Skin Deep

Posted by Lara Masters at 10:52 on 13 Jan 2009

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"Of the Flesh", is an art exhibition of works made entirely from human skin. I wasn’t freaked out by the idea of using dead people as creative material, graveyards are over-subscribed anyway but I was irritated; was this really necessary? Wasn’t it just an attention-attracting device like when Pete Doherty popped a vein and scrawled lyrics in blood when a red felt tip would have been just as vibrant and far more legible?

However, in a rare moment where I briefly held back my bombastic capacity to be judgmental I went to see Andrew Krasnow’s work for myself. GV Art Gallery is not wheelchair accessible but I was carried down the stairs and wheeled around in an office chair such was my determination to get under the skin of this skin.

An interrogation of the gallery owner into the source of the skin used in the art allayed my fears that Andrew was not just Hannibal Lecter with an artistic flair. It was in the lead up to the Gulf War, that Krasnow made his first skin work; an American flag asking citizens what price would be paid for patriotism? When cultural centres in America refused to show the piece because it questioned political leaders the irony proved that the U.S had dictatorship leanings and the message of Andrew’s work was vitally pertinent.

Krasnow’s choice to use skin is further explained by the fact that before he was born, his 12 yr-old sister suffered third degree burns in a fire in which she saved the lives of two other children. Both parents endured extensive and repetitive skin grafting to help their daughter but she died. Andrew’s childhood sketches of a Frankensteinesque father, his torso encased in a metal cage to protect the raw skin from clothing reveals formative memories steeped in the realization of both the frailty and power of human skin.

Other works in “Of The Flesh” are simply anti-consumerism like a hamburger made from skin and filled with human teeth and a skin wallet and none of the work is for sale. I realised I am not fully aligned with the idea of the evils of materialism, perusing the exhibits wearing Prada boots whilst smearing my mouth in Juicy lip-gloss and feeling the onset of a hamburger craving.

Thankfully, Krasnow’s are not abstract works. I find much of what is termed as “abstract art” simply a euphemism for “couldn't really come up with anything art" or "had a hangover art". Krasnow’s work is direct; there are bullets wrapped in skin, skin cowboy boots, a baseball cap and to every piece he adds some of his own skin grafted from him in a surgical procedure.

I didn’t find “Of the Flesh” eerie; the skin looks like leather and the integrity of the work surpasses its unusual medium (although the woman who came in to the gallery before me passed out when she noticed some hairs still attached to the skin in one of the works but perhaps she had skipped lunch.)  

There are installations representing spiritual sentiments too; a delicate pair of angel wings and my favourite; “Soul Loss” where a small, saddened, embryonic figure is hunched over, eyes to the sky, tip-toeing tentatively forward in search of their errant soul. That’s just how I feel right now as I wheel into ’09 trying desperately to snatch back my soul from the devil whom I sold it to in a drink-obscured, lust-fuelled moment about a year ago somewhere in Brick Lane. Lucifer sagely reminded me at the time we exchanged contracts that “ you can't escape the skin you're in” but I was lost in a whirl of wantonness and it wasn’t until seeing Krasnow’s work that I remembered his devilish truism.

If you’re in the market for an epiphany then visit; “Of the Flesh”; GV Art Gallery, www.gvart.co.uk, 49 Chiltern Street, London, W1U 6LY until Sat 17th Jan.

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