File Note 152: Nicola L.

At some point during your childhood you will likely have learned about the hermit crab, the little crustacean that looks for a home in the abandoned carapaces of other sea organisms. You might have discovered that these nomadic creatures often select a scavenged snail shell—fortified by calcification—to serve as a new, if temporary, home. Every year, the cycle repeats: the crab must scout and approve a new shell with each subsequent shedding of the skin.

The artist Nicola L. was fascinated by snail shells and skin—she produced iterations of each in virtually every medium she worked in. She made snail lamps, snail drawings, snail tables, snail beds, snail chandeliers, snail sofas, snail collages, snail bird cages, snail paintings, snail bookcases, even an entire snail-themed room for the Chelsea Hotel (where she was a resident between 1989–2018). She made skins you could enter alone—famously dubbed the ‘pénétrables’ by venerable French art critic Pierre Restany—and skins that operated as rhizome, or membrane, linking one person to a crowd of other bodies.

In many ways Nicola mirrored the habits of the hermit crab: the skin shedder, the shell hunter. A female artist only ‘discovered’ by the mainstream in recent decades, she spent her life casting about for a new home, a better fit, and more accommodating surroundings. Like the hermit crab, she was something of a benthic creature: a punk heroine of the margins who haunted the halls of CBGB, who made herself comfortable in the tenebrous undercurrent swirling below the surface. It was not that Nicola didn’t crave to be recognised, lionised, anthologised, or enriched, but she was—as far as I can tell from reading her own words—a congenital iconoclast, prone to a measure of caprice and humor, and interested, above all, in heeding the call of her art.

Nicola moved between media pliantly, slipping from conceptual and performance works into the design of alluringly slick functional objects, then side-stepping into writing, activism, and directing documentary films (her film subjects ranged from the 1980s punk band Bad Brains to the political activist and enfant terrible of the ‘Yippie’ movement, Abbie Hoffman). Though she was sometimes lassoed into Singer 4 Under Her Skin 5 ‘art movements’ by critics or curators, she belonged to none. Nicola was never quite a pop artist, nor a Nouveau Réaliste, nor a feminist, nor a political artist, nor a designer—though she was, after a fashion, all of these things. Behold, the Brobdingnagian foot-shaped vinyl sofas, lipsticked lip lamps, or eyeball fixtures glowing azure, then observe the political pageantry of her protest placards: WE WANT TO TOUCH, WE WANT TO SEE, WE WANT TO FEEL, WE WANT TO LOVE, and WE WANT TO BE LOVED.

The complexity of Nicola’s relationships to men makes me think of Louise Bourgeois (never mind the undeniable aesthetic affinities in much of their work). Bourgeois, a mother to three sons, used a vast array of media to grapple with the subject of the monstrous father, the fragile, punctilious mother, the reticent child, and the body, always the body, in all its fecundity, vulnerability, mania, and glory. To my mind, Bourgeois, another transplanted francophone turned staunch New Yorker, is Nicola’s undeniable forebear. Nicola, too, took the body as her subject. A feminist who would never identify as such, her work/life (there was no distinction) was a constant renewal of her commitment to the emancipation of her creative self. With the pénétrables, the focus tilts from emancipation to sublimation.

With Nicola’s single pénétrables—such as Cloud (1976), or Earth (1974–78)—the wearer undergoes a solitary, if slightly ridiculous, transmutation. In the Red Coat (an early pénétrable, from 1969, meant to be worn by eleven people), by contrast, the act of sublimation moves from the individual to the collective, in the creation of a genderambiguous, racially-ambiguous whole. The utopian notion of a shared epidermis—one that erases race and gender—is a commendable, if naive, conceit (though it remains the predominant narrative around this extensive body of work). The pénétrables are far more complex. To see a gallery full of Nicola’s gleaming vinyl body parts, or the smooth gloss of a commode’s lacquer, is to know that she was capable of fabricating objects with a glassy, even machined, finish. The pénétrables are emphatically not this—they are crude, ragged, awkward, unnerving, baggy, very handmade. They are at once the mask of the S&M gimp, the straitjacket of the psychiatric patient and the flayed skin of the sacrificial victim—more punitive constraint than portal to an uncolored experience of the world. They are also the body of the postpartum mother: drained, emptied, soft, used.