Heidi Bucher’s “Skinning” Art and Poetics of Space

All Exhibitions Lectures Information International News Editor's Choice

TEXT：Mengxi, ed. by Sue DATE： 2023.9.14

Exhibition View of Heidi Bucher: Beyond the Skins at Red Brick Art Museum, 2023

Heidi Bucher: Beyond the Skins, currently on view at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, features more than 100 works by the artist, as well as five video documentaries of her work, including interviews, and a brief biographical film playing on a loop in the exhibition space. Given that Heidi was nearly fifty years old when she began her personal and intensive artistic career, the 100 plus works in this exhibition are undoubtedly a comprehensive review of this avant-garde artist, who has long been neglected by mainstream art history.

Exhibition View of Heidi Bucher: Beyond the Skins at Red Brick Art Museum, 2023

I. “Rooms are shells, they are skins.”

With her creative use of soft mediums such as latex, mother-of-pearl, and textile, and her unique technique of Häutungen, literally skinning in German, Heidi’s novel explorations of the boundaries between the body, individual memories and histories, and public and private spaces remain capable to intrigue and impress audiences thirty years after her death.

From 1942 to 1946, Heidi studied fashion design at the Zurich School of Applied Arts under the tutelage of Johannes Itten, where she was heavily influenced by the Bauhaus school of artists, including Max Bill. The fad of space aesthetic in the twentieth century was indeed fuelled by futurism and the Bauhaus style.

Since childhood, Heidi has been fascinated by the iridescence of shells, beetles, dragonfly wings and fish scales, especially the unique texture and lustre of mother-of-pearl. In 1972, together with her husband, artist Carl Bucher, Heidi completed the work, “Bodyshells”. She proposed to transform the static sculptures into dynamic wearable ones. She achieved further interaction between the sculptures and the body, resulting in the performative “Bodyshells” as her first major creation.

“Bodyshells” not only blurs the class distinction of clothing, thus restoring clothing’s essential function of “covering”, but also further blurs clothing and sculpture, blurs the gender dichotomy, and thus challenges the established social cognitive order. The preference for handcraft and textiles has been a lifelong part of Heidi’s creative interests.

Heid Bucher, The Bed, 1975.

Textiles, latex and mother-of-pearl pigment, 220 x 160 x 2 cm

Heidi Bucher, Untitled (Tights), 1978

Textiles and white glue, 96 x 43 cm

It was in the 1970s that Heidi also began to make formal use of her signature mix of latex, mother-of-pearl, and textiles. She painted the mix over clothing and home furnishings, with the same effect as the ancient Egyptians embalmed mummies that used spices, cream, and beeswax. Aprons, leggings, pyjamas, underwear … their existence is a product of socially agreed and strictly bounded gender restrictions. Heidi sealed them with a gelatinous mixture. Consequently, the daily clothing that originally wrapped the body, like silkworm chrysalis, cicada moult or snake skin, became the carrier for storing the traces of the residual “life” and personal history. The relationship resembles that between the pearl and the shell. Through the traces, one can still imagine the process and the existence of life.

Exhibition View of Heidi Bucher: Beyond the Skins at Red Brick Art Museum, 2023

II.“Skinning” and Rebirth

In 1973, Heidi moved back to Zurich from Los Angeles after her divorce. At the exhibition, “Borg”, a watershed work for the artist, that was almost in complete darkness, attempting to represent Heidi’s first rented studio in Zurich to her audience.

The studio is located in a basement near Zurich’s central district. It used to be a butchery and a cold room. Heidi named it “Borg”, and here, she completed her first experiments with “skinning”. The “skinning” as shown in the documentary was a process that was more time-consuming, meticulous, beautiful and violent than expected. She waited for the coating to dry and then peeled it off to obtain a complete spatial imprint, which resembled the inner layer membrane of a seashell when reassembled. The inner space thereby gained a visual representation on the outside.

Heidi Bucher, Borg, 1976

Latex, textile, mother of pearl pigment and bamboo, 230 x 350 x 100 cm

Transitioning from sealing textiles to “skinning” spaces, Heidi favours the texture of the thin wings of the dragonflies. Similarly, dragonfly and fish are symbolic in her creations. The artist regards the metamorphic development of insects as a symbol of a breakthrough, thus attaching more metamorphoses and even the process of female life in the metaphoric sense to the skinning.

