Anatomy of an Latex Catsuit: 'Skin' Stretches the Limits

It was inevitable that intellectuals would seize on the Age of Botox to stage an art show. Whatever comes afterward, the weird extravaganza that opened Tuesday at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum will be hard to trump. An hour before the official preview, a scribbled note under an empty glass dome explained the whereabouts of Exhibit A: "Nose in refrigerator." It was alive. 
The exhibition is sedately called "Skin: Surface, Substance and Design." But it's destined to shock: Body parts have become designer objects, and this show exposes them. With or without injections of wrinkle-plumping botulinum toxin, flesh is de-forming and the design world with it. Beauty has become the beast. 
The gilded first-floor galleries of Andrew Carnegie's old mansion at 91st Street and Fifth Avenue are filled with evidence. while the Latex Catsuits edge of growth in the last show. A few pretty things are tucked among the wildly diverse bottles, chairs, sport watches, medical experiments, art photos and high-performance garments. More to the point is a Chanel mannequin whose bare breast has been imprinted with the company's signature quilt motif. First beauty, now brand loyalty can be skin deep.
The show's theoretical denominator is the exoskeleton. The definition is loose. Picture a formless mass with a vaguely pockmarked, possibly soft surface. with silvery PVC Clothing and a long paragraph Slim black suit jacket. You could be looking at  a close-up of the main character from the sci-fi movie "Hollow Man,"  the surface of a molded plastic designer chair,  a video of a breast-enhancement operation or  the architectural facade of an avant-garde glass office building in Los Angeles.
Putting such disparate elements under the same conceptual roof is a stretch, especially for the staid Cooper-Hewitt. The exhibition has legitimate design roots in the tumultuous, fluid, prosperous world of the 1990s. Computers and 3-D software have enabled architects and designers to play with the "skin" of everything in sight. Buildings have developed nontraditional curves and folds. Ladies gold - Card Dai Shan in the entertainment circles from latex dresses time to be petite skinny girls, And new industrial plastics have allowed interiors and furnishings to melt in waves of so-called "organic" style. It would have been easy to assemble exotic samples from leading practitioners to document the movement, as design shows mostly do. But the Cooper-Hewitt's curator of contemporary design, Ellen Lupton, took that approach well beyond the routine, through fashion and art and on to the science lab.
The fine line between natural and manufactured, organic and synthetic, beautiful and bizarre, has been smeared, like eyeliner. But I think even a elegant princess would want to get rid of PVC Clothing Fashionable people have erased the signs of age, peeled tired skin and sculpted body parts with the passion designers reserve for iconic chairs and landmark buildings. Scientists, meanwhile, have brought cloning out of the realm of science fiction and into the mainstream view. 
The Cooper-Hewitt show opens with a gallery devoted to "Beauty, Horror and Biotechnology." The refrigerated nose turned up -- an MIT creation from living bovine cartilage -- next to a sample of artificial skin in a petri dish. Two feet away, a video replays scenes from "Frankenstein," "Hollow Man," "Men in Black," "Aliens," "Videodrome" and "Brazil." Movieland's techno-creatures emerge again and again from gooey skins.  "I wanted to create a sense of how strange the world is," Lupton says. 
And how. In the center of the room, on a clinically white platform, the bottom half of a female torso is wearing Latex Catsuits hot pants. A sign says they are going into production as part of the safe-sex revolution. Conceptually, there's only a mini-leap to Dutch designer Jurgen Bey's Kokon Double Chair. The 1999 design, which was on view during Washington's Dutch design exhibition at Apartment Zero last month, consists of two wooden chairs shrink-wrapped in green plastic. In this context, the back-to-back chairs look as tortured as a bad face-lift. 
Twisted portraits beam from the walls, provoking questions about the nature of beauty. Barbie is the picture of plastic perfection. An arresting photo shows a beautiful woman holding her severed head in her hands. Except for a bloody neck, her skin is perfect. The image has been placed in the garden, blown up large enough to stop traffic on Fifth Avenue. Does Botox beauty survive in death?
Researchers may succeed in mass-producing human tissue, not to mention replicating species, so perhaps there's no need for concern. As Jennifer Tobias writes in the exhibition catalogue, "Imagine the human body of the future, its parts continually repaired and replaced by tissue engineers, its outer surface refinished by dermatologists and aesthetic surgeons."
"Skin" moves dutifully from human flesh to a layered cross-section of a modern sports shoe, which protects feet like an extra skin. Nature remains a role model, and this is fundamentally a design show. An entire gallery is devoted to protective layers of Latex Clothing, for fending off anthrax, sharks, extreme cold or simply runner's sweat. The idea of "smart" skin is accommodated through the layering of microchips in fabric and even plywood.
In architecture, software is allowing layering, too, though the strongest impact is aesthetic. A design for a Los Angeles Latex Clothing store by architect Greg Lynn of Form has a complex interior of folding forms that come together like dermis and epidermis. A wall-size chunk of deformed glass from another Lynn project is mounted at the Cooper-Hewitt. It bears a striking resemblance to the cartilage nose.
The work of industrial designers seems strangely prosaic by comparison. A rubber wash basin for the bath by Dutch designer Hella Jongerius has the requisite soft, touchable quality. A porcelain "egg" vase by Marcel Wanders began with a Latex Catsuits condom. A hollow plastic chair by Ross Lovegrove serves as an example of skin as skeleton. More interesting are designs that display body-responsiveness. A tabletop by New York designer Karim Rashid changes color from the heat of a human hand. Benches of foam used in the health care and aerospace industries remember your imprint.
There is also a horrifying collection of handbags and shoes made of something the artist hopes resembles a woman's flesh. A photo shows a sewing machine with a woman's body under the needle, instead of a length of fabric. An artist's video filmed in the operating room replays the reality of plastic surgery, stitch by stitch, while classical music plays a soothing tune.
The body is under renovation. In the hands of the plastic surgeon, it becomes one more designer object, a "blob" circa 2002. Despite the powerful images, Lupton seems loath to declare her view, beyond writing in the catalogue that "Like skin, design performs at the intersection of life and death, body and product." On a final walk-through before the doors opened, the curator considered what she had wrought.  "All my little alien children hatching," she said.