| Less than two years ago, Dutch artist Joanneke Meester made national headlines with a small pistol, sewn from her own skin. Recently, she participated in the group exhibition, “Fantasy Island – Exhibition Robinson” in Mama: Showroom for Media and Moving Art Rotterdam, located at the Witte de Withstraat. Her work reflects her continued fascination with skin. Meester’s contribution consisted of two works; one a Barbie doll, tightly wrapped up in pigskin and, another, one of her video portraits, which are silent films featuring actors dressed in concealing full body suits. Skin, but more so what’s underneath it, forms a central theme in her work. |  |
Mutilated Dolls and Pigskin – Dennis de Lange on the art of Joanneke Meester
Less than two years ago, Dutch artist Joanneke Meester made national headlines with a small pistol, sewn from her own skin. Recently, she participated in the group exhibition, “Fantasy Island – Exhibition Robinson” in Mama: Showroom for Media and Moving Art Rotterdam, located at the Witte de Withstraat. Her work reflects her continued fascination with skin. Meester’s contribution consisted of two works; one a Barbie doll, tightly wrapped up in pigskin and, another, one of her video portraits, which are silent films featuring actors dressed in concealing full body suits. Skin, but more so what’s underneath it, forms a central theme in her work.
Dennis de Lange: What can you tell us about your work in Showroom Mama?
Joanneke Meester: One of the works, Untitled, is an installation consisting of a Barbie doll standing on a rotating platform. The Barbie doll is wrapped in a layer of pigskin that obscures her body so that only her form is visible. Eventually, the pigskin will decay and disappear and the doll will be fully visible again. We think of Barbie as the prime example of ideal beauty. You learn that when you’re a little girl and you still believe it at a later age. Fixating yourself on something like that, the beauty ideal, can make you very unhappy. That’s why I tried to make her a bit more realistic, a bit more human, by giving her real skin. It is because the power of her beauty is so strong that she will eventually become visible again. It’ll always be stronger, just like in our memory.
In addition to this work, one of my video portraits is also shown. It’s a short film depicting a woman rubbing her pregnant belly with an iron entitled Pregnant. For a while, it looks as if she is warming up the fetus in her belly, which then transitions into masturbation. It is almost as though she wants to iron her belly away and return to her previous self. Loneliness stands out here. With the video portraits, seven in total, I did the opposite by dehumanizing the actors, by giving them a new skin—this time a bodysuit knitted from wool. That caused the film to resemble an animated film or even a drawing. The characters all look like dolls and, because of their bodysuits, their facial expressions are hardly visible. They have become isolated and abandoned creatures. Still, you can feel the emotions that they express in their movements and in the oppressive spaces they occupy.
DL: Why did you choose to work with skin?
JM: Skin is the largest organ in our body and it is very vulnerable. We judge people on the way they look, which is their outside, their skin. We are very occupied with it. Through the external, I’m trying to reach the internal. By working with skin, I try to bring the interior out. So actually, my work has more to do with what is on the inside, the psychology. The same goes for the pistol in Untitled from 2004.
DL: You are referring to the pistol you created from your own skin. What made you do that piece?
JM: During an earlier project when I was making cuddly toys from pigskin, I came up with the idea to make something out of my own skin. At first it scared me, but I could not get it out of my head and eventually I had to do it. It is similar to the situation of someone who is obsessed with his nose being too big and who must make it smaller. I wanted to make something contradictory and I was occupied with the notion of violence. Out of my own, vulnerable skin, I decided to make a gun, an object that is able to penetrate skin from a large distance. The contradiction between the two was so large that it became a statement against violence. But the idea to work with my own skin came first. It was a boundary I wasn’t looking for, nonetheless something that I walked into. It was a part of myself. Something more pure hardly exists.
DL: What are you working on now?
JM: I am currently working on an installation entitled Klaagmuur (Wailing Wall). The wall is about ten feet high and almost 25 feet wide. Transparent plastic bags, lit from behind, will line the wall from top to bottom. The bags are filled with dolls that are mutilated, torn apart and bound together again. Violence has been used against them; they are burned and disfigured. Displayed in plastic bags, they could be viewed as products, or enclosed for conservation purposes. The backlighting lends an x-ray effect to the entire piece. From a distance, the work looks very beautiful between the bright colors, plastic and light. Up close, you see the variation and the care that is put into each doll. By intimately inspecting each doll, it is evident what has happened to them. Meticulous details such as the lace and braids in the dolls’ hair are only perceptible up close.
DL: Do you like to play with that distance?
JM: Yes I do, because of distance a work can be attractive and repulsive at the same time. I once saw a picture of a woman in Sarajevo who was identifying bodies found in mass graves. It was pretty obvious that violence was brought against them. I was fascinated by how organized she was in arranging the bones. The whole structure, the notes tied to the bones and the care she used in her work, almost turned it into something aesthetic, abstract.
That same mechanism of distance is present in my older work. The cuddly toys I made out pigskin look very cute from afar with their funny ears. But it is only when you take a closer look that you can see the pig’s nipples on the dolls’ faces.
