Flash Art uses cookies strictly necessary for the proper functioning of the website, for its legitimate interest to enhance your online experience and to enable or facilitate communication by electronic means. To learn more about cookies please see Terms & conditions

Flash Art
Flash Art
Shop
  • Home
    • CURRENT ISSUE
  • Features
    • Conversations
    • Reviews
    • Report
    • On View
    • FLASH FEED
    • Audacious Advice
    • Dance Office
    • Listening In
    • The Uncanny Valley
    • Flashback
    • (In)Visible Hands
    • PARADIGME
  • STUDIOS
    • Dune
    • Flash Art Mono
  • Archive
    • DIGITAL EDITION
    • Shop
    • Subscription
    • INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION
    • Contact
→
Flash Art

339 SUMMER 2022, Reviews

27 July 2022, 9:00 am CET

Heidi Bucher “Metamorphoses I” Kunsthalle Bern by Sebastjan Brank

by Sebastjan Brank July 27, 2022
1
2
3
4
5
6
Heidi Bucher, Bodyshells, Venice Beach, Kalifornien, 1972. Still. Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Heidi Bucher, “Metamorphosen”. Installation view at Haus der Kunst, Munchen, 2021. Photography by Markus Tretter. Courtesy of Haus der Kunst, Munchen.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Heidi Bucher, Herrenzimmer, 1978. Photography Hans Peter Siffert. Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Heidi Bucher, Herrenzimmer, 1978. Photography Hans Peter Siffert. Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Heidi Bucher, Herrenzimmer, 1978. Photography Hans Peter Siffert. Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Heidi Bucher, Herrenzimmer, 1978. Photography Hans Peter Siffert. Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher.

When the word skin is verbalized — to skin — the associations with this outer layer of the body start sounding sinister at best and downright repulsive at worst; the activities of horror icons Buffalo Bill and Leatherface are just two examples of this gruesome act having permeated public consciousness. But when can skinning become a gesture of working through something that was previously repressed? The technique of “skinning” (Häutung), developed by Swiss artist Heidi Bucher in the 1970s, consisted of applying gauze and fish glue to the surfaces of houses, interiors, doors, and other architectural elements, and coating them with liquid latex.1 With great physical effort, the dried coatings were then peeled from the walls and floors, and what was once a private space was suddenly under the scrutiny of the many. Bourgeois domesticity imploded, so to speak.

These fleshy sheets, arguably the artist’s best-known and also most perversely fascinating objects, are currently on view in the retrospective “Metamorphoses I” at Kunstmuseum Bern, a collaboration with Haus der Kunst and Muzeum Susch. In the exhibition’s entrance area hangs Herrenzimmer (1978), a skinning of a gentleman’s study, a sacred space formerly reserved for the male members of the family, that was located in the vacant villa of Bucher’s late parents. The uneven surfaces of latex act as a receptacle for the suffocating traces of history; it is as if the artist infected the architecture and appropriated it for her own use, impregnating the study room with desire and frustration. The epistemic monopoly of pater familias suddenly seems weak, almost pathetic. It is a fundamentally feminist gesture in the sense that it exposes the highly gendered nature of the supposed neutrality of knowledge, which becomes hollow from within, easily replicable, inverted, and temporarily embodied by someone else.

1
2
3
4
5
6
Heidi Bucher, Bodyshell, 1972. Foam with pearlescent skin. Photography by Beverly Johnson. Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Heidi Bucher, Blaues Kleidchen, 1978. Textile, white glue, paint, and mother-of-pearl pigment. Courtesy of the Estate of Heidi Bucher.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Heidi Bucher, Libelle, n.d. Textile, latex, leftover paint, wire, and mother-of-pearl pigment. Photography by Danielle Kehr. Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Heidi Bucher, Ohne Titel (Puerta turquesa Finca Chimida), 1987. Latex, fish glue, textile and paint residues on canvas. 203 x 105 cm. Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Heidi Bucher, Ohne Titel, 1972. Pen on paper. 22,5 x 15 cm. Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Heidi Bucher, Ohne Titel, 1972. Pen on paper. 22,5 x 15 cm. Courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher.

