During our latest A/Artist discussion round, artist Annelies Wina Doom took us on a journey through her art work "Please do not touch, even clean hands can cause damage", from its conception to its current form. The work is an intervention plus book installation / lecture - performance which has previously been on display at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe as part of the exhibition Paths to Paradise.
The evening was an immersive experience, as Annelies guided us through the inspirations for the work, before diving into it and reading parts to us in a half-planned, half-improvised performance. Afterwards, we discussed the art work, also in light of its representation of "autistic art".
"The idea becomes the machine that makes the book" is a quote Annelies uses to describe this work, free after Sol LeWitt's "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art" * Paragraphs on conceptual art - Artforum 1976
Annelies explained that the idea for this work first came to her during a visit to the Tate Modern gallery in London. There, she saw the Swiss film "The Point of Least Resistance" by directors Peter Fischli & David Weiss, about a rat and a bear trying to make money in the Los Angeles art world.
Together we watched the first five minutes of this film, and saw the rat and the bear visit an art gallery. They inspect the artworks, making appreciative, or perhaps ironic, comments here and there, when suddenly theyencounter a dead body on the floor. They decide to take the body with them, since they believe it will grant them access into the worlds of culture and finance and thereby make them rich.
"So we have an art gallery, we have a murder, you can sort of see a little bit what was going on in my mind.", Annelies explained.
As she continued to walk around the Tate Modern gallery, she imagined the rat and the bear walking behind her and commenting on the artworks. Suddenly, a red sentence on a white wall caught her eye: "Please do not touch, even clean hands can cause damage".
“What a good artwork“, she thought, and could hear the rat and the bear behind her agree: “Not bad, not bad.“
The sentence almost read like a political statement, since clean hands symbolise a clean conscience. Why is it assumed that most visitors of the gallery have clean hands?, Annelies wondered, and what about my own conscience? As she continued to stare at the sentence, another idea came to her: What effect would this sentence have on the walls of a war tribunal?
She thought that philosophers and religious scholars ought to interpret this sentence, and pictured a scholar highlighting each word with a ritual pointer.
But when she tried to research who the artist behind the work was, she could find no information. Eventually, she came to a decision: “If no one is the artist, then I will be the artist.“
Annelies shared how her initial plan for this work was to stage an intervention at the Tate Modern Gallery, adding the same sentence “Please do not touch, even clean hands can cause damage“ underneath the original sentence in Braille, that way forcing visitors to touch it, adding paradox to paradox.
Since getting your art on the walls of the Tate Modern Gallery is not the easiest feat, Annelies decided to first print the sentence, in Roman alphabet and Braille, onto cardboard signs, in order to recreate her experience of reading it in the gallery. That way she thought she could pretend to be a signage seller or representative and try to offer or sell it to musea or war tribunals around the world as a conceptual performance or act. The cardboard multiples were ment to be used as a sample book to convince musea or tribunals or governments or any other place where it would be relevant.
Still, she was taken by the idea of this sentence in the context of a war tribunal. However, there are not only factual wars, but also ideological ones, waged over the interpretation of religious texts, like the Bible, the Quran or the Talmud. Can the people who participate in these wars claim that they have clean hands, a clean conscience?
“I was also thinking about how people read religious texts, because today they often don’t read them from A to B anymore, but instead click through them from link to random link - so what is it that they read, then?“, Annelies remembered asking herself.
She was especially inspired by the Talmud and its study. The verses of the Talmud usually start out with a central statement, which the rest of the verse expands on. These central statements are called Mishna, which translates to “study by repetition“. The Talmudic method of study further assumes that every text worth studying must be written with great care and precision, and that each word is carefully selected and therefore carries weight.
Annelies felt the same way about her sentence, “Please do not touch, even clean hands can cause damage“. She decided to make this sentences her central Mishna, and to study it carefully, word by word.
