ART CHANGES SKIN: THE CORPORAL TURN OF THE 1990S AND VALERY PODOROGA'S METHOD IN AN ENACTIVIST PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

In the 1990s, as the Soviet symbolic order was dismantled, Russian researchers and artists consistently problematized and conceptualized the body in terms of disciplines and political anatomy, bodies-without-organs, body techniques, body projects, and so on. This article examines surface bodies or skin in its interactions with the environment. These bodies are present in Russian art of the 1990s but have not yet been fully recognized and been the subject of specialized research. There skin is not just an anatomical shell, but a key surface of existence and a site of crystallization of body-environment connections. To examine bodies on their skin surfaces the author uses the body-landscape approach of philosopher Valery Podoroga, which he developed to decipher the diversity of body-environment relations in literature and which his student Dmitry Testov reinterpreted in the terms of enactivist epistemology. This paper describes the skin of Moscow Conceptualism to demonstrate the modes of corporeality with which artists in (post-)Soviet Moscow engage. It analyzes strategies for working with skin in Moscow actionism, where, instead of sensitive membranes, artists invent anesthetized armor. Alternative projects to actionism are presented, where skin acts not as an insensitive covering, but as a contact surface. Through an examination of bodily metamorphoses in (post-)Soviet art of the era of transition, the article reveals how such different modes of existence as a radical rejection of the world for its reconstruction and an ecological attunement of the individual with the environment in the spirit of enactivist epistemology emerge and become reality on the surface of the skin.