senses

If modern painting is “art as art,” this means, to paraphrase Reinhardt, that is represents nothing and exists only in and for itself. If this has created an “art language, with an art communication,” this is because this kind of art has implied all along a form of intimate contact with its viewer, in which the viewing of “art as art” becomes “sensation as sensation” or “perception as perception.” This distinguishes “modern painting” from representational painting, which exhibits duality, that is, it uses imagery to refer to “past experiences and feeling,” and to “color and reconstruct in the mind” associations that are meaningful, but that take the viewer far away from the specifics of the encounter with the painting before them.

Such clues from other senses can become so strongly associated with a sense of coolness or warmth that they can occasionally substitute for the thermal experience itself. For example, the taste of mint seems refreshing and cool regardless of what temperature it is. Similarly, the pressure of heavy blankets conveys a feeling of warmth quite independent of their actual thermal qualities.

During the Renaissance, the five senses were understood to form a hierarchical system from the highest sense of vision down to touch. Vision was correlated to fire and light, hearing to air, smell to vapour, taste to water, and touch to earth.

The inhumanity of contemporary architecture and cities can be understood as the consequence of the neglect of the body and the senses, and an imbalance in our sensory system.

The art of the eye has certainly produced imposing and thought-provoking structures, but it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world.

Modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.

“Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It is the sense which became differentiated into the others.” — Ashley Montagu

All the senses, including vision, are extensions of the tactile sense; the senses are specializations of skin tissue, and all sensory experiences are modes of touching, and thus related to tactility.

Perhaps the human fascination with fire stems from the totality of its sensory stimulation. The fire gives a flickering and glowing light, ever moving, ever changing. It crackles and hisses and fills the room with the smells of smoke and wood and perhaps even food. It penetrates us with its warmth. Every sense is stimulated and all of their associated modes of perception, such as memory and an awareness of time, are also brought into play, focused on the one experience of the fire. Together they create such an intense feeling of reality, of the “here and nowness” of the moment, that the fire becomes completely captivating.

People have a sense of warmth and coolness, a thermal sense like sight or smell, although it is not normally counted in the traditional list of our five senses.

As with all our other senses, there seems to be a simple pleasure that comes from just using it, letting it provide us with bits of information about the world around, using it to explore and learn, or just to notice.

There is a basic difference, however, between our thermal sense and all of our other senses. When our thermal sensors tell us an object is cold, that object is already making us colder. If, on the other hand, I look at a red object it won’t make me grow redder, nor will touching a bump object make me bumpy.