The Touch Report by Katrina Palmer

The Touch Report by Katrina Palmer, published 2024 by Book Works

This was also fucking brilliant too.

A simple premise.

Executed succinctly and beautifully and packaged – as everything by Book Works is – in a gorgeous fucking volume that is a pleasure to hold and touch.

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The book contains approximately 150 short passages, each of which describes an act of violence as depicted in one of the artworks at the UK’s, at England’s, at London’s, at Trafalgar Square’s… National Gallery.

Accompanying this list of descriptions are occasional interjections from a first person voice that is taking part in a writing group at the Gallery, possibly arranging (at one point) an illicit assignation within the institution itself.

There are also a handful of images, photographs, showing parts of the physical spaces of the gallery that would not ordinarily be given much attention: the gaps where portraits ordinarily hang when being cleaned/restored/repaired… the back of canvases and frames… A scan of a canvas revealing an image not included in the final version…

Some of this writing discusses the processes of restoration… the ways in which historical restoration processes have possibly, arguably, been ways to recreate over the same physical space an artwork, and how approaches to this have changed…

And around these musings, around this around this around this, stands this parade of violence, of normalised and repetitive violence…

Sometimes the descriptions are so clear it is very obvious which paintings are being described, but some of them – particularly some of the art that was created as blunt religious visualisation for places of worship – are described identically. Which is fair enough, as creating an identical response and set of meanings was their purpose…

The repetition here is masterful, powerful, and clarifies and speaks meaning…

Repetition here, used for glory. For potency.

The work speaks to the unspoken ways violence is foisted on us, even when we feel it isn’t, and how this supposedly neutral, safe, cultural space is one that is, actually – once you’re looking for it – riddled with unsubtle, wall-sized acts of cruelty and carnage…

And these are the images, yes, that have become the canon of visual art as it’s taught to us in the UK…

these acts and these people/characters (mythical figures, religious figures, royalty) committing them or having them committed to them…

These are those whose images have become known, are recognisable to a reader by mere inference alone…

We don’t look at the works in the National Gallery and recall them by the violence they contain, but when the violence is presented so bluntly, so unsubtly, as it is here, it becomes strange that we don’t. That we don’t [ordinarily] consider the bodies of this body of work.

The Touch Report functions as a direct (yet very quiet) critique of the nature of the gallery’s curatorial choices, which is why it feels a little disappointing to discover that Palmer had an official “in-residence” position at the gallery and that this book has been signed off by the National Gallery – their logo is included at the book’s end…

As with any statement that appears starkly critical yet is warmly embraced by the institution or individual it is criticising, one immediately then begins to reconfigure and reflect on the potency of the attack… Is The Touch Report not, actually, a damning critique of the ways in which the British cultural elite has normalised the depiction of violent acts in our canon, but rather a cute new way to think about the collection of the National Gallery?

Maybe it can be both?

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I loved it, though: The Touch Report is both argument and supporting evidence, containing asides and engagement and functioning as a provocative essay with more to say than many books with ten times the amount of text…

Highly recommended – to be read praisingly, tentatively, or with a bit of scepticism.

Go check it out:

The Touch Report by Katrina Palmer, published 2024 by Book Works