care/ tactile epistemology
Witnessing life at Bronx Humanities in preparation for and while making the rubbings was a kind of sensory record—cognitive, emotional, and bodily. The classroom and hallways, school and stairwells were filled with sensory material. Faint food odors mingling with spray bottle cleaner; the tinny quality of sound—a slight reverberation of voices, loud speaker announcements, footsteps on linoleum hallways; the planks of molded plastic fluorescents that bounce blinding reflections—pale oranges and greens—all up and down the tiled walls and windows. Interiors composed in a palette of neutrals—beiges and off-whites, punctuated with incongruent pops of red, turquoise, mint green. Caged hallway clocks, short-stature bathroom stall doors, balled up brown paper-towels in the sink.
These colors, vibrations, sites, and feels are set against the sensory data of making the rubbings. Unfurling long lengths of loud crinkly glassine, pulling at the skim as it twists and creases, reinforcing the edge with two and three pieces of painter’s tape, feeling my way around the objects with a prosthetic wax finger. Pressing tenderly—hard enough to get a clear line, but not too hard so as not to rip the paper. This kind of touch tells stories—about the smooth edges of the particleboard shelves, about the bits of grit under foot, about the rust on the doorframe and hinge. And there were other things I learned about the space by working in it in this way, like the hardness of the floors when I jumped down from a chair, the ball of my left foot tender for days, and the loud hum of the air conditioner unit.
It’s no accident that artist Simryn Gill titles her typewriter triptych, “Caress,” or that the Korean sculptor, Do Ho Suh names his series of rubbings (including a scaled replica of his former New York apartment), “Rubbing/ Loving Project.” This kind of touch requires proximity, care and time. Making the drawings offered me a way into Betty’s classroom space, surfaces, and the small objects of her daily practice. A lens through which to notice the overstuffed bookcase, the stacks of composition books with names on the covers, the math tools like plastic protractors and “crafty things” like jars of glitter. Through these objects I could see something about how many students she teaches (number of pairs of scissors, number of books), about the way she brings art to her teaching (personalized drawings on the composition book covers, plastic tubs of colored pencils), about the resources she has (natural light, computers that flip into desks for each student, a smart board) and those she lacks (sturdy shelving, private workspace, a 4 foot strip of the back wall where the plaster has come off to expose rough concrete.) There is a kind of loving in the way that Betty cares for and organizes her materials—student work on the walls, writing implements bundled in yogurt containers—and the act of rubbing out their shapes also communicates care. Genetic scientist Barbara McClintock famously said of her corn plants, “I know them intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them” (in Keller 1983, 198). The rubbings were also a pleasurable act of intimacy. An offering to the teachers in my study. A way of being near them, in their rooms, carefully tracing the outlines of their things and tools and spaces. An assertion of solidarity, a way of saying, “these rooms and things matter. And what you (teachers) do matters.”
My own caring intervention traces the form(s) of the teachers’ caring labor. Quite literally in the way that my hands moved across Betty’s carefully arranged bulletin board, feeling out her placement, rigging desks and chairs to reach the top edge as she must also have done. But also figuratively in the way these rubbings mimic a kind of domestic labor designated as women’s work. In the making of the pieces, my body took on the shapes of a woman cleaning or organizing—kneeling on the floor, stretching up to high shelves, scrubbing in careful strokes along the length of the chalkboard. This attention to detail calls to mind the notion of “a woman’s touch,” the feminine-assigned capacity to keep things clean, notice and eradicate dirt, and to design and decorate space in a way that makes it feel warm or human or special. The teachers’ attention to space as an act of care came through across the images, interviews, and dialogue. Michelle talked about it in relation to her practice of purchasing snacks for students and setting up a couch in her classroom as a way of making “our school feel like a second home for our students.” V spoke about the “minimalist design” of her classroom space as a form of art, “a way of making my class look and sound and smell and feel like a space for free expression.” And Lee highlighted her regular classroom cleaning as a way to affirm her students’ worth in the face of public disinvestment in their communities and the layers of racism that her 97% Black, Latinx, and Asian student-body population faces. In each of these cases, the teachers draw links between space and care, aesthetics and pedagogy—outlining a form of labor that is emotional, physical, and socially situated.
By carefully arranging groups of rulers and scissors and composition books, in their indexical quality and reference to the time it takes, the rubbings speak to the teachers’ carework. In making them, the shapes of my body (scrubbing surfaces, down on knees, reaching up high as if to dust the tops of shelves) traced the teachers’ own forms as they clean and decorate and care for their classroom spaces and things. And my making of the rubbings, my own meticulous arranging and mark-making is also a form of caring labor.
knowing feeling
The rubbings mirror and reflect out the teachers’ images and texts, as they offer up a theory of body knowledge in conversation with high school pedagogy, art, and qualitative research, what Laura Marks (2000) calls “tactile epistemology,” a way of knowing grounded in physical contact. Marks roots her theory of sensuous knowledge in mimesis, a mode of imitation or copy. As she writes (141),
This description envisions mimesis relationally, in the back-and-forth transfer of knowledge between the subject and object. In this way, the rubbings (my own compassionate involvement in the world) possess a sensory knowledge of me as the maker—my decisions about what to touch and press on, my hands, my eyes—just as I contain the tactile data of the objects and their making—sounds and feels, scale and all that I witnessed in their presence. The act of rubbing—joining paper with the object’s surface through the medium of crayon—dissolves—if only for a moment—the dichotomy between thing and representation. In this way, the rubbings too form and dissolve a set of relationships between me as the maker, and the teachers as participants in my study, and makers of their classrooms in physical space and conceptually/ pedagogically/ relationally with students.Mimesis shifts the hierarchical relation between subject and object, indeed it dissolves the dichotomy between the two, such that erstwhile subjects take on the physical, material qualities of objects, while objects take on the perceptive and knowledgable qualities of subjects. Mimesis is an immanent way of being in the world, whereby the subject comes into being not through abstraction from the world but compassionate involvement in it.
The images encode the sensuous knowledge of their referents, their making and materiality. And in their texture and scale, in the way light reflects off the paper’s sheen, in the way they tell the story of how they were made—call to imagination the process of draping object with paper, of tracing the lines and shapes—they engage viewers experientially, drawing out another relationship of exchange, sensory dialogue between image, viewer, and maker[i]. This emphasis on the relationship between immersive experience, knowing and vision resonates with the foundational concepts of modern anthropological fieldwork. As Grimshaw (2001, 53) explains, with Malinowski’s model, “These two aspects, participation and observation, became inseparable parts of the new ethnographic approach.” She goes on to highlight the “central role accorded to experiential knowledge,” arguing that “Ethnographic understanding emerges from experience, bodily and sensory, as much as from observation and intellectual reflection” (emphasis in original). Following Marks and Grimshaw, I understand the rubbings in a series of sensory, relational interactions, in a series of interchanges between the materials, the space, me as the maker, and a viewing audience. They reflect my own tactile knowing as they invite viewers into sensory engagement with the work.
[i] While the images in person are highly tactile in the way the paper curls into three dimensions, hangs loose from the wall, in the rips at the edges and the textures of wax crayon, smooth, and rumpled paper—here in the context of this article, they are flattened. The digital rendering smooths their surfaces, mutes blemishes and defects. I have included the somewhat abstract series of images (Figures 6,7,8,9,10) to highlight the tactility of the rubbings and draw viewers’ attention to texture, shadow, and the dimensionality of the forms.
