Essay
Viscosity of Skin by Mia Grassie-Clarke
“Sinking meat: his actions will perfectly correspond to the essential viscosity of his personage.” Barthes (2009)
Viscosity is the measure of how thick or thin something is, determined by how it flows through a certain architecture. I am thinking about how the body responds to different architectural spaces or signifiers and the threshold between our body and the thing we are looking at. There is tension when we are faced with the inside becoming the outside, the permanent becoming temporary, and the stagnant starting to move. This tension might be how viscosity is measured for me. I am interested in the viscosity of different mediums, and how fluid or concrete different representations of the body are. Through the use of several artworks, I dissect the viscosity of their personage.
Appendages
Collective Wear 4 Persons, 1994, https://www.studio-orta.com/en/artwork/10/body-architecture-collective-wear-4-persons © Studio Orta
The word “Appendages” is evoked for me when talking about the work of Lucy Orta. Instead of a literal body, there are parts of the sculpture that protrude out which suggests a body. Lucy Orta’s work Collective Wear 4 Persons, 1994 from the series Body Architecture is a tent made for four people, with the fabric for arms and legs protruding out of the tent. It is a modular habitation where … “One’s individual life depends on the warmth of the other. The warmth of one gives warmth to the other.”(Studio Orta, Accessed 15 Mar. 2024) There is a repetition that represents a unified body, a body removed from identity yet still present. An enclosed space for the body is intervened with by making the private public, the “body” represented by clothing extending out of the tent, brings the viewer closer to her topic of the refugee crisis. The appendages reaching out of the tent are sort of like blockages, as they come to a stop at the feet and hands.
The transitory quality of an artwork reveals how artwork does not have to be stagnant it can be in motion. It can physically transport itself, bringing the message into a new context. “Clothes are no longer perceived as a mere covering close to the body, as a second skin, but also as a form of packaging.” Virilio (1995) The transitory signaling through the structure of the tent as clothing represents the temporariness of the lives of the homeless and in other works of the lives of refugees.
Transportation
Kimsooja: Cities on the Move – 11633 Miles of Bottari Truck, 1998, http://monsoonartcollection.com/kimsooja/cities-move-11633-miles-bottari-truck/
In the Western canon of art history painting tries to capture a fleeting moment and make it still. I am looking at instances where an artwork is in movement. The work of KimSooja represents this idea quite literally in her work Cities on the Move – 11633 Miles of Bottari Truck where: “The truck was driven through Korean cities from November 4 to 14, 1997 with Kimsooja sitting atop the bundles.” (Notting Dale Campus, 2021) The work represents women’s role as facilitator, the burden of women’s duties as well as a commentary on different types of migration. As per the definition, viscosity it is measured by how it travels through a certain architecture. In this case, the Bottari truck is the fluid and the cities of Korea are the architecture. To be in transit, a certain level of protection is required. Sometimes the covering of an object can reveal more than the object itself would have. Just the implication that there is an object underneath a covering is enough to disrupt the viewer. Bottari is a package made of tablecloths to hold personal belongings. The covering or protection becomes the point of tension in the artwork.
The tactility of the covering In Meret Oppneheim’s work Le Déjeuner en fourrure brings the viscerality of the object to the forefront. “The work highlights the specificities of sensual pleasure: fur may delight the touch, but it repels the tongue.” (MoMA, 2019) The viscosity of an object has to do with its texture. The tension here is the threshold between the fur and the encounter lips. A cup, made to hold a liquid, with a furry texture disrupts the functional viscosity, bringing us into the visceral. The cup becomes an abstract idea of a cup but what we are left with is a visual signal response.
Cerebral grasping
In the book Body Criticism (1992), Barbara Maria Stafford examines how there are two types of flesh, theindividual flesh and the universal flesh. The individual flesh is how we feel through our own body, and the universal flesh is how we understand the body through collective knowledge. The Cartesian theory is that the mind and body should be treated as separate, whereas Descartes promotes that there must be a union of mind and body. In the Enlightenment, our bodies went from being understood corporeally, to being examined under the knife as flesh. We went from “cerebral grasping” to “manual probing”.
