Skin
Session One 3-day
Instructor: Wolfgang Suetzl
Skin
The separation between two spaces- an inner and outer space- a boundary.
If the skin is more than just surface, if it also has depth making it a site of signification, then I would like to use it as a metaphor for the ‘gap’. For me the ‘gap’ refers to a space with undefinable parameters, it might have boundaries, but the distance between these boundaries are in a state of flux, ever changing and indistinct. The size of the ‘gap’ is determined by the particular point of view from which it is observed at any given moment. [rt]
Benthien, Claudia (2002). Skin. On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World. Chapter 2: Boundary Metaphors. New York: Columbia University Press.
Skin In Language
Two very different concepts:
1. A foreign something, existing outside of and concealing the true self
2. We are our skin.
Is the tendency to use the first concept more readily a result of the shift to an emphasis of the self as a mental construct rather than a physical being? Is it also the result of our being more aware of the physical contents the skin covers to the extent we can reduce those contents to the building blocks of our physiological/biological being? [rt]
Past: the surface of the body was the most essential part of the person
Skins and hides of all creatures were more valuable as a means of protection before synthetic materials became available to us. [rt]
“And to escape with our skins we must risk our skins.” [Goethe]
“I’ve got to lose this skin I’m imprisoned in…” [Tymon Dogg]
“Beauty is only skin deep” and “women have several skins”
Skin and gender identity
Ways we hide our hides...cosmetics and clothing. German expression for a woman not wearing cosmetics “Fruchtschnitte” implies a purity...no added sugar “ungezuckert”.[rt]
“The difference between surface and what lies beneath sets in motion a fluctuating interplay between being and appearance that, in the end, leaves open the question whether truth is hidden inside or reveals itself on the outermost layer of the body (Mattenklott 1982, 14ff)” (23)
Garments and Houses
Decorative facades signify the status the occupant.
Clothes make the man. [rt]
Simplification of the outer facade to expose the inner support structure, the bare surface of the walls.
Modern steel support systems, balloon construction. The structure becomes the facades...the bones are exposed. Criticism of these construction techniques imply that the lightness, the lack of inner support structures or decorative facades hung on massive supporting structures, denotes a lack of content, of depth. [rt]
Significance of home ownership to a migratory existence. What the loss of home means to the self/identity. If we lose our home do we also lose the boundaries by which we define our self? Is a means of coping with the loss of house or home the creation of a ‘new’ home, personal boundaries carried on the body like a turtle carries a shell?[rt]
Elias-- modern experience of the closed/walled off home
Gated communities and walled compounds as the answer to separating and protecting those who have a home from those who do not. But whose skin is thicker? [rt]
Psychoanalysis and two architectural approaches to the home. [rt]
“..., it is the skin that is looked at and touched, because it alone is accessible.” (34)
Thoughts on the early childhood process of individuation. The child still unable to consistently speak of his or her self using “I” discovers the skin peeling away from his or her hand or foot. Curious at first, the curiosity turns to fear as awareness of the “I’ beneath the skin grows. The six year old no longer runs unclothed, he or she has learned to hide the hide; a slight scrape or paper cut requires a multitude of bandages to cover the broken skin to prevent escape or contamination of the internal by all that outside the skin. [rt]
Connor, Steven (2004). The Book of Skin. Chapter 1: Complexion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
“I identify as black,” Rachel Dolezal
“..., the colour of the skin was held to be the expression of the way in which the entire body was knitted together.” (3)
Aristotle-- the skin both medium and product of the excretions of that contained within.
Overcoming the taboo of cutting into the skin for medical study.
If skin is only superficial and what matters is that which lay beneath, is this the reason why it became so easy to dismiss painting? Thin or thick, it is just a substance which gets in the way of our getting to the important stuff which lays beneath...the bones.[rt]
Aristotle-- skin cannot feel; the ability to feel connotates life
‘Humours’ expressed through complexion denote the temperament of the individual; today when we speak of complexion we often speak more of texture or condition than we do of colour...
Really? I think we speak equally of both, though we often do not want to admit that we speak of colour as much as we use to...it's easier to say we mean young/old/dry/oily/combination when we say complexion...but bronzers and lighteners sell as much as astringents and lotions.[rt]
Pores- channels between the inside and outside, keep balance, make skin an organ of interchange
The function/role of skin beginning from a medical-philosophical perspective.
