. From the kitchen comes
the sound of clanking crockery. Whites of the eyes are reddish. Red anger. Lips held together
with a clothes peg. Wet dogs are running around the room smelling like steamed hats.

tactilism reviewed 169
Starched Thursday, stuffing itself with plum dumplings. Death on the tongue. Large milk
cans are banging together so loudly that one cannot hear the beating of one’s own heart.
Runny nose, thanks to a cold. Can’t see through the contact lenses. Windows have opaque
glass in them. Hot glue poured on the left hand. It is a meat-less day.
Hairy Friday, punished by standing in the corner facing the wall. Wetted itself. Dark
brown rivulets of urine running down its legs, sprinkling face-powder on them. Ears covered
with earphones with running water in them. Outside, the smell of spring. Postmen wearing
just shirts are delivering letters. Restaurants are serving fried cheese and French fries with
tartare sauce. Only the purple–orange-striped Vltava River strikes a discordant note.
Pulse Saturday, vomiting on the pianola. But vomiting so cleverly that it’s hitting only the
black keys. The falling muck produces the melody of a Viennese waltz. Outside, under the
windows, striking unionists are demonstrating. Purple ink is seeping from under the toilet
door and spreading in the hallway. Staircase is full of mist and letterboxes overflowing with
crushed garlic.
Dark-green Sunday, has drawn curtains. Poked out the eyes with a knitting needle,
didn’t want to see anyone. Doorbell is covered with a band-aid. Riding boots are filled
with concrete. Only the refrigerator covered with green moss says that nothing is meant
seriously. Will there be lunch again? There was one only a few minutes ago. From the cellar
comes music of the Prague trombone players, and from the attic drifts down the aroma of
drying thyme.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of my experiments was the application of tactile

imagination in film. It facilitated the transfer from one sphere of sensations to another.
In this instance it was the transfer from visual perception to the sphere of touch (physical
sensation). That, without any doubt, is the function of tactile memory.
The first time I used this arranged tactile imagination was in the film The Fall of the
House of Usher (1980). I am referring to a sequence with animated clay, a poetic analogy
evoking the start of Usher’s madness. The poem is a significant factor in Poe’s story.
Simply put, I had to visualize the principle of fingerprinted gesture, something that I
had used in my sculpting; a gesture, charged with certain emotion, has to be printed
into clay, thereby the emotion is fixed. In film, the making of such an act of discharging
of tension is constantly slowed down by an animation technique – that is, a gradual
frame-by-frame exposure. Even though this kind of animation can be relatively quick,
there are at least a few seconds between the frames. It leads to a kind of slowing down
of emotions – the contact of fingers with clay is constantly interrupted. It resulted in
tactile frustration, a kind of constant coitus interruptus. However, this tactile frustration
also led to an intensifying of emotions and inflammation of physical senses. I used a
similar technique in my film Dimensions of Dialogue (1983) in the episode ‘Passionate
Dialogue’ in which I achieved the metamorphosis between the lovers with destructive
gestures into the modelling clay. Here it was not merely gestures into shapeless clay, as
in The Fall of the House of Usher, but using the gestures to metamorphose whole figures.
The gesture was not just a messenger of analogical poetic emotion but also the means
of tactile metamorphosis. In the film The Pendulum, The Pit and Hope (1983), tactilism
was actually a kind of central character; the development was made up by using the
point of view of the camera instead of the real hero, showing only the hands and bare
feet that map out and ‘touch’ the limited space of the cell and also show the possibility

of escape. Various torture instruments, above all the pendulum, evoke the feelings of
‘coming’ (nearing) pain. Torture as the extreme limit of tactilism.
Tactile dream 6 July 2002

