TOO MUCH SKIN?

German artist Heide Hatry is the daughter of a pig farmer, and she's got a farm girl's matter-of-fact attitude toward slaughter and making economical use of a carcass. Her primary material is pig's skin, which has much in common with human skin. Hatry's show "Skin" at Pierre Menard Gallery is sometimes clever, but also cluttered and too reliant on her material's potential for shock value.

Hatry also adds a confusing conceptual ......

Her smart but harrowing video "Slaughterhouse" succinctly follows the assembly-line evisceration of pigs. There's no judgment or commentary, just the visuals. A football made out of pigskin, with staples where the stitches would be, is both creepy and funny......

Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe Correspondent  |  November 9, 2006

Artists often choose the materials that best allow them to express their vision.  Heide Hatry, in an act of partial defiance, has appropriated pigskin as her material of choice –a rather unorthodox substance, fraught with meaning, which slaughterhouses discard in favor of the meat packaged within.  By focusing upon this material with singular concentration, Hatry has made pigskin hers and hers alone.

Duchamp used pigskin tautly stretched over an armature to evoke the flesh of the fallen idol in the Etant donnés, lying spread-eagle in the grass.  Delvoye had the skins of pigs turned into leather, in order to preserve the tattoos applied onto live pigs.  Pigskin was used for book-covers, wall cladding and a variety of other things, though it was not previously isolated in the raw, for its own sake, as an object of beauty.  In order to preserve the natural appearance of skin, Hatry has all the water extracted from it and replaced by plastic, using the method developed by Gunther von Hagens.

Heide Hatry is fascinated by the texture, smell and translucency of pigskin, which she allows to speak for itself in her recent body of work.  She loves the touch of pigskin and wants her works to be not merely seen, but also felt.  By inviting us to indulge in this way, Hatry flirts with taboo, for pigs are loaded with -mostly negative- connotations and works of art are made to be seen, not touched.

As is well known, the Jewish and Muslim religions proscribe the consumption of pork, which is considered unclean –pigs are carriers of parasites that may cause trichinosis, for one.  Pigs are associated with filth –“You swine!  You filthy pig!”- almost certainly because they wallow in mud.  (The reason for this is that unlike us, pigs lack sweat glands.  These mammals need mud to cool themselves off and protect their skin from the rays of the sun).  Pigs appear dressed as nuns in Bosch and as the personification of evil in Animal Farm, though they can also be the embodiment of -slightly grotesque- cuteness in popular culture.  Significantly, pigs have a great deal in common with us, biologically speaking.  When John Wayne needed a new heart valve, he was given a pig’s valve, and when there is a shortage of human skin for burn victims, pigskin makes for a good substitute.

Skin is elastic.  Hatry stretches the pigskin across a panel, stapling one edge against the other, thereby establishing an almost monochrome field of varying incident.  Since pigs are in many respects so close to us -they willingly drink beer, for one- it is unsettling to see their skin handled as if it were mere canvas.  Skin is very personal.  When we grab a body, we often touch bare skin.  An acquaintance shakes our hand, a friend grabs our arm, shoulders or side, and a lover touches us there as well as elsewhere.  Our skin contains us in a way.  It marks off the peripheries of our bodies, shielding our innards from the outside.  Our skin also helps categorize us: “He has good skin tone”, “Look at those pockmarks!”, “She looks old”, “He looks sick”, “She’s got a great tan”, “He’s black”, “She’s white”.  Skin can say a lot about one’s class and ethnicity.  Like pigs, skin is a loaded subject.

Skin is alluring.  When we are physically attracted to somebody, we derive pleasure from seeing his or her body exposed.  (Some would equate skin with sin).  For skin is about the body, uncovered.  Thus, when we speak about the body, we are also speaking about skin.  In fact, if we were to remove skin from a part of the body, we would reduce it to something we would barely recognize.  That part would become a piece of meat, something we would find repulsive.  We breed pigs for their meat.

The nude, which occupies such an important place in the history of art –the Middle Ages admittedly constitute a hiatus of almost 1000 years- is always, also, about skin.  When we admire Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, we admire many things, including the way in which the Dutch master renders the beauty of the young woman’s skin.  Hatry however, shows us skins without the bodies they originally encapsulated –thus providing us with a new take on the hallowed subject of the nude, a take some would interpret as an attack on the integrity of the body.  Skins are testimony to the absence of bodies: The skin of, say, Marsyas or Bartholomew –or the foreskin of Christ- minus the actor.

