Little Tin Openers: Ann Quin's Aesthetic of Touch

Abstract

Although critics have often noted Ann Quin's ‘literary geometry’ (Jordan 2020: 151) and ‘visual composition’ (Stevick 1989: 238), little has been made of the way her use of shapes and surfaces relates to contemporaneous developments in 1960s visual arts. Taking as its starting point Quin's specific art-world context, this essay reads Three (1966) in the light of post-war artists’ anxieties surrounding figuration and their turn towards the potentially generative effects and affects of disfiguration. I go on to consider how Niklaus Largier's account of aesthetic experience as ‘touch and being touched’ is fitting for the way Three makes of literature a plane of perception where figures move tenuously in and out of reach. But while Quin's characters look vainly to figures – human, inanimate, whole, fractured – in pursuit of aesthetic experiences, such ‘touch’ is usually withheld, deferred, or even made violent. What emerges is a view of Quin's particular mode as setting forth an aesthetic of touch where objects trigger not exalted experience so much as marking post-war conditions to be reckoned with, however elusive, equivocal, and resistant to resolution they may be. With this, Three seems to endorse the idea that an artwork at best can be an ‘emotive form’, as Donald Judd put it in 1967, with its characters typifying late-modernist concerns surrounding representation, what makes ‘good’ art, and performance more generally.