On Plastic Disembodiment

The nervous tissue is here related to its technological counterpart, the screen. Both are articulated as interfaces, which mirror one another and appear to be engendered in an almost symbiotic relation. Beyond that, the iridescence of the retina again finds a variety of analogies in Rosenkranz’s sculptural and painterly language, where shimmering, reflecting glass surfaces as well as translucent plastic covers and foils abound. All these instances share an implicit reference to a body whose skin might close it up, shield, or protect it. Such tissues also relate the body to its surroundings. Yet, at the very same time, it is precisely this body—a human figure, standing erect as the epitome of Western artistic tradition—which never appears in Rosenkranz’s entire oeuvre, even though it is referenced incessantly, for example, through accessories like emergency blankets, sneakers, or most obviously the PET bottle itself.^[1] All three examples already specify this implied body as the subject of a specific politics related to its organic life, its survival, or at least the control of its health.^[2]

It might be argued that such an eclipse of the representation of the human figure in Rosenkranz’s work follows a general development within Western modernism. Starting with the historical avant-garde’s imperative of abstraction, the mimetic representation of the human figure became considered a problematic baggage of humanist tradition.^[3] Such a view continued throughout the 1960s and ’70s, with conceptual art’s call for a dissolution of the primacy of objects in favor of often numeric or language-based processes, programs, and instructions.^[4] I would like to argue, however, that Rosenkranz’s work can be subsumed to neither of these traditions. I propose that, in distinction to these two vectors—the abstract and the conceptual—it rather insists on what has been largely suppressed by both: the possibility and urgency of a re-articulation of mimesis. In this way, I want to read the absence of the human figure in Rosenkranz’s work not as an avoidance, but as a mimetic impulse to approach it, yet from a rather oblique angle, where skin, as a membrane between an organism and its environment, takes center stage. To explicate this, I will first focus on two of her largest series, Firm Being (2009–ongoing) and Liquid Life (2022-ongoing), before finally considering a work that is installed at the center of her retrospective exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam: Skin Pool (Shine) (2025). ^[5]

PET bottles are distinguished by their global dissemination, as well as by their extreme proximity to the body. Most of their ergonomic designs, especially their narrowed middle section, await the human hand to grip them. The implied imperative by design, to continuously fill up the human body with its content, to ensure its proper functioning, makes the human organism appear in analogy to it: as a vessel. That Rosenkranz fills these bottles in a topological inversion with flesh hues, and thereby puts on the inside what is supposed to be on a body’s outside, ties the paradoxical knot of identification even tighter: the bottle’s content appears as much inside us, as we are in the bottle. As containers, they isolate what is otherwise part of an ideally unhindered flow of a planetary resource as a common good into quantified amounts. They provide water not only with a shape but also a name via their brands. For Rosenkranz, however, it is less the look of clean, unopened bottles on supermarket shelves, but rather their appearance as floating trash in the seawater of the canals of Venice that prompted her to use them as an artistic material. It therefore might be less their pure commodity status, which is at stake here, but rather their being part of an environmental cycle where a singular Gestalt becomes, in the form of dispersed microplastic, part of its surroundings again.^[6] As microplastic, for whose global spread the PET bottle is one of the predominant symbols, the material becomes invisible to the human eye, but in turn can even be detected now in our blood and organs, especially in the human brain.^[7] Form—and its singular appearance as sculpture—is thereby always related to its nemesis: its continuous dissolution.^[8]

