In many ways, frottage seems a passe activity. Actions of the hand and its interest in rubbing and touching to produce an impression with qualities particular to, connote a feeling of memory, an ersatz or somehow the inadequacies of translating a poem. Resulting objects challenge our contemporary sensibility within a seamless world, juxtaposing a slick, non-porous, hard-candied existence.
A ‘thing’ with texture, let alone an image impression of one; circumspect the meaning of texture and tactility and self-critique it as an outmoded ‘way’. Cracks and fissures and imperfections in our environment is a given; yet to search them out, tautological?
However, line markers as directorial language, as communicative symbols and as portrayed in popular culture are always visually presented conversely. As way finders for us to experience or as totems to journey’s ahead and/or made; their marks and their interstices are overlooked or not portrayed at all. In our environment line markers are personified but not as artifacts or relics as they should be. Further they are to be vaulted as evidentiary – as the snails trail, as Gaia’s shifting currents, as graffiti, as the skin-space between a tattoo.
These varied body references are more than telling than just metaphor…as frottage’s social and prurient double meaning of rubbing against the body of another person, as in a crowd, to attain sexual gratification is telling. We move through the world individually or collectively -we touch some and not others – and to get to another, often shoe soles or tires on pavement, we rub our way.
Aluminum rem(a)inders of the need to (be) touch(ed).
Frôlement.
