I went to the far west end of Dundas West today, to Black Cat Artspace. It was already just a few minutes before 9 when the streetcar finally arrived after a long wait, so I actually sort of expected to find a closed gallery when I got there. But of course, art openings don’t usually actually close at 9 (unlike Artscape Youngspace… =P). The opening was still going when I finally got off at Roncevalles. “Come in!” I looked around, marvelling at what I saw. “Is there anything you like?” “Everything is so cool!” RT described “Tag on Cups” (that’s what it’s called) as “Graffiti artists around the city decorating prethrown cups.” But I don’t think “decorating” is doing justice to what’s there. Every single cup there was sgrafitto, mishima, or both. I was really impressed with the underglazing. And the patterns and the drawings and paintings—I tried painting once and I know what I saw was a lot of work. Yes, I know this is technically surface decoration, but this is very intricate “decoration” we’re talking about. What really struck me the most, though, was that everything was so tactile. When I do sgraffito or mishima, the glaze would fill the holes and lines and smoothen the resulting surface out. Not these cups. You can still very much feel the carved parts—even the thin delineating lines of patterned lettering. (Ok, RT has corrected me: The surfaces were carved; it was not sgrafitto or mishima. And it was body stain, not underglaze. I failed to recognize what techniques have been used. But I’m still very impressed.) Which brings us back to our program’s “Del” show last Friday. One of the pieces was a tactile painting. But compared to these cups, that painting was not very tactile at all. In fact, the day before I went to Del I was at MOCCA, and I was looking at the other set of oil paintings (the first set was oil on plexiglass—on the back of the plexiglass—so the surface was completely smooth), and I was marvelling how three dimensional those paintings were. The only thing I didn’t do was to actually touch them. But those paintings were all more tactile than the “tactile” painting at Del. I’m still unhappy that Del was a two-hour show, and with close to non-existent promotion. But I’m also wondering if we’re being misinformed about the status quo of how tactile normal art forms are. Both Tags on Cups and what I saw at Mocca show that a lot of art is already very tactile…