I am lying on my back on the grass under the large crown of a leafy tree. Pigs are running
in the branches above me. They jump from branch to branch like monkeys. Eva arrives
and informs me that the pigs belong to a tight-rope walker from Velký Osek who lives
with Eva’s aunt. She makes a Victory sign with both hands then crosses the four fingers. I
understand that the tight-rope walker fucks the aunt four times weekly. Now the tight-rope
walker arrives and balances on the rope stretched on the grass. In each hand, he holds a
window removed from its hinges. I say to myself that it’s easy, I could do it, too. Suddenly
the rope starts to twist like a snake. Its two ends come together like Uroboros. The tight-rope
walker now walks in a circle. Terrible squeals come from the crown of the tree. A branch
broke under one of the large pigs and the whole lot is falling down on my face. The weight
of the pig bears down on me as I try to get out somehow. I am beginning to choke. I wake
up with a pillow over my face. During the night I took one of the pillows from under my
head because it was uncomfortable, and put it against the wall behind me. The pillow fell
over onto my face.
Since the original publication of the book Hmat a Imaginace I had only two tactile
dreams. It appears that such dreams are very rare unless deliberately (experimentally)
evoked. Even this form of experimentation opens a huge field of possibilities.
Tactile poetry

tactilism reviewed 171
Here my experimentation is also lacking. Tactile poetry, be it obvious (structural,

objective) or literal (evoking tactile feelings by mediation), has in itself many latent
possibilities. In that field I would like to concentrate my own further experiments.
Tactile blackout
Finger in the nostril. Minor drizzle
Pins and needles in the feet. Bad weather covers the mountain
I am cold. My skin is shrinking, doesn’t cover my whole body
Something scabby, lumpy, perhaps a field
Something liquid, warm, perhaps blood
Something stiff, sturdy, perhaps root
No one will save anything
Not even tactile Chomsky
Buzzing ear
Blind eye
Lame arm
Congested nose
Tongue-tied
There’s nothing to touch anymore
Jan Švankmajer

NOTES
PRELIMINARY PAGES
1 Hmat a Imaginace was eventually published in 1994 (Prague: Kozoroh).
2 ‘Jan Švankmajer in Conversation with Gerald A. Matt’, in Ursula Blickle and Gerald A. Matt
(eds), The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer, (German/English), Vienna: Ursula-Blickle-Stiftung and
Kunsthalle, 2011: 185–86.
3 Two fragments from Hmat a Imaginace have been published, translated into English by Gaby
Dowdell: ‘Like the Touch of a Dead Trout’, and ‘The Magic Ritual of Tactile Inauguration’,
Afterimage 13, Autumn 1987: 40–1 and 42–3. These and some other translated fragments
were included in the edition of Hmat a Imaginace which Švankmajer published in 1994.
‘Gestural Sculpture’ is included in František Dryje, ‘The Force of Imagination’, translated by
Valerie Mason, in Peter Hames (ed.), The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer: Dark Alchemy, London:
Wallflower Press, 2008: 163–64. At the time I asked Stanley Dalby if he would translate
Hmat a Imaginace, I was working on an essay about Švankmajer’s tactile art (relying on just
these few fragments), which I was able to complete with the help of his translation (‘The
Švankmajer Touch’, Animation Studies, special issue: Animated Dialogues (2007), posted
19 July, 2009: 91–101; and ‘Tactile Animation: Haptic Devices and the Švankmajer Touch’,
The Senses and Society 4, 2 July 2009: 141–162).
4 Jan Švankmajer, ‘Tactilní Bilance’, Analogon 38/39, 2003: 27–29; Evašvankmajerjan (Eva
Švankmajerová and Jan Švankmajer), Anima, Animus, Animace, Prague: Slovart Publishers,
Ltd and Arbor Vitae – Foundation for Literature and Visual Arts, 1998: 85.
5 Eva Švankmajerová, ‘Dotek’, in Jan Švankmajer, Transmutace Smyslů-Transmutation of the
Senses (1994), (bilingual) second edition, S. Hošková, K. Otcovská and O. Fridlová (eds),
Prague: Pražská/Metrostav, 2004: 66.
6 Vradislav Effenberger, Transmutace Smyslů – Transmutation of the Senses: 67.
1. INTRODUCTION
1 F. X. Šalda, ‘Hrdinný Zrak’ [‘Heroic Vision’], Volné Směry [Free Directions] 6, 1901–2:
71–73.
2. BETWEEN UTILITARIANISM AND IMAGINATION

1 Karel Teige, ‘Poesie pro Pět Smyslů čili Druhý Manifest Poetismu,’ Svět který Voní [The World
that Smells], Prague: Jan Fromek, Edition Odeon, 1930–31. [Omitted page numbers indicate
they are not stated in Hmat a Imaginace. Where the edition of a book is also unknown the
original edition is cited.]

