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Cosmetic Cloning and Body Art

Pop Quiz: One woman or two?

Or was it a trick question? There obviously are two women there, even if one is a copy of the other. And if you look closely, you can see small differences in hair or the accessories in the background or whatever else you want to pore over. But, of course, there also is only one woman there: a blond archetype of American femininity that is the model for each of these two Miami Dolphins cheerleaders.

The two bodies could almost be clones. And, of course, they are: not because they share a fair amount of genetic material, but because each is an near perfect copy of a social form. Each is identically styled to that conventional model, from physical training to gestural habits to costumes and make-up. Each will stand out because she so completely conforms to one set of social norms. Together they mirror not only each other but their society’s demand for conformity.

But don’t think that style is to blame. Or at least consider the other end of the spectrum:

There is only one of this guy, right? He is a model at the annual Face and Body Art International Convention. Who else could possibly look like this? (The style is the man.) But, of course, he is not so unique. He fits right into the body art subculture, and the artist is drawing on familiar conventions of mythic iconography and popular design. Just in case that context isn’t clear, notice the Mona Lisa figure in the left background. And, like the cheerleaders, his well-toned body is a standard typification of gender.

The cheerleaders train for hours to have a few minutes of spectacular performance, all at considerable cost to themselves and other women. Mr. Body Art is a model of self-fashioning, but only for a few hours in a convention center that tomorrow will be hosting Rotarians while he becomes just another guy on the street. Fashion alternates between conformity and unique self-assertion, and each depends on the other. Most of us spend our time between these two extremes, but we shouldn’t feel too smug about that. Among human beings, there are only differences of degree, never of kind.

Photographs by Abbey Drucker/VMAN Magazine (October 2008) and the Orlando Sentinel, and Vince Hobbs/Orlando Sentinel (2009).

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Flight 447: When Disaster Can't Be Seen

Sometime during the day I picked up the news that an Air France airliner had disappeared in the mid-Atlantic. Dropping from 35,0000 feet, hope for a heroic water landing seemed remote. As I checked periodically, the lack of news became increasingly ominous. Along with that, another form of unease began to make itself felt. Where was the plane–or at least the wreckage? Had it completely disappeared without a trace? Would there be nothing to mark the loss? No twisted fuselage, or crumpled wing–of course not, they sink–but not even objects floating on the water? A pillow, a suitcase, something, anything that could provide a sense of personal connection, of continuity between before and after, some cushion against complete annihilation?

If such a photograph can be taken, I’m sure it will be circulated widely. Until then, the press is having to make do with images of officials, machines, maps, and relatives or friends facing the news. This one is the best so far:

The caption at the New York Times says that “a woman . . . reacted while being taken to a private room at Tom Jobim Airport in Rio de Janeiro.” That doesn’t tell you much, and in fact the photograph doesn’t tell you much. Without the context of the disaster and the information and emotional cuing provided by the caption, the photo could be completely banal. They could be tourists on a bus.

My first reaction was that this photo, like all the initial photos, were merely place holders–images temporarily standing in for the images of the crash that were not available. The disaster could not yet be seen–no one even knew where the plane went down–but it was too disquieting to allow a complete absence of images. That absence would have been an apt representation of the gaping loss created by a catastrophic disappearance, but who wants that?

As I let the photo assert its own quiet presence, however, something happened. It seems to know how difficult it is to comprehend the event of which it is a small part. The darkness dominating the interior space suggests how all are enveloped in ignorance and foreboding. The hazy bright space (water and sky?) outside suggests the vast emptiness into which the plane has vanished. The photo provides a portrait of not knowing, of not being able to see what really matters.

Like the passengers on Flight 447 before them, the two people in this photograph don’t know what is out there. They can’t see the disaster that is engulfing them. Nor can we.

Photograph by Ricardo Moraes/Associated Press.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Being Private in Public

“Liberal democracy” is a political paradox animated by the competing and often contradictory demands and interests of individual and collective living.  The liberal-democratic conundrum manifests itself in numerous civic contexts, but none more clearly than in those situations in late modern society that underscore the tension between the public and private spheres of life.  One solution to such quandries might be to balkanize our public and private selves—to perform one sense of self in public and another and different sense of self in the privacy of our homes—but of course the two are not so easily separated; indeed, insofar as “public” and “private” are dialectical terms, defined contra one another, one might imagine the relationship between our public and the private selves as opposite sides of the same coin: distinct from one another but nevertheless literally and inextricably connected.  The problem for  maintaining a productive liberal democratic life then is in learning how to enact a sense of our private self in full view of a public of  strangers while accommodating the demands of civic decorum.

There is perhaps no more mythic public setting in U.S. civic life than Times Square.  A carnival of commerce, signage, flashing lights, and more, it is often characterized as the “crossroads of the world.” It is also the site of one of the most famous and often reproduced photographs of American life, Alfred Eisenstadt’s “Time Square Kiss,” an image that embodies the key tensions between the public and private selves of the two kissers—sailor and nurse, anonymous man and woman—who spontaneously and yet decorously perform one of the key obsessions of private life in full view of an attentive public of strangers.  That it is a somewhat restrained kiss, and that it achieves the full support of all who observe it seems very much to the point as eros is present, but contained. We have written extensively about this photograph both here and elsewhere and I will not repeat what we have had to say about it any more than I already have.  That said, the Eisenstadt photograph came to mind recently as it was announced that Times Square had been converted into a pedestrian mall that provoked, in the words of the NYT, the sense of “being in a big public room.”

The photograph above was taken on May 25th, the day after the area was closed to traffic and it shows a wide range of individuals in various social configurations lounging in the middle of Broadway as if a day at the beach.  Apparently oblivious to the activity that surrounds them, each individual or group seems caught in and contained by his, her, or their own private universe.  The physical markers of public life are there, to be sure, including a curb, street vectors, pylons placed to identify boundaries, and stop lights in the distance, but none of this seems to have much social significance as a couple eats their lunch, a group of three engage in what appears to be nonchalant conversation, a man and woman (husband and wife?) sleep and read as if in lounge chairs in their own living room, and an isolated, lone man seems lost in self-contemplation; others simply walk about. The point, of course, is that there is no sense of a public here. Less a “big public room,” the photograph portrays a thoroughly fragmented social order, a setting in which the conventions of private living have completely colonized the most public space in America and where individuals have seemingly forgotten how to perform their private selves in public in a way that acknowledges others and  accommodates to the demands and decorum of civic life.

It is really hard to know what to make of this scene. On the one hand it is no doubt churlish to complain about a world in which individuals are given the freedom and safety to relax in a public thoroughfare, unhindered by the needs and demands of others.  And yet, on the other hand, one can only wonder what the effects will be of a social order that so completely reduces the norms and conventions of public life to the unrestrained habits of private living.

Photo Credit: Damon Winter/New York Times

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