{"id":18391,"date":"2023-09-14T13:14:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-14T13:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=18391"},"modified":"2023-09-14T13:14:02","modified_gmt":"2023-09-14T13:14:02","slug":"ruptured-envelopes-double-shells-skins-in-art-in-the-age-of-global-mobility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=18391","title":{"rendered":"Ruptured Envelopes, Double Shells: Skins in Art in the Age of Global Mobility"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I have always thought that artistic creation is a way for the skinless.
To provide oneself with skin.
\u2014Kristina Lugn, \u201cThe Dog Moment\u201d1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Skin is looming increasingly large across cultural studies and aesthetic theory, with scholars approaching this largest of biological organs from an array of sociocultural, psychoanalytical, and phenomenological perspectives.2<\/a><\/sup> \u201cSkin is in,\u201d as Claudia Benthien\u2019s succinct appraisal has it.3<\/a><\/sup> Over the last three decades, artists have engaged skin as a risky boundary: an interface affording \u201cinter-embodiment,\u201d yet haunted by the risk of uninvited permeation.4<\/a><\/sup> During the COVID-19 pandemic, borders have become sites of acute tension; the bodily borders of individual human beings are negotiated no less anxiously. Early twenty-first-century art experiments with skin in a striking variety of media\u2014from animal hides to latex and silicone, from body painting to performance and bioart.5<\/a><\/sup> Through these diverse approaches and practices, contemporary artists often relate to skin as both a site of dangerous exposure and a type of armor, assuming the form of a second skin. I explore mediations of skin in early twenty-first-century art, skin here being conceived as both a semantic trope and a concrete material presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aesthetic experience intersects with somatosensory and cultural vectors. To grasp these conjunctures, my account couples a historical sense of how skin-related art addresses the condition of global mobility, entailing diasporicity and \u201cskinlessness,\u201d with a phenomenological reflection on skin\u2019s haptic appeal. Along the phenomenological trajectory, I draw upon the growing discourse on haptic visuality and embodied aesthetics.6<\/a><\/sup> Reviewing the growing body of empirical evidence indicating that sensorimotor information is involved in how people process artworks,7<\/a><\/sup> Kendall Eskine and Aaron Kozbelt argue that \u201can embodied approach to an abstract domain like aesthetics should fruitfully inform our understanding of that domain.\u201d8<\/a><\/sup> Taking up these ideas, I adopt a somato-cultural approach that connects individual viewers\u2019 somatosensory experiences with the sociocultural conditions under which skin emerges as a meaningful medium.9<\/a><\/sup> Benthien has also sought to marry these concerns, stressing \u201cthe immense significance of skin as a symbolic form for cultural processes as a whole and its importance to the individuation and self-becoming of the human being, in particular.\u201d10<\/a><\/sup> Presupposing a synergy between these complementary historical and sensorial critical modes, I closely analyze a corpus of skin-related installations and videos. In and through these analyses, I show how skin signifies in an age in which mobility dissolves not only geopolitical borders but also subjective boundaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Steven Connor compellingly suggests, \u201c[p]erhaps the skin means, more than anything else in particular, the necessity for there to be a ground.\u201d11<\/a><\/sup> The concepts of skin-as-ground and skin-as-home resonate with the organ\u2019s biological and psychological functions as a protective limit and enveloping shell. Naomi Segal has pointed out that \u201cwith a world running out of control, there is a need \u2018to set limits.\u2019\u201d12<\/a><\/sup> To illustrate this point, she describes how \u201c[m]aths, biology, and neurophysiology have all become sciences of interfaces, membranes and borders.