A Self of Nature

How could this be related to mimesis, since what Rosenkranz’s work does has little to do with an act of imitation, at least when understood as a form of copying or a reproduction of shapes? This would ordinarily be the commonly understood definition of mimesis, which goes back to Plato, who defined the artist as someone who uses deceptive means in their production to blur the boundaries between reality and its treacherous image. Mimesis would be defined here as a problematic process from eidos (idea) to eidolon (simulacrum), in which phenomena in nature would play a form of mediator between the two. In distinction to that, Kant introduced a different and more complex idea of artistic mimesis. Nature might still figure as a starting point here, yet art does not merely copy or reproduce its appearances, but rather interprets them through a form of play, which Kant terms “free imitation” (§47).^[9] On the one hand, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant is very eager to differentiate natural phenomena from artistic ones when he writes: “Art is distinguished from nature as doing (Thun) (facere) is distinguished from acting (Handeln) or working (Wirken) generally (agere), and as the product (Produkt) or result of the former is distinguished as work (Werk) (opus) from the working (Wirkung) (effectus) of the latter.”^[10] Whereas Kant does consider, for example, a beehive as the mere effect of a non-conscious form of acting, the work of art, in distinction to that, requires a conscious and free human agent. Both the beehive and the work of art, however, could be considered products, but the fixed result of a work is always considered more than just the mere effect of a process. Yet, and on the other hand, this human producer as artist receives, according to Kant, their rules and measures through nothing else than nature itself: “[Art] gives rules, or at least examples, but it has its own rules dictated to it by nature” (§46).^[11] In this way the first established firm distinction between the workings of nature and the work of art becomes less clear. What the artist reproduces according to such rules is thereby not natural forms or shapes, but rather natural processes as such, and not identifiable figures. Analyzing this paradoxical relation of mimesis with regards to nature in Kant, Derrida characterized it not as a reproduction of nature but rather as a flexion of physis on itself: “One must not imitate nature; but nature […], folds itself, returns to itself, reflects itself through art. […] There is no longer here any opposition between physis and mimesis, nor consequently between physis and technè.^[12]” In her analysis of recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, Catherine Malabou followed and applied these definitions of mimesis—as developed by Kant and Derrida—in order to describe their inherent relational aspect as one in which art produces “a self of nature.” She writes, “To the extent that artistic mimesis is a gift from nature, it exhibits the identity of nature. Art is the subject of nature. A natural artefact. An artificial naturality.”^[13] In other words, what makes mimesis possible here is precisely not a distance between a human observer and nature, as it would be the case in Plato, but a specific form of immersion, where the separation between the two becomes impossible. Nature spills over into culture, enabling a process of exchange between the two, but also a form of self, which, however, is not simply a human one. Again, what is thereby mimicked or repeated is not a shape, but a process—a form of working. What is of interest here is the becoming porous of a free human agent in relation to what once could be considered natural processes, but which gradually can be less considered as separate from human agency tout court.^[14] And yet, Kant defines artistic mimesis as one where, nevertheless, a certain form of freedom inserts itself. This form of imitation—as becoming other—is never just an effect or a causal relation, but must be considered a form of translation which is always on the move between two poles: the workings of nature as a process and the singular shape of a work. 

Statues to Come

The series Firm Being and its rather solid, closed-off volumes of skin tones, poured into a bottle, approaches such a mimetic relation primarily from a sculptural perspective. Not only since the bottles could be considered readymade sculptures, but more importantly, because the PET bottles are articulated as a peculiar form of mold, which at least potentially could cast the shape of a solid body. As a sculptural process, however, it is stopped in the middle, before ever delivering a final product. It thereby inhabits an in-between status, which is crucial to the articulation of mimesis laid out above. Since this potential cast would be nothing but a repetition of an already existing, mass-produced shape, the result might never be considered a proper sculpture. This is because, as a strategy, it takes recourse to nothing more but the indexical and, to be more precise, the imprint, which Georges Didi-Huberman has conceptualized as a repressed technique of Western sculpture. From the Renaissance onwards, it constitutes an essential but also problematic supplement to sculptural skills. As Didi-Huberman argues, the imprint has been considered too close to nature—and thereby too far away from artistic freedom and intent—to be openly accepted as a proper form of art.^[15] It is therefore not accidental that it primarily survived and thrived at its fringes, be it in the form of death masks or through the production of early medical models of the human body. At least within the series Firm Being, the imprint is not simply that of a human body or another natural form. To the contrary, it paradoxically approaches the human body solely via the imprint of a commodity.^[16] I therefore think it is crucial to connect this strategy to Marcel Duchamp, who, after the Second World War, took recourse to the imprint of the body, precisely against the backdrop of his articulation of the readymade.

