Hans Witschi's The Hand Book: A Film by Stephen Blauweiss

Idiosyncratic Swiss-born artist Hans Witschi creates a metaphor for human birth and social development in "The Hand Book." Having shifted, during a career spanning nearly three decades, from purely representational and figurative work (his early canvases featured ruthlessly direct nude self-portraits of Witschi, who has been severely crippled since birth) to metaphorical treatments of artists and their studios (canvas "studio-visits" as a way of revisiting the "memory of the hand," or, as Witschi says, "the fact that, as one paints, one is constantly aware that each stroke of the brush contains the memory of another artist, and as we complete a painting, stroke by stroke, we are effectively reliving the whole history of art") to a book-length photographic treatment of the hand itself in mainstream media as another form of birth and growth (the hand isolated eventually gives way to the "not-touched touch," or human interaction, and finally, to the mass communal gesture, or social man).

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Film & Animation

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• art
• artist
• photos
• newspaper
• hands
• photography