Phantom Tactility and Corporeality in Contemporary Art. Introduction
Contents:
1. Introduction 2. Performance and Bodily Interaction — Performer and Viewer-Participant — Performer and Viewer-Observer 3. Art That Can Be Touched — Interactive Art Objects — Installations Activated by the Viewer 4. Phantom Bodies and Simulated Tactility — The Body in Transformation — The Body as Object — Аморфное тело — Фрагменты и следы живого 5. Immersive Experience: Sensory Impact and Triggers — Light-Based — Olfactory — Acoustic 6. Conclusion: Phantomness as a Product of Reality
Concept
Gum Souls, 2018 — Holly Hendry
Today, we live in a world where communication in online environments has become more habitual and everyday than direct physical contact. People treat unfamiliar bodies with greater caution and protect their own boundaries more carefully: a hug requires trust, a handshake demands consent, and physical contact carries an increasingly vulnerable quality. After the pandemic and a series of cultural shifts, corporeality in daily life is expressed more often through interactions with the artificial — with surfaces, materials, and devices. We touch plastic, glass, fabric, and metal far more frequently than another person’s skin. In this new corporeal condition, touch does not disappear but becomes phantom, shifting into the realm of the imagined, the substituted, and the sensorially simulated.
The phenomenon in which the body responds to the artificial as if it were living is referred to in this study as phantom tactility. It is a form of sensory experience grounded in interaction, yet not necessarily with another living being. Even without direct touch, bodily memory continues to operate, producing a response where physical contact is impossible. It emerges in the space of substitution, where the artificial becomes part of a living experience. Contemporary artists increasingly engage with this theme — with the boundary between the phantom and the living, with illusions of closeness, and with the need to sense the world differently.
This study focuses on artistic forms that have material and physical presence: performance, installation, and object-based art. These mediums assume direct interaction between the viewer and a space, surface, or body, making it possible to examine tactility as both a physical and sensory experience.
«The body is our interface with the world, and our senses its line of communication…» [O’Reilly, 2009, p. 74].
The research proceeds from the hypothesis that, in contemporary art, tactility is undergoing transformation, adapting to current conditions. It extends beyond physical contact, becoming a specific language of interaction with the viewer through phantom tactility. Artificial materials and sensory environments become ways of speaking about fragility, vulnerability, desire, and forms of presence that manifest even within the non-living.
Additional key concepts in this study are attention, perception, and bodily response, understood through the lens of contemporary culture’s «scattered» and hybrid attention, as described by Claire Bishop. From this perspective, art is approached not as an object of observation but as an event taking place within the perceptual field, where the viewer’s corporeality and attention become integral to the work itself.
The temporal scope of the study spans from the 1960s to the present — from the era of body-oriented performance to immersive environments in which physical contact is replaced by sensory engagement. The selected examples foreground feminist and body-centered approaches shaped by successive waves of feminism. In the 1970s, the female body became an instrument of artistic expression. Contemporary artists take this further: they not only show the body but reconfigure it, creating alternative forms of presence. Whereas the body once functioned primarily as protest or radical gesture, today it becomes a way to articulate transformation, flexibility, and the diversity of bodily experience. It may be artificial, fragmented, virtual, or abstract — and still capable of generating sensorial response.
The structure of the study is organized as a movement from direct physical contact to its phantom form, from body to material, from presence to sensation.
Performance and bodily interaction examines practices in which the body becomes the medium of art — Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Valie Export, Lygia Clark, Marina Abramović, Tino Sehgal, Anne Imhof. Here, touch remains real: it connects, provokes, challenges boundaries, establishes trust or resistance. It is a space where the viewer becomes a participant and corporeality becomes a tool of dialogue.
Art that can be touched explores installations and objects that invite physical interaction — Lygia Clark, Rebecca Horn, Haegue Yang, Vsevolod Abazov, Carsten Höller, Daniel Rozin, Yayoi Kusama, and Renata Lucas. Here art ceases to be something merely observed and becomes a shared experience. These works create a distinct tension between the living and the non-living, where interaction with the artificial acquires an almost intimate character.
Phantom bodies and simulated tactility focuses on artists who create bodies from silicone, wax, and fabric, endowing the non-living with attributes of the living — Alina Szapocznikow, Louise Bourgeois, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Francesco Albano, Manuela Benaim, Maayan Sophia Weisstub, Holly Hendry, Hannah Levy, Pakui Hardware, and Julia Belova. Their works appear alive because they contain what the living does best: being fragile, soft, mutable, and prone to decay.
Immersive Experience: Sensory Impact and Triggers examines artworks that influence the body’s imagination without direct contact — through smell, light, sound, or temperature. Olafur Eliasson, Yayoi Kusama, Mike Kelley, Pfeiffer & Kreutzer, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, and Zimoun create environments in which the skin «remembers» what it feels like to sense. Here the viewer is not engaged through action but through response, becoming part of a sensory landscape.
In this way, the study approaches phantom tactility as a new language of the corporeal in art — a response to an era of digitalization, distance, strict boundaries, and substitution. This language reveals how corporeality and tactility transform. Art becomes a space where the viewer learns to feel again: not by touching, but by responding — discovering the living within the artificial and presence within illusion.