notes 173
2 Coding to letters and numerals is really a quite pedestrian way of getting meanings into
tactile patterns. There are, to be sure, obvious ways of making such a system ‘fly’ at a
faster rate. One way would be to code the vibratory signals to phonemes. We have not
attempted it because of the prodigious investment entailed in learning the phonemes
themselves, but it ought to be tried. It is also possible that there may be developed an
entirely novel cutaneous shorthand, one capitalizing on distinctively tactile properties.
Serious study of basic cutaneous perceptual phenomena, an area dignified by the
devotion of not more than a dozen first-rate minds in the whole of recorded history,
might turn up such a linguistic development.
Frank A. Geldard, ‘Some Neglected Possibilities of Communication’, Science 131, 27 May
1960: 1583–1588.
3 Possibilities for cutaneous communication are by no means confined to conventional
language, of course. Other kinds of information may be imparted tactilely. Rates,
amounts, directions – anything falling on uni-dimensional or bi-dimensional
continua – could presumably be communicated to the skin by way of suitably patterned
mechanical impacts or sequences of them. One of these possibilities has already been
exploited in our experiments. Vibratory tracking of the compensatory–pursuit variety has
been carried out by lining up three vibrators across the chest, letting them be successively
energized to give the impression of continuous movement in one direction or the other
(through utilization of phi), such that the ‘arrowhead’ always ‘points to’ the target, and
with the vibratory sequences temporally spaced to indicate degree of urgency in getting
back ‘on target’. The subjects manipulated a steering wheel and attempted to eliminate all
cutaneous signals by promptly neutralizing all off-target indications.
Geldard, ‘Some Neglected Possibilities of Communication’: 1587.
4 Examples include:
Face slapping: Close your eyes and experience your face. As your eyes remain closed
begin slapping your forehead with your fingers. (Slap 15 seconds in each area.) The
hands are held semi-flat and meet the face simultaneously so that there is no jarring.
Now to the jaw. Slap vigorously there, using palms as well as fingers. Next over the
cheeks with your fingers. Then the lips and chin. Go gently over the nose. Use just the
fingertips over the eyelids. Then go over any part that seems to ask for more. Gently slap
over the entire face again. Stop, lower your hands and experience the results.
Rock Experience: Find a rock the size of your fist. Sit alone in a quiet place. Hold the rock
in your hand. Look at the rock. See its shape, color, colors, the ridges and the indentations.
Feel the weight of the rock. Toss it up and down in your hand. Turn it over and examine
the other side. Feel the surface of the rock. Squeeze it and find out how hard it is. Close
your eyes and rub the rock over your face. Experience its temperature, its texture. Allow
the rock to settle gently over one of your eyelids. Hold it there for 30 seconds with the
rock. Take the rock away. Put your lips against the rock. Let the rock rest anywhere
on your face. Leave it there for from 30 seconds to one minute. Take the rock off and
experience how you feel. Open your eyes and again see the rock.
Under the Sheets: Prelude: Group Activities. Each person goes under a sheet and stays
quiet for 5 minutes. They are allowed to do anything they want to, except to move
around the room. Then move about the room, contact/encounter other people or groups
as long as each stays under his own sheet. Be open to your desires and let whatever
action-reaction that wants to happen occur. No talking during the experience. When
it is over, experience how you feel; come out from under your sheet.
Bernard Gunther, Sense Relaxation: Below Your Mind, New York: Collier Books, 1968: 31,
102, 104.
5 Richard Mennen, ‘Grotowski’s Paratheatrical Projects’, TDR/The Drama Review 19, 4, 1975:
58–69.

3. RESTORER
1 L. L. Vasiliev, Professor of Neurophysiology at Leningrad University, discovered with N.
S. Kulagin an ability of dermo-optical perception (reading and perceiving colours with a
blindfold), a kind of tactile hyperaesthesia. Karel Drbal and Zdeněk Rejdák, Perspectivy
Telepatie [Perspectives of Telepathy], Prague: Melantrich, 1970.
4. SOURCES OF TACTILE IMAGINATION

