In the postmodern age of the mass-produced object, whatwould possess an artist to mimic something in the labor-intensive practice ofhand papermaking? By utilizing paper to mimic such materials as skin,porcelain, wood rot, writing paper, bodies, and concrete, artists raisequestions about the relationship of an original to its copy through a materialinterpretation that reflects upon various issues and concerns in their work.One example is Kiki Smith, who has used mimicry to challenge the representationof the human body by replacing indestructible materials with seemingly fragileones. Rebelling against the idea that serious art must employ historicallymale-identified materials like bronze, Smith created a series of works,including casts of bodies and skin, with paper. In an interview with CarlosMcCormick, she explains: A friend of mine once said to me that nobody was goingto take the things that I or the girls I knew did seriously because we allworked in cardboard and stuff like that…[so] I made things out of bronze for awhile…and then I just thought, ‘Fuck it!’ I didn’t like that. I really likemaking things delicate. I guess you could call them ‘girls’ materials’; butthey’re just things that are associated with girls: soft materials likepaper-mâché. In making work that’s about the body, playing with theindestructibility of life, where life is this ferocious force that keepspropelling us; at the same time, it’s also about how you can just pierce it andit dies. I’m always playing between these two extremes about life.1 Smith’sinterest in paper as boundary, as an osmotic membrane allowing a movementbetween inside and outside, is what Michael Taussig argues as “biological andprior to language,” in an attempt to make the distinction between self andOther porous and flexible while creating an aura of fragility that isillusory.2 This is not an academic or intellectual containment of the body, butone given over to tactility. As Smith continues, “My paper sculptures are madeout of paper that is used for archival purposes and is very tough and strong.It’s a little bit deceiving because it looks much more fragile than it reallyis.” Cast paper becomes more than a receptive medium that gathers and holdsform. It is an active process in which Smith uses paper to speak not only ofthe boundaries of the body, but to gendered notions of artmaking as well,changing how we understand the original through its copy. Where Smith usespaper to mimic political and spiritual boundaries, the artist Roxy Paineexplores the transitory state of nature and its mind-altering substances.Problems once again beget solutions. In working with botanical species withpsychotropic and in some cases poisonous effects, Paine discovered that installingorganic objects had unwelcome side effects: as they decayed, they broke downand produced noxious odors. As the “original” worked out its issues, Painebegan to experiment with creating a double in other materials.3 In the workFecund, Paine extended his investigation into rotting wood by casting the formin paper. In this project for the Aldrich Museum (Ridgefield, Connecticut),studio collaborator Megan Moorhouse of Dieu Donné created a rubber mold of anoriginal sculpture that she cast in cotton paper pulp and meticulously handpainted with a team of eight assistants. There is an immediate irony in themimicking of decay, where paper representing rotting trees becomes a place inwhich time reverses itself. The copy has been made inactive, held hostage inits new material, creating a stable, permanent state out of a devolving one. InPaine’s work, the transitory, pathological nature of the original led him topreserve the copy, in part for practical reasons, in part embalming it to holdfast our attention to the rebellious vagaries of nature. Mimicking decay givesover to a full-blown architectural collapse in the work of Sonia Blesofsky. InCinder Blocks, created while in residence at Dieu Donné, Blesofsky producedvellum reproductions, seemingly solid, but unable to sustain weight, fracturingat the edges and set to fall apart. The surface of the paper, pressed betweenmetal sheets, provides a smoothly troweled, grayish tone that makes the papertake on the appearance of concrete. Blesofsky’s use of mimicry reveals flaws instructural integrity—decoys waiting to plunge the world into instability andchaos, evoking trepidation and fear that transacts its sensory effect on theviewer. In her exhibition New Works presented at Gallery Diet in Wynnwood,Pennsylvania, April 2009, Blesofsky created sculptural installationsconstructed out of vellum paper, mimicking the concerns of the social elite.The broken fence, iron gate, surveillance camera, barbed wire, and skids aresculptural structures that define boundaries. This work explores ways in whicheconomic disparities in urban planning, superstition, and the need to feel safecreates physical barriers as a defense for “the haves” from the “havenots.”Ironically, Blesofsky’s objects are not designed to stand the test of time andoften collapse during the exhibition. With the artist’s choice of objects, itis not difficult to make the leap to Foucault’s social theories of control andcontainment.4 Form literally becomes content in these works as Belsofsky’sstructural failure reflects an underlying societal one. Still Blesofskycontemporizes