Stafford describes how with AI advancements we are getting closer to a “universal skin”. Technology is like a veil covering flesh, kind of floating above the surface. The input from many humans is brought together to create a universe which in the end is perhaps removed from individual processing. With the advancements of surgery, flesh became removed from the identity of the person, just as how the identity of the individual is removed in technology. It is alluded to but not present. “[ With technology]… once palpable objects have been deprived of their “substance” or “flesh”; but with this, a new skin is being created.” The fabric of AI is getting close to a type of embodiment that is completely different from how we know embodiment now. Artist Maggie Roberts, co-founder of the art collective Orphan Drift is making artwork and research about how characteristics of octopuses can be used to advance AI by taking ques from the way they absorb information and feel around to get a sense of their environment.
“If AI were cephalopod its moods would be visible in waves of radiating color. States of calm, anxiety, and fear- approach and retreat- would be on display” from Maggie Roberts’s text If AI were a cephalopod (2019)
Fluids………….
Painting as a medium, though fluid in consistency, becomes still and stagnant in staging. In the Western canon of art history, a painting can represent movement, the process of course contains movement, but the final product itself – the canvas, is still. Artist Natasha Kidd builds structures for the paint to travel through, making them “overfill “flow”, “inflate” or “overflow”. The [2]painting is therefore in a state of in-betweenness. The artwork is not a complete product but instead a means of production. The “removal of the artist’s expressionist touch” (Natasha Kidd, Accessed 15 Mar. 2024 ) goes further than reducing painting to its purest form (as Clement Greenberg tries to dictate). By deconstructing the painting and pumping it through pipes, Kidd highlights the painting’s essential viscosity. The painting is in movement with or without the presence of the viewer, thus the painting is always transitory and does not request for the imagination of the viewer to complete the artwork. I find it interesting how in her artist statement Kidd refers to her work in bodily terms, for example: “a peristaltic pump moves paint from a tank through a plastic tube into a paintingbelly…filling the paintings from the inside out.” Our bodily functions are omnipresent as this is how we navigate through the world, through our bodies (or phones). This inside/outness represented is something I am very intrigued by. Where Degas traces the line up the back of a woman washing, Natasha Kidd traces the viscosity of paint through the tubing; both artists are using paint as a vehicle to show how materiality manifests in the body.
Overflow from Natasha Kidd’s https://www.natashakidd.com/overflow/ (Accessed 15 Mar. 2024)
When I was sleeping on a chair at a hospital in the south end of Boston for three nights because my dad broke his hip, I was faced with the immediacy of pain. A hospital in an area of poverty and homelessness, only half an hour from the brownstones and beautiful campuses. Outside of the hospital were people doing heroin and many homeless people camping outside. At the entrance of the hospital, severely injured people crying for help. I saw a man with his head cracked open, raw, bleeding out, spiraling in despair. Another man in the hall, outside the curtain of my dad’s bed, who was under the influence of drugs, peeing on the floor and roaming the halls screaming whilst nurses put out paper to soak the urine. Drops of dried blood on the floor of the bed from a previous patient. Why is it so horrifying to see these bodily fluids? We connect safety with containment, in this case rightfully so. Maybe I haven’t recovered from the trauma of my dad being in pain, being in that hospital, seeing the poverty so close to my doorstep confront me so immediately. Our body remembers.
Zanele Muholi, Period II (2005). Lambda print, 500 x 375mm. Courtesy of Michael Stevenson. Makhubu (2012)
I am drawn to the way Nicholas Hlobo describes the weight of colour. In the article Violence and the Cultural Logics of Pain, (2012) Makhubu mentions a quote from a Nicholas Hlobo exhibition: “Black is heavier than blood, even red as blood is heavier than black. When blood is thick and black (igazi elimnyama) it’s perceived as heavy by Xhosa people.” This is a very physical and embodied way of thinking about colour, blood, and weight. Without knowing the viscosity of an image, we can guess based on these other attributes.
A series by artist Zanele Muholi consists of five photographs of period blood. Period II is an image where the ambiguity of blood on gravel leaves space for interpretation and questioning of who’s blood, what type of blood, and in what environment. For me, I read how the containment of period blood, and the way it is hidden from men and deemed “gross” is one of many ways in which women have to put on an exterior, whilst below the surface much more is going on. (Sometimes I exchange viscosity for viscerality as I think they have a lot in common). Blood, in my made-up categorization, would have a very high viscosity. I believe the more viscous something has the more power it has to touch the body of the viewer. In this image Period II blood is stopped from flowing as it clashes with the rough texture of the gravel, instead the blood sinks into the crevices of the stones.
