“The skin disappoints. Bursting the sack of skin does not necessarily ensure a good catch. You don’t obtain anymore. However, it does reveal the soul. It is that which is torn, separated, cut, to engender, in a word, the ‘natura’ or torn robe. It is all the more overwhelming that man treats this skin so cheaply. Though it means so much to him, he will shed it at the slightest bidding. And even if he is not bidden he wonders how to rid himself of it for he wants to shed his skin. Clearly the only thing he possesses weighs upon him. It is superfluous since possession and being do not coincide. Possessing it is the cause of misunderstanding in human relations. I have an angel’s skin, but I am a jackal; a crocodile skin, but I am a puppy; I have black skin, but I am white; a woman’s skin, but I am a man. I never have the skin of what I really am. There is no exception to the rule, because I am never what I have.”
(Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, ‘La Robe’)

Perfection – in its broadest terms is a state of completeness, a state of flawlessness. The genealogy of the word reaches back to derive itself from the Latin word “perfectio”, which literally means ‘to finish’, ‘to bring to an end’. In Aristotle’s Book of Delta, from ‘The Metaphysics’, we are provided with what is known to be the oldest definition of perfection that exists. It is here that Aristotle defines perfection in the following terms: “That is perfect which is complete – which contains all requisite parts; which is so good that nothing could be better; which has attained its purpose”. To some extent we still define perfection in such terms, and the idea of completeness in perfection could lead us to the understanding, therefore, that which is imperfect is exactly the opposite of anything complete – it is incomplete, and it is unfinished. For the ancient Greeks, however, perfection was seen as a single quality that was the requisite for beauty. So it is to say that should an object exist in a state of incompleteness, it does not, and cannot, possess the requisite quality for beauty and so must not be an object of beauty. To the thinking of the 19th Century, and the thinking of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, worldly human perfection might ultimately be attained by everyone, and if not perfection, then at least improvement. This would be the great concept of the modern age. To Kant beauty was something different from perfection. By perfection, he does not mean that it ‘could not be better’ as Aristotle did, he means that it is finished. Which in turn implies that the object which is unfinished is therefore imperfect. I am not finished, I am an object, a material surface, of the embodiment of imperfection.

(…)

No mystery, no romanticism, and no obscurities about function, no frontiers, just ‘meat’. This abandonment of concrete as a precise, yet at the same time obscure, material and the embracing of its ‘true’ material qualities caused by casting discarded the desire for the rendering over of the imperfections of its surface with plaster or paint, as a woman may use make-up, or have make-over, in order to disguise her facial imperfections – uneven colour, blemishes, lines, all of which carry the weight of the stories of all kinds of processes. Laughter, sadness, and anger, the emotions that trace themselves back through every line that has become heavily imprinted on the weathered skin. Concrete would start its life as a ‘messy soup of suspended dust, grits and aggregate…subject to the vagaries of weather and human fallibility’, and the rough wooden formwork was allowed to impress its grain, displaying knots and blemishes creating the face on the flesh, it was laid in deliberate and carefully-planned patterns which broke the surface into a kind of modern equivalent for rustication that was wearing all the marks of its flawed and imperfect skin.

‘Certain pictures, whether modern or ancient, transform the map of the human body and thereby get lost amongst the surreal platitudes of the beliefs the spectator holds concerning his own image. Thus, these works force him to reinvent understanding for just one moment, through the aesthetic momentum produced by their visual subversion of banal perception – in other words they force the spectator to reinvent his intimate discourse about himself and about his world of objects’.
(J. Guillaumin)

This imperfect, flawed, skin of the concrete in building is exactly what the economy of cosmetic surgery is turned towards in humans. It is the economy of completeness, and it is exactly the idea of incompleteness that drives us towards the understanding that until we have surgery we are, in effect, unfinished and imperfect. The visual experience of being unfinished is that we are too much ourselves, and too little of the image that will make us complete. And in this completion, we will become perfect. But the image here is made empty by the act of the operation, as we see in the work of the performance artist Orlan. We have a narcissistic phantasy that the face, and the skin that covers it, represents something. ‘The more I look at you, the more convinced I am that your face has a depth. Not a superficial mask,’ says Mark Cousins in one of his lectures on the subject of The Ugly. ‘We have fantasies about a depth which has been opened up by the surface. It is not immediately localised. Dramatised by a wound, the appearance of meat. This is the moment where I realise that the thing that I thought you were, and thought existed in the form of a depth, less than a millimeter underneath that there is meat. Meat which is non-significant…The ugliness of the face cannot be seen, it can only be read.’ The face or surface of the skin signifies an interior to be discovered, a depth to be delved into. If what I perceive on the surface to be imperfect, incomplete, we must assume that when I delve into and beyond the cosmetic, the living leather film that covers you, when the knife pierces that ‘disappointing sack of skin’ that I am expecting to perceive you internally as I do externally. I wish for the interior of your being to be as incomplete as that which covers you, I am not satisfied to discover that there is nothing more contained inside that heaving sack, behind that blemish stained mask, but blood, bone, and meat. Not only have I willfully pierced the sack of skin, but I have simultaneously pierced the skin of an illusion to discover it slowly deflating before me until it leaves nothing behind but a dry leathery film; I am left to discover a hollow gap between the mask and that which it was covering. Nothing fits into our understanding any longer. The work of the artist Orlan and her operations effectively destroys the distinction between the inside and outside in much the same way. ‘The inside no longer lies patiently within the outside, contained and stable and a guarantee that the world is just the world. She is not the nested Russian Dolls that lie within each other, nor is she like the anatomical models with their organs dutifully resting under their lids awaiting your prying eyes.’