Foucault’s theories by reversing this idea of containment, asindividual fear rather than organized social theory dictates who is separatedfrom whom. This shift, in combination with a sensorial delay of collapse,creates a dual reading that suggests Blesofsky is asking us to re-experiencewhat we are as a society, when life can be as fragile as the paper from whichthese objects are constructed. Foundational structures that speak to socialinteraction can also speak to economic ones. The relationship between monetarysystems and life-sustaining resources is addressed in the work of PeterSimensky. Among his projects, Simensky has worked with defunct currencies to createwhat he calls “Neutral Capital.” During a recent residency at Dieu Donné,Simensky set out to investigate how we understand the value of water as aresource. He worked with studio collaborator Steve Orlando to make siliconmolds of heavy grained-wood slats and curved, knotted cotton rope to replicatewater buckets from cast paper pulp. In viewing a form that is intended to holdwater, we are made aware of the absence of water. In this way, water, thebinder in paper and the binder in life, becomes a new metaphor for life’scurrency. Simensky draws an analogy between the sustaining character of theimplied contents of the bucket and the sculpture’s material substrate. Bytitling the work Wishing Well, Simensky cleverly creates meaning by remindingus that water is crucial to life. In the series Once Removed, Arlene Shechet,whose work is informed by Buddhist practice, works with absence and presence incast paper sculptures that mimic Chinese porcelain ware. Shechet begins byusing the technique of pochoir to transfer Buddhist architectural iconographyrepresenting three-dimensional structures into flat, two-dimensional drawings.Dating back to 500 CE, pochoir is a refined, labor-intensive stencil-basedtechnique used to create prints or to add color to preexisting prints. In hermethod, Shechet spoons finely beaten pulp, oversaturated with pigments, throughprepared mylar stencils onto wet abaca sheets. One aspect of this process thatfascinates Shechet is the way the pigmented pulp—colored bluish-black toreference architectural blueprints— bleeds into the base sheet. After thesheets are pressed, Shechet laminate-casts the sheets onto plaster vessels ofvarying shapes and sizes. Once the cast paper dries, Shechet delicately cuts itaway from its model and seams it back together.5 Perched atop the structuresthat created their forms, these sculptures mimic a folding of states by mappingBuddhist architectural drawings from vessel to vessel, sculpturally translatingBuddhist concepts of impermanence. In using paper to mimic porcelain, Shechetis able to work in several dimensions at once, while moving effortlesslybetween Eastern and Western forms. For his work titled Ghost Writer, Paul Wongcreated an installation in an anonymous-looking space filled with objects thatembody a writer’s practice: a table, a chair, a typewriter, slippers, a jacket,cigarettes, and an empty bottle. The artist laminate-casts highly beaten abacaover found objects, producing translucent forms where time evaporates throughthe absence of color and works become artifacts of history and desire. Inconstructing an experience of displacement, Wong shows how the voice of anindividual is subsumed into the homogenous zone of the political state and thewriter’s presence is denied and cut short by the prohibition of individualexpression. Mimicry here reads like a whisper, a physical trace of memory thatevokes absence both as a placeholder for a body and an ideology. In GhostWriter, mimicry is more about what is not there than what is, and reminds usthat political ideologies can dictate that there can be no original textbecause there is no original author. Emiko Kasahara’s Untitled (memo pad andindex cards) is a series of works that offer different perspectives on writingand the body. Kasahara, in collaboration with Mina Takahashi at Dieu Donné,created memo pads and index cards using human hair imbedded between sheets ofhandmade cotton and linen paper. Index cards were widely used in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries to record individual items that can then be easilyrearranged in files. Law firms, libraries, and schools designated spaces tosort and store these cards, which were often managed by clerks. Therelationship of the body to the Industrial Revolution is not lost on Kasahara.There is a Kafkaesque quality to the work as the artist mimics a mass-producedobject by literally drawing relationships between the body and standardizedblank forms designed for lists and memorization. The nature of the original asa mass-produced object is reinvested with new meaning through a handmadeprocess that reveals the costs of the institutionalization of labor and thecategorizing of information into the collective memory. For the 2001 VeniceBiennale, the artist Robert Gober also considered the juxtaposition ofcollective memory in the works Untitled by creating three true-to-scale papers;a cutout article from the New York Times, a torn section of a New Yorker page,and a Xerox copy of a handwritten advertisement for services. Like afourteenth-century manuscript copier, Gober reverses technology in these works,making the news by hand. Working