To the ancient world the skin maintained the body’s integrity, the interior organs rot, but the skin can be preserved [embalmed] to house the remaining soul.
“The skin was that unseen through which the body must be seen, the ground against which the body figured.” (11) [Michel Serres]
split occurs--
the skin as the cover of the body and expression of the complexion of the soul vs. membrane whose task is maintain the balance via elimination of waste
Michel Serres-- philosophy of the senses with the skin as a screen, a membrane, a place of mingling, where inside and outside meet, the skin is the common ground of all senses [common sense].
For Serres the skin is more than surface, it is where “world and body meet and touch”.
For me this is the ‘gap’.[rt]
“The object of thought seems to prescribe the manner of its being thought.” (12)
“The skin always takes the body with it.” (13)
In PT I was told by the therapist who taped me the first time KT tape works by gently lifting the skin so that ‘flow’ to and from the injured or inflamed tissue could help the body heal itself. She could not explain to me what was ‘flowing’. But the tendonitis did subside, so something worked. I continue to tape injured and inflamed areas, even after being convinced that the only thing flowing is the placebo effect. I’ve even recommended KT tape to others, who also believe it works because of belief and not because it ‘lifts the skin from the flesh’ and allows the healing energy to flow.[rt]
“we invent with our bodies, and thereby reinvent those bodies….Our bodies are the kind that are always in question, or transition, are always work in progress.” (13)
Our identity is always in a state of flux. [rt]
Serres- sense of soul resides in the fingertips...the soul is what lies just beyond the fingertips
The soul is dependent upon touch, the soul is touch, we feel/touch with our soul. [rt]
“The skin...a model of the self preserved against change, and also reborn through change.” (13)
Mummies, zombies, ghosts...walking skins, rags and shells. Michelangelo’s self portrait as flayed skin.
Skin= wholeness
“one can never feel the whole of one’s skin all at once.” (15)
One can never know the whole of one’s self all at once. We try with mirrors, but our knowledge is limited by the experience, something is missing, tactility. Reminded of why I like to swim, be completely submerged in water. Reminded of the joy some infants express in the first ‘bath’, the first swim. Submerged in water we feel as much of our wholeness as we can, it is relaxing and exhausting. [rt]
Space-- “the outside of every outside, which has no shape of its own” (17)
“Space is always whole, because it is never in any particular place.” (17)
Bachelard-- material imagination/imagination of matter.
What do you think thinking might be? Skin is both matter and image, stuff and sign.
Subject and object? [rt]
Volume of skin--sewn, pieced, picked, tattooed.
“There is thus an important imaginative link between the point and the thread,...” (19)
Our action and utterances bound in our skin. Habeas corpus.
Benthien (2002), Chapter 8: Different Skin.
Skin Colors in Literature and the History of Science
Racist practice of othering...the non-white is always the ‘other’, the white is the base, the neutral [Buffon].
white-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------black
light------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------dark
the space between, a ‘gap’, is filled with every shade imaginable, yet we fixate on the poles. This is not a case of one end of the line or the other...but the space between imaginary borders. [rt]
17th Century- ethnic differentiation via skin color
black=colored and white=neutral yet both are achromatic
the actual colors which make the skin, yellow, red, blue, etc. are chromatic.
This is something I never understood as a child, and was confused by more when I was first taught the color wheel in art class. I could tell my classmates were not ‘black’ anymore than I was ‘white’. The crayons we used to draw each other were brown, peach (at the time still called ‘flesh’, but we knew we were all flesh), pink, and ochre. Not black, and not white. [rt]
“...: the dark complexion is understood as something that gradually accumulates between the epidermis and the dermis and changes the skin secondarily. The coloration imparted by intracutaneous membrane is thus described as a chemical process- akin to oxidation or clotting- that is not completed until after birth: “ (149)
Enlightenment to 19th Century-- African people reduced to their skin, European to their eyes. Skin color used to deny ‘humanness’, the darker the skin the less likely the visible blush, an expression of feelings, and feelings were understood as a sign of humanity.
21st Century-- we still do not [and probably never will- rt] know WHY skin color developed...we only know now how it developed.
“postulated invisibility of white skin” Black Like Who?
