Free Dissertations - Arts Dissertations

What makes a woman beautiful in visual representation in today's culture

In ‘The Beauty Myth’ Naomi Wolf argued that the then contemporary ideal of beauty encouraged conformity to a virtually unattainable, unhealthy, an unnatural standard of thinness and beauty (Carty, 2005). The history of Western culture is filled with images that reflect the position of women in society. Women are often described in terms of aesthetics, implying that their worth and importance is related to their visual appearance. The beauty ideal of Western cultures has changed over time. Classical artists defined the notion of beauty as perfection. This anatomical perfection was closely related to the idea that beauty could be found in nature and recreated through art. The human anatomy was represented through a close examination of proper proportions and measurements. This myth of ‘natural’, perfect beauty still lives in contemporary culture, where women aspire to some predetermined ideal through any means necessary. Between 1400 and 1700 a fat body shape was seen as sexually appealing and fashionable due to its connotations of wealth. The art of this time portrays plump, sexual, big-breasted and maternal women (Wykes and Gunter, 2005). However, the plump shape was replaced by a thinner, voluptuous body shape which persisted through the early part of the twentieth century, being replaced by a thin, boyish figure in the 1920’s. The modern technologies of film and photography brought to fore once again a curvaceous body typified by Marilyn Monroe. However, as Wykes and Gunter (2005:37) describe it, by the mid-1960’s fashions shifted towards the idealisation of slender body shapes. Skinny fashion models became dominant cultural icons. ‘Discourses of beauty, such as proposed dietary regimes or the use of cosmetics, bore little relation to the notions of health, the objective during the 1960’s and 1970’s was simply to get thinner’ (Arthurs and Grimshaw, 1999:4). In the 1980’s extreme thinness was replaced by healthy muscularity. The ideal female bodies were no longer simply thin, but firm, toned and muscular (Arthurs and Grimshaw, 1999: 20). During the last twenty years the fitness industry has exploded and the body that is today seen as sexually attractive is a ‘fit’ body. Women are encouraged from childhood to fit into the idea of beauty as something that can be constructed with the help of the right diet and exercise regime, the right clothes, the right cosmetics and at the extreme, through plastic surgery. Bodies are ‘exercised, starved, depilated, shaved, pierced, tattooed, cut, stapled and stitched. Skin is bleached with chemicals or darkened with radiation, fat is vacuumed out of breasts, thighs, stomachs and buttocks, bones are cracked, hair is shaved or removed and breasts are stuffed with gobs of plastic’ (Wilton quoted in Arthurs and Grimshaw, 1999: 7). All this is done in the name of beauty derived from ancient paintings and sculptures that first ‘found’ the beauty of the human body and established an ideal through their celebration of perfection. In the name of art, women’s bodies have become aesthetic objects, scrutinised and surveyed through standards of beauty established by Western patriarchal tradition. Symbolically fragmented body parts are known to have been important since the dominant view of the body in antiquity, in which all parts were perceived as in perfect harmony with each other, reflecting the inner harmony and health of the individual. The individual’s health was perceived as a reflection of the higher harmony of nature, which in turn was a reflection of divine harmony (Wegenstein, 2001). However, in contemporary culture, the divinity and harmony of nature have been lost in the flux of obsessive behaviours ranging from dieting to cosmetic surgery. It is not enough be beautiful, a woman has to be perfect – like those smooth, white sculptures of ancient Greece.

This research paper examines the notion of beauty in today’s Western societies through the analysis of the work of artists Orlan and Marc Quinn, who both push the boundaries of what is considered beautiful and ugly. Both artists defy the conventions of representation, break the rules of various patriarchal systems of representation and as a result redefine representation of beauty and the body. The analysis draws from both post-structuralism and psychoanalytic feminism. Orlan and Marc Quinn both criticise the age-old beauty myth through their art. Orlan ridicules the importance of achieving the perfect beauty by invoking a psychoanalytic interpretation of the skin as a platform between the visual image of the self and the body one is (Wegestein, 2002). She demonstrates the impossibility of becoming one with ones’ proper image in the mirror or on the screen. Marc Quinn in turn celebrates difference through the portrayal of different bodies and comparing them to the perfect ideals of ancient sculpture. His works expose the stereotyping and stigmatisation inherent in society based on the ideal of perfection.