\u201d13<\/a><\/sup> Here I work with and through tropes of the skin as an identity marker, protective shell, and interface. Skins figure as productive means of engaging with borders and envelopes that are so tenuous they have to be fortified. Yet millennial skin-related art is not as politically explicit as some more outspoken migratory art projects.14<\/a><\/sup> The installations to which I attend both subtly probe forms of insecurity that people feel in their own skin and query various Other skins. Heidi Kellett has postulated a \u201cdialogic exchange between skins,\u201d which she deems crucial to experiencing skin-based art.15<\/a><\/sup> In this vein, I conclude by putting forward the phenomenological claim, supported by recent empirical studies, that skin-related art, at its best, might foster a \u201cpresence effect\u201d that serves to reawaken viewers to their own skin envelopes and embodiment therein.16<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The corpus under scrutiny clusters around three foci, which echo the skin\u2019s symbolic functions in Didier Anzieu\u2019s Skin-Ego theory (on which I will elaborate presently).17<\/a><\/sup> Inevitable overlaps notwithstanding, the works are subsumed under the categories of double shells, skin fetishes, and destructured skins. I will discuss Nandipha Mntambo\u2019s work with raw cowhides; Ana \u00c1lvarez-Errecalde\u2019s synthetic skin-suits; Jessica Harrison\u2019s imprinting of her own skin onto clay; the latex-clad protagonists of Wu Tien-chang\u2019s videos; Pamela Rosenkranz\u2019s work with the pink silicon known as Dragon Skin; Penny Siopis\u2019s invocations of the South African horror figure Pinky Pinky<\/em> in thickly laid oil paint; and Michel Platnic\u2019s overpainting of faces and bodies in his video emulations of Francis Bacon and Egon Schiele.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Anzieu: The Skin-Ego, Double Shells, and Skin Fetishes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Didier Anzieu\u2019s Skin-Ego theory has been recognized as a useful bridge between psychoanalytical and cultural concepts of skin.18<\/a><\/sup> Here, I look particularly to Anzieu\u2019s evocative use of skin myths, which provide a useful analytical framework within which to approach skin-related art. To situate these myths, a brief review of the Skin-Ego and its related set of concepts is in order. Anzieu\u2019s psychoanalytical theory positions skin as \u201ca primary datum which has elements of both the organic and the imaginary.\u201d19<\/a><\/sup> The Skin-Ego is thus conceived of as the interiorization of very early bodily and psychic sensations: of being shielded, contained, and physically supported by a caregiver within a shared skin-envelope.20<\/a><\/sup> This concept is premised on Anzieu\u2019s insistence that \u201cevery psychical function develops by leaning anaclitically on a bodily function, whose workings it transposes to the mental plane.\u201d21<\/a><\/sup> Like biological skin, the Skin-Ego thus fulfills the functions of a shield, barrier, containing envelope, and sensitive interface, \u201cfiltering exchanges (with the id, the superego and the outside world).\u201d22<\/a><\/sup> The Skin-Ego is formed on an interiorized supporting object, which provides a stable core for the fully individuated self.23<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I follow Rikke Hansen and a range of other cultural critics in adopting Anzieu\u2019s theory as a \u201csuggestive starting point\u201d for cultural analysis.24<\/a><\/sup> Anzieu himself was the first to reach across received distinctions between the regimes of culture and biology by broaching the cultural dimensions of the Skin-Ego. While acknowledging the skin\u2019s physiological role as an interface with reality, Anzieu asserted that skin also constitutes a primary cultural medium, as evidenced by social markings such as incisions, tattoos, makeup, and clothing.25<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Connor has suggested extending Skin-Ego theory into the realm of the \u201ccultural-poetic,\u201d broadening the Skin-Ego\u2019s containing function to account for the complexity and plurality of contemporary subjectivities.26<\/a><\/sup> As Marc Lafrance has maintained, Anzieu\u2019s relevance to cultural theory lies in how his theory demonstrates the crucial role of limits in forming human subjectivity, especially in relation to contemporary conditions of \u201cfluidity, instability, and malleability.\u201d27<\/a><\/sup> It is for this reason that Anzieu\u2019s emphasis on the centrality of skin\u2014as both a cultural signifier and sensory medium\u2014is at the heart of my argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Anzieu\u2019s formulation, the Skin-Ego has nine functions.28<\/a><\/sup> Of these, those of \u201ccontaining\u201d and \u201cindividuation\u201d are most relevant to the present discussion.29<\/a><\/sup> Recalling myths involving flaying\u2014particularly the flaying of the satyr Marsyas for outshining Apollo in a musical contest\u2014Anzieu outlines the universal fantasy of a mutual skin connecting baby and mother. The painful yet inescapable rift from the supportive body leaves the Self bereft of containment and support.30<\/a><\/sup> Of particular interest here is the fantasy of the double wall, evoking \u201cthe protective wrapping, . . . which in phantasy one imagines taking from another person in order to . . . duplicate and strengthen one\u2019s own.