When the February 2013 print issue of US Vogue Magazine was
released, it included a piece on the British painter Cecily Brown. On page 259 there was a statement by Brown
that struck me. So I marked it with a pen. The quote is above.
Being a painter too, I can begin to understand what she meant.
From what I know of her work, sexuality and attraction are
dominant themes. This implies the human figure, the other most striking visual presence in her work. Whether
darkly concealed, smothered, or surfacing in gooey, slippery and
kaleidoscopic landscapes of oil pigments –landscapes that eventually come to
form as recognizable places like a forest or a bedroom- the nude body or bodies
emerge, by itself or moistly intertwined with another, in justified repose or
intimate pose.
With such overt and unapologetic sexuality in her paintings,
at first it seems that it’s no surprise that Brown mentions the word "skin" in
the interview. But it must be more than that: such as the idea of skin as an
analogical device or formal metaphor upon where the meaningful viewing,
necessary entanglements and deep comprehension of artworks bank their premises
on.
A favorite art professor of mine once wrote: “painting’s
analogy to skin is not new.” It sounds like a good place to start reconsidering Brown’s quote.
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| photo credit: Kamilla Bello |
18 square feet –that is the measure of the skin of our
bodies. It is our body’s largest
sense organ. It is also the sense
organ that is always on, in a “constant state of readiness to receive
messages.”[1]
It is also the outermost boundary of our body. If put into analogy with our planet, our skin would be the
Earth’s crust: it covers the entirety of the planet, it is the last place of
contact when leaving the Earth, it is the first place of contact when meeting
Earth. But the Earth’s crust is
extremely thin- it amounts to less than 1 percent of the planet. Whereas skin amounts to 16 percent of
our body weight. This attests to
skin’s significantly concrete presence.
And so I cannot help but find a beautiful yet uneasy dance
between the words “skin” and “image” in Brown’s quote. To “get under the skin of an image” feels
like the equivalent of watching polar opposite creatures having a love affair that
is destined to die.
Image amasses its power in its elusive, shape shifting, and
opportunistic nature. It defies
being exclusively possessed by anybody or anything whether by time, place,
entity, language, idea, cause, or even by its object (if there ever was one to
begin with!). Whereas skin is simply possessed by one body.
The breadth of image’s reproducibility is infinite. Skin can only venture, well,
skin-deep.
The image is the flawless and timeless ideal that embodies
desire. Skin is flawed, rife with
fissures, and is in agreement with time's conditions.
The image is the “site of resistance to meaning.”[2] The skin is the body’s first site of
resistance.
To try to “get under the skin of an image” can only mean
subjecting the image into an embodiment that it is not constructed to be, and
implicating the skin into giving the image a surface that will only render it
penetrable. What is exciting about
Brown’s quote is the violation of image and skin’s established conditions.
It is with this quote in mind that I am rethinking my series
of photographs taken in certain natural environments in the Southwest and
Northeast. In it I photographed my
hands gouging through sand, grazing through snow and sleet, grasping boughs,
channeling through gashes in fallen trees, stroking the furrows of
petroglyphs.
As if my lived and sensory experiences of canyons, deserts,
forests, snowstorms, and hurricanes aren’t enough to establish my sense of awe
and wonder of nature’s otherness, I physically entwine my hands into the matter
that contain, shape and define these places- and then photograph these
acts! I am reminded of
Thomas the Doubter who needed to touch the wound of the resurrected Christ in
order to eradicate his doubt and establish belief in the resurrection.
I can argue these photos as trying to “get under the skin of
the earth" -that they are a lesser violation or semantic conflict than trying to “get
under the skin of an image.” But
the creation of the photographic images nulls the argument. When this or that experience is
flattened into the photographic print, the sensory experience of getting under
the skin of the earth now enters the realm of the image. It is no longer about the skin of the
image, but the image of the skin.
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