Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1790-1860 (original) (raw)

Poetic elaborations regarding the skin in the art of

Translation of the text originally published in "Revista Labrys Estudos Femnistas", 2016. The relations between the corporeal or subjective forms and the aesthetical practice of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) are the starting point in this article. The author intends to generate some possibilities of meaning for the artist’s artworks, through which the fixed identities are criticized and the singularization processes are triggered. In such movement, the most important element is the skin, its production, its retraction, and expansions.

Skin Portraiture: Embodied Representations in Contemporary Art (PhD dissertation)

In recent years, human skin has been explored as a medium, metaphor, and milieu. Images of and objects made from skin flesh out the critical role it plays in experiences of embodiment such as reflexivity, empathy, and relationality, expanding conceptions of difference. This project problematizes the correlation between the appearance of the epidermis and a person’s identity. By depicting the subject as magnified, fragmented, anatomized patches of skin, “skin portraiture”—a sub-genre of portraiture I have coined—questions what a portrait is and what it can achieve in contemporary art. By circumnavigating and obfuscating the subject’s face, skin portraiture perforates the boundaries and collapses the distance between bodies. Feminist, this project pays attention to skin portraits made by women. To better understand skin, each chapter is focused on a particular skin metaphor. In the preface, a consideration of skin and its representation leads into an investigation of the skin-as-self metaphor in the introduction (chapter one). Framing the skin as an organ we dwell in, the skin-as-home metaphor (chapter two) explores touch and its role in experiences of empathy. Turning to the idea that skin is a garment, the skin-as-clothing metaphor (chapter three) fleshes out relationality and a queering of skin. Tackling race and skin colour, the skin- as-screen metaphor (chapter four) investigates the embodied experiences of mixed-raced, multicultural women. Addressing a loss of difference at the level of skin within bioengineering, the skin-as-technology metaphor (chapter five) considers the collapse of differences between bodies and species within bio-art.

Rosenthal + Vanderbeke - Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone

2015

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores representations of skin in literature, art, art history, visual media, and medicine and its history. The essays collected here probe the symbolic potential of skin as a shifting sign in various historical and cultural contexts, and also examine the material and organic properties of the body’s largest organ. They deal with skin as a sensual organ, as an interface or contact zone, as the visual marker of identity, and as a lieu de memoire in different periods and media. In its material characteristics, skin is regarded as a medium, a canvas, a surface, and an object of both artistic and medical investigations. The contributions investigate representations of skin in sculpture, painting, film, and fictional, as well as non-fictional, texts from the 16th century to the present. The topics addressed here include the problematic representation of racial identity via skin colour in various media; the sensual qualities of the skin, such as smell or taste; the form and function of tattoos as markers of personal, as well as collective, identity; and scars as signifiers of personal pain and collective suffering.

The Deceptive Surface: Perception and Sculpture’s “Skin”

In the eighteenth century, sculptors such as Antonio Canova often experimented with polychromy, using wax or grind water to subtly tint their figures’ flesh. In this article, I examine viewers’ discomfort with these surface treatments. I argue that viewers reacted negatively to the colored surface of works such as Hebe and Penitent Magdalene because they found it to be deceptive. First, encaustic treatments mellowed the marble surface, giving modern works the appearance of antiquities. Second, the “reality effect” created by color threatened sculpture’s status as high art. Finally, hyper-realism also suggested that the sculpture’s surface was exactly that—that is to say, only a surface, a shell that contained the messy reality of the body. The polychrome surface therefore oscillated between ancient and modern, flesh and stone, penetrable and impenetrable and raised larger aesthetic, philosophical and scientific issues.

Matisse’s La Danse: On the Semantics of the Surface in Modern Painting

Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics, 2008

Since in Modernism inner meaning is doubted or believed lost, the question arises of what an interpretation ignoring the established dialectics of outside and inside and limiting itself to an exclusive surface would look like. Henri Matisse's 'decorations' raise questions about the differences between figure and background, appearance and essence, inside and outside. Instead of reference to depth under the surface, it is density and expansion, concentration and contraction, which determine the occurrence of meaning on the surface. Matisse presents himself as a flâneur of the surface, as if he wanted to show us, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, that '[i]t is by following the border, by skirting the surface, that one passes from bodies to the corporeal'. Henri Matisse La Danse. Zur Semantik der Oberfläche in der Malerei der Moderne Wie in der Moderne ein innerer Sinn verloren geglaubt oder fragwürdig geworden ist, so drängt sich die Frage auf, welcher Art eine Sinngebung ist, wenn auf die tradierte Dialektik von außen und innen verzichtet wird und wenn der Raum sich in einer exklusiven Oberfläche erschöpfen soll. Henri Matisses "Dekorationen" stellen augenscheinlich die Unterscheidung von Figur und Grund, Schein und Wesen, außen und innen zur Disposition. Nicht der Verweis auf ein Inneres unter der Oberfläche, nicht Tiefe, sondern Dichte und Ausdehnung, Konzentration und Kontraktion bestimmen das Bedeutungsgeschehen an der Oberfläche. Matisse präsentiert sich als ein Flaneur der Oberfläche, als wolle er uns mit den Worten Deleuzes zeigen: "Wir gehen von den Körpern zum Unkörperlichen über, indem wir dem Grenzverlauf folgen, indem wir über die Oberfläche entlanggleiten." What a peculiar partisanship it is that blindly favours depth at the expense of surface, that wants superficial not to mean of wide expanse but of inferior depth, while deep means of great depth and not of inferior surface. 1

The Body As Canvas As Picture: Bodypainting and its Implications for the Model

2020

Body painting turns the body into a canvas – this frequently used phrase illustrates the challenge that body painting faces: It uses a three-dimensional surface and has to cope with its irregularities, but also with the model’s abilities, likes and dislikes. After giving an introduction to the art and categorizing its various types and contexts, the article focuses on the European body painting scene and on the role of the model within the scene. Although body painting can be very challenging for her – she has to expose her body and to stand still for a long time while getting transformed – models report that they enjoy the process and the result, even if they are not confident about their own bodies. A reason is that the “double staging“ – becoming a threedimentional work of art and then being staged for a photograph – remotes the body from the model and gives her the chance to see her painted body detached from herself. On the one hand, body painting closely relates to the body, o...