Skin Gun, the remediation of the body.

To represent the idea of violence in society and show symbolically that the use of a weapon can cause to the human body, the Dutch artist Joanneke Meester has reproduced 'Skin Gun', a gun, the size of a matchbox , dealing with a shred of skin, previously done surgically removed from his own abdomen. The work was exhibited in a glass case at the Amsterdam Art Show, from 8 to 16 May. "If each of us came to carry a gun with your own skin, I think that would think twice before using it," this is the message that the artist wanted to communicate, through an action that draws attention to the body and the product obtained by the body itself, both invested with the role of media and the trustees of specific social and cultural signs. Considering that, since Klein and Manzoni, the body is shown agent of art, as well as expressive material of Body Art and artists in the 90s that have inherited the legacy of Gina Pane, you might have to think about how to present contemporary culture games to confuse and break down, and then "fix", the boundaries between the body and the world, and between the body and technology (Bolter-Grusin). Therefore observe the human body act as a medium that is expressed through the choice of traditional objects such as clothes and jewelry, decorative expressions that seem to respect the boundaries between the body, in fact, and the outside world, or through means such as more radical and extreme body building, the tattooing, piercing, branding, cutting, implantation of mechanical parts by Stelarc and, ultimately, cosmetic surgery, in the case of Orlan; artistic events at first disturbing, the which, however, can also be interpreted through the idea of ​​the free acceptance of physical pain and death as part of a natural cycle Life-Death-Life (Pinkola Estes), or as a form of 'martyrdom', ie death in which it appears that happens in it – and that blend reality and representation – concept, the latter, which we find in the words of Karl Rahner on the Man, who "should therefore have a freedom, freely loved to death. (É) If lÕuomo think death only with the stubborn will to live of the beast, you subtract it, binds directly to the vital afraid only of the existence of the face of pain, (É) transcendence (É) is true only in the form of cognition , freely admitted, of his being condemned to death. "