\u201d31<\/a><\/sup> For Anzieu, the flaying of Marsyas, despite its grotesqueness, bears redemptive potential. Although the containing and shielding skin becomes painfully detached from its grounding medium, it is \u201cconserved whole and this ensures . . . the sustaining of life and the restoration of fertility.\u201d32<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the fundamental skin mythemes (narrative units of myths) that Anzieu highlights, the story of Zeus\u2019s aegis or overgarment that was prepared from the skin of Amaltheia the nanny goat, pertains most directly to my discussion of doubled and fetishized skins. \u201cThe aegis not only makes a perfect shield in battle,\u201d writes Anzieu, \u201cbut also augments Zeus\u2019s powers, leading him to his unique destiny as the master of Olympus.\u201d33<\/a><\/sup> Another skin mytheme pertains to the river Marsyas gushing beneath the suspended skin of the offending satyr. Anzieu associates the river with \u201cinstinctual energy . . . available only to those who have preserved the integrity of their Skin-Ego.\u201d34<\/a><\/sup> A flayed yet vital skin figures centrally in these myths of recuperation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In what follows, I look at a selection of installations that engage in anxious attempts to regrow epidermic envelopes and graft them onto injured Skin-Egos. I draw on Anzieu\u2019s \u201cfantasy of the double wall\u201d35<\/a><\/sup> and that of the \u201csecond muscular skin.\u201d36<\/a><\/sup> In Anzieu, the double wall is conceived as an imaginary defense ensuring the wholeness of the skin ego,37<\/a><\/sup> whereas the second muscular skin indicates a \u201cprosthetic substitute,\u201d an objectified container countering internal fragmentation. I refer to the first as a double shell and the second as a skin fetish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The double shells and skin fetishes addressed in the following section tap into a frightening sense of dissociation from the body. The idea of dissociation, which Anzieu finds in myths and fantasies of flaying, resonates in Franz Fanon\u2019s concept of \u201cepidermalization,\u201d38<\/a><\/sup> or the formation a \u201cracial-epidermal schema\u201d39<\/a><\/sup> imposed by an objectifying, racist gaze. This construction of corporeal existence impairs the innate constitution of a bodily self. Fanon pictures detachment from the healthy, intuitive body schema as \u201can amputation, an excision,\u201d through which one is \u201c[s]ealed into . . . crushing objecthood.\u201d40<\/a><\/sup> Similarly, some installations to which I turn in the following sections render the skin a detached and objectified epidermal shell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Skin as Home and Global Mobility<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In focusing on the growing prominence of these epidermal shells in art installations, I bring the Skin-Ego to bear on contemporary art engaging with the dissolution of borders. In a cultural order pervaded by mobility, whether forced or voluntary, skin functions as a surface on which identity and belonging, body image and social standing are negotiated. Skin is and has been the quintessential focus of racism, discrimination, and persecution throughout history, and remains inscribed in contemporary culture as a crucial marker of Otherness.41<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When approached in relation to art, though, there is more at stake in skin than individuals\u2019 experience. Mieke Bal has proposed that \u201caesthetic encounter is migratory if it takes place in the space of, on the basis of, and on the interface with, the mobility of people as a given, as central, and as at the heart of what matters in the contemporary, that is, \u2018globalized\u2019 world.\u201d42<\/a><\/sup> For Bal, mobility is a pervasive sociocultural phenomenon, which is not limited to individual biographies. It is important that I stress this point at the very outset of my discussion, for it bears on the corpus that I examine. I do not limit my analysis to artists whose lives are marked by migration, or artworks that explicitly address the politics of migration. Rather, I concur with Murat Aydemir and Alex Rotas that the migratory participates in \u201cformations and processes that may well, at first sight, seem untouched by migration.