Hatry tells me how at her first solo show in Chelsea, a woman clutching a leather handbag told her how very disgusting the artist’s material of choice was, without recognizing that she was holding onto a product made of skin, albeit treated differently.  Significantly, Hatry’s work has reminded some people of the way in which the Nazis used the skin of humans for lampshades and the like, a comparison the artist, who happens to be German, finds particularly odious, for Hatry recycles waste product, whereas the Nazis: “Used the skin of human beings as a kind of trophy to demonstrate their power over life and death”.

By stretching soft skin across panels, Hatry provides an interesting take on painting, in which the epidermis of oil is replaced by actual skin.  The evenly spaced staples running down the height or width of the panels and holding two pieces of skin together, read as a zipper, ready to be undone.  The texture of the skin, fraught with small, evenly spaced, parallel blank stripes, echoes the pattern established by the staples.  Flabby nipples may protrude in places, and Hatry may cause the flesh to part somewhere, revealing an underlying piece of skin.  These openings read like large wounds, surgical cuts, gashes in paintings by Fontana, burns or tears through plastic or burlap in compositions by Burri, or vaginas opening onto more flesh.  The stretched skin pulling at the staples, throws off a white, crystalline substance framing seemingly wet areas around the staples, as if the wounds or vaginas were oozing.

Since Hatry uses pigskin instead of paint on panel, it is not surprising to see her tackle some other heavyweights of 20^th century painting.  One vertical composition consisting of three horizontal registers of pigskin arranged one above the other and sown together, is reminiscent of the abstract geometric compositions of Ellsworth Kelly or of Hatry’s countryman Blinky Palermo –who would occasionally sow the edges of two pieces of differently colored cotton fabric together, before stretching these, like a canvas, over a stretcher.  Another composition paraphrases Jasper Johns’ White Flag, by replacing the stars and stripes of Old Glory by sown pieces of pigskin.  (This work offers an adumbrated version of both the painting and the symbol, as it misses quite a few stars).  This interpretation of the United States flag –by a German artist- will undoubtedly provoke outrage in this age of rising nationalism.  (I can already hear it coming: “Is she calling us imperialist pigs?”).  This is just fine, as it may lead to much needed thinking about -among other things- blind patriotism and the meaning of symbols in our society.  The task of the artist is to question the status quo.

Another work, now hovering between sculpture and architecture, consists of a plain, rectangular room built from floor to ceiling of identical panels of pigskin.  Here as elsewhere in Hatry’s work, the translucent skin encloses a volume, as it was designed to do -though now the volume is hollow.  Here, skin re-enacts its original purpose.  It separates the inside from the outside, and offers protection within.

Michael Amy

Skin Treatments

It may be associated with footballs and gross junk food snacks but, in Heide Hatry's hands, pig skin is both a product and poetic medium. At Volume Gallery, the German artist, brings a palpable respect for the material to works of redemptive, almost primeval beauty despite, or because of, the violence that produced it. Several hides—some gashed and stitched back together—are mounted and framed to reveal the inherent richness of their surfaces. These works portray a life cycle coopted by human production systems, exhibiting a near animistic (in a post-industrial sense) devotion.

Aric Chen, Hint Magazine, July, 2004

Skin Treatments

Heide Hatry studied art at the Paedagogische Hochschule in Heidelberg, following which she studied art history at the University of Heidelberg.  She taught art at a private art academy in Heidelberg for thirteen years.  She has exhibited in group shows in Heidelberg, at Volume Gallery in New York and DNA Gallery in Provincetown, MA.  The present is her first solo exhibition. 

“Skin Treatments” represents the fruits of Ms. Hatry’s recent explorations in the medium of pig-skin.  Although she was born in a rustic castle, her early life was spent on her family’s pig farm, and like Joseph Beuys with his fat and felt, she returns to the material in which she was even more deeply immersed than he in the evolution of her more recent work.  Ms. Hatry’s father envisioned a sort of self-contained farm economy in which his family would produce all of the materials required to support the pig farm, raise and slaughter the pigs and prepare meat and other products for consumption in a hotel that would complete the complex.  In his fervently whimsical scheme, a son would be the farmer, one daughter the hotelier, one the accountant, and Heide the butcher.  Almost twenty-five years later, in some way, elements of her father’s dream have been realized – her brother now owns a horse farm, one sister is an accountant, one a restaurateuse, and Ms. Hatry herself, well, she’s working with dead pig.

