Animal skins in contemporary art

Abstract

ABSTRACTRecent accessibility to biotechnology has given rise to ‘bio art’, an art form that operates within the process of life itself on a genetic or transgenic level. Works include Eduardo Kac's GFP Bunny (2000), a genetically modified fluorescent rabbit, and Marta de Menezes' manipulated butterflies (1999). Simultaneously, artists have begun to use dead animals in their work, with duo Snaebjornsdottir/Wilson tracing the cultural afterlife of stuffed polar bears (nanoq, 2004), and Andrea Roe creating automata from animal skin and motors (e.g. Seagull, 2004). These trends, ‘animal life’ and ‘animal death’ at first seem diametrically opposed; however, this article argues that they cannot be separated. Together, they represent a preoccupation with the appearance of animals in contemporary society. Where bio art seemingly moves ‘beyond the surface’ to manipulate life, it also collapses the surface—depth distinction by working within the realm of appearances, i.e. it is the skin of Kac's rabbit that glows and the wing colouration of de Menezes’ butterflies that has been altered. The use of taxidermy in art similarly investigates appearances, with skin being a metaphor for the separation of human and non-human animals. Writing about objects rather than animals, Anzieu suggests that there is something pathological about the projection of skin onto non-human entities, about the need to reify those skins. It is a projection that stands, for him, as testament to the unfinished formation of human subjects who, in order to confirm the coherency of their subject-hood, must continually reaffirm their own skin-borders. This article examines the animalization of the skin-border, with skin — the use of skin, the showing of non-human animal skin — playing a vital role in the complex interrelation of zoe, ‘natural life’, and bios, ‘political life’, and addresses, more specifically, how these issues have been taken up by contemporary artists.