\u201d43<\/a><\/sup> Here, I am concerned with works that, instead of explicitly foregrounding mobility as their subject matter, relate to the idea of skin as home or ground, a sheltering envelope and an identity marker. Thus, the present discussion pivots not on the politics of migration, but rather on a sense of global turbulence that agitates our subjective and collective \u201cshells.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sara Ahmed has subtly woven skin into her phenomenological description of \u201cthe lived experience of being-at-home.\u201d44<\/a><\/sup> I find her assertion, that migration involves \u201ca spatial reconfiguration of an embodied self: a transformation in the very skin through which the body is embodied,\u201d extremely helpful.45<\/a><\/sup> Yet I seek to expand Ahmed\u2019s focus beyond \u201cthe discomfort of inhabiting a migrant body.\u201d46<\/a><\/sup> Indeed, I stress the bidirectionality of this sociocultural malaise: On one side, emigrating subjects are haunted by a loss of home and ground. On the other, receiving communities are simultaneously deeply unsettled, as limits and borders become porous and permeable. Amid such contingencies, \u201chuman beings feel increasingly less sheltered in the skin,\u201d Benthien asserts.47<\/a><\/sup> Figuring global turbulence through the trope of the skin in contemporary art, then, speaks to the urgent need to seal and fortify failing envelopes while responding to intersubjective challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of the artists whose works I address here is enmeshed and engaged with this global, though regionally differentiated, condition. The ways in which they approach it, however, unfold in relation to a range of different geographical and social contexts and are colored by their diverse backgrounds and experiences. Mntambo and Siopis work in South Africa across the racial gap. Born in Zimbabwe and growing up in postapartheid South Africa, Mntambo works from a Black African position;48<\/a><\/sup> Siopis, the descendant of British and Dutch immigrants to South Africa, struggles to form a sense of belonging, ridden with guilt.49<\/a><\/sup> Early on in the postapartheid era, Okwui Enwezor (a world-leading curator and theoretician of African art) accused Siopis and other white South African artists of recycling racist tropes rather than addressing the problematics of their own past.50<\/a><\/sup> Driven to delve into her white identity in this way, Siopis\u2019s engagement with racial anxiety is manifest in her series Pinky Pinky<\/em>, which I later discuss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based like Siopis and Mntambo in a deeply troubled home country, Wu Tien-chang evokes Taiwan\u2019s traumatic history of Chinese martial rule (1949\u201387). Coerced into adopting the Chinese language and culture,51<\/a><\/sup> while at the same time inundated by American forces posted on the frontline with mainland communist China, Taiwan emerged from this period in a state of \u201cdiaspora at home.\u201d52<\/a><\/sup> Wu addresses identity-related tensions in his video installation Farewell, Spring and Autumn Pavilions<\/em> (2015), discussed here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Active in Barcelona, Spain, the Argentinian artist \u00c1lvarez-Errecalde remains within the cultural perimeter of the Spanish-speaking world.53<\/a><\/sup> Her position perhaps best befits Anne Petersen\u2019s description of contemporary itinerant artists as \u201ctransnational cultural worker[s].\u201d54<\/a><\/sup> Creating empty skin-suits tagged with the geographical and personal details of their original \u201cwearers,\u201d she posits a void at the center of identity. Harrison and Rosenkranz are based in Scotland and Switzerland, respectively. The geopolitical circumstances of these countries are not nearly as troubled as those of South Africa, Taiwan, or Argentina. Rosenkranz\u2019s expressed aversion toward national identification, along with her ongoing uneasiness about Caucasian-tinted skin functioning as an identity marker,55<\/a><\/sup> can be understood by way of Irit Rogoff\u2019s concept of \u201cactive . . . unbelonging.