Intimacy In The Age Of The Virtual
December 2, 2020 – January 20, 2021
“I would like to tell you—since we are among friends, and since I am talking not to all of you, but rather with each and every one of you . . .”
—Jorge Luis Borges, from “The Divine Comedy,” in Seven Nights
Far Away, So Close is an exploration of attempts to create intimate spaces in real life and virtually. The contemporary era has been characterized by efforts at forging real connections between distant actors in spite of distance. But physical proximity may not be required for human connections that challenge alienation and detachment. As feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway has explored, how do the nodes of connectivity open the possibility of “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” and ask us to embrace “the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine”?
Well before COVID-19 brought us into quarantine, far from the contact with strangers and lovers alike, the world had already been so transformed that our relationships were often made online, sustained through emojis and quick check-ins, expanded via video chats, and sometimes ended via text.
To some, creating an intimate experience via the pixel and screen has seemed impossible. But what do we mean by intimate? If it is not the human touch combined with a kind of spiritual presence that can only be found in the company of another, is the meaning of the word being watered down, or is it being transformed and expanded, stretching to include even those with whom we do not share a physical space?
As Hannah Arendt has suggested in The Human Condition, “the modern discovery of intimacy seems a flight from the whole outer world into the inner subjectivity of the individual, which formerly had been sheltered and protected by the private realm.” Is there a way to take that inner subjectivity and translate it so that two (or more) intimacies could be united, regardless of location, distance, or separation?
The artists of Far Away, So Close, respond to the question of the potential for intimacy through the virtual with pointed ambivalence. Many of the works included here were made before the pandemic; others were made in response to it.
Mickalene Thomas’ je t’aime (2014) is a close-up meditation on the lover’s body, fragmented, caressed by the eyes of the viewer and by the camera. The inherent tension in the piece is borne out by the schism, the distance between the lovers’ eye, embodied by the camera and the projection, and the beloved’s body, presented and caressed, yet always simultaneously distant in that it is an image and not a presence. A similar kind of touch is exactly what is left out in Skin Hunger (1&2) by the podcast Death, Sex, & Money. For the individuals in the episode, the absence of the physical warmth of the flesh is impossible to substitute with an image. Lauren Lee McCarthy’s I heard TALKING IS DANGEROUS (2020) makes the challenges of proximity painfully clear under the pandemic. Transforming conversation between two people, together, into a screen- and phone-driven interaction, similar to texting but made painfully distant by masks, fear, and the virus, the work creates an awareness of all that’s lost in these technological exchanges. Similarly, Angela He’s online game a new life (2020) looks at the challenges of new love as it makes its way toward greater and more complicated intimacies, where each decision doesn’t necessarily bring the lovers closer together. The attempt to use the digital to overcome distance is at the heart of Love on Lockdown, the episode of the podcast The Cut, in which two strangers dive into the intimate, for better or worse, with a two-week first date. It is an act that would, in other times, seem emotionally risky, to say the least, but in today’s world is both emotionally risky and physically threatening, even if we’re only thinking about the virus. Whether in painting, as in the work of Bayan Kiwan (MA ’20), or the voyeuristic photos of Katia Repina (Intimacy in times of Corona, 2020), online services (Lam Thuy Vo’s Carebot, Caroline Sinders’ Social Media Break Up Coordinator 2015—Current, Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s Smell Dating, 2016), or games (Kaho Abe), or even prints of touches to a screen (Tamiko Thiel), the artists demonstrate the broad array of possible meanings, misinterpretations, and challenges inherent to new versions of intimacy.
—Keith Miller, Curator
Artists: Angela He, Bayan Kiwan, Caroline Sinders, Death, Sex & Money, Kaho Abe, Katia Repina, Lam Thuy Vo, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mickalene Thomas, Mimi Ọnụọha, Tamiko Thiel, Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, The Cut