1 Franz Kafka, In der Strafkolonie, Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1919.
2 Stanislav Drvota, ‘Přípěvek k Problému tzv. Chronických Taktilních Halucinos’ [‘Contribution
to the Problems of So-called Chronic Tactile Hallucinations’]. Prague: Universitas Carolina,
Medica Vol. 3, 1957: 429–443.
3 In tactile hallucinations the patient experiences contact with various animals, most
commonly insects or other small animals, existing only in the patient’s imagination.
At other times the patient feels electrified, touched by cold fish, or that someone is
obscenely touching the patient’s genitals and so on. Similarly, even such physical
cenesthetic hallucinations often have sexual context. The patient feels the sensation of
coitus or of pregnancy (even men); ‘being possessed by the devil’ also belongs in this
category. With dysaesthesia [abnormal sensation] comes a metamorphosis of sensory
stimuli. Cold is felt as warmth, tickling becomes pain, pinching becomes vibrations
and similar. Diabetics are familiar with dysaesthesia when walking – they feel that they
are walking ‘on a carpet’, ‘in the mud’, and so on. With paraesthesia tactile sensations
are experienced without any perceived outside stimulus. The patient feels that hot water
is being spilt over the body, and then cold water, or that a part of the body has suddenly
seized up, or similar. Most interesting from my point of view are of course reflexive
hallucinations, for their close relationship to synaesthesia. With one sense, the patient
registers reality while at the same time, with another sense, a hallucination. Most
frequently the visual is felt in a tactile sense. The hallucinator reflects activity which
he sees, hears or perceives as if what is happening around him is being done to him.
For instance: he sees a real knife and immediately feels pain, as if he was being cut by
it, or he hears ringing of bells and sees a dead corpse in a coffin. Or he sees a cleaning
woman scrubbing the floor and feels that she is scrubbing him, sees her wash and wring
clothes and feels he is being washed and wrung, hears a sewing machine and feels that
he is being sewn up, and so on. Similar states are possible to bring about by ingestion
of mescalin.
Dr V. Vondráček, Vnímání [Perception], Prague: Zdravotní Nakladatelství, 1949 and
Dr Z. Mysliveček, Obecná Psychiatrie [General Psychiatry], Prague: Státní Zdravotnické
Nakladatelství, 1959.
4 In addition to the main erogenous zones of children’s sexuality, the mouth and the
anus, there are many others in childhood. Genital and total satisfaction at that age has
already been dealt with. Lindner mentions several other pleasurable areas combined
with thumb sucking. He mentions, for instance, that apart from genital stimulation
thumb sucking is accompanied by rubbing of fingers, scratching of hair, Adam’s apple,
ear lobes, nipples, navel, etc. He describes a case of the six-year-old son of a tobacconist
who, while sucking his right thumb, was at the same time using the little finger of the
same hand inside his nose causing blood to flow over his lips. Lindner also described
a case of seven years old boy who sucked his thumb while irritating his nostrils and
ear canals. This boy would regularly secrete a piece of bread under his pillow before
going to bed. Piece by piece he chewed the bread and made small pieces to insert
into his nostrils or ears until they were completely filled up. Only then was he able to
go to sleep. Stimulation of various areas is often done quite independently. Children
quite like to pick their nose or ears. Sometimes they introduce various articles into