This way, she arrived at a new idea: What if every word became a book?
becomes the machine that makes the book
How can every word become a book? Inspired by the concept of a concordance, an alphabetical list of words with a list of all citations for each word in the Bible, Annelies created a “reversed concordance“, listing all sentences in which a certain word appears in eight different religious and philosophical texts. These texts include the Bible, the Talmud and the Quran, but also Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Schopenhauers The World as Will and Idea, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, as well as the Kama Sutra. Since each word in the sentence becomes a book, there are ten books: one for the word Please, one for the word Do, a book for the word Not, Touch, Even, Clean, and so on. Each page of eachbook is divided into eight columns, one column for each of the texts, and each column contains sentences from its respective text in which the book’s titular word appears. This way, you can open the book Please on a random page to compare mentions of the word Please in the Bible to mentions of Please in the Kama Sutra, the Interpretation of Dreams, or any of the other texts at the same time.
The book - Annelies refers to it as “the book“, although it consists of ten separate physical books, one for each word - has a total of 1700 pages and is 12cm thick. Its effect is difficult to explain, but became apparent quickly when Annelies started reading from it.
She had “the book“ with her, neatly stacked in a big box. She explained that she wants to use this copy as a study object, to see what new insights she may find in her old work. In the following few minutes, she took us on a journey to do just that.
A journey through the book
Please
Annelies takes the first book out of the box: Please.
Then she starts reading an excerpt from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea: “This table is intended to show how the spheres of concepts overlap each other at many points, and so leave room for passage from each concept to whichever one you pleaseof several other concepts… “, she reads, then skips to the Talmud: “You may go and marry any man that you please! The essence of a deed of emancipation is the words 'Behold, you are hereby a free woman, behold, you belong to yourself.' If a man said to his wife, 'Behold, you belong to yourself', what are we to say?“
Do
After this, she closes the book and retrieves the next one from the box: Do.
She leaves through it, looking for her bookmark, but doesn’t seem to find it. We all shift around looking for the bookmark, all doing something, until someone asks: “Was it really important?“, to which Annelies replies: “no“, closes the book and takes out the next book: Not, a very thick volume.
Not
Annelies opens it, and flips through the pages, chanting: “not, not, not, not, not… - “
“All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; To the place from which the rivers come, There they return.“, she reads from the Bible, then:“That which has been is what will be, that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.“ and finally the last curated sentence out of talmud verse 3880 out of Book III: Not If you treat me like this please kill me
We move on to the next book, Touch, where we encounter a familiar sentence: “But God did say: you must not eat fruit from the tree in the middle of the Garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.“
Annelies skips across the page to the Kama Sutra: “… touching any parts of his body according to his wish, kissing and embracing him when he is asleep…“
Enough of Touch, we move on to Even.“For it is only thus explained in the first volume, while the second is devoted to a more detailed investigation and a complete development of the individual doctrines. Even those who should not make up their minds to read the first volume had better not read the second volume till after the first…“
I find it difficult to follow these long winding sentences, but fascinating nonetheless.
Clean
Annelies does not dive further into Even, but instead decides to move on to Clean - her favourite, as she admits. She opens the book to find a blue marble inside, a bookmark that becomes a balancing act as she reads a quote from the Talmud: “A condition of doubt concerning an object of uncleanness that floated upon the water“.
We find out that the Talmud especially contains many great quotes about cleanness, such as “Drawing a distinction between an uncleanness at rest and one on the move“, and “If a witness says, “you have contracted uncleanness“ but he says “I have not contracted uncleanness“, he is regarded as clean. If two witnesses say “you have contracted uncleanness“ but he says “I have not contracted any uncleanness“, we arrive at a dispute.“
Annelies continues: “If a dead dead creeping thing was found in an alley it causes uncleanness retrospectively to such time as one can testify, I examined this alley and there was no creeping thing in it, or to such time as it was last swept“
“If a woman aborted a shapeless object, if there was blood with it she is unclean, otherwise she is clean. Since green and white are regarded as unclean, was it at all necessary to mention red and black?“
“I could go on and on, but you get the idea“, Annelies tells us, only to immediately dive back into her book: “If a man put his hand into a hole in which there was an object of uncleanness and there is doubt whether he did or did not touch it, such a condition of doubt - however many, the doubts about doubt that one can multiply“.