The interiors of the buildings Bucher chose for her skinnings thus carried either great personal significance for the artist, or had strong historical connotations — the line is, of course, fine. For example, several skinnings were created in the abandoned Bellevue Sanatorium clinic in Kreuzlingen, Thurgau, where Anna O., the first subject for Sigmund Freud’s studies of hysteria, was treated at the turn of the century.2 Bucher’s skins, which float awkwardly in the air or lie on the floor of the Swiss institution (Bodenhäute [Floor Skins, 1980–82]), parasitize in a deconstructive fashion the host body by chipping away at its edges.3 Said Bucher in 1981, “Peel off one skin after the other, discard it: the repressed, the neglected, the wasted, the lost, the sunken, the flattened, the desolate, the inverted, the diluted, the forgotten, the persecuted, the wounded.”

In addition to the skinnings, the exhibition brings together for the first time all the other major works of this neo-avant-garde artist, from early design studies from her student days in Zurich to the “Bodyshell” group of sculptures created during a period of experimentation in New York and Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, when Bucher came into contact with Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro at the California Institute of the Arts, became familiar with the work of Eva Hesse, and immersed herself in the then-burgeoning feminist art sensibility. “Bodyshells” (1972/2021) are wearable — and rather genderless — body sculptures made of foam with a shimmering mother-of-pearl coating. They bring to mind the Bauhaus fusion of dance, costume, and sculpture. Chronologically, the last group of works exhibited are the skinned doors created by Bucher on the volcanic Canary Island of Lanzarote, which served as the artist’s temporary retreat until shortly before her death in 1993. Devoid of their use value, the ghostly presence of these portals haunts the room.

“Metamorphoses I” makes clear that in her feminist art practice, Bucher did not simply transform the apparent objectivity of the status quo into something personal, intimate, subjective. Doing so might simply be a reversal of roles. Instead, she showed that objective reality is itself fraught, conflicted, and not neutral. Just like the unconscious, historical traces are indestructible, but they sometimes need someone to materialize them.

1 Despite its strong presence in what might be called feminist art, it would perhaps be too ambitious to associate latex with this sensibility. However, this material has offered some women artists a way to explore the unruliness of matter, exploiting its inability to ever take on the rigid forms so strongly associated with self-contained Minimalist works (see Lucy Lippard’s 1966 exhibition “Eccentric Abstraction”).
2 This work is unfortunately not on view at Kunstmuseum Bern.
3 In The Parasite (1980), Michel Serres notes that although the parasite is usually weaker than the host, it enables communication by being the necessary third party, but it also disrupts the message by acting as the “dark side of the system”.

Share this article
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Mail
More stories by

Sebastjan Brank

When Your Smile Is So Wide and Your Heels Are So High: The Paintings of Louisa Gagliardi

14 June 2022, 9:00 am CET

My father recently told me how he often walks around the house opening doors and gazing into empty rooms. He…

Read More

Tishan Hsu: Body Currents

6 July 2022, 9:00 am CET

As of late, “prescient” has become the preferred modifier for artist, Tishan Hsu. Indeed, as framed by the recent retrospective…

Read More

Misaligned Identities: Raphaela Vogel

10 June 2022, 9:00 am CET

When I think back on 2018 there is always something that feels misaligned — a disconnect between myself and the…

Read More

Beyond the Limits of Empirical Knowledge: Marguerite Humeau’s New Way of Thinking and Making

12 July 2022, 9:00 am CET

Some might consider Marguerite Humeau’s artistic trajectory unconventional. Coming to art via design, she first studied textile design in France,…

Read More

  • Next

    Wolfgang Tillmans “Sound is Liquid” mumok / Vienna

  • Previous

    Artists at Risk: A Conversation with Ivor Stodolsky and Marita Muukkonen

© 2023 Flash Art

  • Terms & conditions
  • Contact
  • Work with Us