notes 175
these cavities, such as beans, marbles and so on, which often have to be surgically
removed. Such activities are also the source of intimate amusement for some adults. The
excitement accompanying such activities is evidence of their sexual character. Some
adults retain from their childhood the pleasure of finger rubbing, with or without some
object – bread, paper or even nose snot. Each of those normally secondary erogenous
areas can be of primary significance to some individuals. Hirschfeld, for instance,
relates a case of complete satisfaction reached by stimulation of the ear canal, and
another one of the eye socket. Dobreyne, in ‘Moechiologie’ writes that some individuals
reach orgasm by rubbing their chin. Another interesting case of onanism is described
by Taylor: A woman of twenty-two attained satisfaction by moving her arms as if she
was afflicted by St Vitus dance, and alternately pressing the nose point or the ear tragus
with her middle finger. Sometimes the soles of the feet are also erogenous areas. The
popularity of such stimulation in the middle ages is evidenced in the paintings of Silena
and Faun, who tickle each other’s soles. In Russia, in the middle of the eighteenth
century the Empress Anna Leopoldovna had six official female foot ticklers who, at the
same time, related obscene stories or sang lewd songs to her. Important erogenous zones
included the nipples; their stimulation was observed in animals of both sexes, even dogs
or cats, as mentioned by Ch. Férer.
Bohuslav Brouk, Autosexualismus a Psychoerotismus [Autosexualism and Psychoeroticism] Vol. I,
Prague: Edice Surrealismu, 1935.
5 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, London: John Murray,
1872: 257, 258.
6 Roger Caillois, Cohérences Aventureuses: Esthétique Généralisée, au Coeur du Fantastique, la
Dissymétrie, Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
7 What was once a satisfaction to the subject is, indeed, bound to arouse his resistance
or his disgust today. We are familiar with a trivial but instructive model of this change
of mind. The same child who once eagerly sucked the milk from his mother’s breast is
likely a few years later to display a strong dislike to drinking milk, which his upbringing
has difficulties in overcoming. This dislike increases to disgust if a skin forms on the
milk or the drink containing it. We cannot exclude the possibility, perhaps, that the
skin conjures up a memory of the mother’s breast, once so ardently desired. Between
the two situations, however, there lies the experience of weaning, with its traumatic
effects.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Lecture 23: The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms.’ The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE), edited by James Strachey, Vol. 15,
London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1975: 366.
8 Záviš Kalandra, Skutečnost Snu. Unfinished manuscript.
9 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE, Vol. 4: 228–29.
10 André Breton, Les Vases Communicants (1932), Paris: Gallimard, 1955: 78–9.
11 Alfred Maury, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, Paris: Didier, 1861: 133–34.
12 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: 229–30.
13 Robert Macnish, The Philosophy of Sleep, 1835. Cited by Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams:
25.
14 August Hennings, Regarding Dreams and Sleepwalkers, Weimar 1784: 258. Cited by Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams: 24.
15 Macnish, The Philosophy of Sleep, 1835. Cited by Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: 24.
16 Alfred Maury, Le Sommeil et les Rêves. Cited by Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: 25.
[This is a selection chosen and renumbered by Švankmajer, from Freud’s list of Maury’s
observations.]
17 Marquis d’Hervey – Saint Denis, author of anonymous work published in 1867 under the
title Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them: Practical Observations.

18 André Breton, Les Vases Communicants, 1955: 10.

19 Arthur Rimbaud, Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition,
translated by Wallace Fowlie (ed.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966: 121.
(Reproduced with the permission of the University of Chicago Press. © 1966 by The
University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.)
20 A. Hošek, Souvislost Barev a Tonů, 1928. Republished Prague: Galerie Hlavního Města Prahy,
1991.
21 Dr V. Forster, Okultní Úkazy a Jejich Psychologický Výklad, Prague: J. Otto, 1923.
22 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Paris: Terre Humaine, Plon, 1984.
23 Charles Fourier, Le Nouveau Monde Industriel et Sociétaire; ou, Invention du Procédé d’Industrie
Attrayante et Naturelle Distribuée en Séries Passionnées (1829). In Oeuvres Complètes de Charles
Fourier, Vol. 6, Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1966.
24 Karel Tiege, Svět který Voní [The World that Smells].
5. SHORT ANTHOLOGY OF TACTILE ART

1Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, London:
Chancellor Press, 1988: 254. (Originally published in Philadelphia: Graham’s Magazine,
August 1841.)
2 Rachilde, La Jongleuse, Paris: Mercure de France, 1900.
3 A piece of wallpaper or newspaper does not pretend to be a wall or a journal lying on
the table, but is merely a surface of specific colouring and specific tactile qualities, that
are a part of a composed design and contrasts with other surfaces covered with layers of
paint also often richly varied with brush work.
Karel Teige, ‘Realism and Irrealism in Cubist Work’ (1951), in Karel Teige, Vývojové
proměny v uměni [Developmental Changes in Art], Prague: Nakladatelství Československých
Výtvarných Umělců, Edition Orientace, 1966.
4 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Hmatové Umění’ [‘Tactile Art’], in Guillaume Apollinaire, O Novém
Umění [About New Art], Prague: Odeon, 1974. (‘Mon Cher Ludovik’ was first published in
Almanach des Lettres et des Arts, Paris: Martine, Choses De La Mode, 1917 and ‘L’Art Tactile’
was first published in Mercure de France 125. 472, February 16, 1918: 751–53.)
5 F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Manifesto of Tactilism’, Milan: Comoedia, 11 January, 1921.
6 Karel Tiege, Svět který Voní [The World that Smells].
7 Our sense of touch is well developed by civilization as to its deftness but is not
aesthetically cultivated for impressionability. Quite often the visual sensations, when
viewing substances of varying softness or roughness, arouse in us tactile notions, as
against the mere touch in the darkness that does not stimulate us intensively.
Karel Tiege, ‘Poetry for the Five Senses or The Second Manifesto of Poetism,’ in Svět který
Voní [The World that Smells].
8 Vítězlav Nezval, ‘Dekalkomanie’ (1937), Magnetická Pole, J. Tomeš (ed.), Prague 1967:
124–126.
9 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), translated by Haakon M. Chevalier,
London: Vision, 1973: 290.
10 Claude Cahun, ‘Prenez garde aux objets domestiques!’, Cahiers d’art I-II, L’Objet, 1936.
11 I would characterize Surrealist anti-aestheticism as a function of freeing imagination
from the enclave of artifice in order for imagination to enter into life and create greater
possibilities for it.
6. INSIDE
1 Albert Camus, ‘Absurd freedom’, The Myth of Sisyphus, translated by Justin O’Brien,
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955: 51. (First published in Paris: Gallimard, 1942.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Hazova (trans.). Prague: Odeon.
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Dissymétrie. Paris: Gallimard.
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—— (1953–1975) The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). The Standard Edition of the Complete
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INDEX
Numbers in italics indicate illustrations
alchemy, xv, 68 Darwin, Charles, 39, 49

alchemistic tools, 28 Devětsil, 100
Algelander, A., 79 Dimensions of Dialogue, xxii, 154, 169
analogy, 20, 32–39, 46, 61, 65, 75, 80, 81, 97 disgust, 39, 40–44, 46–50, 57, 63, 67, 78, 175n7
associative delirium, 21 distribution of tactile art, 164
synaesthetic, 70–71, 168 Dominguez, Oscar, 101, 103
Apollinaire Guillaume, 90–91, 92, 163 dreams, 12, 41, 52, 54, 55–56, 58, 61, 67, 75,
Ay-O, 97, 99 82, 99, 139
erotic, 55
Baron, Karol, 39, 41, 44, 46, 47, 49, 54 experimentally aroused, 58, 67, 170
blindness, xxiii, 10, 18, 68, 171 oral, 55
art for blind people, 82 tactile, 21, 25, 28, 53, 54, 55, 58, 61, 67,
colour blindness/Daltonism, 19 82, 99, 113, 170
tactile blindness, 19 Drvota, Stanislav, 28
Boccioni, Umberto, 88, 90 Dryje, František, 32, 35, 39, 41, 42, 43, 47, 49,
Boucher, François, 53 50
Bounoure, Micheline, 12, 15, 18, 20, 21, 24, Dubret, Michel, 32, 38, 39,
25, 102 Dubuffet, Jean, 89
Breton, André, 53, 59 Duchamp, Marcel, 1, 104, 105, 106, 155, 163,
Brouk, Bohuslav, 175n4 165
Buñuel, Luis, 103 Dunant, Gilles, 32, 38, 39
Caillois, Roger, 46 Effenberger, Vratislav, xviii, 12, 15, 18, 20, 21,
Camus, Albert, 109 22, 32, 34, 39, 41–47, 49, 55, 61–62
Castle of Otranto, The, xix tactile portrait of, 136, 137
censorship, xv, xix Eluard, Gala, 102
clothes, 4, 28, 40, 130, 131, 139, 174n3 emotion, 14, 16, 39, 49, 59, 76, 100
expression, xxii, 8, 39, 85, 94–95,149,
d’Hervey, Marquis, 59, 116 151, 169, 114
Dadaism, 92, 96 tactile, 45, 51, 67, 105, 115–16, 149, 151,
neo-Dadaism, 90 169, 105, 115–16, 123
Dalí, Salvador, xvi, 59, 72, 102, 103, 105, 155 visual, 83

Ernst, Max, 101, 105 Kocman, J. H., 99

eroticism, 2, 25, 28, 51, 55, 55, 62, 75, 79 Kolář, Jíří, 90
childhood, 174n4 Koubek, Jiří, 32, 34, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46,
erogenous zones, 174n4 47, 49
touch and, xxiii, 80, 96, 99 Kounellis, Jannis, 90
Export, Valie, 83 Krátký Film, xix
Fall of the House of Usher, The, 151, 152–53, Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 69