[[[[[[[[[[[[[Bandages ]]]]]]]]]]]]]
“A bandage functions as an aid. It holds back, restricts, hides. It is uncomfortably corrective. It protects others from the uncontainable self.” Makhubu (2012)
In Philip Guston’s self-portrait Painter (1980) the bandages show the struggle of the artist. Philip Guston is bandaging himself, showing a vulnerable side, a side that feels like he needs protection. Returning to the sanitary pad as a form of bandage that contains blood, restricts it, and hides it, we can look at bandaging as a kind of veiling. A common theme in the self-portraits of Philip Guston is an acknowledgment of the way society veils truths of war and violence. Phillip Guston depicts himself as a kkk member, depicting the darkness of society and the dark parts of himself (such as his insomnia, his smoking, and his declining health). The bandages could represent all of the knocks that he’s felt as an artist or all of the wounds he’s had to open up to create these paintings.
Painter (1980) 5 https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/151.1989/ © Estate of Philip Guston
/inside/out\
The inside versus outside can also be described as public vs private. There is a duality, where you cannot have one without the other. In Body Art, (1997)Amelia Jones talks about a duality of flesh: “The flesh of the world and the flesh of the visible.” And how just like flesh we are both subject and object at the same time. “The notion of flesh – a hinge of two-sided boundary ( that is also a part of the things it separates) marking “being’s reversibility”Jones(1997)
Undoing this boundary between inside and outside creates a point of vulnerability. The violence against homosexuality throughout history has forced the containment of sexuality. Designated places formed such as nightclubs where freedom could exist at least for a certain amount of time in certain spaces.
Perhaps the inside/out of the body has had a ripple effect on the environment. With the imaging in MRIs, you can more literally turn someone’s body inside out. Whilst it is a great technological advancement, Barbara Maria Stafford (1992) talks about how this is quite a large invasion. Maybe there is an element of voyeurism to an MRI scan, the opening up to see deeper or hidden parts that usually would be concealed. “The vulgar incision flaunted pain, entangling contours, and suffering shapes.”
“D’Cruze and Rao (ibid.) [ talks about how] bodies [are] burdened by their proximity to the material circumstances of daily life (dirt, disease, blood), [ especially ]queer bodies. ” Makhubu (2012) This is an example of how the inside impacts the outside, the closer one is to the outside perhaps the closer to danger. It is hard to be free in your body when you are trapped in an imposing society, as we are corporeal and the inside and outside cannot be separated, the only thing that exists is the threshold. A threshold often imposed upon marginalized groups forcing them to stay contained.
Absorption.
What we ingest is also a representation of a body. Park Mcarthur draws out these different things we consume and products we use, wrapped up in labeled packaging revealing how the way we live. Putting this on display is like putting your insides on display, and it is a way of describing the body and also how society treats bodies. On top of these Polyurethane plinths ( which are made to absorb sounds and impact ) items such as food, cling film, condoms, medicine, etc.
All wrapped up … a tray filled with single-use latex items. Photograph: Mark Blower/Chisenhale
Another example of the absorption is in the work of Simon Fujiwara whose painting of Angela Merkel, the presence of the individual is shown by the makeup she wears. Transferring what is applied to the face onto a different surface is like forensics, a way to examine the body through the remnants. Angela Merkel being a politician, putting on a “mask” to present herself to the public is another layer in which these paintings show through materiality the life of the person depicted.
Masks (Merkel F5) & Masks (Merkel E5.3), 2016, https://www.estherschipper.com/artists/101-simon-fujiwara/works/17476/
The way that materiality can embody a message, technology disembodies. “The fragmental quality of space has been extended into the digital realm… we continue to live in a state of profound rupture and disembodies messages” (Nadia Brown & Sarah Allen Gershon, 2017). Viscerality is when our body has a physical reaction to a material and viscosity is how these messages travel. The body is not still, it is transitory, the body is not concrete it is fluid. Viscosity is not only in substances, already in the body or absorbed into our body, it is also in space. Viscosity is also in the signaling of messages that make up these ideas of “space” and “body”. I have taken away in the process of writing this essay a way to more deeply understand the process of creation, and how to feel the way through an artwork listening through tentacles like an octopus.
References
Barthes, Roland., Annette. Lavers, Neil Badmington, and Sian. Reynolds, Mythologies, Rev. Vintage ed. (London: Vintage, 2009)
Orta, S. (n.d.). Artwork — Studio Orta. [online] www.studio-orta.com. Available at: https://www.studio-orta.com/en/artwork/10/body-architecture-collective-wear-4-persons. [Accessed 15 Mar. 2024].
