IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
Over the last few years, Icelandic artist Björk has become a leading figure in experimenting with new manifestations of her body, modified through makeup, costumes, and computer-generated imagery. At the same time, a social media subculture is growing as a critical exponent of contemporary notions of beauty, as its images, performances, and works experiment with the human body by transmuting it into an aesthetic that is sometimes dark and always provocative.
One of the outlets spreading this discourse is Dazed Beauty, launched in September of this year. According to Bunny Kinney, editorial director of Dazed Media, “beauty is no longer synonymous with looking good. People [today] recognize beauty as a form of transformation, where the scary or the ugly is also part of it.” Therefore, the site, which also has its own Instagram profile, aims to “expand people’s minds and make them aware of what is beautiful.” Since then, its images have ranged from people exploring body modifications or expressions of non-binary beauty to artists who use the grotesque as a new visual identity for this human being—part monstrous, part metaphorical—in a moment where unattainable and artificial beauty can, however, end up falling into the realm of the frightening.
This is what happens, for example, with celebrities and their surgical procedures. The same content platform, Dazed Beauty, published last week an opinion piece commenting on why we feel entitled to know the truth behind the plastic surgeries and/or diets undergone by celebrities. While the author reinforces the issue of privacy and individual freedom, what she ends up ignoring is that celebrities, as public figures, become brands—companies that must include an ethical and transparent approach among their values and proposals. That is, if celebrities market their image, not being transparent about it is equivalent to, for example, a company that promises to have a more humanized approach in its production chain when, in reality, it is just talk.
Therefore, while celebrities like the Kardashian sisters promote beauty and diet products they may not have even tested or that might not work (and for which they have been criticized by artists and activists like Jameela Jamil), they also reinforce a beauty ideal sustained by the media and a sexist aesthetic. And all this happens in a vicious cycle, because while these celebrities benefit from possessing this beauty ideal or faking it through surgery and Photoshop, they themselves are victims of what they reinforce as entropy proves stronger than market forces: aging, gaining or losing weight, getting sick, and dying are not part of the beauty agenda created by the media imagination.
That is why anti-beauty movements, as Kinney explains, propose more extreme forms of transformation that may involve surgical procedures (such as tongue splitting) or even artists experimenting with makeup, clothing, prosthetics, and software editing. “Beauty is not a fixed concept. There is an artistic aspect behind what they are doing,” Kinney reinforces. More than just bringing the body positivity discourse, it is the exploration of new beauty ideals beyond the human that are on the agenda of these digital subcultures.
And despite being isolated, niche movements, the idea has been circulating in the popular imagination and has also reached the mainstream with major fashion houses like Gucci. During its Fall 2018 runway show, the brand presented a performance based on Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, bringing a transhuman and monstrous beauty to the catwalk with models carrying their own heads or sporting horns and third eyes. According to Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s creative director, “we are the Dr. Frankensteins of our lives. We invent, we assemble, we experiment.”
Thus, such a debate ends up being part of the transhumanist agenda, or more specifically the post-gender one, since such manifestations also touch on the idea of using technology as a way to transcend human capabilities not only in their functionality but also in their aesthetics. This is why movements like the Cyborg Foundation are exploring possibilities such as the Transpecies Society, which proposes a space of expression for people who do not identify as human, but as something beyond and different—perhaps similar to what artist Hatti Rees, 22, does when creating virtual alter egos, or the Australian artist Jason Ebeyer, who has been developing alien creatures inspired by “internet subcultures, fashion, eroticism, and technology.”
In Brazil, artists like Aun Helden propose this aesthetic through performances, photography, videos, and music that challenge established classifications of gender or even species. The same applies to Salvia: with over 175,000 followers, their art draws attention for presenting a haunting ideal of beauty that is still endowed with elements traditionally seen as beautiful and attractive, thereby reinforcing the eroticism also explored there.
According to Alexia Inge, co-founder of the online beauty retailer Cult Beauty, “men and women are starting to move away from the prescribed aesthetic ideal entirely to move toward something much more related to personal expression. They’ve been going through a three-year process of digital makeup education, from the basics to layering and detailing, and now they’re starting to experiment.” It is from these experiments that the path opens for new possibilities of beauty ideals and expressions of what it means to be (post-)human in the internet age.
