Making Our Mark: Human Indentation as a Form of Connection
Thomas Faulkner
→EFS 2028
Standing in the middle of my dorm room, I contemplate—through tired, 8 AM-lecture eyes—a significant molding of my body in my bed. The blue-striped sheets are wrinkled, and sagging beneath is a version of me that no longer exists, a familiar sagging that welcomes my body to indent a new shape while mourning the shape it was before. My duvet is tossed forward, creating an ocean of folds, a pattern of spontaneity. I can feel the weight of past-me and, funnily enough, I start to think of my bed as a version of my body. An unconscious body dreaming of skipping that one criminally early class and sleeping through each one of my alarms. In a way, the indentation of my bed-body marks a series of decisions: to get out of bed, obey my alarms, and go to class. Without some similar chain of decisions—markers of a quotidian schedule—this indentation on my bed would cease to exist. On the other hand, I’m tempted by my empty bed’s promises of eternal fusion. Its presence welcomes a Dickensian slumber, nightcap and all, and thoughts of hibernation from the world cloud my vision. I debate whether this is sad or normal and then faceplant on my twin XL.
I began thinking of privacy as both a privilege and as isolation. For most people, it is the bed that gives us the most privacy; it is the one thing that carries the weight of our good, bad, lonely, and social days. It is our comfort. Privacy is the sheets we can hide under to momentarily disappear. On the contrary, it is also something we use to share privacy with others. Larissa Pham’s article, “In Bed: The Mattress as Art,” published in The Paris Review in 2018, focuses on works by Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas that reflect on the meaning of beds. The bed can be a reminder of a vegetative or depressive state, littered with alcohol bottles and condoms as in Emin’s My Bed. The bed can also be an abstraction of the body, as in Lucas’s jaundiced mattress, Au Naturel, complete with a pair of melon breasts and phallic cucumber that protrude from the mattress’s skin. Alongside Pham’s references, my mind drifts to a performance done by one of my classmates here at RISD for our design class. In a dim classroom under the wavering eyes of her classmates, my peer Sasha tossed and turned under a single blanket for five minutes using a table as a bed. Reminiscent of Tilda Swinton’s performance The Maybe at MoMA, here too the bed is transformed from a symbol of privacy into one of public observance—the meaning of the performance can only be interpreted as a result of its public setting. In these performances, the audience is putting an intangible, yet present, indentation on the bed and the person within it; the indent of the audience becomes wider as more people observe, filling the missing mold beneath the person’s body.
Beyond the obvious communal aspect of a first-year dorm room, human indentations can be found almost everywhere in art. Physical and social mark-making and indentation are quintessential to the experience and making of art. Take Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series for example: in a combination of land and body art, Mendieta articulates the ubiquity of the female figure in nature, while also commenting on a personal separation of cultural identities brought on by her immigration to the United States from Cuba. Additionally, Mendieta connects the body with nature, indenting and drawing silhouettes (siluetas) of her body into the earth’s canvas by sculpting with natural materials such as branches, rocks, fire, sand, water, flowers, and clay. Mendieta’s Silueta series shows how the indentations of the human body can be, but aren’t always a physical manifestation. Human indentation is inherently abstract—we are inextricably linked to the natural world. How we impact it, both positively and negatively, reveals our physical indentation. Mendieta’s series immortalizes her, and our, ephemeral body—an indentation in the sand washed away by the ocean next to it. The series functions as a form of understanding her experiences regarding cultural dissonance and the feminine presence. Indentations are significant in the fact that they can be personal, private, natural, communal, ephemeral, historical, and cultural. Most importantly, they are palpable. From a sociological standpoint, human beings are a curious, observant kaleidoscope of social butterflies. We touch and interact with everything and everyone around us to understand them and share the experience. When looking at a space or object that used to be occupied by a human, a particular warmth, routine, personality, and sympathy is reflected onto us. We have that feeling of just missing the person who used to be there, occupying the object. The object then becomes a person, which provokes a peculiar question: can you objectify an object?
