Art and the Hand

Art and the Hand

When you look at a work of art, say the Mona Lisa, you are struck by its beauty, as by that of its subject. You may imagine that long-dead woman, or the artist who painted her. But you don’t generally imagine the hand that painted her (or it): you don’t form a mental image of that hand as it moves over the canvas. You could, but you don’t. Yet you know it’s true—a hand did apply paint to the canvas. The painting is of a woman and by a hand. I want to suggest giving a moment to the artistic hand; try to imagine it, give it its due, thank it.[1] To do this it helps to see the painting as a representation of the hand that painted it—to see the hand in the painting. The mobile delicate hand. Suppose that next to the Mona Lisa there is a depiction of the artist’s hand, still or moving; it might even be a video of the hand as it paints. Then it would be brought home to you that this painting is a manual production (backed by a mind or brain). No hand, no painting; and no art. The painting is like a piece of music: both are products of the hand. In a musical performance we see the hands and fingers move as sounds are made; not so in artistic “performance”. But we could, in principle; then we might bring the hand into greater prominence. We could imagine the brush strokes as we look at the finished product. Each mark on the canvas reflects a particular hand movement—as each note played on the piano reflects a particular hand movement. We like to observe the virtuosity of the expert guitar player, and we could likewise observe the expertise of the accomplished painter. In other words, the hand is part of the art form (it isn’t like the foot on which the artist stands). And the hand is part of the human body, so it too gets represented in the work of art. The work points in two directions: to the world and to the artist as embodied being (it has a double intentionality). It is a hymn to both. The painter is painting himself. You can’t separate the art work from its means of production. When we look at ancient cave paintings we learn about that bygone world and how it was seen, but we also learn about the hand that painted it; it was clearly a sophisticated piece of equipment, and a means of expression. The picture depicts the artist, anatomically, functionally.[2]

It is a different matter with photography: here the role of the hand is negligible. What was once done with the hand is now done with the lens and photographic paper (or electronics). The hand has disappeared from the picture. This is a new art form, belonging to a different artistic natural kind. It evokes a different kind of response from the viewer. Not surprisingly, photography caused a crisis in pictorial art: you don’t need the hand anymore to create a representation of reality! Accordingly, art became less realistic, less like photography. Modern art re-asserts the hand; it insists on the hand. Where older art was content to let the hand disappear, as if the work of art emerged from nowhere, the new art placed the hand at the center of attention: this was indubitably produced by an actual human hand—not by nature or God. The more abstract, the more human. Modern art is explicitly manual art—you can see the hand in the brush strokes. At the same time, it became more secular, more humanistic. You could easily see it as hand-crafted, so it distinguished itself from photographic art. In this respect it became more like music: palpably produced by the human body in action (e.g., action painting). It became possible to link the two art forms: painting as music and music as painting. I mean that the role of the hand is openly acknowledged in the two art forms. A musical piece is like a painting in sound; a painting is like a piece of music in shape and color. Then, photography is like the sounds of nature as opposed to musical sounds: not hand-generated. There is hand-produced beauty and non-hand-produced beauty. To put it differently, the role of the active creative subject is manifest in one sort of aesthetic object but is not present in the other. The same distinction exists in sculpture: the hand-sculpted object versus the naturally occurring object (Michelangelo’s David versus the beautiful flesh-and-blood youth). The hand is pivotal, determinative. It seems to us as if the hand is miraculous in its ability to create beauty (“How did he do that?”), but in the case of nature we don’t marvel in this way—we take nature for granted or invoke an all-powerful God. There is a difference in aesthetic attitude; the hand is the crucial distinguishing element. Ironically—and this may be the point—abstract art is more humanistic than realistic art, because in it the human hand features more prominently (nature does not produce Henry Moore sculptures or Kandinsky paintings). A child’s drawings are highly humanistic despite being unrealistic shapes, because the child is present in them. Moreover, the limitations of the hand are more obvious in non-realist art, because the hand is more part of the subject-matter. A hand inadequately drawing a hand tells you a lot about the human hand—its scope and limits. Modern art is thus more candid about the human condition (“Anatomy is destiny”, to quote Freud). We are not demigods but mortal creatures. We are flesh made of moving parts, notably the hands.

Handwriting versus printing, handmade clothes versus machine-made clothes, individual art versus mass-produced art, painting versus photography, hands-on medicine versus chemical medicine—the theme is universal. The hand runs through all civilization, or its absence. I am not saying, “Hands good, no hands bad”, but the difference is worth noting; in particular, painting is a manual art in its essence. Detached from the hand it becomes something else entirely.[3]

[1] This essay is intended as a continuation of my book Prehension (2015) and assumes that general perspective.

[2] It doesn’t depict the artist in the same way it depicts its subject-matter, but it does call the artist to mind by means of marks made. It provides signs of the artist, particularly his hand.

[3] Of course, the eye matters enormously, but without the hand the eye is artistically impotent. Painting is not so much a visual art as a visuo-manual art. When artists depict hands, they are engaging in a reflexive act. Sculpture could exist in the land of the blind, because of the sense of touch; that would be hand art without eye art.