ABSTRACT
Another crucial and intriguing feature of Cronenberg’s game-pods is their nakedness; a trait that by no means is unique to them and recurs in the sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, as well as in Chris Cunningham’s and Patricia Piccinini’s work. Piccinini’s neoplasmatic work in particular come across as grotesque and obscene because of the pieces’ crude and uninhibited nakedness, which triggers a primary eroticism that is simultaneously seductive yet also very repellent. Her previously mentioned work, Still Life with Stem Cells (2002), is disconcerting primarily for the child featured being so exposed and unperturbed by the objects’ unsettling appearance. What is interesting in this case is that naked skin does not just mean the absence of fur, but the exclusion of any type of covering, which in turn is meaningful when considering what the philosopher Kate Soper argues about the essential role of clothing as a first negation of man’s animal origins.48