Hands
Finally, we move on to the next book, Hands. Annelies opens it to find a peculiar object inside: a photo of an Italian politician with his arm outstretched and pointing forward, folded into a big paper airplane. Annelies picks up the paper airplane and uses its tip, the politician's hand, to point at the text as you would use a ritual pointer, also called yad, for a religious text.
Of course, there is more to this gesture: in the 1990s, Italy conducted a large scale investigation against political corruption which they termed mani pulite - clean hands. Using the pointing hand of a dubious politician as you would use a yad for the torah is of course highly subversive, and there is more: the crashing airplane is a reference to the Italian film The Invisible Wall (Il muro di gomma), in which a reporter spends decades trying to break through the invisible wall that military officers and politicians have constructed around the true causes of an airplane crash.
We immediately move on to Can, and hear an excerpt from the Origin of Species: “But with regard to the material world we can at least go so far as this: we can perceive that events are brought about not by isolated interpositions of divine power…hmm“, Annelies trails off as if it's not that interesting to her.
Then she reads from the Bible: “and southward, and eastward, and westward: For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever. And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.“
From the book Cause, we hear an excerpt from Schopenhauer: “For the knowledge of the causes of the manifestation of this inner nature affords me merely the rule of its appearance in time and space, and nothing more.“
At last, we arrive at the final book, Damage, which is a very thin volume: The Origin of Species does not contain the word damage, nor does the Kama Sutra or Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Annelies reads from The interpretation of Dreams:
“The whole plea - for this dream - recalls vividly the defence offered by a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition. In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all.“ With this little story, absurd in its banality, ends our guided journey through “the book“.
More performance than presentation
We were all impressed by the presentation, which was equal parts spontaneous and planned, and discussed what we liked about it: the idea of using various objects as bookmarks, the connections between different sentences that this way of reading invites you to make, as well as watching an artist get lost in and rediscovering her own work. It felt like a performance piece, we agreed, and suggested to develop it into one: an open-ended performance, different every time.
Understanding the book better
After her presentation, Annelies let us browse through all of the books for a while and encouraged us to mark sentences that stand out to us, since this copy of the book is now meant for exploring and studying.
While we did this, a number of questions came up. Someone asked why Annelies chose these texts, the Bible, Origin of Species, and not others, to which Annelies replied that next to important religious texts she also wanted to include other “standard works“ that have changed people’s perceptions of the world on a large scale. To make a selection, she conducted a survey among writers and philosophers, asking which books they would choose, then opted for the ones mentioned most.
We also noticed that the column for some books, like the Talmud, often continues on for many pages after the columns for other books “run out“. Annelies explained that this happens simply because the Talmud is a much longer book than some of the others, which naturally leads to more mentions of most of the words. Someone suggested that it might be nice to correct for the lengths ofthe books, so that the frequency of the word in each book becomes stands out. However, we also agreed that it is nice to see empty columns run on for a number of pages, with the name of their emptiness at the top.
Annelies admitted that she is not completely satisfied with this iteration of the book, since she initially wanted to print it in the form of little Bibles, with hard covers and the typical thin paper, but did not have the financial means to realise this. She also shared various other ideas for the work: to print it on marble in cuneiform in order to invoke the image of an ancient commandment, or to translate the work into many different languages to create a whole library of “the book“. The idea of translating this work is fascinating, because, once the sentence is translated, the book makes itself - a computer programme will scan each text in the respective language for the respective word and automatically create the columns of sentences we saw in the English book. On the other hand, the translators must take great care with the sentence, knowing that every choice of word would lead to an entirely different book.
Is this autistic art?
After this, the discussion was redirected to the topic of autism. Is this work an example of “autistic art?“, we asked, and reflected on it with the help of our list of words to define autistic art, which was the topic of our previous discussion round.
