HAPTIC FEELING: GENEALOGIE TRA STORIA DELL’ARTE, CRITICA E NEW-MEDIA

This doctoral project aims to offer a genealogical investigation of haptic perception in art history. Although haptic perception has been the subject of an extraordinarily articulated and interdisciplinary panorama of studies from the last decade of the 19th century to the new millennium, it has yet to receive systematic recognition in art history and historiography.It was intersecting these directions, the four sections that make up the thesis aim to create a cohesive and harmonious treatment. The motility of the hand is the protagonist of the first section entitled Prehistory of the haptic. From iconography to morphogenesis, which, starting from a philological deconstruction of Jeff Koons' Balloon Venus series (2008-2021) and its relationship with the haptic feeling "of positivity", aims to formulate a hypothesis of a reinterpretation of modernist plastic hinged on this prehistoric artefact and on some of its figures, tracing a submerged historiography that could support this critical proposal. he second section of the project, entitled The History of the Haptic - State of the Literature and Critical Reconnaissance initiates an itinerary into the 20th-century development of the notion of the Haptic in the art-historical sphere through a critical re-reading of a panorama of sources, approaches, and orientations. In posing the haptic as a methodological question, the section moves from a critical reconnaissance of Alois Riegl’s role and an examination of the figures elaborated in the historiographic field to analyses the relations between haptics and the historical avant-garde. Following this, the third section of the work, defined as An Alternative History of Haptics, hypothesizes a 'prehistoric' and laboratory genealogy leading back to the 1892 rehabilitation of the term 'haptic/haptics' in the psycho-aesthetic sphere, tracing a network of relations between the scientific side (Wundt, Dessoir, Titchener, Münsterberg, James) and the artistic side (Berenson and Stein). Such an interweaving gives rise to the fourth section of the present work, entitled In the histories of the haptic, and aims to interrogate some selected nodes by which, in the second half of the 20th century, understood as a conceptual figure and interdisciplinary dynamic, a web of case studies has emerged whose analysis can assist the study of haptic feeling in an art-historical perspective and which, from the New York of 1916 up to the 1990s, allows us to highlight how it has grafted itself onto, actively participating in, stylistic issues and the intermediate development of sculpture. Finally, in the third section, entitled “In the sanctuary cave: haptic feeling and new media”, conceived as an appendix, the discussion interrogates the multimodal disposition of the haptic when sculpture takes over complex environmental and intermedial organisms. It again interrogates the paleo-historical framework about the contemporary mediasphere and the modes of evocation of touch widely probed by artists such as Laure Prouvost, Camille Henrot, Julien Prévieux and Marguerite Humeau.