Oooh,
you're hot.
catalogue
essay for Chris Langton exhibition, Tolarno Gallery
Temperature is evident in two predominant domains: outside
of the body and within the body. Dividing the two is skin:
a psycho-sexual epidermal field of tactility. One's skin
is both barometer to external climate and thermometer to
internal constitution. The skin of one's being, then, is
the dimensional warp between the social and the self. While
appearing to be the aerated cloth of flesh accountable for
the greater proportion of dust in the domestic environment,
skin is far more than a microcosmic forest of physicality:
it is the border between the molecular grain of existence
and the macrocosmic forces which shape existence. It can
map the touch of ice cubes, fingernails, clamps, tongues,
sugar, hair, oil and teeth as imprints of the presence of
someone else onto oneself. Those imprints become their own
ebodyprint' across time, greatly affecting the self through
a personal history of touch.
As
the prosecution of rape hinges on penetration, the prosecution
of child abuse hinges on being touched, so does the definition
of the body commence with skin. Nightmare On Elm Street's
Freddie Kruger is the monstrous apparition of the transgression
of skin. Burnt alive by the parents of those he molested
while alive, he returns from his hellish furnace, transmogrified
and gloved with metallic rapier digits. His ravaged skin
is that of the most wrinkled and impotent paedophile; his
efingers' the harbingers of the most murderous and soul-destroying
touch. Throughout the Elm Street cycle of films, his skin
is fetishized for its corruption; his touch is magnified
for its destruction. True to the ectoplasmic phantasmagoria
of 80s special effects movies, his whole being is rendered
not simply as abjectified flesh, but as skin: stretched,
gashed, marred, peeled. His being is one whose skin engulfs
and overwhelms space, drawing one into contact with his
multiplied form.
Skin
is the draped flesh drawn by the artist of the nude; the
translucent reflective fabric which grants the photographer
form. Less a window to the world or a mirror to the soul,
skin is the icing on the flesh cake. It beckons with its
saline sweetness and its glycerine aura. The visual arts
present it as a fecund accruement of form: from the ripe
fruit of Rubens to the succulent rumps of Picasso to the
eviscerated gore of Francis Bacon to the withered frames
of Giacometti to the melted putrescence of Max Ernst to
the bleached visage of Andy Warhol. Not surprisingly, the
presence of skin in art's erotica is a post-Gothic veil
wafting in the mental miasma of desire, welcoming sex and
death in a series of enveloping folds. More than bones alone
- the repository of graveyard ritual - skin is the medium
of choice for necrophiliac artists. Ed Gein's infamous artworks
included not only his mummified mother's skin suit, but
also lamp shades made of skin and a shagpile carpet of shredded
skin. Like an Ikea store at Auschwitz, Gein's household
of horrors subsumed the most frightening identification
with skin into the domestic realm.
In
Iconic art of Orthodox dogma, the representation of flesh
is both refuted and celebrated. The skin of God must be
comprehensible in human guise yet palpably Other from human
touch. The technique of alchemically balancing red hues
with green metaphysically approximates skin as the dimensional
dermis of the corporeal and spiritual, using frequency vibration
in light's colour spectrum to clash the two at the optical
bordering of red's overtake of green. Icon portraiture physically
shimmers at the granular level of the painted surface. Transferrals
of religious encounters - from the realms of ethereal apparitions
and extraterrestrial visitations - are portrayed with not
dissimilar epost-colourization'. Ghosts are rendered transparent,
their skin a sign of vaporised translucence which is an
ideal in the mortal world of beauty. Aliens oppositely are
figured with skin that emits light. Brilliance streams from
their surface, glowing and radiating an intensity beyond
the colour spectrum. Pushed past being light-reflectors,
they are unearthly light-broadcasters from beyond.
Skin
is also the layer of significance which communicates to
the doctor the state of one's being. It can be read like
the sky - an expanse of hue, luminousness, vibrancy; it
can be interpreted like weather charts and geographical
maps - a series of ovulating swirls of colour-banding across
the rainbow spectrum. Like a homeopathic colour chart, skin
can turn blue, be ruddy, become jaundiced. It can be touched
to feel its heat, but its true state will initially be signalled
by its external look. Skin, of course, is thermal in every
sense. It is the heat glove that depicts the presence of
humans in environs removed from sight. Thermal camera's
from the room next door or from a satellite above can zone
in on the hot spots of any clandestine activity. Thermal
readings and graphs of the body - its corpus, its brain,
its blood system, anything - pass through the skin to that
which percolates, bubbles and boils below its surface. Numerous
monster films thrill to the depiction of thermal activity.
The screen's romance with grain is suddenly thwarted by
harsh posterization and solarization as we see how the Other
sees. Following the point-of-view in Wolfen, Predator and
Vampires, we hunt humans, optically following their presence
as warm-blooded mammals: meals just out of the microwave,
heated and ready to go.
A
chilling torture technique employed by modern-era extortionists
is to make a shallow 1cm horizontal incision across a (man's)
chest then slowly peel back the skin downwards with pliers.
Skin is sturdy enough to carry with it any adjoining stretch
while lifting off its upper layer to reveal the bloodied
impasto underneath its fine lining. The concept of this
torture is not merely to inflict pain, but to traumatise
through the act of seeing what lies beneath one's skin.
Like a projection into the future where one witnesses one's
death, the sight of the dimensional depth just the other
side of eskin-deep' can debilitate beyond comprehension.
Philip
Brophy. Pale-skinned, thin-framed, fast metabolism.
