Skin Job (2002)

• 69%
• 2002
• Jennifer Reeder

"Art Jones commissioned this piece for a show called "Word" which opens at Diverse Works in Houston this April. Each participant was asked to choose a particular article or essay in order to generate a visual/audio/virtual response. The work produced is a conversation between an artist and a writer. For Skin Job, I chose to respond to various articles contemporary theorist, Laura Kipnis has written about pornography. I am interested in the similarities between how she writes about sexualized female bodies and how many other contemporary writers address technology. We fetishize flesh in the same way that we fetishize machines. The text in the piece is an original haiku which suggests that the heroine is man-made—an android. She is a bionic woman with an unlikely sense of loneliness, sexuality and desire. She seems observed and disoriented in her empty, future space. This piece contemplates a virtual identity as it influences a sense of contemporary utopia. (...