So the concrete is an unfinished surface, and it is too much itself and too little that of the image that would complete it, or that which would perfect it. But it is nonetheless, as the Brutalists intended, true; it disguises nothing behind the mask of itself because it brings it all to the forefront and wears its insides on its outside; it has inverted the natural order of outside over inside. In effect now there is no inside, and there is no outside as it has removed the shroud that previously disguised its reality, that was acting as the mendacious shroud that lay over our perceptions. As Orlan said ‘the body is both what hides the world from me and what delivers me to the world, it reveals my dependence on others and their hold over me’, she sees the readjustment between the inside and the outside as a question of returning to an image which she felt is more in harmony with what she is inside, perhaps more truthful. The skin always speaks, and we read the vicissitudes on its surface believing that what we read has a depth, but it never really says what it shows. As the buildings, and ourselves, are enveloped in this matter we become prisoners of our own forms, captives of the image that we think we read. We inevitably appear as something other than what we are. But in piercing the skin, and in exposing all the processes and functions in the concrete, something happens to our understanding of the inside and the outside – the frontiers disappear, and the ‘semiotic capacity of the reader to read begins to break down. The world and our previous understanding becomes illegible.’ Inside becomes outside, and outside becomes everything.

(…)

When we leave the concrete raw, and when we expose ‘the scars on the building made by the way that it was cast’ we may be able to consider it ‘to be synonymous with one’s own physical imperfections’. We read it, we do not recognise it, and in our reading it comes closer to us than we wish it to. Rawness is about exposing the process of what a building is about, and as we perceive the process of the creation of a building through the imperfections of its surface it is possible that we could perceive ourselves in this way too, it is a removal of the mendacious skin that covers buildings, and essentially covers us. The process is part of the result, perfect or imperfect, finished or unfinished. If we were to read Semper’s writings on cladding, we will see that his theory contains the idea that the wall retains the traces of its origins in woven textiles through centuries of replication in different materials, and that ‘the ghost of a long tradition of handcraft may be seen in its ornament and manufacture’. In much the same way we could perceive the skin of the body, that has not been altered by the hands of a surgeon, bearing all of its lines and blemishes retain all the ghosts of ones past. If this is true, then the same applies to untreated concrete, as it does to the human skin that bears the marks of its existence, or its inevitable degeneration. Antonin Artaud, in his ‘Theatre of Cruelty, stated that “in our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds…violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality” which, he said, lies “over our perceptions. The cruelty it takes…to completely strip away their masks and show an audience the truth that they do not want to see.” Artaud, who sought to remove aesthetic distance by bringing his audiences into direct contact with the dangers of life by turning the theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected from, was a commitment, on his part, to assaulting the senses in order to awaken and free the mind from false realities. Perhaps it was exactly this removal of aesthetic distance in Brutalism that put us, as the spectators, face to face with a truth that we did not wish to see, we experience a kind of cognitive dissonance, as outlined in Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, where what we see is familiar yet at the same time foreign. Essentially it is a paradox that causes us to be attracted to and repulsed by what we see at the same time. It was unfamiliar and unreadable, and therefore presented us with a certain fear by directly removing us from the place where our senses and what we knew were protected; removing us from the place where we once accepted the ‘finished’ object as a prerequisite for perfection. We are, instead of this, shoved into an unknown place, a place which we cannot read because we have not yet experienced it. It is a place where the incomplete reigns, where the inside and outside are no longer a dichotomy of one another. This incompletion puts us in a state where neither beginning nor end exist, striving for an improvement through the acceptance of all that we do not wish to see in what we are and what materially surrounds us.