\u201d56<\/a><\/sup> Although Rosenkranz is clearly apprehensive about the way in which skin can manifest ethnic Otherness, she has never openly addressed this point, which might bear on her biography. Finally, Platnic\u2019s immigration from France to Israel is unique within the conceptual frame of migration, in that relocating to Israel from worldwide Jewish diasporas is conceived as a homecoming, albeit mingled with uprooting. While maintaining close cultural ties with his country of birth, Platnic has described his childhood as imbued with Otherness and insecurity.57<\/a><\/sup> In Ahmed\u2019s terms, he seems to have inherited \u201ca body which feels out of place\u201d from his Jewish parents.58<\/a><\/sup> The son of a French-Jewish holocaust survivor, Platnic\u2019s overpainting of his own skin bears the weight of personal and collective trauma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite working across so many different situations and varied biographies, formal approaches, and concerns, each of these practitioners is experimenting with forms of epidermal covering or enclosure. Emerging from a mesh of mobilities\u2014some current, others originating further back in history\u2014these works tap into what I propose to read as an overwhelming sense of skinlessness in contemporary culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Double Shells, Second Skins<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a point of entry into my discussion of double shells, the first of skin\u2019s symbolic functions I addressed in this essay, I turn now to the full-body skin-suits in \u00c1lvarez-Errecalde\u2019s performative installation More Store<\/em> (2009) and the accompanying photographic series Histologies<\/em> (2011). In developing my analysis, I put \u00c1lvarez-Errecalde\u2019s skin-suits in dialogue with Mntambo\u2019s treated cowhides, which are sculpturally molded onto a cast of the artist\u2019s body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For More Store<\/em> (2009), \u00c1lvarez-Errecalde created a series of life-size, stretchy skin-suits, based on photographs of forty anonymous nude women aged eighteen to seventy-five. Visitors to the installation may wear the suits, literally donning an Other\u2019s skin. In a pseudocommercial gesture, which emphasizes the skins\u2019 transformation into wearable objects, the artist sewed tags recording each woman\u2019s age, spoken language, and nationality onto the suits.59<\/a><\/sup> Addressing the \u201coverwhelming desire to represent skin without a necessary connection to a body,\u201d Kellett reads \u00c1lvarez-Errecalde\u2019s work through the metaphor of skin-as-clothing.60<\/a><\/sup> Kellett has coined a succinct term for work in this vein: haut<\/em> [sic<\/em>] couture, which puns on haut<\/em> (skin) in German and the French haute couture (high fashion).61<\/a><\/sup> The women\u2019s skins, detached and objectified, tagged and displayed like fashion items, are patently invested in cultural critique. Yet there is no escaping the darker tones underlying this installation, which go beyond the artist\u2019s stated concern with the \u201cdevitalization, domestication and exploitation\u201d of female subjects in the global marketing system.62<\/a><\/sup> Strikingly, the row of hanging skins resonates with slaughterhouse imagery, bringing a substratum of anxiety into view. Recall Anzieu\u2019s fantasy of flayed skin functioning as a double shell: \u201cthe skin that has been torn from the body . . . represents the protective envelope, the shield, which one must take from the other in phantasy either simply to have it for oneself or to duplicate and reinforce one\u2019s own skin.\u201d63<\/a><\/sup> The connotation of flaying is amplified in \u00c1lvarez-Errecalde\u2019s subsequent, related photographic series Histologies<\/em> (2011), in which female and male protagonists wrestle with the foreign skins, struggling uneasily to either fit them on or peel them off. Fitting in and out of the skin-suits requires a double effort: not only donning an ill-fitting garment but also taking on a body image that will inevitably be distorted due to age, gender, and ethnic differences between the suit and its wearer. Whereas visitors\u2019 skin is actually stimulated in More Store<\/em>, which involves putting the skin-suits on, stimulation is only suggested when one contemplates the photographs of Histologies<\/em>. \u00c1lvarez-Errecalde is thus able to elicit somatosensory engagement, as if viewers are haptically feeling a vulnerable and often dysfunctional skin-envelope. In coming into uncomfortable proximity with \u201cthe ill-fitting \u2018flayed\u2019 skin of another,\u201d participants become more aware of their own skin.64<\/a><\/sup> Indeed, \u00c1lvarez-Errecalde\u2019s skin-suits convey a deep vulnerability, hinting at a pending failure of the fantasy of the double shell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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