ABSTRACT
Touch performances pose a unique challenge to conventional visualist aesthetics. They dissolve the separation of artist and audience and conceptually frame the proximal interstices. Often, the beholder in effect co-creates the piece as visual apprehension gives way to the immediacy of kinesthetic involvement. The distinct relational aesthetics of touch in turn confers an affective texture that can range from rough to soft intensity, from cool to agitated engagement. In this chapter, I will focus on performances by artists that function as tactile experiments in pain, pleasure, desire, healing, power, and knowledge. Each enactment embodies specific socialities of contiguous touch whether through gestures of greeting and relationship, kinesthetic therapies, ritual aggression, libidinal play, extra-rational knowledge, or the provocation of spatial boundaries.
