Skintight
Michaël J. Amy
Artists often choose the materials that best allow them to express their vision. Heide Hatry, in an act of partial defiance, has appropriated pigskin as her material of choice–a rather unorthodox substance, fraught with meaning, which slaughterhouse discard in favor of the meat packaged within. By focusing upon this material with singular concentration, Hatry has made pigskin hers and hers alone.
Duchamp used pigskin tautly stretched over an armature to evoke the flesh of the fallen idol in the Étant domnés, lying spread-eagle in the grass. Delvoye had the skins of pigs turned into leather, in order to preserve the tattoos applied onto live pigs. Pigskin was used for book-covers, wall cladding and a variety of other things, though it was not previously isolated in the raw, for its own sake, as an object of beauty. In order to preserve the natural appearance of skin, Hatry has all the water extracted from it and replaced by silicon, using the method developed by Gunther von Hagens.
Heide Hatry is fascinated by the texture, smell and translucency of pigskin, which she allows to speak for itself in her recent body of work. She loves the touch of pigskin and wants her works to be not merely seen, but also felt. By inviting us to indulge in this way, Hatry flirts with taboo, for pigs are loaded with–mostly negative–connotations and works of art are made to be seen, not touched.
As is well known, the Jewish and Muslim religions proscribe the consumption of pork, which is considered unclean–pigs are carriers of parasites that may cause trichinosis, for one. Pigs are associated with filth–"You swine! You filthy pig!."–almost certainly because they wallow in mud. (The reason for this is that unlike us, pigs lack sweat glands. These mammals need mud to cool themselves off and protect their skin from the rays of the sun.) Pigs appear dressed as nuns in Bosch and as the personification of evil in Animal Farm, though they can also be the embodiment of slightly grotesque cuteness in popular culture. Significantly, pigs have a great deal in common with us, biologically speaking. When John Wayne needed a new heart valve, he was given a pig’s valve, and when there is a shortage of human skin for burn victims, pigskin makes for a good substitute.
Skin is elastic. Hatry stretches the pigskin across a panel, stapling one edge against the other, thereby establishing an almost monochrome field of varying incident. Since pigs are in many respects so close to us–they willingly drink beer, for one–it is unsettling to see their skin handled as if it were mere canvas. Skin is very personal. When we grab a body, we often touch bare skin. An acquaintance shakes our hand, a friend grabs our arm, shoulders or side, and a lover touch us there as well as elsewhere. Our skin contains us in a way. It marks off the peripheries of our bodies, shielding our innards from outside. Our skin also helps categorize us: "he has good skin tone," "look at those pockmarks!," "she looks old," "he looks sick", "she’s got a great tan," "he’s black," "she’s white." Skin can say a lot about one’s class, age, health and ethnicity. Like pigs, skin is a loaded subject.
Skin is alluring. When we are physically attracted to somebody, we derive pleasure from seeing his or her body exposed. (Some would equate skin with sin.) For skin is about the body, uncovered. Thus, when we speak about the body, we are also speaking about skin. In fact, if we were to remuve skin from a part of the body, we would reduce it to something we would find repulsive. We breed pigs for their meat.
The nude, which occupies such an important place in the history of art–the Middle Ages admittedly constitute a hiatus of almost 1000 years–is always, also, about skin. When we admire Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, we admire many things, including the way in which the Dutch master renders the beauty of the young woman’s skin. Hatry, however, shows us skin without the bodies they originally encapsulated–thus providing us with a new take on the hallowed subject of the nude, a take some would interpret as an attack on the integrity of the body. Skins are testimony to the absence of bodies: The skin of, say, Marsays or Bartholomew–or the foreskin of Christ–minus the actor.
Hatry tells me how at her first solo show in Chelsea, a woman clutching a leather handbag told her how very disgusting the artist’s material of choice was, without recognizing that she was holding onto a product made of skin, albeit treated differently. Significantly, Hatry’s work has reminded some people of the way in which the Nazis used the skin of humans for lampshades and the like, a comparison the artist, who happens to be German, finds particularly odious, for Hatry recycles waste product, whereas the Nazis " used the skin of human beings as a kind of trophy to demonstrate their power over life and death."
By stretching soft skin across panels, Hatry provides an interesting take on painting, in which the epidermis of oil is replaced by actual skin. The evenly spaced staples running down the height or width of the panels and holding two pieces of skin together, ready as a zipper, ready to be undone. The texture of the skin, fraught with small, evenly spaced, parallel blank stripes, echoes the pattern established by the staples. Flabby nipples may protrude in places, and Hatry may cause the flesh to part somewhere, revealing an underlying piece of skin. These openings read like large wounds, surgical cuts, gashes in paintings by Fontana, burns or tears through plastic or burlap in compositions by Burri, or vaginas opening onto more flesh. The stretched skin pulling at the staples, throws off a white, crystalline substance framing seemingly wet areas around the staples as if the wounds or vaginas were oozing.
Since Hatry uses pigskin instead of paint on panel, it is not surprising to see her tackle some other heavyweights of 20th Century painting. One vertical composition consisting of three horizontal registers of pigskin arranged one above the other and sewn together, is reminiscent of the abstract geometric compositions of Ellswoth Kelly or of Hatry’s countryman Blinky Palermo–who would occasionally sew the edges of two pieces of differently colored cotton fabric together, before stretching these, like a canvas, over a stretcher. Another composition paraphrases Jasper John’s White Flag, by replacing the stars and stripes of Gold Glory by sewn pieces of pigskin. (This work offers an adumbrated version of both the painting and the symbol, as it misses quite a few stars.) This interpretation of the United States flag–by a German artist–will undoubtedly provoke outrage in this age of rising nationalism. (I can already hear it coming: "Is she calling us imperialist pigs?") This is just fine, a sit may lead to much needed thinking about–among other things–blind patriotism and the meaning of symbols in our society. The task of the artist is to question the status quo.
Another work, now hovering between sculpture and architecture, consists of a plain, rectangular, room built from floor to ceiling of identical panels of pigskin. Here as elsewhere in Hatry’s work, the translucent skin encloses a volume, as it was designed to do–though now the volume is hollow. Here, skin reenacts its original purpose. It separates the inside from the outside, and offers protection within.
Republished from the book Skin (Kehrer).