In Heidi’s case, skinning is both a method and a metaphor. As in snakes, butterflies, chrysalises and placentas, the shedding of waste is often labelled as filth. They are hastily stripped and discarded in the kitchen or during surgery. “The repressed, the neglected, the wasted, the lost, the sunken, the flattened, the desolate, the reversed, the diluted, the forgotten, the persecuted, the wounded”, as described by Heidi, are rather like the “ab-ject” as defined by Julia Kisteva, instead of the solid, shiny and immortal. While disturbing order, they pull the subject towards the collapse of meaning, serving as a constant reminder of the presence of death that intrudes on life. Here, Heidi, who is a fan of Chinese art, employs almost the same symbolism of death and rebirth as the silk fabric in ancient Chinese burial culture.

Heidi Bucher, Wanda Vogel, 1976

Latex, textile, colour and mother-of-pearl pigment, 83 x 92.5 cm

Heidi Bucher, Libellenlust II, 1977

Textile and Latex, 85.5 x 82 cm

Heidi Bucher, Untitled, 1980’s

Textile, Glue, Mother of Pearl, 264 x 137 cm

The dual concepts of violence and rebirth that are implicit in the act of skinning represent an attempt to seal the history of the individual in order to reopen it, and also, the unveiling of the nature of life in terms of fragility and death. Both Heidi and an artist she admired, Eva Hesse, relied on latex for their experiments with materials, even though latex as a material may not withstand the test of time, of which they were aware. Immortality is probably only a patriarchal illusion, but on the other hand, it implies an acceptance of, and even an homage to, the ultimate fragility of the body.

III. A Room of One’s Own

Heidi has codified the method of skinning, and further explored the possibilities of the act in various spaces. The attribute of the chosen spaces has witnessed a gradual transition from intimate to family history, and even historical and is loaded with public memories.

Heidi Bucher, Floor Skin (Ancestral Home, Obermühle), Pasquet Flooring, Room 15, 1st Floor, 1980

Jute, fish glue and latex, 340 x 260 cm

Heidi Bucher, Wardrobe, 1980

Textile, latex, mother-of-pearl pigments, 225 x 210 cm

A case in point is “Herrenzimmer” (“Gentlemen’s Study”). In 1978, Heidi skinned the room in her family’s former residence in Winterthur, which had been inhabited by her family for generations. In Heidi’s memory, the study occupied by her older male family members was a forbidden zone, implying mystery and authority. The skinning completes a restatement, clean-up, and even subversion and liberation of the gender politics of space, which is manifested in the functional division of the spatial structure.

The study and the smoking room are often regarded as male spaces, while the kitchen and the bedroom are the opposite. As a metaphor for society, home is not neutral in its spatial division; rather, it constantly reinforces the social value of the two different genders and the binary notion of gender. This gendered spatial construction becomes a container or even a shackle that divides individual memories and experiences. The skinning is not only a cleaning, but also an imaginative stripping of the patriarchal family structure. While the subtle violence hides a certain emotional catharsis, it serves as a metaphor for the preservation and metamorphosis of history, revealing the complex relationship between the human body and spirit, and the history of human beings.

The metaphors of “liberation” and “rebirth” continued to exist in Heidi’s work in 1983. What was different is that Heidi began to dive deeper into the history of the building itself. She designed the performance of “The Hatching of the Parquet Dragonfly” in the women’s prison in Le Landeron. The recording of the performance is shown at the exhibition in the Red Brick Art Museum. The artist had five female performers wear men’s underwear and then completed the coating and skinning, which Heidi referred to as “hatching”.

Heidi Bucher, The Hatching of the Parquet Dragonfly, 1983

Textiles, latex and mother-of-pearl pigment, 142 x 58 x 6 cm

The mobilisation of building’s history was furthered by two important acts of skinning. In 1987, Heidi skinned the entrance of the portal at Grand Hôtel Brissago, where Jewish women and children were interned by the Nazis during the Second World War. Then in the following year, she found her way to Sanatorium Bellevue in Switzerland, and created important works such as “Audienzzimmer des Dr. Binswanger” (“Dr. Binswanger’s Parlour Room”).

Heidi Bucher, Small Portal (Sanatorium Bellevue, Kreuzlingen), 1988

Gauze, fish glue and latex, 340 x 455 cm

Heidi Bucher, The Audience Room of Doctor Binswanger (Sanatorium Bellevue, Kreuzlingen), 1988

Gauze, fish glue and latex, 360 x 525 x 525 cm

In Heidi’s works, history, memory and emotion acquire a new, linguistically inaccessible imagery. As Gaston Bachelard puts it in The Poetics of Space, “When we have been made aware of a rhythm analysis by moving from a concentrated to an expanded house, the oscillations reverberate and grow louder. Like SupervielIe, great dreamers profess intimacy with the world. They learned this intimacy, however, meditating on the house.” As one receives a new poetic image, an emotion is re-spoken, the poetic reverberation is taking place in the inner space of consciousness, and the house – at Heidi’s request – “has to fly”; “It has to get away, far away from reality.”