“Hands changing hands”
In Cosmogonic Tattoos bodies and objects mingle, merge, move into each other, and move across space. Jim has spoken about this movement, saying that he wanted to evoke migration, exile, loss, and longing, and I see this in the moving bodies, bodies in boats, bodies on wheels. This movement is also about objects, bodies carry things, things carry bodies or body parts, and in the installation context this movement evokes trade, conquest, appropriation, and plunder, as Jim has suggested. The installation features, in Jim’s words, “Hands changing hands, shaping histories we tell ourselves in order to comprehend it all.” For me, these brief lines eloquently capture the alternative cosmogony of Cosmogonic Tattoos. Jim’s description suggests experience, movement, story, and touch; it emphasizes the hands that are all over the installation; and I think it invites us to see the hand as a faculty through which we encounter the world, an encounter articulated through objects. Indexical hands, open hands, you see them here, hands holding, hands changing, hands changing hands. In the lower section of this window, hands cradle, they reach, and they pinch. Hands hold, hands carry, hands rest. And hands make.
For some ancient and medieval philosophers, hands make us human. Aristotle notes that the joints of human arms bend in the opposite direction to those of quadrupeds “to facilitate the bringing of food to the mouth, and other uses to which they are put.” Isidore of Seville writes that “the hand, manus, is so named because it is of service, munus, to the whole body. It gives food to the mouth, does all work and carries out all things; by the hand, we give and receive.” In the twelfth century, Guillaume de St. Thierry echoes Isidore’s point about hands bringing food to the mouth, but elaborates: because we have hands, humans can speak. “All the beasts have feet where men have hands,” he explains. “Although nature has given man hands for many functions, above all it is for this: if man had no hands, his mouth would have to be fashioned like those of quadrupeds so he could take food from the ground. The length of his neck would have to be increased, and his nose shaped like that of a brute animal. He would have to have heavy lips, thick, coarse and projecting, suited to cutting fodder. The fleshy part around the teeth would have to be solid and rough, as in dogs and other animals that eat meat. Thus if hands had not been provided for the body, an articulated and modulated voice could not exist. Man would have to bleat or low or bark or make some other kind of animal noise. But now, with the hand serving the mouth, the mouth serves reason and through it the soul.” Human rationality is indexed to the hand; people can speak because they have hands; for these thinkers, the hand is uniquely human, it makes humans unique, the hand makes us human.
But the “hands changing hands” in Cosmogonic Tattoos ask us to reconsider the predictable embodiments that would identify hands as already human. Cosmogonic Tattoos invites us to think about hands, not just the hands that create, making art, but also hands that pluck the strings of a boat that is a musical instrument, hands doing weird stuff, hands taking flight (Claire Zimmerman called these bird hands), hands that index, evoking the manicules that scribes used to index medieval manuscripts and that Catherine Brown has so eloquently analyzed).
These hands that point and reach and fly and play suggest not so much bodily dismemberment as bodily possibility; and I think they align with Michel Serres’s description of the hand as a faculty of the body. Not simply a body part, the hand represents the body’s capacity to reach out beyond itself, as well as toward itself. For Serres the hand is not singular, it is undifferentiated, it escapes binaries and categories, it dwells in the multiple. Here is Serres, from Genesis: “The [hand] can make itself into a pincer, it can be fist and hammer, cupped palm and goblet, tentacle and suction cup, claw and soft touch. Anything. A hand is determined accordingly. So what is a hand? It is not an organ, it is a faculty, a capacity for doing, for becoming claw or paw, weapon or compendium. It is a naked faculty…the possibility of doing something in general.” I think that Cogswell and Serres align in this notion of the hand as defined by doing, the body-become-hand as a faculty of the human.
In Cosmogonic Tattoos the hands that point, reach, grasp, and fly play with notions of absence and dismemberment in their multiplicity, perhaps supplementing some iconically absent hands. Serres describes the body-become-hand as demonstrating a readiness to be absorbed in thought, contemplation, or experience, and I take this characterization as a useful provocation for thinking about the hands that took flight across the windows of our museums and across the space between them.
Thought, contemplation, and experience describe both the artist’s work , and the viewer’s perception, I think. Jim said about the installation, “I want people to have an experience. Embodied experience. Embodied knowledge.” Cosmogonic Tattoos both invites that kind of experience and models it; it puts bodies, and bodies become hands, in relation to objects, it suggests the ways that objects define the faculties of the hand. I return to my favorite piece of the installation, this evocative ship that is also a lute or a harp. This ship carrying hands figures an odyssey through touch and sound, but it also invites us to ask whether the hands make the boat into an instrument, or whether this floating harp defines the hand, orienting bodies-become-hands, giving them something to do that makes them what they are. And yet, some of these hands escape the discipline of musical play, cupping or splaying figures, pointing off toward more hands. These bodies-become-hands hold the human in view even as they point to the objects that they handle and that make them hands. They index an imbrication between body and thing that redefines the humanity of the hand as an interaction with an object, even an interaction with another hand-as-object, the “hands changing hands” that Jim evoked in his own description of the installation.
For me, Cosmogonic Tattoos is a sprawling, dizzying, and compelling story about hands: about carrying and taking, about indexing and discovering, about moving things and making things move, about orientations toward objects. Sara Ahmed has insisted that perception always involves orientation: “what is perceived depends on where we are located,” she says, “which gives us a certain take on things.” For Ahmed, our orientations define what we perceive, what we notice, what we value. I think that Cosmogonic Tattoos refines this point, indexing the objects that orient our perceptions and give shape to our faculties—and to the stories we tell about our take on things and our taking of things.
Jim said about the installation: “I want people to make up their own stories. I want them to narrate the piece to themselves. I want them to share their narratives with other people.” My narrative about Cosmogonic Tattoos is a story about hands, but it’s also a story told by hands. And all those hands invite us to think about taking, and giving, and about the touches—both exploitative and caring—that make us human.
