Introduction by Chris Sharp
It is no secret that beauty, especially where the female body is concerned, changes. Or to be more specific, the criteria by which physical beauty is appraised changes. What made it into history and mythology paintings in the 19th century was quite different from what made it onto the silver screen in the middle of the last century. And what we now perceive as a physical ideal would probably have been regarded as a symptom of perverse and diseased thinking from the point of view of the 18th century. Whatever the case may be, it cannot be denied that physical beauty is anything but stable, and what is more, it is a highly mediated experience-- and that before it was mediated through film, the media and advertising, it was mediated, most importantly, through art, painting, sculpture and more recently, photography.
This new series of photos, entitled Tales of Beauty, by Marco Guerra and Yasmina Alaoui, addresses just these questions of beauty and mediation, and more. Combining their backgrounds and experience in fashion photography and contemporary art, the duo decided to confront these issues in the uncommon form of exceptionally plump women. This is not their first collaboration, they have been working together for the past few years, in a contrapuntal way. But this is the first body of work upon which they have collaborated, both conceptually and formally, from start to finish. Initially working with nothing more than a rolleiflex and northern light, they invited four corpulent beauties to pose nude for them. Guided in a large part by Alaoui’s instinct for sculptural volume and Guerra’s adulation of the female form, the series was shot with a dynamism that passes from voluptuous landscapes of physical abstraction to more traditional modernist nudes. At times, a string of rotund, fleshy folds becomes impossible to read as a human body (which gives itself away via a stray nipple), while a frontal, three-quarter shot of a full-figured body with a hip-cocked and shoulder-dropped becomes an unlikely sculptural counterfeit in classical contraposto.
Contrary perhaps to what one might expect, the bodies portrayed in these images are anything but off-putting, nor does any fascination they are liable to engender rely on exposing us to something we might not normally have occasion to see (heavy naked ladies). These photos are not natural, nor are they necessarily interested in trying to sell us on ‘naturalness’, or a different or bygone notion of physical beauty (even if a celebration of the full-bodied female figure is clearly at stake). They are much more interested in complicating beauty, problematizing it in a way that is as disturbing as it is seductive. For these photos are highly seductive. And yet their seduction is just as am- biguous, not only in its effects, but in its method. But how does this work?
First and foremost, anyone who gives these photos more than a cursory perusal will notice that something is amiss with these bodies, something here is not quite right. Because for all their so-called ‘imperfection’, they seem strangely perfect, impossibly devoid of blemish. Which is exactly what they are: devoid of blemish. After having shot the photos on a rolliflex, using northern light so as to create soft shadows and smooth skin, Guerra and Alaoui manipulated the images, removing every trace of superficial, physical flaw, and slightly washed out the tone and colors in order to blur out the lines of time, and as such, produced perfect, rotund bodies. Despite all the human abundance of these women, an essential part of their humanity has been removed, that which invests the photos with a keen and surreptitious sense of contradiction. What you might initially experience as a push and pull, a sort of attraction-repulsion vis-à-vis these images has less, in the long run, to do with any surfeit of flesh than it does with how that soi-disant surfeit is manipulated and portrayed. Indeed, it’s more of a question of the ‘natural’ versus the ‘unnatural.’ What is more, these photos pack a heavy erotic punch, due in part to the skill and persuasiveness with which the bodies were lovingly shot, and due in another part with the fundamental promise of fertility such a plentiful figure is liable to yield. And yet that there is something evasive about the punch.
You want to like these bodies, to abandon yourself to them the way they abandoned themselves to you, but only they haven’t entirely abandoned themselves to you-- cru- cial, human nuances have been withheld, enveloping these bodies in a kind of smooth, aesthetic deceit. Consequently, this can both fuel your attraction to them and temper it, marking it with uncertainty.
This push-pull is further augmented by two other important aspects, which in some cases, are hard to separate from one another. One is the large range of reference and citation the photos are capable of eliciting-- numerous images by Man Ray (not least among them Le Violon d’Ingres, 1924) come to mind as well as Hans Bellmer, Edward Weston, among others (among post-war photography, the most ready reference would be Irving Penn’s series Earthly Bodies, which seeks to portray the same subject, over-sized women, in a similar way. But in his series, Penn is much interested in celebrating an unusu- al kind of physical beauty, while Guerra and Alaoui are, as already stated, much more interested in problematizing beauty in general). On a more historical note, these women are inevitably ‘Rubens-esque’, going on to evoke Rococo ideals of feminine beauty, as seen in the paintings of François Boucher, while also referencing the realism of Courbet. Some images can even bring to mind the mannerism of Parmigianino and Bronzino, so strange and unnatural are the poses and the way the women have been portrayed. Take for instance the hand in a close-cropped image of a woman sitting, her breasts and overflowing stomach occupying the center of the image. Her right hand in the lower left of the image, which is placed palm up on her knee, possesses a singularly articulated and unnatural quality (as in posed), reminiscent of the highly-posed, self-conscious hands of Bronzino’s bizarre portraits (the crowded close-up quality also, incidentally, crowds into mind his allegory Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time). There is also something distinctly marmoreal about this hand, as if what were being shot here were a statue and not a human being, an impression that is increased by the sculptural smoothness, devoid of defect, of the body portrayed therein.
This in turn leads to another aspect of the push-pull of these images. For while many of these bodies were shot with undeniable warmth, this marmoreal sense of the sculptural inevitably ushers in questions of death. At times, so sculptural are the bodies that it is hard to discern whether or not they are in fact sculptures, and not living, human bodies (the presence of pubic hair in several goes on to complicate that, by partially suspending questions of the non-human, but never dispelling them entirely). They come to exist in a liminal space between life and death, thus liminalizing, so to speak, our attraction to the photos, forcing us to uncomfortably ask ourselves whether or not we are attracted to a body, or a sculptural representation of a body.
Indeed, the abovementioned range of reference sets up a similarly uncomfortable dynamic. Because when all is said and done, there is a fair amount of déjà vu in these photos, but that déjà vu is directly linked to the many references they bring into play. The photos themselves could be said to border upon pastiche, but they are not, for the simple reason that their wealth of visual and art historical citation are not the byproduct of mere aping, but are specifically deployed to put pressure on certain conventions and accepted notions of beauty. Nevertheless, the photos themselves are incontestably ‘beautiful,’ and it is hard to know exactly what we’re responding to when we look at them. The photos themselves? That which they evoke? Or their references?
Are we simply the slaves of certain aesthetic codes, obeying unconscious Pavlovian directives about beauty? Or are we genuinely stirred by what we see in these photos? Even if the bodies portrayed therein are not genuine? Or is beauty itself just a highly mediated construct, built by art itself, becoming a kind of structuralist fantasy that ultimately gestures back to its own manufactured impossibility? However you want to look at it, this series of photos, which occupies a unique position in contemporary art by virtue of its relaxed relationship with beauty (what could be more taboo now when discussing beauty than beauty itself?), manages to successfully seduce us while making us, if ever so gently, reflect upon the complex terms of that seduction.