169 loathing, 28, 39–43
See also Poe, Edgar Allan
fear, 43–46, 49–50, 55, 73–74, 115, 134 Man Ray, 88
infantile, 67 Marenčin, Albert, 12, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 39,
of blindness, 41 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 85, 87
of touching, 39, 40, 43, 48–49, 67, 117, Marinetti, F. T., 5, 80, 85, 91, 93–97, 99, 101,
136 105, 114, 134, 163, 164
sensations, 73–74 masturbation, 26, 32–39, 49, 61–62, 67
fingers, xx, 1, 19, 21, 38, 40, 46, 80, 82, 87, see also onanism
105 Maury, Alfred, 56, 58, 61, 65, 113
exploring objects, 6, 12, 18, 19, 21, 115, Medek, Mikuláš, 76–78, 107
132, 136 tactile portrait of, 77
fingertips, 3, 105, 109, 134, 173n4 Medková, Emila, 12, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 32,
preparation for touching, 63, 80, 134 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 49, 63, 66, 134, 168
used to discharge emotion, 115, 151, 157, Mena, Pedro de, 86
169 Mennen, Richard, 4
Forster, V., 68 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, xxii
Fourier, Charles, 69 metamorphosis, 83, 105, 169, 174
Freud, Sigmund, xx, 49, 52, 56, 58, 65, 82 tactile, 67, 116, 169
Futurism, xvi, 93–96 Mojžíš, Juraj, 12, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22
see also Marinetti, F. T. Motol Hospital, Prague
Children’s Psychiatric Clinic, 6
Galton, Francis, 79 psychological tests with tactile tablets,
games, xviii, xix, xvi 6–10
childhood, 10 mucous membranes, 28
interpretive, 12–25, 32–39, 155–77
synaesthetic, 70–71 Nádvorníková, Alena, 12, 16, 18, 20, 21, 24,
tactile, xviii, xxi, 11, 31, 146, 164 25, 57, 61, 65
Geldard, Frank A., 4, 173n2–n3 new realism, 90
gesture, 39, 61, Nezval, Vítězlav, xvi, 101
gestural sculpture, 149–53 Novák, Ladislav, 79, 99
tactile, 63, 105 tactile poems, 97–98
Gilardi, Piero, 89
Grotowski, Jerzy, 4–5 Oldenburg, Claes, 89
Gunther, Bernard, 5, 10, 99, 113, 160–64 onanism, 28, 175n4
see also masturbation
Heraclitus, 114 Oppenheim, Meret, 102
Hošek, A., 68
humour and touch, 139, 155 Parent, Mimi, 26
pathological touch, 28
Kafka, Franz, 26 hypersensitivity, 40, 39, 40, 68
Kalandra, Záviš, 52, 56, 65, 67, 82 paraesthesia, 174n3
Kiesler, Frédérick, 104, 105 tactile hallucination, 28, 67, 174n3

