What is a hand? Poem by Marc Kregting

What is a hand? That might seem a naive question, but in the age of reproduction, and, whether as a result of the clash of cultures or not, plastic surgeonisation, the artist hardly resembles the superman Romanticism and Futurism would have made of him. Maybe that's for the best. It isn't always pleasant but at least beneficial to achieve a proximity to oneself. After all, the exploitation of bluffing rarely did anyone much good and without evidence to the contrary every reproduction has its original, which, without irony, is legitimately referred to as ‘natural'. One can now submit his own hand to a thorough investigation, as if that rather intimate limb has grown into something figurative. Does this make the hand of the one the hand of the other? In 1968, when at least a generation clash and a memory clash had wanted heralding in, Ton Lemaire wrote in his essay Tenderness: ‘The hand - instrument of the disaffected consciousness - comes to itself in the mercilessness of the all-embracing transfigurer and the consolation of the loving caress.'