BEAUTY AND DESIRABILITY IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

‘As children we learn what girls and boys should be, and later, men and women. These subject positions and the values inherent in them may not all be compatible and we will learn that we can choose between them. Whatever else we do we should be attractive and desirable to men’ (Weedon quoted in Wykes and Gunter, 2005:31). The ideal feminine appearance is no longer seen as an outward expression of an inner identity. Instead, today’s culture encourages ‘self-conscious manipulation of possibilities, a manipulation in which excess, stylisation and irony are brought to the fore’ (Arthurs and Grimshaw, 1999:4). From early childhood women are taught how to reconstruct themselves. They become accustomed to disguising themselves and decorating themselves for the gaze of men. Over the past 30 years they have gone further than ever before in this process. They can re-arrange some of the organic material of their body – sometimes without any harm to health, sometimes with devastating consequences (Wykes and Gunter, 2005: 48). Today there are more ways to achieve what remains an unreal ideal. Women are being sold youth but at the same time aging becomes unacceptable. According to Wykes and Gunter (2005:48) two different meanings are enabled by the beauty is youth myth – the represented one and the connoted difference – ‘age is ugly.’ The problem is that so many of the images offered to women are the same – thin, fair, young, fit, sexual – and the goods sold to women are sold to help them achieve that image whilst, at the same time, women are expected increasingly to occupy a large variety of roles – sex symbol, career woman, mother, wife, housewife, athlete (Wykes and Gunter, 2005:52). The confusion of images and the variety of representations must seem scary for young girls entering adulthood. All women modify their appearance in some way in order to define themselves according to society’s expectations. As a result, all women are subject to the same pressures and so to some extent all women suffer as subjects of social construction.

It is this suffering that Orlan attempts to draw our attention to in her performances. According to Potkin (2000:76) performance is a revolutionary medium which sets itself apart from the gallery system and art establishment. Implicit in this position is a rejection of modernist forms of practice and systems of power perceived as masculine and a resistance to established hierarchies and the notion of art as a commodity. Performance art by women can also be understood as a response to art politics, which marginalized women as artists and manipulated women’s bodies in representation. Performance foregrounds the role of the artist as woman and as such, Potkin (2000:76) claims, operates as a critique of traditional notions of subject/object within art. Since the beginning of the 1990’s Orlan has undergone plastic surgery several times, which has turned her face into a combination of Botticelli’s Venus, the Mona Lisa, Boucher’s Europa and other female figures of art history (Zimmermann, 2002). Her use of the technology of plastic surgery as a medium for artistic expression exemplifies the social pressures on women to conform to standards of ideal beauty. The impossibility of patriarchal beauty standards is revealed in her performances which point to the fact that there is a tradition of using the female body to represent certain meanings and values that are very different from those that can be articulated by the male body (Zimmerman, 2002, Faber, 2002). Blum (2005) refers to the ideal beauty as the ‘Other Woman’, the woman that we aspire to become. She explains that when you buy a body part for aesthetic reasons, you automatically compare yours to others who have better or worse (Blum, 2005). In today’s culture, celebrities are often seen as the representations of the ideal self. The celebrity culture encourages identification and imitation, transforming plastic surgery into a mainstream activity not unlike ordinary shopping. The difference is that more than anything; plastic surgery relies upon women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies.

