anorexia – Thoughts from the Underground

Over the past week or two, I’ve been collecting a lot more information about body image, or the body, in relation to artists’ works. Particularly, scholars who’ve written about the body, artists who use the body in their art, or artworks featuring the body or body image. It’s been actually quite interesting to look through all of this information. Here’s a list of what I’ve come across below. For some of them, I’ve written some short thoughts or descriptions about what I’ve seen or understood.

Marina Abramovic, (performance art) Rhythm 0:

In Rhythm 0, Abramovic placed about 70 articles of pain and pleasure in front of her, and then stood as an object while the audience manipulated the objects with her body. Starting out innocently, the performance turned more malicious and aggressive as audience members began to cut her skin, tore her clothes, fondled her breasts and even put a loaded gun to her head. (She provided the gun and the bullet.) When a guard announced that the performance had ended, Abramovic, now teary eyed, walked towards her audience as one of them, yet many or all of them literally ran away. The artwork questions how we objectify each other and tests the limits of our civility towards each other.

Carolee Schneemann, (performance art) Interior Scroll:

In Interior scroll, Schneeman reads a paper scroll as she simultaneously pulls it from her vagina. Definitely an act of reclaiming her body and her ownership of her sex.

“I thought of the vagina in many ways– physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation.”

Barbara Kruger, (photography collage) including Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face, Your Body is a Battleground, You Are Not Yourself:
I have to admit that I don’t quite get the art, but I really like the phrase, “Your Body is a Battleground”. It represents so well how strongly we have to remain conscious of the fact that we have a right to not look like how the media, fashion, and the contemporary body aesthetic tells us we should look.

Cindy Sherman, (performance/photography) including Untitled Film Stills and other photos series in which she dresses up as other people/identities:
This is an amazing selection of images that challenge identity and image. When I looked through these photos, I thought “Who are we really?” Is our identity ours, or do we in some way embody the identity of others? I’m still not so sure I know what Cindy Sherman really looks like….
Link

Pipilotti Rist (video performance) PickelPorno:
Pipilotti Rist apparently made her mark with this video. It features a man and a woman, some nudity, and a fish-eye camera, along with other imagery; some sexual. At first, I really didn’t like the video because not only did I not see any intention, the production quality is fairly poor. (I guess I’m used to HD!) I turned it off, and then returned to watch it. After a while, I found enjoyment in the unusual or overlooked perspective views of the body. For instance, with the camera so close to the body, human skin is seen as it really is – hairy and imperfect. I found that while I often wanted to turn away, I couldn’t. It was like a visual exploration of the body, reminiscent of the way 2 lovers explore each other’s bodies.
View film on YouTube

Ana Mendieta (performance/experimental) Cosmetic Facial Variations:
She was a Cuban artist whose work included a series of “Cosmetic Facial Variations, such as looking ambiguously male and/or female.

Orlan (‘whose medium is plastic surgery – commenting on the world of artificial changes to the body to be perfect/beautiful’):

Seems as though she has undergone a series of plastic surgeries, and then uses not only the surgical results as artwork, but also the surgery videos. She also seems to want to push our interpretations of chasteness and sexuality in religion, and the openness, or lack of openness, of female sexuality.

Laura Mulvey, (scholarly writing) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema PDF”. “A seminal work on ‘the gaze’ – how female identity is structured through the male gaze”:
Points

Women are Passive and receive the action; Men are Active and give the action
Men are both the lead actors and the spectator; women are there for them
Women’s lack of a penis is a threat of castration and unpleasure; are “disarmed” simply due to lack of phallus/phallus-symbol
Scopophilia, “love of looking”
Cinema defines space, time and size
Image of women used for detachment and voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms

Interview with Vanessa Bancroft, from The GuardianInterview with Vanessa Bancroft:

The artist makes performance pieces featuring up to 100 semi-nude and nude models, many of whom resemble the artist and/or have eating disorders. Bancroft admits that she has been struggling with eating disorders (exercise bulimia) since she was 12.

Janine Antoni (process) Gnaw:

The artist took two blocks of chocolate and lard, bit into them piece by piece, and then made a chocolate box and lipstick out of the pieces she’d bitten. I appreciated this for the repurposing of the lard and chocolate, but biting into lard feels viscerally creepy. Detailed description from MoMA and from Brooklyn Museum. Link

Chris Woebken (design, technology)Animal Perception Helmets:
I love that these seem so game-like, fun, and goofy. My favorite is the ant, because it’s such an abstract view of the world. It also reminds me of Pipilotti Rist’s work, Pickelporno. I’m considering the use of magnification in my project.

Simon Høgsberg (photography) Faces of New York:
A photography project featuring 10 New Yorkers who Høgsberg found immediately fascinating after a month of looking, 7 hours a day.
Link

Phillip (“Mr Toledano”) Toledano (photography) A New Kind of Beauty:
Features a series of still photographs of people who have clearly undergone some type of plastic surgery. The people themselves did not look “normal” – as in, their plastic surgery procedure(s) was very obvious – but their portraits were beautiful. For the most part, I found that many of them looked alike, both men and women, as if the same facial aesthetic was the same for both men and women. They seemed so much like a new species of hermaphroditic, male/female neutral people, I wanted their names to be more exotic than just Steve, Yvette, or Michael….

Something-Fishy.org
A few links on eating disorders in men and ballet dancers. (Note: There are few reference links provided, so the factualness of many of these statements cannot be easily verified, but the anecdotal information is useful.)