Color and Form--dark skin, European features
reminds me of the first Supermodels with darker skin- Iman, Naomi Campbell. It would be another 10-20 years before Alek Wek would walk the runway and grace the pages of Vogue and Elle.[rt]
Kleist- Betrothal in St. Domingo
Babekan “the “shadow of kinship”...does not protect…” (157)
I grew up in a larger, mid-western US in the years of and immediately following desegregation of the public schools in that city. I attended schools with strictly, judicially mandated racial-balance. My circle of friends reflected this. Age ten, fourth grade, recess was spent playing jump rope...double-dutch with two ropes turned at alternating directions. One day the girls decided we would jump in teams. A competition. “Light skin against dark” they cried, and then began dividing each other into teams. I naturally thought I would jump with the light skin team my friend J. was leading, but I was told no, I belonged to the dark skin team, not because I was dark, I was rather pale with dark eyes and reddish hair, but because I wasn’t “mixed”. That day I learned what intraracial racism is, and that it is just as nonsensical as any form of racism.[rt]
“The awareness that the skin has the character of a garment, and the realization that ethnic identity is merely a worn identity,...” (161)
Agamben, Giorgio (2011): Nudities. Chapter 7: Nudity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
“The event that was not produced...called the very nudity of the human body unequivocally into question.” (57)
The theological significance of nudity is not nudity itself, but awareness of a change in relationship…Eve separated herself from the trinity which was formed under the cloak of grace/light..Adam, Eve and God. By asserting herself as an individual she precipitated the Fall. The replacement of the cloak of grace/light with God-given animal skins sent Eve and Adam back to the herd of creation, to the other ‘animals’, assert your individuality there! Or learn to behave yourself and maybe you’ll regain the cloak of grace/light...[rt]
“Nudity is something that one notices…”(59)
Awareness that one is the ‘exception’ in the situation...if all others are clothed/unclothed [the same] I become more aware of the state of difference/individuality I occupy. [rt]
“This woman is the tenacious custodian of paradisical nudity.” (62)
Stripped down to a state of nakedness...nude...we are all the same, yet our individuality is most apparent when we lack apparel; in our ‘natural state’. [rt]
“Nudity is not actually a state but rather an event.” (65)
“...nudity belongs to time and history, not to being and form.” (65)
Striptease is the impossibility of nakedness because of our relationship with nudity.
“...nudity can never satiate the gaze to which it is offered.” (66)
We know that beneath the nudity there is a nakedness unrevealed to us; what is this we cannot see? [rt]
“like children”--”the nostalgia for nudity without shame” (71)
I remember a hot and humid day in early June. We were hosting a garden party at our home. Our son, age 3 at the time, had a small plastic pool to cool off in. Before the party he had been playing with a few toys in a wading pool. As our friends and their children arrived, the kids began to run around, growing hotter and sweatier. One child took off his or her clothes and climbed into the pool, another did the same while a third began to add some more water from the garden hose. Soon a dozen pre-school age kids were running and playing naked in back, beside, in front of, and inside our house. All of these kids sans-clothes had at least one European born and bred parent. The kids who remained in clothes had both parents who were raised in the USA. The next day a neighbor who was invited with her family to the party told me her daughter, age 3 and a daily play-companion of my son, had come into their kitchen after she had looked out the window and seen the party had started.
The girl said “bye Mom, I’m going over to L---’s house now”.
The mother had her back to her daughter, and when she turned to face her she saw the girl had taken off all her clothes and stood naked in front of her.
In shock the mother said, “not like that! go put your clothes back on!”
The girl said “but all the other kids aren’t wearing any, why should I?”
“Because we wear clothes!” the mother said.
Sartre “Being and Nothingness”- relationship with the other
“...the supreme challenge of grace is to exhibit the body unveiled with no clothing, with no veil except grace itself.” (74)
If grace is a veil, how can the body be unveiled yet at the same time veiled in grace? [rt]
the sadist equates the obscene with the loss of grace; being the object for the other is the equivalent of ungraceful
“Nudity is that thing that must be presupposed as prior to grace in order for something like sin to occur.” (78)
ex. Helmut Newton’s diptych-- in neither order of the images does nudity take place
“Fashion is the profane heir of the theology of clothing, the mercantile secularization of the prelapsarian Edenic condition.” (81)
“What do we come to know by knowing nudity?” (81)
Something is lost. But what? Ignorance or identity? Which one? And does the loss precipitate the search? Where do we search, inside or outside the self?
