Endles touching: Herder and scuplture

Abstract

The relationship between the hand and the eye and thus between touch and sight is the mark of a founding instability; an instability, it can be argued that accompanies the history of aesthetics. Integral to that history is the attempt to control, or at the very least to assert control over that which is inherently unstable namely the domain of sensation. This is a state of affairs that accompanies the emergence of aesthetics and which finds its most exact formulation in the distinction between sensation and cognition.