Skin is a Language
Anne Swartz
"Skin is a Language" is a presentation of thirteen works from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s permanent collection, which generally deal with the idea of skin. The gallery location is a modest-sized space, no larger than, say, the main gallery of a 57th Street art gallery. But, modest translates into fascinating and engaging.
Carter Foster, curator of drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, co-curated this exhibition with Apsara DiQuinzio, curatorial assistant at the Whitney. After visiting the exhibition, I spoke to each of the co-curators about their ideas behind the exhibition.
You enter the gallery, which has wittily colored signage, with the letters of the exhibition title each rendered in a different flesh color. However, skin color plays into a few of the works, necessitating a consideration of what possibilities exist for the idea of skin. Skin is rich in symbolic, metaphoric, romantic and allegorical allusions. In addition to skin color, there is skin as a protection or line of defense, skin as a thin, outer layer, skin as an action of hurt, harm, covering, bruising or swindling; or there is skin as a referent for humanity, suggested by fingerprints, words, signatures or other evocative indications, like footprints.
The co-curators inverted a quotation from French literary critic Roland Barthes to highlight the multifaceted nature of skin. In A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1979), Barthes wrote: "Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire." This quotation bespeaks the sensation and possibilities for skin in art as an image, a phenomenon, a symbol and a reference. The co-curators explicitly state the themes of the exhibition in their statement as "skin as an index of identity; skin as a permeable boundary and as a tactile surface; and skin as a site for culture and sensorial perception." These broad issues are, surprisingly effectively considered in this selection of works.
The curators have installed Nancy Grossman’s Head 1968 of 1968, a sculpture of a leather covered head, and Bruce Conner’s Medusa of 1960, a black assemblage, on a stark rectangular white table on the right of center from the gallery entrance. The table acts as a podium, making connections between the small size of the Grossman and Conner sculptures more apparent. It also de-limits what might have been an otherwise potentially perverse installation of each of these sculptures; on pedestals, each could have resembled some kind of inversion of portraiture. Though that issue certainly is one aspect of these works, it would have over-emphasized it.
The table is set at a high level, almost four and a half feet, so the sculptures are slightly below eye level for the person of average height. Even though it is a relatively small sculpture, Grossman’s Head 1968 dominates the room because it is positioned in the viewer’s sight line. One of the great artists of the early days of New York’s Women’s Movement, Grossman used leather and portraiture as a way to explore aggression, violence and memory, all in life-size or slightly larger-than-life bust forms and, notably, before S&M leathermen really existed. The curators both remarked on Grossman’s work as a key source for the exhibition concept, which they wanted to examine in dialogue with Conner’s sculpture. The Medusa sculpture on the same table is a grotesque image of the mythological Medusa, a combination of wax, rubber and mesh cloth, typical of Conner’s assemblages of the period.
If you haven’t seen a Grossman work, get to the Whitney right away. Her sculptures convey a highly original and powerful aesthetic. The curators both spoke about Grossman’s use of leather as skin in the form of disguise, but I think it is much more. This leather skin reveals what’s beneath it, in much the same way our clothes, tattoos and body piercings might give information about our desires for comfort, defense or interaction. The sensuality of the leather is interrupted by the energy of its black color, the symmetrical lines of force created by the zippers striping the top of the piece and the bright whitish uncovered nose alongside two metallic stars where dimples might be on a face. Many of the references to skin that this exhibition tackles reside in this piece.
On the gallery walls, while skin color plays into several of the works in the show, it is only literally considered in Glenn Ligon’s 1993 text piece, Untitled (Ralph Ellison). Using lines from Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ligon employs a simple serif font with a scratchy, grainy presentation to draw attention to the power of the black words against the white field of the page. The effect is stunning, as is Ligon’s oeuvre, and evidences the power of speech, text and writing in conveying visibility, creativity and individuality. For a person of color, Ellison’s text deals with the presence, the existence of self, as defined and asserted by language, which Ligon then highlights through his manipulations.
