Second skin
Subtitle: Josephine Baker & the modern surface
By: Anne Anlin Cheng.
Contributors: Baker, Josephine, 1906-1975.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 234
ISBN-13: 9780195387056
Subjects: Baker, Josephine, -- 1906-1975 -- Criticism and interpretation; Modernism (Art); Surfaces (Philosophy); Arts, Modern -- 20th century; Arts and society -- History -- 20th century
Other titles: Josephine Baker & the modern surface; Josephine Baker and the modern surface
Description: What does a black burlesque star have to do with some of the most enduring and passionate ideas in modern aesthetic theory? The spectacular Josephine Baker emerges in this fascinating untold story as a principal figure in the drama behind the making of Euro-American Modernism. Instead of seeing her nude performances as a Primitivist given, the author argues that Baker's famous skin was central to the debates about and desire for "pure surface" that crystallized at the convergence of modern art, architecture, machinery, and philosophy. Taking the reader across the Atlantic, through real stages and imagined houses; banana plantations and ocean liners; metallic bodies and radiant cities, this study tracks the ardent and protean conversation between the making of a Modernist style and the staging of a new black visuality. In this account, the author and the Modernists known to have adored and objectified her in fact shared a common dream: the fantasy of remaking and wearing the skin of the other.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Her own skin; title: In the museum; title: Skins, tattoos, and the lure of the surface; title: What bananas say; title: Housing Baker, Dressing Loos; title: Radiant bodies, dark cities; title: The woman with the golden skin; title: All that glitters is not gold (or, dirty professors); title: Ethical looking; title: Back to the museum.