The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies 2011 “Brave New World”

Feminist Aesthetics and the ‘Art’ of Cosmetic Surgery

A visual essay by Alice YeowCurtin University, Bentley, Western Australia

aliceyeow@gmail.com

Objectives

1. Interrogate the Enlightenment notion of aesthetics, according to which women are usually positioned as the ‘beautiful' subject of the male artist/viewer’s gaze.

2. Offer a brief history of the ways in which women’s bodies have been visually represented in Western art as aesthetic objects.

3. Examine the ways in which Enlightenment aesthetics influences aesthetic surgical ideals of feminine beauty.

What is Enlightenment Aesthetics?

• The branch of philosophy concerning the nature of beauty and art, which developed during the European Enlightenment.

• Proponents include Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), William Hogarth (1697-1764), David Hume (1711-1776), Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831), Johan Winkelmann (1717-1768), and Edmund Burke (1729-1797).

Enlightenment aesthetics asks:

• ‘What is the relationship between beauty and artistic representation?’

• ‘Are some people better at producing works of art than others?’

• ‘How do we come to make good or bad judgements about art and beauty?’

• ‘Are there universal standards of taste?’

Aesthetics: the ‘science of understanding.’

- Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762)

‘The harmony of nature with our cognitive power is presupposed a priori by judgment, as an aid in its reflection on nature in terms of empirical laws.’ (Kant, The Critique of Judgement 24)

‘It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least a decision afforded confirming one sentiment, and condemning another’

(Hume, Essays and Treatises 136)

Judgments of beauty are universal

Kant famously proposed that judgements of beauty are based on feelings of disinterested pleasure: that is, feelings of pleasure that are not linked to a desire to possess a ‘beautiful’ object, or even an interest in the existence of the object in question.

Judgments of beauty are universal

‘[…] emotions of the mind are of a very tender and delicate nature, and require the concurrence of many favourable circumstances […] if any of these circumstances be wanting […] we should be unable to judge of the catholic and universal beauty.’

(Hume, Essays and Treatises 261)

Why were Enlightenment philosophers interested in Greek art?

1. The way men and women were represented in the past: early Christianity emerged from a thoroughly Hellenised Pagan civilization that was rich in Greek/Roman visual representations of men and women.

2. Greek culture was considered more ‘civilized’ than other cultures.

3. 18th century Classical revival in art.

• The Classical revival enabled Enlightenment aestheticians to use what they believed were Classical examples of human beauty to establish a theory and history of art.

• The philosophy of aesthetics invented the very notion of art, not the other way around.

• Makes sense that aesthetics (hence art) has come to incorporate other eighteenth century values (gendered/raced).

Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydoros. Laocoon and His Sons. 25 BCE. Vatican Museums, Rome.

Aesthetics as a feminist problem #1

The notion of women as embodiment of beauty is embedded in aesthetic theory.

The Line of Beauty

‘[…] flowing, gliding outlines […] which are in waves,’ giving ‘not only a grace to the part but to the whole body […]’

(Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty 227).

Capuan Venus c. 4ACE [original artist unknown]

Venus de Milos c.130 BCE[original artist unknown]

• We can see the Hogarthian line of beauty on Classical sculptures such as The Capuan Venus and the Venus de Milos.

• A Classic pose: the figure rests on one leg, while the other is bent, causing the hip and shoulders to tilt; the head is slightly turned, back arched, and one arm is raised.

• This is known as Contropposto, or the ‘counterpoise,’ which was developed by the Greeks to represent freedom of movement in the human figure.

Ingres, Jean Auguste-Dominique. The Source. 1856. Louvre, Paris.

Canova, Antonia. The Three Graces. 1815. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

Venus Kallipygos. C.1 ADE. National Archeological Museum, Naples [original artist unknown].

The relaxed stance does not compromise the figure’s symmetry: the viewer’s eye is drawn along the lovely ‘S’ shape of the girl’s body, beginning from one shoulder, to the opposite hip and down along the leg.

