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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathMonstrous Bodies
 
The Forest (van Lamsweerde, Inez), 1995
 
 
 

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information society has new opportunities in store for the new woman. In the photoseries «Final Fantasy,» for instance, she links the biotechnological with the male fantasies of Lolita and lets both of them culminate in the little girls' gruesome grin. In contrast, female desire is also present in the photoseries «Well, basically basuco is cocaine mixed with kerosene.» On the one hand, the two stereotypical Barbie beauties appear to be the direct offspring of NASA technology and thus fetishes in a phallocratic order. On the other hand, with their bicycles and their rocketshaped Popsicles they are depicted as demanding women who want to have the male technoculture for themselves. This image is the condensate of a posthuman condition in which everything is artificial and not innocent, but seemingly cheerful and enjoyable. The monstrous is no longer something gone wrong, but normalized conformism and purity of the body itself.

The (Apparent) Fluidity of the Genders

While in van Lamsweerde's early works the monstrous of future bodies is the dissolution of the female and its simultaneous sexualizing hypertrophy, the theme of the

 

subsequent series «The Forest» (1995) is the confusion of maleness or the genders. The obviously ecstatic state of the effeminate men in elsewhere, the melting away of pure maleness, is not depicted as an abhorrence, but rather as something open, pleasurable. These cyborg fetishes exhibit their non-wounds, the shifts, interventions and disfigurements made in order to position them as fetishes, and they suggest the transgression of gender boundaries as a new opportunity for subjectivity. The dissolution of individuality and gender is followed by the flexibilization of postmodern identities. This appears as fluidity of the genders and ethnicities—a theme that boomed above all in the area of digital photography, advertising and the music clip. [7]

Ugo Rondinone's effective staging of himself as a woman became well known in the photoseries «I don't live here anymore» (1995–2001). As a basis for his work, Rondinonoe took fashion photographs of perfect women and mounted his face onto theirs. The result of this is not only that a female model wears a beard without any qualms, but that when viewing the series the same face looks out at you again and again from

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