Technification is making gestures in the meantime precise and rough - and thereby human beings. They drive all hesitation out of gestures, all consideration, all propriety … …Thus one no longer learns to close a door softly, discreetly, and yet firmly. -Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from the Damaged Life (1951)
Was there ever really a time when gesture was under threat? It seems so unlikely that just a few years after Balzac a mechanizing force would appear that, however strong and new it was, could erase the social coding that underwrote the collectivity of Mme. Vauquer’s boarders. Can hands in the know ever lose their knowledge? Certainly that frustration would warrant the slam of a door, or otherwise impede its closing, but bodies communicate whether their privacy is ajar or not.
A wink, a toss, a flick, a knot. Contingent expressions that evade semiotic regimes. Still, there is a space in every exchange where intuition is put at risk, where its severance from thought feels like a necessary efficiency. In ink or in flesh, the curse of cursive is that it says too much, giving more away than its author hoped or knew. But this remainder is the interval through which spontaneous looks and compassionate characters draw their power. A flicker between images, where bodily abstractions organize themselves into exuberant lines of flight. Performed on a stage, a tableau stretched until the limbs tremble. Silently on display.
-Aryen Hoekstra