Aesthetics as a feminist problem #2

(Feminine) Beauty is also eroticised.

‘[…] that part of a woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness, the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye glides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whether it is carried.’

(Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry 216)

Medican Venus c. 1 ACE. [original artist unknown]

The language of purity

• Burke’s aesthetics (like Kant’s and Hume’s) is laden with gendered terminology, despite the notion that aesthetic judgment is supposed to be objective.

• This is because the very conceptual framework of Enlightenment aesthetics is gendered: always caught up with the feminine, and fear of the feminine.

‘The fair sex has just as much understanding as the male, but it is a beautiful understanding, whereas ours should be a deep understanding, an expression which signifies identity with the sublime.’ Thus ‘[woman’s] philosophy is not to reason, but to sense.’

(Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the the Beautiful and the Sublime 78-9)

‘Though men of delicate taste be rare, they are easily to be distinguished in society by the soundness of their understanding, and the superiority of their faculties above the rest of mankind.’

(Hume, “On the Standard of Taste” 274)

‘Creativity has been appropriated as an ideological component of masculinity while femininity has been constructed as man’s and, therefore, the artist’s negative.’

(Pollock, Vision and Difference 21)

Masculine: FeminineSublime: Beautiful

Artist: Art workCreator: Created

Mind : BodyIntellect: Emotion, sex

In other words, the VERY NOTION of aesthetics is gendered!

What does this mean?

Women are regarded as incarnates of beauty; yet their bodies are denigrated by the male sexual gaze.

Tintoretto. Susanna and the Elders. c.1560. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

In his ground-breaking 1972 study, Ways of Seeing, Berger argues that the notion of aesthetics is inherently gendered, and this is most obvious if we take, as an example, the female nude in Western art.

Note Susanna’s line of beauty, her youth, and her gaze, which is directed upon the mirror (a symbol of female vanity). Susanna watches herself while the Elder gazes upon her.

The Judgment of Paris

Rubens, Peter Paul. Judgement of Paris. 1636. National Gallery, London.

Typical representations of this scene depict the nude, or partly nude, bodies of Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera in such a way that they have nothing to do with Paris’s judgment, for he can’t see them from the voyeuristic angles that the artist/viewer can.

Rubens, Peter Paul. Urteil Des Paris. c.1638. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Rubens draws attention to the women’s bodies, which are contrasted against the dull, dirt-coloured, background.

Note the peacock on the left, again a symbol of vanity, and Athena (with Medusa’s head on her shield) offering herself to Paris, who is rewarding Aphrodite with the golden apple. Here the female nude implies an awareness of being seen by a male spectator (Paris or the artist himself, hence the viewer), who is forced to decide which of the three goddesses is the most beautiful.

The male gaze

Berger notoriously contends that there is a difference between being ‘naked’ and being ‘nude.’

‘To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude.’

(John Berger, Ways of Seeing 1968)

The male gaze

The disciplinary male gaze is also a voyeuristic gaze (in both paintings, Rubens enables the viewer to see a woman’s nude body from three different angles), and an act of possessing the female subject.

This is true in aesthetics as well as in Renaissance and Post-Renaissance sculpture and painting. It explains why, for example, women are nearly always depicted with no pubic hair, for this is associated with power and sexual passion.

• What is feminine beauty, according to Western art?

• Fairness (of the skin and hair).• Gracefulness, characterised by

round stomachs (denoting fertility), and the Hogarthian line of beauty.

• Long hair gathered in a knot ‘without a visible band to confine it’ (Winkelmann 68).

• Round eyes with half closed eyelids, expressing love (Winkelman 94).

• Smooth bodies (no pubic hair)• Passive stance (implies sexual

availability, vulnerability, or shame?)

The ‘art’ of surgery

‘Liposuction’ refers more crudely to the removal of fat, whereas liposculpture ‘should be an artistic procedure. It is the three dimensional sculpting of the body.’

