Chenman and the Cosmetic Face

A twenty something Beijing photographer, Chenmen has a extensive list of clients under her belt already, but it is her beauty work that executes a personal vision, engaging the viewer in a new appreciation for the cosmetic face.

Via Coilhouse

The Cosmetic Body as a Political Space

Wafaa Bilal's brother Haji was killed by a missile at a checkpoint in their hometown of Kufa, Iraq in 2004. Bilal feels the pain of both American and Iraqi families who have lost loved ones in the war, but the deaths of Iraqis like his brother are largely invisible to the American public.

... and Counting addresses this double standard as Bilal turns his own body in a 24-hour live performance -- into a canvas, his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell. The 5,000 dead American soldiers are represented by red dots (permanent visible ink), and the 100,000 Iraqi casualties are represented by dots of green UV ink, seemingly invisible unless under black light. During the performance people from all walks of life read off the names of the dead.

Elena Fajt - A Troubling Sense of Dress

FaceCULTURE's fascination with hair is well documented here and I am particularly intrigued by designers and artists who move this subject into a 3 dimensional form for presentation.  Elena Fajt is a visual artist and associate professor of fashion design at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, whose research has considered the analysis of the symbolic dimensions of hair, and in turn has incorporated human hair into garments. Fajt's Hairsense project invites us to think about the relationship between our bodies and questions our comprehension of hair: i.e. when it is on the head we admire it, but it turns into something alien and repulsive at the very moment of removal.  

 

Dreams, 2001

 

Hair Hat, 2001

 

Handwritings, 2001

Little Black Dress, 2001

Fajt's use of hair as a raw material and its application in and on existing pieces of garments and accessories invokes in many viewers their worst sexual fear, that of castration, impotence and unarousal caused by lack of sexual attraction, in the case of these fashioned objects, ugliness.  This fear is not surprising and within text there are associations with the discomfiture of hair to be found also.

While linguistically all words that represent hair stem form terms descriptive of specific types of hair, the colloquial use of "hairy", to mean troubling, was first recorded in the mid-nineteenth century in a context that suggests that it may have been inspired by the Latin "horridus", (the source of English "horrid").

Heresy and "Hair-esy" in Ugo Tarchetti's Fosca, by David Del Principe Italica © 1994 American Association of Teachers of Italian.

The Twisted Lamb that Bites!

In writing faceCULTURE it is wonderful to acknowledge other visionaries whose fascination with the fashioned body engages the viewer in a more focused and valued way.  Twisted Lamb is authored by Mary Lee whose unique and exciting perspective has evolved through extensively travelling the world (her mother believed it was more important to hitchhike through Africa than attend school, and she ended up travelling all over the world by the time she was 20).  These are more than a collection of fashion photographs, instead they are snapshots of emerging and evolving fashioned cultures.

Her observations of the tribal culture of fashion are clearly informed by her degree in Creative Writing and experiences as a model, stylist and art director, but it is her understanding of how make up, hair and fashion should be accepted as an art form that ignites the imagination.  When reading her blog it is possible to get lost in her reverence for creativity, and it is conceivable that you may never wish to return home.

I believe fashion is art. We are canvases and anyone who would like to argue that with me I am ready to debate. To ignore adornment of the body is just ignoring ourselves and a lack of self-expression.

Mary Lee

Twisted Lamb's observation of West Coast Make up artists Adam Tenenbaum, Jessica Lynn Atreides and Andrew Jones, in 'The Future of Make Up', underpins the desire for the creative spectacle to be considered as a manufactured cultural symbol.  It also extends the boundaries of acceptable forms of expression while beginning to place the construction of makeup and hair in the arena of an intellectual topic.  So the lines are drawn, what type of visionary are you?

Alex Does It Again!

 

Fantastic article on Alex Box in this months Sunday Times Style Magazine

"For me, the inspiration is having a model that can be transformed," she says.  "I don't really know what I'm doing until it pours out on the canvas, and that canvas happens to be the model's face."

 

Lucy Mcrae talks about Hyper Human - Pushing a material to its limits

Lucy McRae talks about Hyper Human from This happened – Utrecht on Vimeo.

Often it is difficult to grasp the creative collaboration between designers, the creative moment and the reasons why.  Defining how designers understand and how problems generate solutions calls for a rationale that does not rely on specialization, rather a shared understanding of how to perceive the problem of what is to be achieved.  Radical innovations through working on the face and body can be found within alternative disciplines outside of make up and the fashioned body, which is why it is important to be informed by the intention of designers such as lucyandbart, where alternative disciplines ask for original perspectives on problems and new potential ways of how to solve them.

This form of 'Design Thinking' allows for restriction free thinking that explores the generation of ideas and considers multiple ways of representing the ideas and the solutions.  It is particularly interesting that these solutions are relatively 'low -tech'.  What does this mean in terms of make up? It means that artists and stylists are beginning to rethink how to work on the body and  build up alternative associative networks of knowledge from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds, and finding original techniques and methods to apply.  Simply put, we need more 'LucyandBart's' if we are to move make-up application beyond casual 'beauty'.

Packaging Beauty and Compressed Shapes

Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin have always pushed the boundaries of fashion photography and with their latest editorial for V, they have worked with stylist Panos Yiapanis and artist Paddy Hartley.  Hartley’s one of a kind plexiglass face corsets, make the models look like packaged meat products.

Sleeping with a meat-muslin mask would keep you young.

According to 1930’s The Art of Feminine Beauty by Helena Rubinstein, beef could provide a fabulous facial: “Cut pieces of paper—a strip to cover the forehead, another for cheeks, chin, and a thin narrow strip for the nose. Give your pattern to the butcher, who will cut the meat accordingly. Leave openings around the eyes and lips. Pack the meat over your skin and secure it with a strip of muslin. Leave it on one to two hours or overnight if possible.”

Hartley has received international acclaim for a series of face corsets focused on exploring attitudes towards plastic surgery and ideals of facial beauty.  The bioglass and cinching invoke Botox, collagen, implants and other techniques that stretch and compress faces into their proposed ideal shape – but only temporarily. Hartley elaborates on these ideas and more in an excellent interview over at We Make Money not Art.