The Contrary of Beauty
An inquiry into the relativeness of the concepts of beauty and ugly
When we look at an image or object, we are always influenced by our aesthetic judgment and taste. Especially when dealing with images of the body, beauty canons make us react with even more harshness towards what is not considered tolerable. Starting from Orlan’s concept of displaying the repulsive processes of body alteration, I focused my visual research mainly on grotesque hands and faces with heavy make-up ready to interrogate us asking: in what does the aesthetic experience of ugliness consist? Can it be a valid alternative to break free from the aesthetic canons? With my images, I tried to free the subjects from any aesthetic canon, but I realised that ugly images are bearers of many feelings. Indeed, every time I tried to depict the human body in an ugly way, the result was never just ugly, but ugly and unattractive, or ugly and ungainly, or ugly and deformed and so on. If ugliness provokes physical reactions, is it still possible to draw an aesthetic judgement from it?
In a world where it has become easy to modify our bodies, it is still difficult to accept ourselves. Aesthetic canons, promoted and mediated by social media, seem to acquiesce to false representations as long as they are beautiful. But if the falsification of beauty is accepted and even promoted, can the same be said of the falsification of ugliness? Aristotle believes that craftsmanship can turn the representation of something ugly into a product of beauty corroborating the assumption that art can consciously render an ugly image into a desirable and beautiful one.
At the end of this project, I came to the following consideration: showing counter-beauty means facing secular aesthetic conventions that treat ugliness as the quintessential negative element that must be destroyed. This conception is still difficult to redeem and a positive evaluation of ugliness might be hard to understand. One possible way that might give ugliness new values could result from experimenting with new modalities of making pictures that proudly shows every kind of subject without prejudice.
This theoretical and photographic project was created during a class led by Prof. Leander Eisenmann and Prof. Paloma López Grüninger.