(Rastogi “An Artistic Approach to Figure Sculpting” 86)

According to the US literary and cultural historian Sander Gilman, the term ‘aesthetic surgery’ is most commonly used today to describe elective surgical procedures that alter the surface and shape of the face/body.

The ‘art’ of surgery

The ‘art’ of surgery

‘By studying the patient’s figure carefully and looking at their proportions, balance and harmony can be achieved […] To do this the surgeon requires two attributes: an artistic flair with the ability to think and conceive in three dimensions, and the surgical skill to then take this three dimensional vision and create a beautiful figure.’

(Dr Anoop Rastogi, “An Artistic Approach to Figure Sculpting” 86)

‘Dr. Benjamin Norris has been inspired by classic European beauty, and his passion is to achieve a look of elegance. He specialises in the creation of beautiful, natural-looking breasts that result in a well-proportioned, harmonious body.’

(Silkwood Medical par. 5)

The ‘art’ of surgery

Still not convinced?

What does this mean?

• Enlightenment aesthetics informs the template of feminine beauty that is employed by cosmetic surgeons and their advertising campaigns.

• cosmetic surgery – or ‘aesthetic surgery,’ as many doctors prefer to call it – is an understandable problem for feminist theorists, because it mimics the relationship between the female subject/patient and the male artist/surgeon.

Aesthetics and Race

• Enlightenment aesthetics is tied to race because it was during the Enlightenment when the notion of aesthetics (hence beauty) converged with scientific theories of the raced body.

• Bernal: Aryan vs. Ancient model of Greek history

‘The Aryan model allows for a unified European race of superior accomplishment, linguistically and culturally separate from an Africa that brought fourth blacks, Egyptians and Jews […]. This brings aesthetics into the service of newly emerging theories of race by denigrating non-Europeans as ‘ugly’ or, at the very least, lacking the ability to make aesthetic judgments.’

(Bindman, Ape to Apollo 15)

Aesthetic discourse is freely adopted by Asian cosmetic surgeons and consumers:

Launched in 2010, Singapore’s “first media dedicated to [the cosmetic surgery] industry” (Mapletree Media).

Cosmetic surgery advertisement, China Cosmetic Surgery & Beauty Magazine, Malaysia

The following images are taken from the latest online issue of Aesthetics and Beauty Magazine (Malaysia)and Cosmetic Surgery and Beauty Magazine(Indonesia).

Nearly all advertisements in two magazines utilise white European models, despite the fact that services are targeted at Asian women and represented by Asian surgeons.

The few Asian models in these magazines have light hair, light skin, light eyes, small mouths, full lips, high nasal bridge, ‘double’ eyelids.

Many are Classically posed:

Daphne & Apollo (Bernini); Sydney Body Sculpting Clinic; Billboard in Taiwan

Cosmetic surgery advertisement, Seoul

Some advertisements are actually superimposed on Classical images: note the Grecian figure, left.

Sustris, Lambert. Venus et L’amour Attendant Mars.c. 1550. Louvre, Paris.

Titian. Venus of Urbino. 1538. Uffizi, Florence.

Reception area, Dr Kim’s BK Clinic, Seoul

Michealangelo. La Creazione di Adamo. c.1511. The Sistine Chapel, Rome.

Conclusion

• Because most of the feminist literature encompassing women’s aesthetic surgery has primarily focused on Western culture, the widespread nature of the phenomenon in Asia raises questions about how aesthetic surgery is marketed on a global scale, and how Asian women’s bodies are represented: why, for instance, are particular kinds of surgery more popular among Asian women? And is there a connection between Asian aesthetic surgery trends and Western ideals of aesthetic beauty?

• This essay demonstrates that Enlightenment aesthetics is indeed relevant to any feminist analysis of aesthetic surgery, because it associates women’s bodies with beauty and male sexual pleasure, and this has gone on to inform the way feminine beauty is represented globally.

