Clown

Clown is an online fashion editorial in the beloved animated gif style. Photographed by Pamela Reed and Matthew Rader for hop on the spiral bitch. Click on the images to link to the animated version.

Details of maquimagem - under the thin and fragile layer of make up lies a mirror: the more you use it, the more you reveal your own image

Simulation of use of a compact-image powder

A vision of the display with the images of make up: maquimagem

Performing maquimagem

Maquimagem

This is a conceptual work in which make up is literally part of the image. The images of beauty are made of printed make up and are fully consumable. As our parameter of beauty is spread through media and its images, making the images part of the product is an attempt to make explicit how we consume the idea of beauty.

Sun Tattoo

Designer Yu-Chiao Wang has come up with the idea of a Sun Tattoo. It is actually a 'wearable' cloth stencil - a robe, with a specific pattern. It requires staying long enough in the sun or having a good use of UV rays to leave on the skin a beautiful tattoo. The stencil covers only a part of your body allowing sun to hit certain areas.

Says Wang: "Sun Tattoo is a soft stencil which can be used for making the tattoo pattern on the skin by sunshine. It's better to use it with sunless tanning cream."

Make Me a Monster

'Make Me a Monster'. Dazed Digital.com

Inspired by Alexander McQueen’s comment on throwaway materials and Rodarte’s A/W 09 Frankenstein collection, the Franken-Fashion mask project was born. Thirteen designers delved into their studio scraps and created new ways of concealment and performance.

Naomi Filmer, Chocolate Mask, For Another Magazine 2001. Photo: Richard Burbridge

Jewellery designer Naomi Filmer is interested in ennobling body's least celebrated places. The sculptures of her Breathing Volumes project focus on the space formed by the mouth, the chin and the neck. She made an imprint of her own contours, capturing the facial expressions that appear as she inhaled and exhaled. The result is not exactly jewellery but a sculpture that enters into a direct relationship with the observer.

Make up application is repetitive in application and removal, and as a ritualistic function it appears to be pointless at times, we do not learn from it. At other times we learn about ourselves and others through its ability to foster contemplation, imagination and mastery of perfection. Like good performance art, its real essence is in the moment, not the ability to capture it through media, and yet it is never enough, we go on delighting in its daily creation and removal in a frenzy of seeking perfection. It is no wonder that over the last five years YouTube has seen a huge increase in make up tutorials, which has led to an increase in knowledge but not understanding. In partnership with this desire to force social identity through cosmetic application is the desire to make this contrivance seamless, effortless, as if we innocently awake each day with the appearance of painted allure and perfection.

It is interesting to consider other approaches to constructing identity that are also as repetitive, another approach to identity and images can be found in Buddhist meditative exercise: the laying of a mandala. A mandala is is a picture of spiritually symbolic nature, composed out of coloured sand by Buddhists in a day- or even week long procedure, just to be brushed away after completion. The motivation is to focus on the shown spiritual symbol and eventually come closer to the goal of overcoming ones self-attachment, meaning to separate one from the deceptive idea of something like a 'self'.

For some the role of the fashion model is to attempt to create a new female version of perfection for all to desire and emulate daily. According to Baudrillard however:

...the fashion model’s body is no longer an object of desire, but a functional object, a forum of signs in which fashion and the erotic are mingled. It is no longer a synthesis of gestures, even if fashion photography puts all its artistry into re-creating gesture and naturalness by a process of simulation. It is no longer strictly speaking, a body, but a shape.

Jean Baudrillard. Seduction. 1990

Looking in the mirror, I too have begun to see a shape, the more I engage with creating and recreating the face, the more my body, my face disappears under my desire to create my own coded language to be observed by others. The popularity of the mediated beauty concept, has made articulating alternative models of beauty difficult but I still desire to effect a mode of visual aesthetic that negates the accepted forms of idealised, Westernised beauty. Using magazine images of fashion models in my work is an initial method of participating in the ritual of the cosmetic application of signage. Breaking free from the mirror I aim to resist reinventing aesthetic stereotypes, by not seeking perfection but instead through finding my own 'shapes'.

This 'Critical Design Approach' will enable me to reflect not only on identity but also on consumer culture by challenging my audience's preconceptions and expectations thereby provoking new ways of thinking about make up, its use, and the surrounding environment.

Scarification and the 'Carnal Arts'

Many groups in Africa use cicatrization (scarification) to produce permanent patterns on the skin, often starting in childhood and adding new designs throughout adult life. Scars may be produced by medical treatment, when medicinal substances are scratched or incised into the skin. They may also be purely decorative. Although some facial scars are thought to ward off disease or evil eye, they may also be markers of social status, personal traits, political rank, or religious and ritual authority. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, body incising is a respected specialty, and practitioners owe allegiance to Ogun, the god of iron.

The Nuba, a tribal group in Sudan, idealise scarification, dark skin and hairlessness. Scarification is considered a mark of beauty on women, and her first set of scars are cut from the naval to the breasts when her breasts first start to mature. On menses, more scars are cut on her body, and after weaning her child, a final set on her back, neck, arms, and legs. The raised scars are connected with sexual desire, and are said to create erotic sensations when touched. I am considering the possibilities of combining this mark of beauty in combination with thermochromatic colour. it may be interesting to attempt to heighten this element of sexual attraction, like applying red lipstick to lips. According to anthropologists, the lips remind us of the labia, because they flush red and swell when they are aroused, which is the conscious or subconscious reason women have always made them look even redder with lipstick. with this in mind it is possible to interpret scarification as a vehicle for the investigation of what is becoming a debate about beauty ideals.


Am I trying to make the face and body more beautiful? I want them to be different, I want to reinvent perceptions of what is possible, what is beautiful. Surgery is used so casually to do this, my interpretation desires to invent without being invasive.

This touches on Orlan's philosophy of 'Carnal Art', Carnal Art is a self-portrait in the classical sense, yet realized through the technology of its time. Lying between disfiguration and figuration, it is an inscription in flesh, as our age now makes possible. No longer seen as the ideal it once represented, the body has become an 'modified ready-made'. Carnal Art loves the baroque and parody; the grotesque, and other such styles that have been left behind, because Carnal Art opposes the social pressures that are exerted upon both the human body and the corpus of art. Carnal Art is anti-formalist and anti-conformist.

Orlan was the first artist using surgery and plastic surgery to divert it from its habits of embellishment and rejuvenating and has put into question the actual state of the body and the possibility of genetic manipulations. Her body has become the product of a public debate both online and off. During the seventh surgery in New York, Orlan asked the surgeon to put on her temples implants which are normally used to make the cheekbones more prominent, and so, Orlan is now wearing two bumps on the temples.

Carnal Art is not against cosmetic surgery but, rather against the conventions carried by it and their subsequent inscription, within female flesh in particular, but also male. Carnal Art is feminist, that is necessary. It is interested not only in cosmetic surgery, but also advanced techniques in medicine and biology that question the status of the body and the ethical questions posed by them.

Orlan and the Work of Art in the Age of Hyper-mechanical Organic Reproduction by Kubilay Akman