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- Title
For your Glaze Only: Imperfect Divinity.
- Authors
Anselmi, William; Wilson, Sheena
- Abstract
Images are consuming the human-ness of the body. Present reconfigurations of humanity's goals have targeted the human body as a malleable tabula rasa formed by the etchings of an imagebased consumer society, the society of the spectacle. Sculpting the body as a medium of transcendence and idealizing its form as attainable perfection-the parameters of which come to us via Western paradigms of artistic beauty (from high art, to cinema, to commercial advertising)-are practices that drive us towards a very contested post-human realization. With the associated abandonment of ethical premises that once constituted the basis for social cohesion, Western societies are reformulating citizenship: social beings are defining their individual identities according to lego-aesthetics that, in fact, deny human individuality and encourage composite identities constructed on predetermined models of acceptability. Our virtual presentation (paper) will expose such practices, through a theoretical analysis of two different cultural texts: the first, a video commercial about plastic surgery (http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua3sm5NhJ3s&feature=related) and the second, an x-ray pin- up calendar(http://www.repubbica.it/tecnologia/2010/06/18/foto/calendari̲ai̲raggi̲x-4945752/1/? ref=HRESS-2). These texts illustrate the processes of exposing and colonizing the "inner-self". The video promotes plastic surgery for its potential to deliver the human body's own while the pin-up eroticizes the female skeletal structure. These image-based constructions of reality have embarked upon phantasmagoria/immateriality as the body's final destination. We will expose these contemporary practices and transformations of social perceptions and representations of the body, through a critical and theoretical analysis.
- Subjects
PHOTOGRAPHS; INDIVIDUALITY; INDIVIDUALISM; AESTHETICS; SOCIAL perception; PHANTASMAGORIA
- Publication
International Journal of the Image, 2011, Vol 1, Issue 3, p73
- ISSN
2154-8560
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.18848/2154-8560/cgp/v01i03/44201