viz. - body modification

(Re)Composing Bodies - Giovanni Bortolani's Fake Too Fake

Cate Blouke — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Giovanni Bortolani, from the Fake Too Fake series

Using some seriously inventive (and at times disturbing) photoshop, Italian artist Giovanni Bortolani has created a series of photos about the composition of the human form. While the image above suggests a relationship between the body and the organic by superimposing a leaf skeleton on a man's back, most of Bortolani's photos in the series explore bodies in terms of that which is "fake" or constructed. The images in Fake Too Fake are jarring, but they ask us to consider what we're doing to our bodies in this age of plastic surgery and diet pills. NSFW (and somewhat gruesome) material after the jump.

Giovanni Bortolani, from the Fake Too Fake series

Though Joseph Ayoub from White Zine (a website about digital arts) argues that Bortolani's images "can sometimes be too trashy," I think that many of them make interesting and complex arguments about visibility and identity. Juxtaposing male and female, black and white, inside and outside, Bortolani questions how identity is constructed or shared. What is the relationship between inner self and outer appearance?

While the images might be rather risque for some classrooms, it would be an interesting exercise to ask students to come up with captions for these images, or to treat them like advertisements with slogans. The solitary, brooding model is reminiscent of the Calvin Kline underwear ads, and the arguments these images make would certainly fit the context of celebrity, body image, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I can imagine several of these images as strikingly effective anti-drug advertisements which wouldn't be too far off from the scare tactics of current campaigns. Of course, that could also open up a conversation about rhetorical fallacies, but the images are unquestionably effective in terms of getting our attention.

Written on the Body

timturner — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:34:53 +0000

Image credit: FeelUnique.com via NYT

Well, after today I will absolutely stop poaching all my Viz. entries from the The New York Times, but their home page is currently trumpeting a story on "The Body as Billboard" that I imagine any reader of this blog would be interested in.

The importance of what cannot be seen

Jillian Sayre — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:14:21 +0000

I'm not quite sure how to write about this for Viz., but when I found out about it, I thought it was important to think about in terms of the limits, possibilities, and intimacies of visual rhetoric.

A tattoo artist in NYC recently wrote to Mod Blog about her first job drawing in the nipple and areola for a mastectomy patient. The entry, titled "Rx Tattoo," describes how a surgeon contacted the artist to supplement the work of reconstructive surgery.

For me, the story has a few important intersections for the student/scholar of visual rhetoric. The need for the tattoo demonstrates the importance the visual representation of the body to even the most intimate of its observers. Without the nipple, the breast could seem incomplete, or even still sick. Even though it is just a "drawing," the tattoo brings presence back to the breast, or wholeness back to the subject. The nipple, similar to the increasingly popular inside-of-lip tattoo, therefore constructs an intimate or private language, an idea that is not frequently attached with the hyper-visibility of a lot of body modifications.

I also think that this is interesting in terms of the rhetoric of body modification itself, that is often thought to be reclaim the body for the subject. If cancer can make the patient feel that the body is not her own, taken over, invaded by the cancer itself, then this act of modification could serve as a ritual "taking-back" or assertion of ownership and control.
Last, I just want to point out the strange relationship between health and sickness for body modification. As Victoria Pitts points out in her book In the Flesh, body modification is often surrounded by the discourse of mutilation, perversion, self-harm and other ways of designating the body modifier as "sick" - with this new form of tattoo it is the body modification that tries to approximate "healthy" according to normative standards. In this way does the nipple reconstruction actually undermine the destabilization project that many body modifiers understand themselves to participate in?

Science as (body) art

Jillian Sayre — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 19:53:35 +0000

Following our earlier discussions about the intersection of science, art, and rhetoric, I bring you the o-chem tattoo. I think the tattoo not only promotes science as a field of visual representation but is also among a growing corpus of "geek" tattoos. These tattoos frustrate the long standing assumption that body art and body modification is an unintellectual enterprise, one in which you tear at, pervert or destroy the body. In this way, these tattoos also work against the mind/body split, demonstrating how thought is not separate from but also occurs on and through the body.

Check out the following link to see a group of geek tattoos at ModBlog