No Going Back

Skin in the Game follows on from the acclaimed fieldwork diary, The Metabolic Museum. In this new book written in a conversational style, Clémentine Deliss expands on how artists today understand the creativity to be found in historical research collections. Questions are raised on how to work with contentious collections, the law from the perspective of Indigenous artists, and the concept of the “prototype” that defines an artist’s career. Deliss speaks with leading women artists—Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlincx, and Andrea Zittel—, about their moment of “skin in the game,” when they knew there was no going back, and that art practice would become their Hades and paradise in one. What was the prototype that defined their practice and that like a revenant returns over the course of an artist’s lifetime?