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This is an article about the use of women as muses in Surrealism, but it strikes me as an eerily prescient description of our current body politic: the cartoonish dimensions of our currently revered body type, dysmorphic filters, the growing ubiquity of cosmetic surgery...
'the atmospheric feeling of a breast, buttock or heel'
!!!!!
This nails the hyperrealism of the bodies of so many Love Islanders, reality stars and Insta models. They compose entire bodies out of a grab bag of ideal features and the subsequent result is often quietly unsettling.
!!!!!
This nails the hyperrealism of the bodies of so many Love Islanders, reality stars and Insta models. They compose entire bodies out of a grab bag of ideal features and the subsequent result is often quietly unsettling.
At this stage in my life I feel neither positively or negatively about body modification/'enhancement' in general. I have a stoic fascination with all of it and how our brains are and aren't processing these shifts in the aesthetics and functions of our physical form.
I remember thinking the plot point in Years and Years with the young girl who becomes 'transhuman' was far fetched but the more I observe the feedback loop of how we're developing tech & how that tech is now shifting us into something 'post human', it's starting to make sense...
There's a long precedent of women strategically crafting the bodies they'd come to be famous for: look at before pics of Marilyn Monroe, Dita Von Teese, Anna Nicole Smith and Nicki Minaj and you'll see. Call it tragic or savvy, but perhaps the art of artifice is still valid.
When I catch myself lamenting our inability to accept our 'natural' bodies, I have to wonder what any of us mean by natural and why we idealise it so much. We can pine after some anachronistic, Eden like purity all we like, but too much has changed and not all for the worst!
