I first came across Touch at an art history conference in a session entitled ‘Home and Homelessness’ and a paper delivered by Kate Keohane entitled ‘Taught, Tether, Teeter’.2 Of all the images and ideas that I came across over the three days of the event it was this piece that most touched me. Touch lingered and took root in my imagination, and I’m returning to it now in the context of the theme ‘Above, Below, at the Edge of the Water’ that we are exploring in ‘The Critical Fish’.3 I am struck by the two water edges and the space between them. Many of our artists and writers explore the edge where water meets land, tides ebb and flow, salt and fresh water mingle, and material is swept away and deposited. This is the water’s edge nearest to us where we splash, fish, play, paddle; that we run in, out, and away from, and look down at as waves wash around our feet. But Antoni’s edge is the far, distant line where sea meets sky. Touch is a moment of magic; neither above or below the water, both here and there; in the world and at its outer limit. The simplicity of the gesture, albeit a really difficult one to perform, makes me catch my breath with all that it contains and reveals. 

The horizon means different things and appears differently, according to your vantage point. For Touch Antoni returned home to the Grand Bahama Island and to the familiar view from the house she grew up in. In Hull (4318 miles away) we have big skies and the city has been famously characterised as being at the end of the line. J.B. Priestly wrote about Hull as being, ‘by itself, somewhere in the remote east where England is nearly Holland or Denmark’.4 Larkin wrote about a sense of ‘limitlessness beyond Hull and then eternity’.5 Hull reaches the sea 20 miles away via the mouth of the river Humber. Here Spurn Point, a long thin slither of land, juts out into the estuary and disrupts orientation and the horizontality of the coast line. Walking Spurn simultaneously reveals the North Sea on one hand and the mud flats of the river on the other. When tides and weather dictate, river and sea rise to touch each other. Walking the length of Spurn to its most southerly point you feel as though you could almost touch the south bank from the north. At Spurn the horizon nearly surrounds you like the rim of a dinner plate rather than a horizontal line on a page.

The east coast is disappearing and the coastline is retreating (depending on your viewpoint), due to manmade and natural forces. The sea carries material from eroding cliffs and deposits it further down the coast, sea levels rise and manmade sea defences and activities conspire to create a precarious and shifting boundary between sea and land. I imagine the sea creeping  ‘forward’; each wave advancing a little more than it retreats, like breathing in more than you breathe out each time. For all its visual distinctiveness the horizon is another illusory, shifting edge, imaginary and symbolic, that appears to separate water from air, and heaven from earth; where colour and tone meet in ever changing ways. The horizon seems to draw a categorical line (the end of something, the beginning of something different) but in fact there is constant flux and exchange. 

In Mathematics there is the concept of the limit. Take the number sequence 1, 1/2, 1/4 etc. The sum of these numbers, approaches, but never quite touches 2. It gets ridiculously close, but only reaches the limit at an imaginary point we think of as infinity. Like the vanishing point of linear perspective; the imaginary point where parallel receding lines appear to converge and touch. The horizon is symbolic and imaginary – always in the distance, just out of reach, cordoning the familiar, seen and experienced from the imagined and unknown. The horizon appears to be a binary divide, like the partitioning of positive and negative by the x axis, but is more interface or interchange than edge. Fish puncture the surface, and arc up out and back into the water. Birds swoop below to catch fish and water itself travels back and forward as it cools and warms, condenses and evaporates. Antoni walks this imaginary symbolic limit, the x axis at the edge of the world, poised perfectly between positive and negative; walking between swimming underwater and flying.

I am fascinated by walking as art, where the art object dissolves to reveal an uninterrupted line between artist and viewer. I’m also drawn to viewing through walking; in the context of public art, participation and space: the mobile and embodied experience of art in the shared space of a particular place. 6Touch brings to mind some city boundary walks undertaken by artists Ruth Levene and Ian Nesbitt and as discussed in conversation with landscape archaeologist Bob Johnston.7 Johnston talks about the historic process of ‘beating the bounds’, which is a tradition of ‘marking a boundary by perambulating around its extent’ and which he suggests is, ‘tied to our sense of region, our sense of place, and how a community forms itself and reminds itself of who it is…’.8 Through this lens Antoni appears to make her precarious way around the edge, and ‘beats the bounds’ of the world. In so doing she gives us a sense of our (precarious) place in the world; who we are and what we share.