index 181
Pendulum, The Pit and Hope, The, 169–70 tactile collage, 119, 122–3, 123
Picasso, Pablo, 88, 90 tactile imagination, xvi, xxii, 28, 67, 96, 155
Poe, Edgar Allan, xxi–xxii, 82, 151 film applications, 169–70
Poetism, xvi, 3, 70, 79, 97, 100 roots of, 28, 105
‘Second Manifesto of Poetism’, 100–1 Surrealist, 100–107
see also Teige, Karel; Nezval, Vítězlav tactile interpretation, 12–13, 22, 24, 75, 155
pop art, 90 tactile memory, xxii, 6, 10, 12, 118, 132,
167–69
Rachilde, 84–85, 96 childhood, xx, xxii, 25, 46, 49, 51, 167
repression, xx, 38 role in tactile art, 17, 51, 105
repulsion, 39–49, 74, 160, 168 somatic sources, 20
Rimbaud, Arthur, 59, 68, 69, 70 tactile ready-mades, 109–111
rubbing, 113, 161 tactile therapy, 4–5, 113
of fingers, hands, 117, 174n4 see also Gunther, Bernard
scrubbing, 116, 163, 174n3 Tactilism (art movement), xvi, 96, 97, 99, 101,
105
Šalda, F.X., 1 Futurist Manifesto of, 93–96
samizdat, xv, xvii, xix see also Marinetti, F. T.
sensory deprivation, 41 tactilism (sensory), xxi–xxii, 10, 90, 105, 136,
tactile deprivation, xxiii, 3 162, 168–170
sight, 1, 100, 149 bodies as crucibles of, 28
role in tactile art, 67, 155 creative, 90, 105
touch implications, 10, 14, 51, 61, 80, tattooing, 83
83, 90, 126–131 Teige, Karel, xvi, 3, 70, 79, 100–01
soft art, 90 ‘Second Manifesto of Poetism’, 100–1
Spanish Baroque, 85, 90 totalitarian systems, xix–xx
squeamishness, xxii, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 67
Stejskal, Martin, 12, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 39, Uecker, Gunther, 89
40, 42, 43, 48, 49, 55, 57, 67 utilitarianism, xx, 5, 81
subject–object dualism, 24, 149 utilitarian functions, xvi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 28,
Surrealism, 22, 100–1, 105, 176n11 67, 80, 101
French Surrealists, 100 utilitarian habits, 5, 80, 123, 165
Group of Czech–Slovak Surrealists, xix, utilitarian objects, 4, 109
xxi, 2, 72, 167 utilitarian touch, 51, 80, 90, 105, 115,
Šváb, Ludvík, 12, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 39, 41, 165
43, 45, 47, 105
tactile portrait of, 138, 139 Van Eyck, Jan, 83, 86
Švankmajerová, Eva, xvi–xvii, xxiii, 39, 40, 41, Vince, 32, 37, 39
43, 45, 48, 62, 63, 126–31, 141 Vrba, Luděk, 10
tactile portrait of, 134, 135 see also Motol Hospital, Prague
synaesthesia, 19, 28, 68, 70–71, 72, 79, 80, 82,
127, 168, 174n1, 174n3 Williams, Edith Clifford, 91, 92, 96
tactile cinema, 103, 105, 155

see also Dalí, Salvador

Merleau-Ponty (1998) and Writer/director of Experimental Animated Films Including de Anima (1991)

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Merleau-Ponty (1998) and Writer/director of Experimental Animated Films Including de Anima (1991)

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JAN ŠVANKMAJER was born on 4 September, 1934 in Prague.

STANLEY DALBY (translator) emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Australia in

CATHRYN VASSELEU (editor) teaches animation at the University of Technology,

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Touching and Imagining

English translation by Stanley Dalby

Edited by Cathryn Vasseleu

Published in 2014 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © 2014 Jan Švankmajer

International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art: 1

ISBN: 978 1 78076 146 6 (HB)

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Printed and Bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall

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List of Illustrations viii

2. Between Utilitarianism and Imagination 3

4. Sources of Tactile Imagination 26

5. Short Anthology of Tactile Art 82

Afterword: Tactilism Reviewed 167

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1. The Mouth of Truth. Italy. Archive of Jan Švankmajer. ii

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83. Marcel Duchamp: Please Touch, 1947. © Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP.

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123. Jan Švankmajer: Vacations (gesture poem), 1983. 148

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This book involved collaboration between an author, a translator and

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When I was initially approached to translate Švankmajer’s book on tactile art I

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Jan Švankmajer is renowned as a Czech Surrealist filmmaker who weaves

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My tactile experimentation began somewhat out of spite. My first tactile

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Liberation always comprises of achieving, against degenerate stylistic, cultural and

Our sight is being corrupted on an unimaginable scale. Daily it is drowned and

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BETWEEN UTILITARIANISM AND IMAGINATION

The history of human spirit, as seen through psychoanalytical research, shows

6. Touching is one of our basic needs. If we could not

7. Meissner’s tactile loop magnified by factor of

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Tactile utilitarianism objects Tactile utilitarianism activities

Experiments in expanding the utilitarian functions of touch

Research into the fundamental importance of tactile communication, conducted

As with Scierski’s ‘narrow group,’ Cieslak’s was a one-day introduction to a process

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8. Lygia Clark: The I and the You: Cloth–Body–Cloth series, 1960

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A. a) yellow b) blue c) green B. d) purple e) orange f) red

List of Illustrations viii

2. Between Utilitarianism and Imagination 3

4. Sources of Tactile Imagination 26

5. Short Anthology of Tactile Art 82

Afterword: Tactilism Reviewed 167