Orlan’s ongoing transformation of self through plastic surgery confronts notions of beauty, identity, control and technology. She directs the performance under local anaesthetic, shocking her audience to the extent that it is they who seem to experience pain and horror. It has been claimed that Orlan reverses the relationship of the portrait because she forces nature to imitate art and so the scalpel becomes the tool of the artist (Zimmerman, 2002). By exposing the violent domination of women’s bodies by patriarchy, Orlan explores the dominant discourses about femininity circulating in Western societies. As Foucault (1977) explained it, bodies are disciplined through constant surveillance and examination in fields as diverse as medicine, art, anthropology and the media. ‘The human body thus enters a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it’ (Foucault, 1977:138-139). Women, by being constantly under surveillance, internalise this surveillance. They attempt to transform themselves into the image of womanhood presented in the media. The superficiality of this is exemplified by Orlan’s reading of philosophical, literary and psychoanalytic texts as she is operated on whilst at the same time all the participants in her performances wear costumes designed by famous fashion designers. The first six surgeries transformed Orlan’s body and face according to the standards of ideal beauty. However, her latest surgeries are further blurring the boundaries between ugliness and beauty. She has begun to transform herself into a ‘mutant body’ with implants inserted at each temple, creating two lumps on her head and the largest breast implants possible for her anatomy (Faber, 2002).

According to Faber (2002), Orlan deliberately creates and embodies visual parodies of Christian martyrdom by assuming cruciform positions on the operating table. These images reinforce Orlan’s embodiment of the rituals of feminine beauty that pressure women to seek unattainable physical perfection. In contemporary Western culture, women learn the rituals of beautification from an early age. The marketplace of commodities offers the faces and bodies of fashion models, film stars, and television presenters for consumption by the public. Little girls learn femininity through playing with Barbie dolls, watching music videos by stars that are both sexual, childlike and feminine, playing videogames where the figures look like masculine sexual fantasies and more importantly, by identifying with the ‘real’ women around them, constantly surveying themselves, worrying about this body part and that, and comparing themselves to others. The idealised image of a woman, the Barbie doll, is an amalgam of various culturally prescribed perfect physical attributes. Orlan, in a sense, constructs herself by using the same physical attributes that have been used in the creation of Barbie. More significantly tough, she destroys this creation through her further performances that transform her into something all the more ambiguous. She embodies the excesses of Western society. Women who take plastic surgery too far become modern monsters – their quest for perfect beauty has led them to perfect ugliness. Think about Jackie Stallone’s scrunched up face or Lolo Ferrari’s larger than life breasts. Is this what contemporary beauty has become? Orlan’s performances challenge the patriarchal imperative to control the body, as she is both the subject and the object of the performance. In a sense, she reveals modern women’s complicity in their own oppression. If the feminine condition is to be beautiful, it is notable that individual women are always stranded on the other side of beauty (Blum, 2005). There is always the Other Woman who we compare ourselves to. Fixing one ‘defect’ exposes many others. In a society where standards of beauty are modelled through fashion models and celebrities women can never achieve perfection for there will always be a new beautiful face to imitate. The fact that women constantly compare themselves to others stands in the way of true satisfaction. As Blum (2005) puts it, no matter how close we come to imitating the Other Woman – through the products we buy or how we wear our hair, and most dramatically through surgery – once it is we who are in the position to be the Other Woman, she instantly jumps to another place on the map for us to trail after. Orlan knows that beauty touches the grotesque – the border between beauty and monstrosity is the true source of imagination (Morgenstern, 2003). Difference is therefore the true source of beauty. But is the patriarchal society ready to accept difference?

