Making Faces
September 14th, 2011Last weekend, I read about a size-8 model ridiculed on Australia’s Next Top Model, and I read about an aging woman who died after she injected her own face with hot beef fat. And last weekend, I learned about illustrator Jonathon Rosen’s cover for a book about beauty. Published with MIT press, the book is The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty by Bernadette Wegenstein, Director of the Center for Advanced Media Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. (Last weekend, I also learned that Paul Ha will be the new director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center.)
Jonathon Rosen's cover for "The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty"
Like something out of the Mütter Museum or the workshop of an alchemist moonlighting in phrenology, Rosen’s haunting, surgical set-up photo reminds me of fairy tales, dentist nightmares, Tim Hawkinson’s Emotor, and the more distressing final moments of A Clockwork Orange. Having taken courses with Jonathon Rosen myself, though not those new courses he teaches now, I’d say those are undeniable relations to uncover in his proto-bionic, playful aesthetic.
Tim Hawkinson, "Emotor," 2002
Making Faces
More on beauty later this week when I get to Frank Benson’s Human Statue (Jessie) at Taxter and Spengemann Gallery.