• Although many scholars have pointed out the gendered

significance of aesthetic surgery and Enlightenment aesthetics, however, few have drawn a connection between the two discourses. Furthermore, the important racial/racist implications of Enlightenment aesthetics is yet to be acknowledged in Asian aesthetic surgery, which, as we have seen, borrows explicitly from Enlightenment aesthetics.

• Aesthetic surgery is therefore an understandable problem for feminist theorists, because it mimics the relationship between the female subject/patient and the male artist/surgeon, and because its very conceptual framework is a product of gendered and raced ideas.

Works citedBartolini, Lorenzo. Faith in God. c.1835. Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 21 Oct. 2009. ---. Nymph and Scorpion. c.1846-1851. Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 21 Oct. 2009.

Ways of Seeing. Writ. John Berger. Prod. Mike Dibb. BBC, 1972. Television. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. 1. The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1987. Print. Bouvier, Christelle. “The Latest in LHE.” Cosmetic Surgery Magazine May – Jul. 2009: 62-63. Print.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. London: Oxford UP, 1767. Print. Canova, Antonio. Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss. c.1973. Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web 21 Oct. 2009.

---. The Three Graces. c.1813-1816. Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web 21 Oct. 2009.

Cazeaux, Clive. The Continental Aesthetics Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.

Gilman, Sander. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000. Print. Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty. London: Reeves, 1753. Print. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 1739. South Dakota: NuVision Publications, 2008. Print. 224-49. ---. Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects: Moral, Political, and Literary. London: A Miller. 1768. Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique. The Source. 1856. Musee d’Orsay, Paris. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 21 Oct. 2009.

Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and Beautiful. Trans. John T. Goldthwait [1960]. Berkely and Los Angeles: California UP, 1764. Print.

---. The Critique of Judgement. 1790. Trans. Werner Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987. Print. Korsmeyer, Carolyn and Peggy Zeglin-Brand. Feminist Aesthetics. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 1995. Print.

Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Gender and Aesthetics: an Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. “Lely Venus.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 9 Feb. 2009. Web. 28 Oct. 2009.

The Liposuction Clinic. Advertisement. Cosmetic Surgery Magazine Feb. – Apr. 2000: 23. Print.

Orlan. “Refiguration/Self-hybridization, Precolumbian series.” Orlan. 1998. Web. 18 Mar. 2011.

---. Carnal Art. Dir. Stéphan Oriach. Perf. Orlan. Myriapodus Films, 2001. Film.

Pollock, Griselda. Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.

Ragosti, Anoop. “An Artistic Approach to Figure Sculpting.” Cosmetic Surgery Magazine. Nov-Jan 2003: 86-87. Print.

Shiner, Larry. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003. Print.

Silkwood Medical. “Meet our Doctors.” Silkwood Medical. 2009. Web. 13 Oct. 2009.

---. “Meet our Doctors.” Silkwood Medical. 2009. Web. 13 Oct. 2009.

Tintoretto. Susanna and the Elders. 1560-62. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Art and the Bible. Web. 21 Oct. 2009.

Titian. St. Mary Magdalene. c.1530-1535. Galleria Palatina, Florence. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 21 Oct. 2009.

“Venus de’ Medici.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 14 Oct. 2009. Web. 28 Oct. 2009

“Venus de Milo.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 15 Oct. 2009. Web. 28 Oct. 2009.

“Venus Kallipygos.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 2 Sep. 2009. Web. 28 Oct. 2009.

Winkelmann, Johann Joachim. History of Art Volume Two. Trans. Giles Henry Lodge. Boston: Harvard U P, 1849. Print.

Works cited

*Note on cover artIn her confronting photographic series, Refiguration/Self-hybridization, the French artist Orlan fuses images of various faces and bodies corresponding to beauty in different cultures and eras, in order to challenge mainstream notions of beauty. Orlan is also the first to use cosmetic surgery for artistic performances (See Orlan, Carnal Art).

Orlan. “Refiguration/Self-hybridization, Precolumbian series.” Orlan. 1998. Web. 18 Mar. 2011.