viz.

Image Credit: Laura Kalman, Cystic Acne, Back (2009)

Via Bioephemera

In a post earlier this week, Cate discusses “Freeze! Revisted,” an art project that literalizes our consumption of violence. In response to the “sensual suicide” of mod-pixie models sucking on gun-shaped popsicles, I offer these blinged-out (and beautiful?) representations of diseased female bodies.

In her series “Blooms, Efflorescence, and Other Dermatological Embellishments,” Lauren Kalman photographs models wearing jewelry arranged to mimic the skin infections, rashes, and sores that manifest underlying medical conditions. With remarkable spareness, Kalman’s images manage to shorthand a number of issues at the intersection of health, beauty, and consumption. The temporariness of the jeweled piercings (specifically, gold acupuncture needles adorned with semi-precious stones) mirrors the fleeting surface visibility of long-dormant diseases like syphilis. At the same time, the relative permanence of these materials underscores our bodily impermanence, a susceptibility to disease and decay that we attempt to “ward off” through consumption of “talismanic commodities” like jewels. As Jessica Palmer of Bioephemera notes, do the images also suggest that there is something “sick” about female consumption and body modification in the service of ideal beauty?

Image Credit: Lauren Kalman, Wart (2009)

Via Bioephemera

For me, the most intriguing aspect of this series is the provocative way it links commercial and medical representations of the “imaged body” (Kalman’s term). By connecting these seemingly disparate classes of images, Kalman calls attention to “the similarities between images that intend to project ideals and those that display subversive or even abject bodies. For example medical imagery, pornography, and advertising display anatomy, often using similar positions and compositions.”

Image Credit: Lauren Kalman, Nevus Comedonicus (2009)

Via Bioephemera

In class, it might be interesting to talk about why the photos are jarring—how do they subvert the binaries of health/disease, nature/culture? But while unsettling, are these images also beautiful? (Or, frisson-style, does their sexiness stem in part from the discomfort they provoke?) If so, is that in part because, while they undercut viewers' expectations, they simultaneously conform to certain conventional representations of (white, young, healthy) women? Kalman’s earlier series “Hard Ware” (2006) transforms jewelry into grotesquerie, as in the mouth encrustation below. Other pieces turn “shameful” bodily fluids (saliva, snot) into cartoonish, expensive-looking adornments. Less explicitly "diseased," these bodies are also less ambiguously repulsive: in "Hard Ware," jewelry takes on a runny or crusty or monstrous bodiliness, while in "Blooms" disease becomes abstracted, idealized.

Image Credit: Lauren Kalman, Lip Adornment (2006)

Via Bioephemera