with collaborator Megan Moorhouse at DieuDonné, the artist used cotton rag, cotton linters, and abaca, seeking suitableequivalents to the papers in archival raw materials. Photoetched plates werecreated for each of the works by master printer Todd Norsten and meticulouslydetailed to parody both textual and non-textual aspects of the work. Yetthrough their displacement, these fragments take on a psychological naturethrough a juxtaposition of objects that appear to have been cut from anewspaper, torn from a magazine, or Xeroxed. The most obvious question is whyGober would go to such lengths to re-present these objects? Is this the“distracted collective reading with a tactile eye” that Taussig speaks aboutwhen he defines the shift away from allegorizing artifacts to an “opticalunconscious,”6 or is Gober using the lexicon of his own surreal work to drawrelationships between art and current events, abstracting it into thecollective memory? Maybe both. By using mimicry in contemporary art withhandmade paper, artists shift the concept of mimesis beyond a rational processof making and the production of models to a broad creative approach thatencompasses social, political, psychological, and cultural concerns of everydaylife. _________ notes 1. Kiki Smith, Interview by Carlos McCormick. Journal ofContemporary Art vol. 4, no. 1 (1991): 81–95. Available online on JCA’s websiteat http://www .jca-online.com/ksmith.html (accessed August 14, 2009). 2.Michael Taussig, Tactility and Distraction,” in The Nervous System (New Yorkand London: Routledge, 1992), 144. 3. Lynn M. Herbert, Interview with RoxyPaine” in Roxy Paine: Second Nature (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston,2003). Available online on James Cohan Gallery’s website athttp://www.jamescohan.com/artists/roxy-paine/ articles-and-reviews/ (accessedAugust 14, 2009). 4. See Michalis Lianos, “Social Control After Foucault,”Surveillance & Society vol. 1, no. 3 (2003): 412–430. Available online onSurveillance & Society’s website as PDF downloads in French (original) andEnglish translation at http://www .surveillance-and-society.org/journalv1i3.htm(accessed August 14, 2009). 5. Kiki Smith, “Arlene Shechet,” Art on Paper vol.8, no. 2 (November/December 2003): 42–45. 6. Michael Taussig states, “[Walter]Benjamin had in mind both camera still shots and the movies, and it was theability to enlarge, to frame, to pick out detail and form unknown to the naked eye,as much as the capacity for montage and shock like abutment of dissimilars thatconstituted this optical unconscious which, thanks to the camera, was broughtto light for the first time in history. And here again the connection withtactility is paramount, the optical dissolving, as it were, into touch and acertain thickness and density, as where he writes that photography reveals that‘the physiognomic aspects of visual worlds which dwell in the smallest things,meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, butwhich, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference betweentechnology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable.” From MichaelTaussig, “Tactility and Distraction,” in The Nervous System (New York andLondon: Routledge, 1992), 144.
Kiki Smith, Untitled, 1995, 53 x 18 x 50 inches, brownpaper, methyl cellulose, horse hair. Photo: Ellen Page Wilson. © Kiki Smith,courtesy of Pace Wildenstein, New York.
Sonya Blesofsky, Cinder Blocks, 2008, dimensions variable(each element lifesize), cast abaca. Courtesy of the artist.
Studio assistant Stevie Remsberg, in 2002, hand painting thecast pulp edition Fecund by Roxy Paine. Courtesy of Dieu Donné Papermill, NewYork
Sonya Blesofsky, Untitled, 2009, vellum paper. Installed atGallery Diet, Wynnwood, Pennsylvania, April 2009. Courtesy of the artist.
Arlene Shechet, Once Removed, 1998, 12 feet diameter, castabaca paper, hydrocal (100 pieces). Installed at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, SantaMonica, California, 1998. Courtesy of the artist
Peter Simensky, Wishing Well, 2008, 19 x 13 x 13 ½ inches,cast cotton pulp, published in an edition of 3; project director Steve Orlando.Courtesy of the artist and Dieu Donné Papermill, New York.
Paul Wong, detail of Ghost Writer, 1998, 34 x 44 x 44inches, cast abaca paper. Courtesy of the artist. Emiko Kasahara, detail ofUntitled (index cards), 1998, 3 x 5 inches, human hair between linen and cottonpaper, published in an edition of 6; project director Mina Takahashi. Courtesyof Dieu Donné Papermill, New York.
Sonya Blesofsky, detail of Gate and Razorwire, 2009,life-size, vellum paper, tape, glue. Courtesy of the artist.
Robert Gober, Untitled, 2000–2001, 4 1/16 x 5 1/16 inches,intaglio print on hand-burnished, cotton linter paper with transparent yellowoxide and carbon black pigments, hand folded with hand-torn edges, published bythe artist in an edition of 15; collaborators Megan Moorhouse (paper) and ToddNorsten (printing). Courtesy of Dieu Donné Papermill, New York.
Robert Gober, Untitled, 2000–2001, 2 10/16 x 3 7/16 inches,intaglio print on metal-dried, hand-burnished, 50% cotton linter and 50% cottonrag paper with titanium white pigment, hand torn, published by the artist in anedition of 15; collaborators Megan Moorhouse (paper) and Todd Norsten(printing). Courtesy of Dieu Donné Papermill, New York.
