After researching into Cindy Sherman and ORLAN’s grotesque performance pieces and photography, I was intrigued by why they chose to portray women’s bodies in this way, producing responses that range from carnal attraction to disgust.
The grotesque, as art historian Frances S. Connelly writes in her book The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture (2012), is “a boundary creature” that “roams the borderland of all that is familiar and conventional.” It is desirous of transformation—an “open mouth that invites our descent into other worlds.” The grotesque, she writes, is inherently associated with the feminine—bodied, earthy, changeful. That thinking has long shaped depictions of the female body, including archetypes of sexual or environmental threat, like prostitutes, femmes fatales, and sorceresses. Even centuries before the term emerged, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle “advanced the influential argument that a woman’s body is monstrous by nature, a deviation from that of the normative male,” she writes.
My initial playful experimentation looking into online relationships, with our emoji use and sexualised foods, has now taken this grotesque form. While it does still adopt a playful side to it, I’ve began a short film called “Preparation For Sending My Boyfriend a Nude”, which includes myself creating new breasts for myself using clay in the cold, ready to admire in the mirror. They are meant to look like cherries, but end up looking bloodied. This is furthered by the use of a knife, cutting off bits of my new breasts for a more circular shape, then painting with a large wall roller brush, a stereotypical industrial and male item.
These emoji images and videos are meant to represent what one would send or create on a social media page. This is what I am meant to try and strive to look like. The clay aspect is for a very hands-on, gritty look, adding to the grotesque imagery. I also wanted to link it to being quite sculptural, perhaps narrating my film with Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion, thus creating a new outlook on the traditional ideal female form, as this one is made by a woman – but still for the male gaze.
After moulding and wetting the clay, I begin putting it on my breasts, almost sensually, but slightly chaotically. They do not look conventionally attractive, and certainly don’t look like cherries, which was my intention. I wanted it to look like I thought they looked attractive on me, even though I had transformed my breasts into something quite monstrous. I do this by looking at myself in the mirror, and remaining emotionless throughout the video, with no shock or disgust on my face; the judging will be made by the male gaze.
As I have previously touched upon, the sexual game we play with casual and/or long-term partners using emojis online is done to win a sexual “prize” at the end of it. At the end of this preparation, I ate a banana, a phallic food object that has certainly been sexualised, with the help of sexting and emojis. This was symbolic for what I hoped to gain from showing my new, morphed body.
saratrouble 