By Anne Anlin Cheng
During the determine of Josephine Baker, Second Skin tells the tale of an unforeseen but enduring intimacy among the discovery of a modernist variety and the theatricalization of black pores and skin on the flip of the 20 th century. Stepping open air of the platitudes surrounding this iconic determine, Anne A. Cheng argues that Baker's recognized nakedness needs to be understood inside better philosophic and aesthetic debates approximately, and hope for, 'pure floor' that crystallized on the convergence of contemporary artwork, structure, equipment, and philosophy. via Cheng's research, Baker emerges as a crucial artist whose paintings engages with and affects a variety of modes of modernist show resembling movie, images, artwork, or even the fashionable condominium.
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Extra resources for Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface
Example text
Are we looking at a person or a replica? Is she (or it) being stripped down or dressed up? Whose gaze? And what kind of a body is it anyway that wears feathers and bananas like second skins? I am not interested in claiming “Baker-turned-ornamentation” as either the sign of her objectification or the evidence of her subversive agency or some simplistic notion of selfinvention. Instead, I want to concentrate on the details and textures of those ornamentations and ask questions about what that “style” is itself doing in relation to the supposed “real” body that it covers.
While it may be said that many aspects of Baker’s performances—from her lyrics to her choreography to her costumes—draw insistent attention to the very notion of the fetish, both racial and sexual, this observation, instead of saying something about Baker herself or about her politics, in fact provokes a series of questions about the convergence of style, history, and performance and about how fetishism as a mode of partial recognition feeds into the politics of that convergence. To make inroads into this complex of interpenetrating issues about art, exposure, race, sex, imperialism, and contemporary critique, let us begin by considering what might be called Baker’s relentless self-fetishization.
3 For these innovators of modern architecture, the ideal of architectural purity—defined as specifically the liberation from “primitive” and “feminine” inclinations—is inextricably bound to the twin ideals of culture and civilization. 4 For Freud, Loos, and, half a generation later, Le Corbusier, “man” becomes civilized—and his surroundings modernized—by renouncing primitive proclivities. The discourse of the “pure” modern surface thus produces a nexus of metonymic meanings—purity, cleanliness, simplicity, anonymity, masculinity, civilization, technology, intellectual abstractism—that are set off against notions of excessive adornment, inarticulate sensuality, femininity, backwardness.