Virilio, Paul. “Observations on the Work of Lucy Orta.” Dazed and Confused (1995).
WAL/2/1/ORTA Women’s Art Library, Special Collections, Goldsmiths, University of London
Campus, Notting Dale. “Spotlight on Art: Kimsooja – Cities on the Move – 2727 Kilometres Bottari Truck, the Bottari Truck – Migrateur 1997.” (2021) Https://Www.Nottingdale.Co.Uk, www.nottingdale.co.uk/latest/spotlight-on-art-kimsooja-cities-on-the-move/#:~:text=The%20truck%20was%20driven%20through,or%20involuntary%20migration%20and%20movement. [Accessed 15 Mar. 2024].
Meret Oppenheim. Object. Paris, 1936 | Moma, www.moma.org/collection/works/80997.
Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum
of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019) [Accessed 15 Mar. 2024].
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. MIT Press, 1992. In chapters “Dissecting” and “Abstracting”
Roberts, Maggie (2019) 0rphan Drift Archive. (n.d.). If AI were Cephalopod, 2. [online] Available at: https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/if-ai/if-ai-were-cephalopod/ .[Accessed 15 Mar. 2024].
Kidd, Natasha www.bathspa.ac.uk. (n.d.). [online] Available at: https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/our-people/natasha-kidd/.[Accessed 15 Mar. 2024].
Nomusa M. Makhubu (2012) Violence and the cultural logics of pain: representations of sexuality in the work of Nicholas Hlobo and Zanele Muholi, Critical Arts, 26:4, 504-524, DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2012.723843
Nadia Brown & Sarah Allen Gershon (2017) Body Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, 5:1, 1-3, DOI: 10.1080/21565503.2016.1276022
Jones, Amelia (1997), Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 329 pp., 63 black-and-white illus. RACAR, Revue D’art Canadienne, Canadian Art Review, 24(2), 75. https://doi.org/10.7202/1071670ar
Farago, J. (2016). Sucked up, squeezed out: the super-absorbent art of Park McArthur. The Guardian. [online] 26 Jan. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/26/park-mcarthur-poly-chisenhale-gallery-london-sculpture-art [Accessed 15 Mar. 2024].
[1] 1.Tea with almond milk, coffee with oat milk, a kit Kat.
2. Coffee with milk, toast with jam and butter. Meal deal: BLT sandwich, paprika crisps, Green innocent smoothie. Cup of tea no milk.
3. Tea with whole milk, a chocolate truffle, a meal deal with a chicken tzatziki wrap, carrot and hummus snack and latte coffee drink. For dinner a few crackers, 3 chocolate truffles, and made a chicken tomato cous cous olive and tzatziki dinner. Then had two glasses of white wine, two glasses of red wine, some salted almonds, a tiny bit of cabbage. An Indian piece of marzipan, an Italian piece of marzipan.
4. This morning, tea with whole milk, 3 rosemary crackers. 3 crackers with tzatziki, another cup of tea this time with brown sugar. An orange. Iron pill. Leftovers from last night’s dinner. A marzipan chocolate.
5. Two slices of brown toast with butter and marmite, a cup of coffee at home with whole milk, an oat latte at school, a meal deal all-day breakfast sandwich, Doritos, innocent blue juice, malteasers mini bunny chocolate. Crackers. Cheese. Bread. Butter. Wine lots. vape.
6. Tea with whole milk, crackers and cheese, some bread and butter. Tea no milk. Peach vape (ew) hot crossed bun, spaghetti with tuna and olives.
[3] 7. Tea with whole milk, marmite on toast.
8. Tea, two eggs and spinach, coffee latte whole milk, salad with romaine, tomato, feta, maom sweets x 5, tea no milk. Sweets. Tea. chickpea saag.
9. Pita with butter. Tea with almond milk. Sweet loose-leaf tea, Sula butterscotch drops. , chickpea saag, apple, sour patch kids, tea. Meal deal pesto pasta, coffee latte, quavers.
[4] 10. Pita with butter, tea with almond milk, coconut cappuccino, salad tomatoes with romaine, yogurt, crips, energy drink, butterscotch drops. Belvita crackers, salad with chicken
11. Belvita, tea, brown bread thin, Belvita, salad with chicken.
12. St Patrick’s Day: scrambled eggs on toast, coffee with almond milk, tea with almond milk, white wine, black velvet (Guinness and champagne) Sausage, mash, gravy, carrots, parsnips, camembert, bread, rhubarb crumble, blue moon, peppermint tea.