Some words from the list that could be associated with this work are hyperfocus, systematic work, cataloguing, and fractal attention. Hyperfocus, since Annelies fixated on a single sentence for multiple years while completing this work; systematic work, since the books were compiled according to a system through a computer programme; cataloguing, because the finished work is a catalogue of sentences. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it is an example of fractal attention, because both the inspirations for the work, as well as the ideas for realising it and the possibilities of expanding on it are manifold and a testament to a highly associative mind. In her presentation, Annelies has guided us through only a few of these inspiration and ideas, and afterwards, we immediately started discussing possible future directions.
A fractal and highly associative mind is something that characterises autistic people, and there have been scientific studies confirming that autistic people have difficulty with regulating their attention and discriminating between important and less important stimuli (source: Unmasking Autism book), which in turn facilitates associative thinking and jumping from one association to the next.
A rabbit hole of infinite associations
In this case, the work itself is also highly associative in its own right, as it invites the reader to draw connections between the different texts and relate them back to the original sentence, which opens up an infinite hole of meaning to get lost in, “sort of like Alice in Wonderland“, as Annelies said, adding one more association to the list.
It is an artwork that highlights the beauty of connections and relationships between texts, words and concepts without offering explanations, allowing the reader to get lost in an endless flow of associations. Will the reader be able to follow - are they even meant to? Every person looking at these books will form their own associations, as different sentences across the texts and books will stand out to them, thus making it a very personal and subjective experience.
For example, I found myself leafing through the book Hands, where a sentence from the Kama Sutra caught my eye: “What foolish person will give away that which is in his hands into the hands of another? Moreover, it is better to have a pigeon today than a peacock tomorrow.“ This made me smile, because while I used to think of pigeons as annoying birds on city streets, I now associate them with mycelium towers and dancing. Reading this sentence, therefore, I found myself thinking “It's better to have a pigeon any day of the week!“, and falling into my own rabbit hole of associations.
'I am a tag cloud!'
This space of associations you enter when browsing through the book reminded us of the concept of a tag cloud, which is a tool to visualise the most frequent words in a text by arranging them in a cloud shape, the largest words being the most frequent. “I think that you are a tag cloud“, another artist told Annelies, and she agreed: “I am a tag cloud!“
Annelies shares that she always had difficulties identifying one project or topic to work on, but that she has always been good at researching, compiling lists of links and references. “Eventually I realised that maybe, my project is searching.“, making endless archives she said.
This is also reflected in another of Annelies’ works, which is playing in the background during our discussion. It includes searches and images from Pinterest of animals and plants, compiled for Mediamatic’s Inhuman Carnaval Costume Lab for The Dutch design Week. To make the video, Annelies just screen-recorded her search for interesting images of other beings. Thus, the searching quite literally becomes the art.
Someone objected that usually, however, art is not made by floating around in a tag cloud - the cloud must be navigated and streamlined; The artist must identify something here and there to pursue and complete before continuing to roam around the cloud. “And you did that“, another artist addressed Annelies - “You identified one sentence, ten words, and eight books to compare - very clear restrictions.“ And yet, the work is not confined to these restrictions at all, but invites for endless possibilities of developing it further.
A hopeless affair? Far from it.
Towards the end of our discussion, Annelies told us that after finishing the work on the book, which took her multiple years, she still wanted to stage her intervention at the Tate Modern gallery. “If only to place the books underneath the sentence and run away“, she said. But when she returned, the sentence was gone. Annelies searched for it on the website and eventually encountered it again in the rules and regulations, but it had been changed, now reading: “Do not touch the works of art, even clean hands damage surfaces“. “Well, with that you can do nothing at all!“, Annelies told us and and added: “So it was all a hopeless affair in the end.“
Obviously, none of us agreed with this assessment. The evening’s presentation, which took us through the process of how this art work was conceptualised and created, then had us dive into the book ourselves by watching the artist read from it and get lost in her own work once again made us enthusiastic about the idea of creating a performance piece around this concept, and the artist herself has many ideas for future directions this art work could take.
At the end of the discussion, we agreed that the book is an art work that reflects the associative nature of the autistic brain, and invites readers into this space of infinite associations. Therefore, in answer to the question whether this artwork is autistic, we may conclude that yes it is, and in the best way possible.