DIFFERENCE AND THE WESTERN BEAUTY IDEAL

Nineteenth- century philosophic and medical discourses constructed beauty as an aspect of a person’s ontological value, which became the indicator of moral worth. The fact that black women were considered ‘ugly’ and ‘degenerate’ then constituted them as a sexual threat representing the forbidden ‘Other’ (Arthurs and Grimshaw, 1999: 9). This black ‘Other’ produced a history of fascination and fear where desire and revulsion intermingled. ‘Otherness’ did not derive from some essential, natural qualities of blackness but was a social construction. Similarly disability in modern Western societies is constructed socially. Whereas men transgress in their actions, women and the disabled transgress in their very being by challenging any notion of a body with fixed boundaries (Arthurs, 1999). Women’s bodies are always in process. The maternal body in particular is the grotesque body par excellence. Marc Quinn’s much debated sculpture ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ demonstrates the difficult questions regarding accepted forms of beauty and ugliness. The sculpture of a pregnant, disabled woman represents patriarchal ideas about who deserves to be included in our culture, a question in which the determining factor seems to be a border between the healthy and the sick, the masculine and the feminine, and beauty and ugliness. Feminists talk about how the world has been designed for the bodies and activities of men. As Wendell (1996: 39) describes it, in Western countries, life and work have been structured for fit, able and strong bodies whereas art and culture represent those who dominate the social world. The reliance of cultural and aesthetic ideals on the healthy and able body makes alternative forms of beauty seem monstrous and disturbing. The history of sculpture celebrates the nation’s heroes, institutions and middle-class values. The place of women in this tradition was as the object, as the personification of beauty or virtue (Carson, 2000:57). ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ is one of the most visible portrayals of disability today. Installed in Trafalgar Square with the masculine, phallic Nelson’s Column and other male sculptures, it seems to question the ideals of aesthetic beauty. Historically, aesthetics tracks the emotions that some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies, but according to Siebers (2003) aesthetic feelings of pleasure and disgust are difficult to separate from political feelings of acceptance and rejection. The oppression of women and people with disabilities takes the form of aesthetic judgement about their bodies and the emotions they elicit. Their actions are called sick, their appearance judged obscene or disgusting, their minds depraved, their influence likened to cancer attacking the healthy body of society (Siebers, 2003). Both women and the disabled are seen as devalued, their bodies are seen in terms of a lack and they are subjected to a scrutinising gaze. Women are gazed at for their beauty and sexuality; the disabled bodies are looked at for their ugliness and monstrosity. Both become passive and oppressed bodies, categorised, classified and controlled by others.

Like women, disabled people are often portrayed through cultural stereotypes. The practices of the culture industries thus contribute to the ‘Otherness’ of both women and people wit disabilities (Wendell, 1996). The stereotypes of disabled women as helpless, dependent and imperfect contribute to their marginalisation from both society and cultural practices. ‘Physical imperfection is more likely to be thought to ‘spoil’ a woman than a man by rendering her unattractive in a culture where her physical appearance is a large component of a woman’s value’ (Wendell, 1996:43-44). Alison Lapper’s damaged limbs probably evoke metaphorical meanings of being crippled, which include helplessness and dependency. It could be said that the disabled woman is generally seen as having nothing to offer. They are not seen as beautiful and therefore could not possibly attract a man; they are discouraged from becoming mothers and unable to participate in the contemporary beauty and health culture through diet and fitness regimes. Wendell (1996:44) emphasises the power of the culture alone to construct disability through a consideration of bodily differences – deviations from a society’s conception of a normal or acceptable body – that, although they cause little or no functional or physical difficulty for the person who has them, constitute major social disabilities. She thinks that facial scarring and large body size are important examples as they are disabilities in appearance only and therefore constructed completely by stigma and cultural prejudice.