His installation Étant donnés (1946–1966), which depicts a three-dimensional, headless and hairless white female body, flesh-colored and nude, lying within a landscape against the backdrop of a waterfall, could on the one hand be considered a puzzling return to a form realism in terms of bodily representation after abstraction. However, the production of this nude is tied to many different singular small sculptures, which, like Firm Being, are rather too small to be considered freestanding, autonomous works and thereby open themselves up to their surroundings: mobile, close at hand, positioned on tables or mantlepieces. This often-overlooked series of works by Duchamp mainly consists of body parts, which he produced via direct imprints from different real and artificial bodies. The female sculpture, part of Étant donnés, becomes not only the result of imprints of real bodies but also engenders, as a mold, a new series of imprints, like Feuille de vigne femelle (Female Fig Leaf) (1968), or Wedge of Chastity (1954). The latter consists, on the one hand, of a direct imprint of a body part, which is cast in bronze, and on the other, its complementary counterpart, made of flesh-colored dental plastic. It engenders a confusing play between positive and negative forms, in which mold and object become interchangeable. This use of the imprint disperses the organism into a variety of part-objects, which are both abstract-looking and excessive in their realism, because of their indexical nature.^[17] Instead of seeing them as a break within Duchamp’s oeuvre—as a return to a form of realist sculpture—I would rather argue, and I follow here Helen Molesworth’s lucid analysis, that they are to the contrary intricately connected to Duchamp’s earlier readymades, even to his most notorious one, the pissoir Fountain (1917).

As a sculpture, Fountain is part of a theoretically endless series of casts made with a singular mold.^[18] It is thereby part of a larger serial system of commodity production. Like Rosenkranz’s PET bottles, Fountain’s title relates it to the possible hydration of the human body, which through its often vertical installation becomes even more literal, since the pissoir clearly resembles turn-of-the-century white porcelain public drinking fountains, in which one would insert one’s head, drinking from a protruding steel tube installed on its inside. Fountain, almost comically, thereby combines pissing and drinking, and inscribes them as complementary activities into a metabolic cycle. However, as always in Duchamp’s work, this complex is strictly bound to a patriarchal, heterosexual matrix of gender divisions. Setting Fountain next to the casts of female genitals, like Feuille de vigne femelle, forces one to read it as a negative shape surrounding the male body, on whose anatomy it is implicitly modeled as a kind of mold. What the later part-object and the earlier readymades, like In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915), Hat Rack (1917), or even Comb (1916), have in common is their insistent nearness to the body. All three canonical examples of Duchamp’s readymade production constitute either accessories to, or even prosthetic extensions of the human subject. In a phenomenological double-bind, they are always touching and being touched.^[19]

Firm Being directly combines these two strands of Duchamp’s practice, as it overwrites the readymade as being part of a capitalist and serial commodity form with the indexical model of the imprint. At the same time, Rosenkranz eradicates Duchamp’s heterosexual matrix, which constitutes any body as the effect of a projection of a male desire, and cannot help but to inscribe every form into an oppositional structure between protruding and intruding shapes, implying thereby a supposed unity of male and female. Firm Being, in distinction, envisions a rather fluid body outside of such a binary structure where, already on a morphological level, such distinctions between gendered shapes—phallic and not—cannot be stabilized.^[20] This queering is directly related to the formal strategy, which undoes the dichotomy between body and mold, inside and outside, and finally between an autonomous organism in relation to its external environment.^[21] Instead of stating the body as an autonomous organism and a form of origin, in Rosenkranz’s work the implied but also contingent starting point of the imprint is the mold of the bottle, whose microplastic, transported and dissolved by water, enters the human body and thereby engenders a non-reversible process of plasticity. Through the blood, it enters every organ, and most prominently the brain, which finally becomes literally built, shaped, and formed by this material. The model of the imprint is thereby radically expanded to a form of touching, through which the very material of the mold becomes one with the body to be “cast.” As recent research findings show, the amount of microplastics in our brains rose exponentially within the last ten years, and now constitutes around 0.5 percent of the brain’s total mass. As the researcher Bethanie Carney Almroth announced with regards to the material’s planetary spread: “There’s nowhere left untouched, from the deep sea to the atmosphere to the human brain.”^[22] If Duchamp famously insisted that works of art should be less retinal and more concerned with the intellect, Rosenkranz finally includes the brain into a sculptural perspective, which at the very same time decenters it from the human as origin and telos.^[23] The implied material of microplastic, which is both invisible but also omnipresent on a planetary level, must now obviously be seen as part of what Kant once termed the workings of nature, which can no longer be separated from the spheres of economic, political, and social reproduction. Rosenkranz’s refusal to analyze or even criticize this very process of plasticity from a distance, for example, as a form of artistic research, is again due to its decision to inscribe itself within its very mimetic form of exchange.^[24] And this also makes clear how the initially stated absence of the human figure in Rosenkranz’s work is directly related to its hyperbolic endeavor to not represent an individual, but rather the human species, whose universalist supposition is, at present—at least when seen from a postcolonial perspective—under heavy dispute.^[25]