On the same wall, there is a late untitled print from 1992 by David Wojonarowicz, an artist consumed by his personal explorations into art, the intersections between art and popular culture, and his homosexuality, as well as his eventual tragic decline from AIDS. This print shows a text in red letters over a black and white background photographed image of messily bandaged hands. The narrative bespeaks the idea of decline and disintegration powerfully and poetically in such lines as: "I am a Xerox of my former self…I am disappearing but not fast enough." Foster noted that this piece complemented the Lignon, prompting the viewer to consider the surface as an entity, as a "very direct expression of the idea of skin." DiQuinzio remarked on the relationship between the two pieces focused on the artistic investigations into "cultural invisibility." She further noted that these paired works help emphasize the importance of language in creating sensation, as Barthes’ quotation made clear.
Next, the viewer encounters the juxtaposition between four works on a side wall. The American artist Lebbeus Woods, who focuses on experimental architectural imagery and metaphors, is represented by an untitled print from 1993 from his "War and Architecture Series" about the destruction and rebuilding of Sarajevo. Underneath the Woods’s image of shifting wood spikes, some colored and some dotted with an occasional dab of red recalling blood, is an early untitled print of 1982 by David Wojonarowicz depicting a red figure against a map of Texas (where the artist was born) with a camouflaged plane. Next to this pairing is a 1991 print by Annette Lemieux titled Stolen Faces, which is a triptych with a color photograph of pixilated faces/masks, a center panel of military figures with their faces covered, and on the right panel is a black and white photograph with the faces missing. Alongside is a 1991 lithograph by Jasper Johns of Target with Four Faces, a two-dimensional re-working of his 1955 collage of the same name of four painted and sculpted faces above a real target attached to the canvas. These four works all suggest the importance of faces in establishing identity, since the faces depicted in these works are all compromised, missing, shielded, or camouflaged. The target in the Johns resonates with the military imagery in the three other works, recalling the vulnerability and erotics of piercing skin, what Foster termed "the implied violence of the work." These points were also made more compelling by the juxtaposition to the Grossman and Conner sculptures.
Cutting skin is an issue in the works by Ellen Gallagher and Catherine Opie, which are paired on the next gallery wall. Gallagher’s untitled mixed media work of 2001 is one of the most surprisingly delicate works in the exhibition, despite the artist’s visceral treatment of the paper. She constructed the piece by ripping away at the top layer of the paper, literally skinning it. The work combines watercolor, cut paper, ripped paper and clay in an image of swirling severed heads in varying shades of black skin color, surrounded by wave-like forms. Where the eyes would be on the heads, instead the viewer sees small white squiggles. Foster remarked that this piece said so many things about the theme of the exhibition. This work forms a fascinating contrast to the 1993 self-portrait color photograph titled Self Portrait/Cutting slightly larger than life size by Catherine Opie. Opie inverts many of the features of portrait photography, showing herself from behind against a "typical" monotonous shiny fabric background. The most bizarre twist here is the incised lines on her back that depict two girls and a house; a suggestion of the desire to "set up house" or "play house" exhausts all the childish references in the brutal act of cutting into someone’s skin to make this little picture. Where the Gallagher is magical, whimsical, and primeval in its whirl of characters, the Opie photograph is assertive, unnerving and antagonistic.
The remaining three works in the exhibition involve photo processes. Eva Hesse’s untitled circa 1958 photogram, Félix González-Torres’s series of eight photographs from 1993-94, Untitled (Sand), and Roni Horn’s Clownmirror (2) of 2001, which consists of two color photographs in a single frame. The Hesse image consists of a central tilting image of a leaf in an ovoid face shape, a thin veneer. The idea of skin is suggested here through the facial formal resemblance and in the thin leaf. The González-Torres photographs show images left behind by people running across in sand. The Horn works depict a clown blurred in movement. DiQuinzio remarked on the "transformation of time" that these works all suggest, much as skin records the passage of reality.
I found myself noticing the absence of eyes on the faces, of whole skin and of casual humor in this exhibition. It is as though skin has become so laden with connotations that we cannot look for, or laugh about, skin. This exhibition offers many thought-provoking juxtapositions. The Grossman sculpture alone makes this exhibition worth a visit. If you go, you’ll see much more.