“The Fall is therefore not a fall of the flesh but of the mind.” (82)
The trembling which makes the body knowable, yet ungraspable….the quiver that signifies the body, the identity is fluid, not solid, fixed, graspable.
“The nudity of the human body is its image--that is, the trembling that makes this body knowable but that remains, in itself, ungraspable. Hence the unique fascination that images exercise over the human mind. Precisely because the image is not the thing, but the thing’s knowability (its nudity) it neither expresses nor signifies the thing. Nevertheless, inasmuch as it is nothing other than the giving of the thing over to knowledge, nothing other than the stripping off of the clothes that cover it, nudity is not separate from the thing, it is the thing itself.” (84)
W. Benjamin moved beyond the theological
“...whereupon revelation dissolves all secrets” (85)
Portraits- face/body relationship-- the nakedness of our face contrasted with our covered bodies. The face is where the human expresses him or herself.
I think of cultures in which the face along with the body is almost completely covered. The act of covering is often taken as an act of controlling expression. Or when the choice is made to cover the face, it can be an act of self-control, limiting or choosing the parameters of access to personal identity. And when we chose to reveal not only the face, but the body in its nudity, are we truly revealing the identity within? [rt]
See Part B, second year proposal outline
Classen, Constance, The Deepest Sense. A Cultural History of Touch. Chapter 6: Tactile Arts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
“...the sense of touch was believed to have access to interior truths of which sight was unaware….Touch functioned to correct the misconceptions of sight.”(277)
In English it is said something touched our heart or touched our soul; not something smelled/tasted, heard our heart or our soul. Though sometimes we say someone looked into, or saw into our heart or our soul. [rt]
touch- bridges space and time (278)
“One might assume, however that paintings, at least, would be left untouched; surely all one can do with a painting is look at it. While paintings may not have attracted great tactile interest, however, they did not altogether escape handling.” (279)
I have a friend, a librarian with a degree in art history and a background in handling art. We joke that every time I go with him to a museum he always gets reprimanded by a guard for touching the art. I once left him with my child, in the courtyard of MoMA while I viewed a special exhibit in peace. I came back to the courtyard to see my son climbing a David Smith sculpture while my friend photographed him...and a guard approached him to remove the child from the art. The guard then surrounded most of the sculptures in the courtyard with velvet ropes. It was five years before we took my son back to MoMA. It is one of his favorite places.
“Portraits, in particular, has long called forth gestures of intimacy because of their ability to evoke human presence.” (280)
elimination of touch has become an acceptance of only engaging through our other senses
How much of this has enabled the digital age to flourish? If we are no longer allowed to touch, then we suppress the desire to touch, and this leads to forgetting how to touch...until screens responsive to the touch were invented. My children are seven years apart in age. The older one was 7 years old when we got our first touch screen device, the younger one was an infant. By the time the younger one was two and saw the black rectangle in the living room display moving pictures and sounds he instinctively went to it and touched and swiped to see if it would respond, and was frustrated when it did not. His grandparents, almost 80, struggle to get their smart phones to respond in the way they want to...
Have museum’s curated themselves out of a physical existence? Maybe not. After all, they produce spectacular events which bring the public in en masse. But often the galleries housing the collections are empty...who wants to look at something standing so far back? What about the digitization of collections? And the Kindle revolution? I do read digital books, when practical reasons for accessing them in that format outweigh preferential reasons for holding them in my hands and turning their pages. But I’d much rather do the later than the former.
Prohibiting touch for me inhibits intimacy. The reason I make objects is because I like to touch the materials. The reason I write long hand with paper and pen as well as type on a keypad and not a touch screen...I want to feel the process. And what’s more, I want the viewer to be able to feel the process too. Therefore I have been trying to make my work as tactile as possible; even if this means violating the ‘rules’ of touch.
This past fall I created works that required touch. One piece, Wanderland, required the viewer to travel through a narrow hallway filled with works on paper, hanging from ceiling to floor, making it impossible to travel across the space without touching the work. One of the viewers I invited to experience the work is also a curator. His initial response to the piece was a near panic attack [but only near, he remained in control of his self] because he could not help thinking “Don’t touch the art! But what do I do if the art is touching me?”. Maybe this becomes an answer to the ‘not touching the art rule’...make the art touch the viewer.[rt]