The modern society not only represents the handicapped as mentally and physically disabled – and demand their exclusion from the public sphere as a result – they reject works of art that represent alternatives to the beauty ideal (Siebers, 2003). Therefore, the works of Marc Quinn summon an aesthetic revulsion equivalent to the disgust felt by many in face-to face encounters with people with disabilities (Siebers, 2003). It is important to note that whereas sculptures representing disabled people are often regarded with fear and revulsion, the perfect statues of antiquity that are also missing limbs, are seen as the epitomes of beauty, health and virility. The stunning works of Marc Quinn make a contribution to the history of art by assaulting aesthetic dictates that ally beauty to harmonious form, balance, hygiene, fluidity of expression and genius (Siebers, 2005). The Alison Lapper sculpture in particular, by being a nude, pregnant, disabled woman is exactly what modern society fears. By being pregnant she has lost control of her body, by being disabled she is deemed ugly and deviant by society, and by being naked she challenges the traditions of art portraying women as passive objects of the male gaze, beautiful, perfect and sexual. Allison Lapper is different, therefore she cannot be judged through the contemporary beauty standards. The sculpture challenges people to rethink the image of beautiful bodies. It probably upsets popular expectations about beauty of art by presenting society with new aesthetic standards of beauty based on the ‘Otherness’ of both women and the disabled. The difference and ‘ugliness’ of this sculpture somehow turns into an ‘unspoiled’ beauty that is hard to find in a society obsessed with thinness, manufactured beauty and fitness. Both Orlan’s performances and Marc Quinn’s sculptures make us aware of impossibility of total control and discipline of our lives.

CONCLUSION

Discourses construct our sense of self and the media are the primary sources of discourses about beauty and the body. Women, young and old, must comply with the aspects of the feminine promoted by dominant patriarchal discourses. They must continually reconstruct and monitor themselves according the ideal standards of beauty, the beauty myth. Wolf (quoted in Wykes and Gunter, 2005:61) explains, ‘the beauty myth tells a story: ‘the quality called beauty objectively and universally exists. Women must want to embody it and men must want to possess women who embody it. This embodiment is an imperative for women but not for men, which situation is necessary and natural because it is biological, sexual and evolutionary.’ However, the beauty myth is only a myth, a fictional narrative held in place by the patriarchal society. Wolf (quoted in Wykes and Gunter 2005:61) continues, ‘In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed standard, [the beauty myth] is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.’ As a result, the female body becomes a problem, the Other that can only be controlled through regimes of beauty. Women become obsessed with looking right – and the right look derives from impossible and unattainable standards set a long time ago through the examination of art and nature. The ideal body shape has changed but idea of perfection hasn’t. Women are constantly pressured to look a certain way and many women end up going too far by resorting to extreme dieting and plastic surgery. It is this pressure to look perfect that is the subject of Orlan’s performances. She stretchers the boundaries of beauty and ugliness by continuously changing, becoming the envied ‘Other Woman’ and then becoming something else altogether – something that could be described as different. However, Orlan’s modified body, represented as artistic material, is still subjected to an examining gaze. This gaze blurs the boundaries between art, technology and medicine due to the fact that Orlan’s performances not only question the boundaries of beauty in art and culture, but also draw from a tradition of extra-artistic uses of the body. There is an aspect of voyeurism in the examination of this body which is literally opened up to the gaze of others. As Faber (2002) puts it, Orlan’s impotence and her self-assertion during her surgeries embody in an extreme way how cultural messages are imprinted on our flesh – with possibly violent repercussions.

