Long Live the New Flesh

Meret Oppenheim

“If you speak a new language of your own that others have yet to learn, you may have to wait a very long time for a positive echo.”— Meret Oppenheim.

Whether or not it's because I am casting off the persistent dregs of a bad cold, I am thinking even more than usual about the incredibly complex mechanism of the human body, and the Surrealist body presented by Meret Oppenheim. 

There is a well-known photograph by Man Ray (1933’s Erotique Voilée) where Oppenheim stands at a printing press, covered in ink . In some ways the photograph contributed to the Swiss artist’s perception (by men) as a femme-enfant, an archetype of femininity seen through the eyes of male Surrealists; yet Oppenheim was never about tradition and female conformity — she despised the term “feminist art.” Interested in the psychological teachings of Carl Jung from a young age, she adopted his theory of androgynous creativity, favouring an approach to art that was not ‘male’ or ‘female’ but of indeterminate sex.

Man Ray, Erotique Voilée (1933).

In 1932, aged 18, Oppenheim moved to Paris and started sporadic art classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse, an institution directed to painting and sculpture. In 1933, she met German-French painter, sculptor and poet Hans Arp and the Swiss sculptor, artist, and printmaker Alberto Giacometti, who became her artistic mentor. In 1933, Oppenheim created her first sculptural piece, a small gold ear appropriately titled Giocometti’s Ear, and invited her to participate in a Surrealist art exhibition in the “Salon des Surindépendants”. It was not long before André Breton asked Oppenheim, who impressed all with her uninhibited demeanour, to the group’s meetings at Café de la Place Blanche. 

Through her daring, unabashed art, Oppenheim took preconceived expectations of femininity, the female body, and presumptions about her own body and subverted them into works of deviance and resistance. A considerable part of Oppenheim’s legacy was toying with the body, external and internal, anatomical and physical, corporeal and mortal, and in doing so, she produced some of the most daring art of the twentieth century. 1936’s famous Object (or ‘Breakfast in Fur’ as André Breton called it) — a fur-lined teacup, cup and saucer — is an excellent example of toying with familiarity. Of the work, the American artist Jenny Holzer noted that Oppenheim transformed an everyday object into an otherworldly thing. ‘It's sinister,’ says Holzer, ‘it seems like a cup that could fight back. I suppose it implies teeth and so the cup could bite you, and I also like that it's repulsive.’

Meret Oppenheim, Objet (1936).

Holzer talks about the unpleasant thought of eating or drinking with a mouthful of hair, akin to the grotesque discovery of hair in a meal. ‘When you're eating,’ she says, ‘there is nothing more disgusting than when you get hair in your mouth,’ yet in teacup form, the artwork retains an element of practicality, gains a level of mischief and salaciousness, and thwarts social etiquette. 'I like that the fur would be a way to muffle sound,’ Holzer continues. ‘It's like she [Oppenheim] killed off the chit chat part of the tea ceremony. I think that it basically tells you that life is not what it seems.’ During the 1970s, Oppenheim told an interviewer: “I have been asked so often, ‘How did you have the idea of the fur cup?’ It bores me.”

Oppenheim’s playfulness with ideas surrounding her body and physicality included x-raying her skull. The self-portrait appears as a black-and-white negative complete with large hoop earrings: the most unusual addition to her internal cranial structure. To quote Whitney Chadwick, women Surrealist artists ‘increasingly deploy the body as a site of resistance and a locus for expressions of death, disintegration, horror, and presymbolic forms of expression.’ 

It’s compelling to chart how women artists explored their mortal bodies, considered their bodies’ limits, their bodies' animalism, their transient bodies, and the eternity of bodies in their art — Frida Kahlo, Leonor Fini, even Remedio Varo — as I wrote in a previous newsletter). Oppenheim’s Parkett no. 4 (1985) is another of these examples.

Meret Oppenheim, Gloves (for Parkett no. 4) (1985).

While Parkett no. 4 might not be as obliquely danger-red or as sexually charged as other artworks, the design still targets the body’s anatomy and blood in a very particular way. Here, Oppenheim’s goat blue suede gloves, detailed with the delicate webbing of the hands’ veins, depict an external bloodline for all to see.

Like her friend and occasional collaborator Elsa Schiaparelli, Oppenheim did not adhere to the idea that what garments conceal needed to be de-emphasised or hidden—even something as sartorially on the nose and haute couture as Elsa Schiaparelli’s Skeleton Dress (1938) play with these ideas. Oppenheim's use of fur, an elegant pair of gloves displaying rather than concealing veins, and an extremely cool self-portrait of her skull, to name but three. The body — in all it’s guises — on display. To quote from David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1982), ‘long live the new flesh.’

Meret Oppenheim, X-ray of My Skull (1964; printed 1981).