The Horror of Touch: Anna Morandi's Wax Models of Hands

Abstract

When a hand moves, there is always something of the stranger in it. Perhaps it is because the hand rarely seems to be in sync with the rest of the body, frequently betraying the face or undermining the voice, and always casting doubt on the unifying power of consciousness. The hand has a tendency to stray, one moment disregarding the resolve of the body to which it is connected, the next directing it as if it knows better. Anna Morandi's wax model of two hands (Fig. 1) is unswerving in its pursuit of the strangeness of hands that act as if detached from the body, especially when they are not.1 These hands seem to be on the move, reaching forwards and upwards, stretching out fingers and pressing down with the palm. Suddenly, one recoils, twists, and curls inwards as if reconsidering its onward move. The two hands-agile, animated yet curiously indistinct-emerge out of large gathered sleeve cuffs, which might well have burst from below the small wooden ledge that provides one of their distinctive frames. Within this frame, the hands appear not only as three-dimensional entities in space, but also as part of a body elsewhere, underneath the ledge for instance. This sense of the hands as part of another whole is encouraged by their position, with the left and right acting together, at odds with each other no doubt, yet side by side nonetheless. But the sense of these hands as an embodied pair changes if they are considered within another frame, the one defined by the flat wooden surface against which one visualises the movement of the hands (Fig. 2). This brings the hands into something that is more like a traditional frame, where they seem to move in and out of the picture plane, and in the process reassert the boundaries of this surface as the privileged site of existence. But the unflagging movement of the hands implies that they also seek to escape the limits of this picture frame, even as they are becoming entrapped by it and turned into an autonomous whole. © 2011 The Author.