Walking, marching, rambling, trespassing are all political acts. Walking is also intensely personal and like our handwriting identifies who we are. When I watch Antoni walking the tightrope I catch my breath; my body sways, compensates and balances, in empathy. As someone who falls over more than most, I hugely admire Antoni’s skill and accomplishment. In everyday walking our feet create parallel train tracks for our weight to be spread between. In Touch heel is placed in front of toe in front of heel creating and walking a line. This line is in relationship to the vertical line running through the centre of the body, which Antoni must keep returning to like touching base, and the horizontal line of her outstretched steadying compensating arms (like wings?). Three perpendicular lines, like the x,y,z axes of 3 dimensional space, but interdependent and unstable like a game of Jenga or Pick up Sticks. Antoni describes the discipline of learning to walk a tightrope as almost like ‘learning to walk again’.9 I’ve had to learn to walk again myself, following an operation, and I’ve watched my children and grandchildren learn to walk in their own idiosyncratic ways.

Touch is charged with contradiction. It is an image of the possibility of impossibility – walking on air, defying gravity, head in the clouds and freedom. Antoni describes it as the ‘least amount you can walk on’10(so maybe the closest you can get to flying?). And yet at the same time it is a difficult and dangerous thing to do. It is also an image of constraint – to walk or toe the line is to conform to authority. To walk a tightrope is to navigate an uncomfortable and narrow path between opposing ideas or forces; not one thing or the other, but also a bit of both. Perhaps Touch suggests the coexistence (and balance) of these opposing forces in our lives? Or maybe we should rethink lines, borders and boundaries, in keeping with Heidegger’s definition of the limit as being a beginning not an end: ‘Things begin at their limits for it is here that they enter into relationships with the rest of the world’.11 

There are so many art history connections wrapped up in this work. Miro and Lautrec  represented tightrope walkers and Klee, famous for taking a line for a walk, said in a lecture in 1921,  ‘The tightrope walker with his pole (is a) “symbol of the balance of forces.” He holds the forces of gravity in balance (weight and counterweight). He is a pair of scales’.12 Balance in images or sculptures often involves relationships between opposing elements: verticals and horizontals, figure and ground, positive and negative, dark and light and so on. Antoni draws a connection between her physical balancing act and being emotionally in or out of kilter. She describes how in training for Touch it wasn’t so much that she learnt or became more balanced, ‘it’s that I was getting more comfortable with being out of balance’.13 She also describes how as we walk we lose and gain our balance with every step we make.14 This characterisation of walking as a kind of push and pull brings to mind the in and out of breathe, waves and tides.

Artists use horizons to navigate the visual relationships between objects, spaces and themselves; to measure angles and distances and to establish contrasts of tone and colour at the edges of things. I could make numerous art history horizon connections from Rothko’s abstract paintings, to the line separating Bride and Bachelors in Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915-1923), to the many horizon references in Lawrence Weiner’s work – including Hull Horizon (1998-2003).15 The horizon line coincides with the viewer’s eyeline. When I learnt to paint and draw I was interested in paintings that suggested distance and recession and, at the same time, acknowledged the flatness of the picture plane. Or views that somehow combined a looking down at the foreground and a looking across to the distance. I recall a Cezanne painting of Mount St Victoire where, as viewer, you look down at the valley beneath you and across at the far horizon.16 Cezanne included a tree in the foreground (large in scale because of its proximity) with a branch stretching left to right across the canvas and parallel to the undulating horizon line. In connecting these two lines Cezanne collapsed pictorial space, bringing the far and the near together on the flat picture plane. Like the experience of Spurn Point you are suddenly closest to the thing that you are furthest away from. In Touch Antoni coincides the lines of the tightrope in the foreground and the horizon in the far distance and thus collapses the space inbetween. This synchronising of near and far only works when filmed/viewed from a certain position. Antoni describes how, in order to film Touch from the right height and create the illusion of walking the horizon, they had to dig a hole for the camera person.17  

Distance is the space between two points or places. In Touch this is the space between near and far; the beach and the horizon. Antoni has also talked about Touch as ‘walking my lifeline’; she returns to the view from her childhood home to make this piece and speaks of how her mother encouraged her to spread her wings beyond the limited horizons of her island home.18 I haven’t seen the whole 9 minutes of the video, only a YouTube excerpt, but I imagine at some point Antoni pivots on the tightrope, regains her balance and retraces her steps. In my imagination this is walking back down the time line, from right to left, from now to then. We all return to the homes and spaces we grew up in, in our dreams and imaginations, and sometimes with our own children, as if to show them something of ourselves, and themselves. Antoni was born and brought up in the Bahamas and studied and works in the US. I can’t presume to comment on the cultural, racial and social space between these two points. Mentally I measure or map my personal ‘social and economic distance travelled’ in terms of the space between the horizons of my mum’s life and my own. By some measures this is a huge (housing, economic, jobs, mental and physical health) and yet sometimes I find the space between us collapsed and that I am closest to the person that convention would say I am furthest away from (because she has been dead for many years). 

