The New Flesh
“To kill the old flesh, you have to become the new flesh,” once rang the sanguine words of David Cronenberg’s 1983 body horror opus, Videodrome. In many respects, his proclamation was correct for haute couture as it stands today, if latent. Jolts of electricity supplied by amalgamation with long-dormant tech, sutures masticating grisly stretches of skin, epidermis reconstructed in vitro, synthesizing corpuscles through layers of atelier-grown neo-fibre, the world of fashion points to a transhumanist emergence, formerly relegated to ideological conjecture. Now, the make-believe of laboratory, factory, and abattoir batch-wear has been made real via innovation in sculptural, software, and 3D printing techniques. Willed by an urge to forge vêtements from whatever apparatus befits the post-apocalyptic occasion, the body has been reskinned as armor, and the rationales are numerous.
Gemma (@angelrei) pictured modelling Mad Max makeup artist Julian Dimase’s (@julian_dimase) Skin Suit. Prosthetics draped to mimic an extra layer of epidermis. Photographed via musician Daine (@d4ine). Uploaded 7th August 2024, made accessible through PAP Magazine.
For Melbourne-based FX artist Julian Dimase’s work, it is a most literal reclamation of the human physique. Pictured above, gore is turned into a thing of beauty as the sag of characteristically human skin drapes around its faceless model. In fashion, generally, the musculature of the body is a subtle centrefold, the very contours of which our discovered fabrics are fitted to flatter—an ode to the physical realizer of all our actions, motions, and endeavors, as well as their output. Yet, when such an homage to our material resolve is rendered overt via prosthetics, and a non-organic substance is positioned to look like it had once been live, grotesquerie is what stands pronounced, highly perturbing and provocative. It lands itself all too eerily close to our own impermanence, blurring the lines between the blood, sweat, and tears of the plausibly implausible on the silver screen (e.g., The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Saw) and reality.
However, this is a quality that perhaps speaks more to the viral A.I. assisted visuals of Rob Sheridan’s take on the Met Gala (emphatically, the ‘Meat Gala’) rather than the Skin Suit itself. Sheridan’s digitally driven work cleaves a demonic hellscape in the midst of a real-world occurrence, as if Hellraiser’s cenobites had been portalled in to stake a claim in the event, whereas the Skin Suit is absolved of crimson, scarlet, and any other evidence of a sapped vitality or barbaric struggle, more like a blank slate. It makes for a captivating middle ground, arrête-de-penser rather than prêt-a-porter, the Skin Suit challenging our standards of beauty, terror, and admissibility, all at once testing the bounds of implication through explicit garb. It is not even the most warped thing to come from Dimase’s “twisted mind” (a phrase which has baffled many for its usage to denote the most palatable of current arts—one which would have practical effects aficionados H.R. Giger, John Carpenter, and Cronenberg halt in their tracks) and still looks as if it were concocted in the WETA Workshop, shed from the Pale Man of Pan’s Labyrinth himself.
Another key trademark of the new flesh, however, is that it doesn’t have to capitulate to rigid biological doctrine. As the vessel housing our selfhood, etched in the pliability of a less durable leather, worn down over time, the body also constitutes any immaterial extension that is privy to the forces of circumstance. “Context is all,” once formed a critical motif in Margaret Atwood’s feminine bodily autonomy morality fable, The Handmaid’s Tale, and these words resound just as much as the disturbances the text depicts align with history: the subcutaneous self is host to modification. Our skin acts as a permeable boundary for the senses, the medium through which we accumulate our personal totality of experience. It is tooled as such, being the largest organ that inhabits our frame.
Yet, in spite of homeostatic demands—to balance all that is bodily—the brunt of cellular memory bears a toll if the wrong data becomes implanted. For multi-hyphenate artist yeule, their trauma manifests in iconic and echoic self-displays of scarification, cut, screamed, and dazed on the cover art and opening track ('x w x') of their latest album, softscars. Uprooted and waxed lyrical, the Central St. Martins’ graduate’s lacerations surpass embodiment in the traditional sense of the old flesh. Their make is akin to that of Ex Machina’s Ava, or even The Major in Ghost of the Shell, conflating robotic apathy with the hollow they feel deep in their being as they self-diagnose themselves with a cyber-circulatory system. Wires form new veins, ambient music the electrostatic pacemaker, and the heart their empty chamber, as they contemplate their secluded existence.
In an interview with Pitchfork, in their own words, yeule said, “I was really curious about the way computer systems work and technologically how we write code that learns to adapt [on second album, Glitch Princess]. I was thinking about all those things in relation to my humanistic flaws. softscars was more like an enfleshed understanding. There was a lot of tactile mediums in writing it […] I just really wanted to tackle the physical body and experiential pain […] A lot of my struggles came from gender dysphoria and eating disorders, which very much have to do with the physical form. Now I want to feel human sometimes. I want to feel like I have bearings. I want to feel like I’m real. It’s like I turned into an A.I. and my soul left my body, and now I’m an A.I. trying to find out what it means to feel like a human being.”
Be it that the new flesh is responsive to transmutation in the technological age, forever in a state of flux and discordance, it ironically also holds the capacity to resist. More specifically, cranking the voltage of Donna Haraway’s renowned A Cyborg Manifesto essay up a notch, the body (or, more apropos, the body electric) is a linchpin against authoritarian regimes—the final sum of the body when treated as an aggregation, dystopically, rather than a constituent whose stance is a coup against its larger.
This theme is prominent in Swedish-born Anna Uddenberg’s sculptures (one of which pictured below), which comprise a series of contorted mannequins encased in exoskeletons, splayed across impossible furniture, as functionality is taken to the nth degree. Like Frederik Heyman’s innumerable collaborations with Arca, minimal space haunts the figures of these installations, imbuing the work with a cluttered hyper-corporeal feel as Uddenberg’s figures are simultaneously mounted into psychosexually intimate “service positions” (a phrase taken directly from a dialogue that the auteur shared with Living Content). Metal adjoins limb, lampooning the soulless spirit of J.G. Ballard’s perverse auto-erotic asphyxiative novel Crash, while the bodies’ graft confers a commentary on capital. Immobile, they gain animism, their existence optimized to the point in which it detracts from their living comfort. Nonetheless, they show resolve in the face of it, standing superior, their ability to withstand the pressure of economized living a very feat against it.
From sentient mettle to steel metal, so long as the new flesh does not become an avid consumer of plastic (as in Cronenberg’s cautionary tale on evolution, Crimes of the Future), what better way to showcase human advancement than refreshing the silhouettes we have long-perfected—bioengineering a path forward—by delving under the skin.