The desire to represent perfect, individual bodies denigrates or excludes the experience of disability. The emphasis on beauty and the aesthetic representation of bodies not only discriminates but also leads to the oppression of people with disabilities. Bodies that do not fit the established beauty ideal are feared because they represent lack of control. The categories of normal and abnormal are projected both onto the female and the disabled body and used symbolically as a means of exercising control over women and the disabled people. Marc Quinn’s sculptures deny this patriarchal control since the disabled bodies, rendered monstrous by the social order, are publicly displayed as works of art. The ‘ugliness’ of his sculptures is displayed alongside the perfection of other artworks, rendering their perfection ridiculously unattainable. It becomes clear that beauty can never be achieved: it must always be sought. What is disturbing is that the media tell people what to look for to make ourselves beautiful, where to buy it and how buying it will improve our lives (Wykes and Gunter, 2005). These discourses are so strong that it is questionable whether the artistic works that promote the beauty of difference will have any impact on our lives. They may shock us momentarily, they may even make us more open to new standards of acceptability, but in the age where we are constantly surrounded by discourses where femininity metamorphoses from one sign to another, succeeding generation’s variations on the ancient topic (Wykes and Gunter, 2005), the beauty myth seems to be accepted as the truth of the feminine condition. It is important to note that feminist accounts of femininity tend to be rather determinist, not granting women any power at all. The feminist critique sees the cultural construction of beauty as in the sole interest of patriarchy and capital. What is largely ignored is women’s own, willing participation in and enjoyment of the beauty culture. Can fashion, make-up, fitness, diets and even plastic surgery be empowering? The passivity of women in traditional accounts of femininity seems to overlook the fact that rather than being aimed at men, beauty practices are predominantly aimed at the self as well as at other women. Feminine rivalry is a part of modern female heterosexuality, whereby women’s relationships with each other are reshaped around an imaginary masculine desire (Blum, 2005).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANON, 2005, ‘Commissioning Group selects two woks to jump-start programme’, http://www.fourthplinth.co.uk/press-releases/press_release2.htm [Accessed 27/10/2005]

ARTHURS, J and GRIMSHAW, J, 1999, Women’s Bodies – Discipline and Transgression, London: Cassell

ARTHURS, J, 1999, ‘Revolting Women: The Body in Comic Performance’ in ARTHURS, J and GRIMSHAW, J, 1999, Women’s Bodies – Discipline and Transgression, London: Cassell, pp.137-164

BLUM, V, 2005, ‘ Becoming the Other Woman – The psychic drama of cosmetic surgery’, A Journal of Women Studies 26.2, pp.104-131

CARSON, F, 2000, ‘ Sculpture and Installation’ in CARSON, F and PAJACZKOWSKA, C (Eds.) 2000, Feminist Visual Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp.55-73

CARTY, V, 2005, ‘Textual portrayals of female athletes. Liberation or nuanced forms of patriarchy?’ Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 26.2, pp.132-172

FABER, A, 2002, ‘Saint Orlan -Ritual as violent spectacle and cultural criticism’ The Drama Review, 46/1, pp.85-92

FOUCAULT, M, 1977, Discipline and Punish, London: Penguin Books

MORGENSTERN, A, 2003, ‘ The Etiquette of being a breast’ River Teeth: A Journal of Non-fiction Narrative, 5.1, pp.64-75

ORLAN, http://www.orlan.net/ [Accessed 27/10/2005]

PAJACZKOWSKA, C, 2000, ‘Issues in feminist visual culture’ in CARSON, F and PAJACZKOWSKA, C (Eds.) 2000, Feminist Visual Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp.1-21

POTKIN, H, 2000, ‘Performance Art’ in CARSON, F and PAJACZKOWSKA, C (Eds.) 2000, Feminist Visual Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 75-

SIEBERS, T, 2003, ‘What can disability studies learn from the culture wars?’ Cultural Critique, 55, pp.182-216

STURGEN, M and CARTWRIGHT, L, 2001, Practices of Looking- An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press

ZIMMERMANN, A, 2002, ‘Sorry for having to make you suffer – Body, Spectator and the Gaze in the Performances of Yves Klein, Gina Pane and Orlan’, Discourse, 24.3, pp. 27-46

WEGENSTEIN, B, 2002, ‘Getting Under the Skin, or, How Faces Have Become Obsolete’, Configurations, 10.2, pp.221-259

WENDELL, S, 1996, The Rejected Body -Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, London: Routledge

WYKES, M and GUNTER, B, 2005, The Media and Body Image, London: Sage

Order Now. It takes less than 2 minutes.

  1.  
  2.  
  1.  

Please note: The above dissertation snippet was written by a student and then submitted to us to display and help others. Thanks to all the students who have submitted their work to us.