leahnDESMA9: Week 4

What is beautiful, what is appealing?

These questions are as old as time and the answers are constantly changing and unique to every individual. Human appeal shifts with greater understanding of anatomy and changing perceptions of beauty and health. It is an evolutionary function to be attracted to individuals who appear healthier as a mechanism to spread more viable genes in offspring. It is in our nature to favor beauty and thus driven us to want to preserve and honor it. People have changed from practicing mummification and dissection to extending life and preserving/enhancing looks with plastic surgery. The human pursuit for the “fountain of youth” is ubiquitous.

“1536 Fountain of Youth”

WW1 provoked the use of chemicals, electricity, technology, and weaponry that was destructive to the body and made plastic surgery necessary to restore faces and lives. War is what drove medical technology as limbs were being lost on the battlefields and thus restoration led to voluntary alterations for beauty. Dissection and surgery were interesting to artists and scientists; thus contemporary art and medical illustrations have shifted.

“Gray’s Anatomy 1918 edition: anatomy is at the intersection of art and science”

Orlan has had a series of cosmetic-surgery performances in the late 1990s in which she reconfigured her face and body as a critique of the standards of beauty imposed on women. She interrogates every defining aspect of being human – gender, ethnicity, religion, beauty, physiognomy, and even physiology itself. She pursues her interpretation of beauty in her own artistic way. She brings attention to concepts of beauty and aging by surgically replicating famous artwork’s body parts and facial structure. She is a spectacle who reads from philosophical and literary works while being operated on to embody and preserve visions of beauty by renowned painters in history. By replicating cherished features from classical paintings and creating things like the BioArt project: The Harlequin's Coat, she is using herself as a medium between art and medical technology.

"Harlequin Coat"

She questions beauty and who and what we are. These views of self and manipulations of body and genetics are also themes seen in The Island of Dr. Moreau, where vivisection of the mind and body are central themes to the novel. It questions the extent to which we can alter our appearances through scientific reconstructive surgeries and how much control we have over our bodies. It is know that humans have 10x more microbial cells in their body, and are thus mostly bacteria, and microbes influence behavior. Are we even ourselves, who has control over ourselves?

“The Island of Dr. Moreau”

In this week’s material, we explored human perception and both emotion-provoking and unconventional forms of art. At first, images of road kill made me feel sick and Orlan’s procedures were disturbing, but Dianne Gramalla’s virtual reality immersion and calming glasses were beautiful and appealing to the senses and lessened pain. It made me realize how art may come in different forms, but it still serves a purpose in exiting the senses. Forms of art can influence the body, science and technology, while perceptions of beauty in anatomy shape art. Thanks to science now we can sequence our genome, know what we are composed of, and peer into ourselves without having to be cut open. We now have noninvasive ways to understand anatomy (fractures, ultrasound, digital chromagram) and communicate through technology (Stephen Hawking).