Three far-flung figurative sculptures—Statue of Juliet in Verona (1969), The Recumbent Effigy of Victor Noir (1891), and Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1896)—suggest that the answer points towards yes. Though they inhabit different countries, each sculpture has undergone the same chemical transformation as a result of repetitive and targeted human interaction. Over decades, viewers have rubbed away the patina in peculiar spots on these statues in hopes of good fortune. The ritual is possibly most clearly shown in the statue of Theodore Dwight Woolsey at Yale University. Here, thousands of eager students each year walk up to the cross-legged former Yale President simply to rub his left shoe. As a result, the bronze sculpture has been patinated, leaving a glossy yellow sheen on that spot. Seated upon a towering chair, book in hand, Woolsey has come to embody a vision of academic success—excessively attractive to touring students. As part of a harmless ritual, it is said that those who rub their left foot will have higher chances of being admitted to the university, resulting in a “it-can’t-hurt-to-try” attitude. Woolsey carries on his left foot the prospects of past and future students—invisible figures who have made their mark of ambition in the form of a golden shoe. Woolsey himself is indented in the space around him—the campus—which shares its history alongside his audience. The students themselves are quickly invisible, but their interaction with the piece is explicitly and eternally visible.
Not every ritual of human mark-making is harmless, and the Statue of Juliet by sculptor Nereo Costantini presents an interesting discourse around the use of the female body for personal gain. Depicted as a pious and reticent adolescent, Juliet’s bronze figure holds one hand to her heart and the other on her floor-length dress. The bust, however, is stained a rich gold due to years of repetitive groping—and selfies of the act, grinning men and women alike, dominate the search results. Through it all, Juliet bears a solemn, almost stoic, gaze downward, as if she’s regretful of her immortal state, in which a golden abuse travels parasitically down her body, to the delight of her audience.
This imprint of the human psyche—specifically in line with reproductive fortune and sexuality—is shown once more in The Recumbent Effigy of Victor Noir, or Statue of Victor Noir, in Paris, France. Among the bodies of Marcel Proust and Jim Morrison in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Noir stands out. The famous French political activist’s body lies spread out on the cold stone beneath him, his top hat a few inches from his right leg. Infamously prominent, however, is the gold discoloration on Noir’s crotch and lips. An unfortunate accentuation of the crotch, caused by extremely tight French pants, has enticed women from all around the world to touch him in hopes of fertility. In this instance, sexuality and the risque have been indented on the original purpose of the tomb; Noir’s original memorialization has shifted to one of infamy and human desire. Noir’s forced indentation—the communal attempt to indent upon an object as a form of indentation itself—is conceptually if not physically present.
In all three examples, figures once symbolic of martyrdom and freedom have now become ones of sex appeal and fertility. There is something undeniably uncomfortable about the glossy, bronze corrosion of the bodies. On one hand, these statues serve as a representation of community and ritualism between humans. But, on the other hand, they call into question the morality behind the perverse fondling of these figures, especially when they can’t give consent. Is it an innocent and humorous visual portrayal of the human id, or is it something darker? Or, since two out of three are objects of people who really once lived, does the humanity within them become merely emblematic and rightfully objectifiable?
Walking around Providence with these indentations of the human body in mind, the world seems a lot more malleable. Turning the corner of Market House near the canal, I run into the statue of Edward Bannister—19th-century painter, founder of the Providence Art Club, and RISD board member—seated stiffly on a bench drawing the Providence landscape. The space next to him on the bench welcomes me, and every person in Providence, to sit next to him. To indent alongside him. As an artist; as a human; as a tourist; as a resident. I look down at the pad of paper in his hand and notice it’s empty. He tells me that the future isn’t indelible—that it is something actively being written and revised—as he hovers over the paper waiting to indent.
“Whether it is a statue of the person before me on a bench, a footprint in cement, or a body and its imprint in a bed, I feel an undeniable connection to the human presence.”
Whether it is a statue of the person before me on a bench, a footprint in cement, or a body and its imprint in a bed, I feel an undeniable connection to the human presence. These marks remind us that others experience and interact with the same objects we do, no matter how personally attached we may be. Though we regard a particular seat in the Met or chair in the Hay, as “our spot,” it has been indented thousands of times before and after us by the bodies of others—who perhaps consider the same table or chair as “their spot.” It's somewhat melancholic to recognize our unoriginality, and also our isolation. Stifled away in the dorm room I am supposed to identify as “my own” has made me miss the indentations of my family members even more. The objects they use don’t exist in this liminal space and even though I have a roommate, I have never felt more alone. So it is through these blank, used spaces that I try to communicate with humanity, slipping under the covers and making my own dent in society. The bed is private and public all at once—and I feel both bedless and well-rested at the same time.
Thomas Faulkner sees a fig tree branching out.