Although there was no conscious connection between her upbringing and her current choice of medium, the work makes it quite clear that Ms. Hatry is very much at home with the material – that its inherent aesthetic qualities, as exemplified by the unexpected surface textures evident in the work, as well as its deeper richness and plasticity, are somehow self-evident in her hands, is the first mark of her mastery.  But it is her more personal interaction with the material, her sense that somehow it must retain a kind of rough-hewn elegance if its origins are to be respected that marks both the material and the work as her own.

In choosing flesh as a medium, Hatry is compelled to embrace, or at least to accept, the social and economic dynamic of which death is a by-product and compulsory reproduction for the purpose of this socially useful death is a matter of engineering, of Technik.  But as an artist, her goal is the redemption of her material, both the physical stuff of which her art is made, and the inner world which fashions it as art.  Detritus became stuff for art long ago, in the collages of the cubists, the expressionists and the surrealists, in the humble collages and boxes of Joseph Cornell -- and nowadays it is rarer to see an actual painting or sculpture on view in an art gallery than an assemblage or construction from historically unconventional materials, or at least a work in disparate media.  But the detritus of an overt death industry like meat production is rarely thematized, and far more rarely engaged as a medium.

The exceptional semi-abstract series collectively entitled “Gash” engages themes at the heart of animality, some more fundamental than the simplest first steps of social life, some forever raging at the core of personal identity.  The works are at once suggestive of the social violence by which sexuality, particularly female sexuality, is imposed, or later constructed – the brilliant use of harsh materials suggestive of violence in the construction of these pieces, the painful “pentimenti” that stand alongside some of their seams, viscerally evoke images both of woman as meat and of the capacity and need of all thinking meat to create itself – and of the ferocious mindless spermatic imperative to reproduce.  The explicitly dual imagery suggests that the latter is always already inside the former, and that the subtly evoked struggle is a foregone inner dialectic.

Although its themes include the violent construction of sexuality, the glib appropriation of other lives to human ends, the omnipresence of evidence of our violence against the world and the uneasy truce among sex and death and power and beauty, whose signature quivers on the still pained surface of art, the final impression left by Heide Hatry’s current work, predominantly in the medium of pigskin, is composure.  All of it, from the abstract but powerfully allusive series called “Gash,” to the delicate abstractions and even almost minimalist exlorations of the pure texture of her medium, to the minute turbulances and joys of her exquisite book-works, all of it bespeaks an equanimity, or a wisdom, in which vision is at once critique and acceptance, or rather love.

John Wronoski

Chelsea

Heide Hatry, “Skin Treatments,” Volume, 530 W. 24^th St. July 16-27, 2004

Experimentations with pigskin.  Though initially off-putting, interesting relationships emerge between Hatry’s grotesque medium and other elements such as wood panels and classical artwork.

Nicole Haroutunian

Bei der ersten Begegnung mit den Bildern von Heide Hatry spürt man tief in sich die Anzeichen eines neuen noch nicht da gewesenen Glaubens. Man ahnt das Mysterium versteckt zwischen Dreck, Blut und Kot. Verwandelt kehrt man in die reale Welt zurück, in sich verborgen die Botschaft eines neuen heroischen Zeitalters. Nun hat es sich ausgezahlt mit nie nachlassender Beharrlichkeit an die Tore zu hämmern - nun öffnen sie sich. Die Bilder von Heide Hatry funktionieren wie die Filme von Maximilian Kastell. Was als primitiver Horrorfilm daher kommt beeinflußt den Betrachter mit subtilen Effekten auf unterbewusste Weise. Mit klinischer Präzision und manipulativer Kraft erzielen Filme und Bilder ihre Wirkung. Wie auch den Filmen muß man sich den Bildern weit öffnen, auch wenn die Bilder in einen eindringen wie eine Klinge - aber um zu heilen. Es ist als würde etwas hinter meinen Augen einen anderen Entwurf der Welt betrachten, das Grauen dringt tief in die Seele ein, man will nicht wahr haben, was man eben gesehen hat. Aber das ganz große Geheimnis versteckt sich unter der Oberfläche der Bilder, es sind Einschübe anderer Bilder und Geschichten. In einem von Kastells Filmen übernehmen Zombies die Macht, denn die Menschen sind gerne Zombies. Was in diesen Bildern zu sehen ist, ist weitaus schlimmer. In keinem zukünftigen Traum ist man mehr zu Hause. Man träumt nur noch von fremden nie gesehenen Menschen, man kennt sie nicht, hat sie nie gesehen, will nichts mit ihnen zu tun haben. Doch grade durch diese Begegnungen wird es gelingen diese Welt zu zerstören so wie sie ist.

anonymous reviewer, amazon, 2005