“A ballet dancer is very aware of what her body looks like. At each practice she attends she wears skin-tight clothes and dances strenuously in front of large mirrors. A dancer has to look at herself for many hours in a day and this can cause a realization in the dancer. The general public may look in the mirror for a few minutes a day, hardly aware of what they really look like, but a dancer has no choice but to stand in front of a mirror and compare herself with others in the room…. The truth is as stated by a dancer, ‘In the real world people who are not thin do not get jobs.’ “

Emma Hack (skin illustrator, photographer, sculptor), Various skin illustrations:

I just came across this artists work and found the camouflage aspect of her art really interesting and beautiful. And, I enjoyed how the work focused less on the body and more of the body’s disappearance into the art. Her website is emmahackartist.com.

Genesis 1:27 God Created man in his own image:
Lastly, I was just listening to the radio the other day, and there was a guy talking about homosexuality and tolerance. The man speaking was relatively conservatively religious, except that he advocated for tolerance towards gays and lesbians (though not towards gay marriage.) In any case, he quoted the Bible and it seemed to fit with my body image interest, so I’ll just add it here, too. Link.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

During the final discussion during our last Wearables class, I started thinking about two subjects. One is my own past and the other is the user of my wearable design. Thinking back on my past life when I was immersed in ballet training, in all that time I don’t think there’s ever been a point where I’ve met a ballet dancer, male or female, who wasn’t preoccupied with some part of their body. So this brought me to the subject of body image. The user is someone focused on body image. My high-level idea is to make a series of weighted vests for the anorexic, each vest representing the amount of weight she’s lost. The vests are not just to call attention to the wearer’s extremely small and unhealthy size, but to call attention to how acceptable it is to have a negative view of our body image.

For my initial research, I’ve found articles, images and websites focused on a few main topics, such as body image and body shape, different examples of the female body throughout history, fashion/garments for slenderizing (i.e. corsets), and eating disorders. There are a few overlaps between some of the links, but these are mainly my areas for now.

Examples in Art and Media

This Peter Paul Reubens painting, from 1622-1625, shows an example of the classical female figure. The female figures are quite volumptuous, and display rolls of fat around their abdomen and legs, as they bend their torsos and legs (though the one on the right appears to be growing the tentacles of an octopus).

Model Lizzie Miller recently posed for Glamour magazine, and in doing so created either a trend or a firestorm in fashion. Her photo shows her sitting pretty much completely nude, yet also showing an “unfashionable” belly roll.

Though she is clearly a beautiful women, the article states that this model is considered “too large” for plus-sized fashion. The article, which can be found here, goes on to discuss how women across the world are seeking change to modify their appearance. Body image is definitely on the mind.

But, is “bigger” in? Perhaps. It seems also that the use of models of average size and larger, have recently been seen during this year’s Fashion Week gracing the runways of some major designers.

A new ABC Family drama, “Huge”, fictionally depicts the ‘Real World’ style life of a group of teens at a fat camp. The exploitation continues with another (non-fictionally) reality series, which is (unbelievably) called “Thintervention“. It features a personal trainer, who arguably has taken her exercise routine just a little too far, and a group of about 5-7 overweight people who she and her team attempt to train.

Clearly, there’s a disconnect between beauty, fashion and glamour, and what’s popular and deserves to be on TV. Runway fashion tends to make it to the mainstream market, eventually, in some small part. That shows acceptance, but I have a hard time believing that this overwhelming obsession with body image will go away anytime soon. It’s too widespread and it’s been around for a while.

“The body has become a casing for fantasy…rather than a place from which to live.” (Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is A Feminist Issue and Bodies)

Body Modification and Corseting

As I mentioned earlier, a previous article gave many examples of women modifying their bodies, referring to some rather extreme cases of plastic surgery. But, referring back to talking about how fat we should not be, I also looked into the history of corsets as a form of creating the illusion of a waist and a form of body modification, more so now than during their height of fashion. The first designs for corsets, in the 16th and 17th centuries, were called ‘stays’ and they were more for the accentuation of the bust than the waist. Following this and some changes in women’s clothing styles, corsets were reinvented for the effect of cinching the waist by the mid 19th Century. The idea of tightly lacing the corset began at this time, and for some still continues today.

Tightlacing has the effect of displacing a woman’s internal organs and deforming the lower ribs. Some women have and still attempt to achieve waists as small as 16″ in diameter, though this requires wearing a corset about 23 hours a day, 7 days a week. Meanwhile, though women’s figures have actually gotten bigger, many women still desire a tiny waist and some have turned to other measures to achieve the “ideal” weight.

Negative Body Image

Around the world, the fight to achieve a perfect body image continues, sometimes manifesting itself in nationwide self-loathing. For instance, only 5% of Argentinean women are satisfied with their body image, and it’s even been documented that girls as young as 7 have developed some form of an eating disorder. American’s, also dissatisfied, spend billions on weight loss, dieting and exercising every year. Billions more are spent on plastic surgery to help make ourselves beautiful.

It’s not really important to go into the specific statistics as much as it is to acknowledge that body image is a big issue. The persistence with which we have some negative issue with how we look is prevalent and persistent, and this will continue to be so for a very long time. My project(s) attempts to not only embrace our poor image of ourselves, but to also reward the wearer for achieving what so few apparently cannot. At the same time, the effects of this achievement would require the wearer to lose a significant and unhealthy amount of weight, and as the vests got heavier, the wearer wouldn’t be able to actually wear them because they would be too thin.

I’d like to add more items to this vest project, dealing with body image. I’m considering an electric-microphone component, maybe embedded into the collar of the vest, that converts a speaker’s deep confessions to some type of mumbled, garbled computer words. A way to share your thoughts, without truly sharing your thoughts.

Specifically thinking about the design of the vests, I have a modern style in mind, but since I’m just gathering my thoughts at this point, I’d rather stay generic and ambiguous for now.

Additional References:

Tag: anorexia

Body Image in Art and Design

High-Level Ideas Regarding Final: Body Image