Painting, Slipped Away

In all examples of the series Firm Being, the water brands—Re Fresh, Caledonian, Nature’s Spring, Neuro Bliss, Niagara—are paired with additional titles in parentheses: Blind Straw, Blue Leaf, Like Falling, Greek Sea, Clouds Tender, to name just a few. As if drawn from a stream of consciousness, they appear random in their pairing with the brand names; cryptic, yet at the same time threadbare through language’s decades of use in advertising. However, it binds each instance to a poetic strategy, which should not be considered as cynical, but as the only possibility to make sense, in a narratological perspective, of this posthuman, inescapable process of plasticity, where the different hues and shades of color are now tied to a possible impression of a landscape—filled with an atmosphere, surrounded by plants and water—which now appears tied to a potential lifeform, be it fictional or real.^[26] Or, to put it differently: working in the language of branding is marked as the only way to become a weak and labile agent within this megalomanic cycle. Such an impulse becomes even more explicit with the series Liquid Life. Here, the otherwise closed PET bottles are suddenly opened and articulated now less as sculptures, but as actual means for a practice of painting, which might use the bottles as mixing cups: the German title used by Rosenkranz for different works very close to the series is Mischbecher. Like the articulation of sculpture as a form of imprint in the making, they are designated as part of a painterly process, whose finished tableaus are at times exhibited next to them, but which are, because of their presence, somehow leveled down as mere examples.^[27] The Mischbecher is a curious result of the decision to work not only monochromous. It is also due to the highly watery, at times semi-diaphanous form of acrylic paint deployed. How does it compare to its classical predecessor in the practice of oil painting, the palette, which, as a form of horizontal tableau, can be described as a form of preliminary stage of painting as such? On the palette, colors are mixed, tried out, and provisionally set next to each other, before they might end up on a finished, autonomous work, hung vertically against a wall. As Darby English describes it in the context of the evocation of palette work in Ed Clark’s abstract paintings, the palette might stand for the “negligible stage in the fabrication of objects for presentation in a painted scene. […] Suspending color in just this liminal zone identified with the ‘before’ of painting forces the viewer to apprehend both the collaborative nature of color relations and the decisions impelling them. […] Palette work suspends the coalescence of color into image: deployed as a specific intensity, abstraction keeps image at bay.”^[28] What English is implicitly hinting at is the function of the image, to identify a subject in the strict sense. To keep this force of identification at bay is what the evocation of the palette work, in tandem with modernist abstraction, might be able to achieve. To focus on the palette itself, one could therefore describe it, following English, as a painting prior to the finished work: improvised and to a certain extent outside of an external gaze proper. The marks on a palette are thereby not only weak in their power to produce proper figures, but also labile when it comes to their expressive significance in relation to their supposed producer. In short, what appears to be at stake is the destabilization of painting’s force to produce an image of the human subject. In distinction to the palette, the PET bottles cum mixing cups of Liquid Life further reduce such possibilities of mark-making. When dipped in them, the brush cannot leave a trace. Every difference between tonal hues, figures, and background almost immediately tends to dissolve. The mixing cups leave color in an intermediate stage between their plastic potential as a thick material and their ability to form virtual figures when applied on a flat surface.

