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.

Image Credit: Sarlandière, Jean-Baptiste. Anatomie méthodique, ou Organographie humaine en tableaux synoptiques, avec figures.

(Paris: Chez les libraires de médecine, et chez l'auteur, 1829).

Historical Anatomies on the Web 

This week I thought I play far afield from my usual subject areas by exploring the image database for the National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division.  This database--Historical Anatomies on the Web--showcases many high-quality digital images of the NLM’s collection of illustrated anatomical atlases dating from the 15^th to the 20^th century.  The quality of the images, the detailed historical introductions to each anatomical atlas, and the descriptions of the illustration techniques all contribute to the immense pedagogical potential of this collection.

Image Credit: The Museum of Fat Love

H/T: Layne Craig

Amidst massive media coverage of the “obesity epidemic,” visual arguments have emerged online that challenge the terms of the current debate.  One example is the website, The Museum of Fat Love, which presents a collection of photographs of smiling couples.  Similarly, Newsweek ran a series of photographs on their website titled “Happy, Heavy and Healthy” in which readers submitted pictures of themselves performing athletic feats.  Both websites called for volunteers to submit evidence that individuals classified as overweight or obese can live healthy, happy lives.  The use of visuals in both instances is striking—both websites are predicated on the understanding that overweight individuals have been misunderstood (perhaps even vilified) in the course of public debates on obesity and public health.

Carolee Schneeman’s controversial sixties-era films remain to my mind some of the most visually provocative reflections on the “deep and meaningless” facets of life during that turbulent period. Meat Joy (1964), made during an era of U. S. Cold War propaganda, Vietnam War escalation, and multiple political assassinations, celebrates flesh in a context that, at first, may seem anachronistic. And yet, American military and economic claims on the world provided artists of the period a safe space to reflect on the body and cultural taboos associated with libidinal experience.

Today, Meat Joy is a delight to view. The French voices and Dylan-esque harmonica background provide a feeling of joie de vivre that correlates with the playful embraces of scantily clad women and men. When processed fish, chicken, and sausage enter this orgy, I thought, okay, Schneeman is going to drive the metaphor down our throats (maybe not literally, but close enough). But visually, the performance remains so compact, visually kinetic and complex, and surprisingly light-hearted, that the gesture of, say, a fish, squeezed up tight between a young woman’s thighs, is, well, marvelous to behold in this context.

Schneeman’s argument, however, materializes the body—bringing it out of our minds, where too often it exists in submission to social and cultural ideals. By recontextualizing bodies on a stage in orgiastic abandon to the performative moment, the arms, legs, and torsos we see give definition to the space around them, and ask viewers to see bodies at play as they explore tabooed social boundaries.

Fuses (1967), by contrast, presents bodies in a much more intimate, domestic setting. With only ambient beach sounds to supplement the 22-minute, 16 mm film, the intimacy between Schneeman and her lover, James Tenney, is mediated through frequent narrative cuts, image-layers, and post-production manipulation of the celluloid itself. Despite the occasional glistening, post-coital cock, Fuses distances the audience from an experience of literal fucking. Instead, viewers witness an argument for how sexuality can be internalized and reflected on as an experience of the mind as well as of the body. If anything, the film is grounded in a mimesis that recalls the mental state during sex, with rapid image juxtapositions, visual submission to the body, ambient sources of light through a window, intrusions from a pet cat, and glimpses of the face of the other.

While the argument is made in a specifically hetero-context, the intrusion of ecstatic otherness often experienced in sexual intimacy is revealed here, making this a unique, and valuable, film about an area of life that typically remains hidden from popular view. Unlike pornography, which is about manipulating the image-as-product, aiming stylized sexual acts at a particular audience’s desire for physical gratification, Fuses, with its gorgeous shifts of light over the room and textured visual tableau, invites speculation from viewers on attitudes about sexuality, bodies, and expressive, if unconscious, forms.

I find films such as these compelling because they challenge our notions of suasion in the epideictic mode. Without explicit narratives—or even spoken arguments—we are left with the performative gestures of the visual frames of the films themselves.

Is sarcastic, rather than bitch, the new black? To build on our discussions of the image of women in politics (see John's post about Michelle Obama's halo and Tim's recent post about Hillary and/as the Devil), I find the discussion of the two women's "edgy" humor to be quite interesting and I think it affects the way that their images are produced and read.

The Human Rights Campaign's Daily Newsletter recently spotlighted an article in The New York Times about Michelle Bruce, a 46 year old politician in Riverdale, GA.

Miss Landmine Angola is an art project by Morten Traavik designed to raise awareness for Angolan landmine survivors. Here’s the Miss Landmine Manifesto:

* Female pride and empowerment.
* Disabled pride and empowerment.
* Global and local landmine awareness and information.
* Challenge inferiority and/or guilt complexes that hinder creativity-historical, cultural, social, personal, African, European.
* Question established concepts of physical perfection.
* Challenge old and ingrown concepts of cultural cooperation.
* Celebrate true beauty.
* Replace the passive term ‘Victim’ with the active term ‘Survivor’

And have a good time for all involved while doing so!

The project is complicated, seeing as it is based on the controversial beauty-contest model, but it might serve as a useful classroom example for talking about the body and the ways it can be represented.

via: Boing Boing

Perhaps a good point of departure for a discussion of Women in Film would be the creator's earlier attempt to give us an overview of Women in Art:

Does high art create/communicate normative body structures or gender roles in the same way as popular culture?

I recently read a New Yorker article that mentioned the spell-binding youtube video "Women in Film" seen below. It's quite mesmerizing, have a look.