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the art work I most immediately connected to Touch: a still from a performance by Mona Hatoum in 1985 as part of a series of performative works carried out on the streets of Brixton. In the performance Hatoum walks barefoot with her Doc Marten boots tied to her ankles, dragging behind her.19 I first saw the photograph at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull and its powerful (and for me positive) message has stayed with me. Hatoum’s piece is simple. She doesn’t introduce new objects into the world but tweaks and reconfigures an everyday situation and in so doing somehow takes the lid off the familiar to reveal its depths. Both works complicate the act of walking and yet both women move forward despite the difficulty of the task or the things holding them back. At the same time they expose that the ability or right for freedom of walking in public places is far harder for some than others.

Having made this connection I was excited to discover that Hatoum and Antoni had exhibited and worked together and that in 1998 Antoni interviewed Hatoum for Bomb magazine.20 This includes an intriguing short introduction in which Antoni recalls how she edged closer to Hatoum through their work before actually meeting. In the interview Antoni describes being ‘haunted’ by Hatoum’s Measures of Distance – a complex and layered video work where slides of Hatoum’s mother in the shower are overlaid with letters she has written to her daughter in Arabic and a soundtrack of Hatoum reading these letters in English.21 Hatoum was living and working in England whilst her mother was in Beirut. Hatoum said she wanted every frame, ‘to speak of closeness and distance’ and she contextualises their separation; ‘once I made the work I found that it spoke of the complexities of exile, displacement, the sense of loss and separation caused by war’.22 Later in the interview Hatoum writes about the way her work can prompt new ways of looking at the world: ‘In a very general sense I want to create a situation where reality itself becomes a questionable point. Where one has to reassess their assumptions and their relationship to things around them’.23 She connects our beliefs and assumptions to the ground under our feet, and this analogy directs me to a mental picture of Antoni walking the horizon: ‘So it makes you question the solidity of the ground you walk on, which is also the basis on which your attitudes and beliefs lie’.24 I would also like to highlight a connection to Hatoum’s Incommunicado (1993) – a child’s cot where the mattress has been replaced with lines of wire stretching the length of the cot, like the wire you would use to cut cheese. In both works wire is both ground and support, and sharp, precarious and dangerous.

As I near the end I’m wondering what kind of writing this is. What connects Cezanne’s mountain in Provence, Spurn Point, Hatoum’s Doc Marten’s dragging through Brixton and Antoni walking the horizon line in the Bahamas? Antoni talks about Measures of Distance ‘haunting’ her. Likewise I have art works as touchstones in my imagination that hang around and through/with which I think about ideas, issues and new works. This is my vocabulary ready to form clusters and constellations to tackle new ideas or challenge old ones. Luckily Antoni releases the work for me (and others) to use as they wish: ‘What I really want is for the viewer to bring back the information of their life to the object and to take that information back to their lives. And I have to be careful not to get in the way’.25 

I’ve written about collapsing the space between beach and horizon, near and far, now and then, and between people separated from each other, and maybe themselves. But does this writing respect the distance between Touch in the Bahamas, with its history entwined with British settlement, colonialization and slavery, and Hull in the UK? I hope so! This art work has taken me to the writing of Edouard Glissant, via Kate Keohane’s paper. I am particularly drawn to the idea of ‘la pensée du tremblement’ (a ‘quakeful or tremulous thinking’) which visually connects, in my imagination, with the vibrations of the tightrope.26 I can’t possibly do justice to these ideas here, or yet. This is work in progress for me, but the connections are fascinating. Manthia Diawara, writing about the work of Kader Attia, explains Glissant’s proposal that to share common ground with someone, ‘is to be related to him/her through the rhizomes of places and imaginaries, to feel, like him/her, the vibrations and pulses of the world’.27 

This writing is a conversation with Touch and an exploration of common ground. In this time of lockdown and Covid, where horizons are limited, and touch is precious and rare, it’s also a thank you letter to Antoni for walking and expanding the horizon.