What I have so far ignored is the representational aspect of color hues implied in all of the cases discussed above. The starting point of the palette in Firm Being is a variety of skin tones, ranging from white and brown to black. The skin pool of the installation Skin Pool (Shine) (2025) might therefore not only be read as a work, which might synthesize and singularize the serial approach of Firm Being and translate it to a monumental scale. Its focus on a white skin tone problematizes its very own limit when it comes to its goal, to approach humanity as a species.^[29] To do so, it must structurally suppress what W. E. B. Du Bois termed the global color line, the twentieth century’s most pressing problem of exclusion and oppression.^[30] It cannot help but to put before the viewer what Sylvia Wynter termed the excessive overrepresentation of “Man,” the result of a false form of universalization which is based on a model of a white subject.^[31] The average white skin tone is nothing but the repetition of an artificial projection of what Man is by a global colonial industry. Its threatening and dystopian promise of a constitution of a global body, of which microplastic is just one potentially lethal factor, does not take place outside, but within colonial difference. In order to answer the question of who the “we” of Our Product might be, one obviously needs to critically reinscribe the color line on the side of its reception, where every difference to the projected ideal is registered, and thereby enacts new forms of exclusions in relation to the disturbing identification it might call for; that is, who might be able to see or not see oneself as an implied part of the abyss of the pool. It is not one community, but the production of one as a supposed hegemony, which is founded on a continuous work of segregation.

Wynter defines the struggle of the millennium as one between the colonial project “of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass […] conception of the human, Man […] and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the humans species itself/ourselves.”^[32] In distinction to gender, which Wynter sees as based on a “biogenetically determined anatomical differential correlate,” she argues that race is a “purely invented construct,”^[33] which is based on an “extrahuman ground.”^[34] Wynter argues that the continuation of the color line throughout the twentieth century—white/non-white—and its ethnoclass conception that the human is the result of a mapping of former distinctions based on Christian doctrine, like heaven/earth, rational human/irrational animals, onto what she terms a purely “degodded” conception of the human in modernity. Following a Darwinian conception of evolution, the chain of distinctions could now be rearticulated as selected/dysselected and deserving/undeserving.^[35] The new extrahuman ground, on which the color line is based, becomes now evolution, “thereby reducing the human within the terms of a biocentric human sciences paradigm to being a mere mechanism driven in its behavior by its genetic programs.”^[36] The prerequisite for such a continuation of distinction which reproduces the color line is, however, the idea of an enclosed organism and its successful adaptation to an external environment.^[37] Following Gregory Bateson and Franz Fanon, Wynter implies that the only way out of this fatal continuity lies in the necessary destruction of the segregation of our current culture of knowledge production into “Two Cultures”—Natural Sciences and Human Sciences—as well as an ensuing redefinition of the human, in its “multiple self-inscripting, auto-instituting modalities,” a “nonadaptive mode of human self-cognition.”^[38]

The significance of Our Product might therefore be read as twofold: its reproduction of an overrepresentation of Man at the same time critically transforms this image of Man into a species outside of any body, be it structured by organs or delimited as a figure. It does not follow evolution as a new extrahuman ground, but thereby undoes its supposed mechanistic telos. The envisioned figure of the human species can no longer be described as an adapting organism, but must be registered as fused with a process, which can neither be attributed to nature nor culture solely. The series Liquid Life, however, and in distinction to this, appears to refrain from any tonal reference to skin. The hues of its opened-up bottles, filled with and covered by an always changing mixture of pink, blue, brown, green, and white, could at best be termed subcutaneous: a realm of flesh in the making, before becoming an organism. But also, and this might lead back to the picturesque associations of landscape already implicit in some examples of Firm Being, its hues at the same time evoke a somewhat ethereal or atmospheric realm, a sphere where the body is still bathed in its surroundings.

In a talk titled “The Renaissance and Order,” delivered in 1949, the painter Willem de Kooning made the daring argument that “flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.”^[39] What De Kooning implies is the relation between the emergence of oil painting and a certain appearance of Man in the European Renaissance—modeled on the white subject—which became the major reference against which every other material was seen, judged, and estimated. “The interest in the difference of textures—between silk, wood, velvet, glass, marble—was there only in relation to flesh” […]. For the Renaissance artist, flesh was the stuff of which people were made. It was because of Man, and not in spite of him, that painting was considered an art.”^[40] How could this ideal, and its blatant underlying exclusions and repressions in the name of reason, be disfigured? Rosenkranz’s work could be seen as the impossible reversal of this: testing the disappearance of Man by aiming at a fragile, always elusive point: forever before painting.^[41]