Martha Rosler | Chromatic Spiral

Barbara Kruger

We are going to take part in the contest “Life is lived, not weighed”, announced for the Comunidad de Madrid.

Pupils have to make up a poster of 45×32 cm where they reflect and think about anorexia and bulimia with a sentence of 140 characters as maximum. The object of the contest is to encourage conscious, critical, and caring reflection about the prevention of eating disorders (anorexia and bulimia).

Here is the presentation about the issue by Lindsey Rowe, our assistant:

Anorex and Bulimia by Lindsey Rowe from Espiral Cromática

I would like to reflect about it with the work of some images from desmotivaciones web, advertisements and contemporary artists’ works.

Why does beauty canon change?

The Three Graces, by Peter Paul Rubens

What is society saying to us?

Captura de pantalla 2014-10-14 a la(s) 20.56.39

Right photograph by Kevin Carter

What kind of values give some toys to the children? Fashion

Vanessa Beecroft, an italian artist who thinks about the lost of women identity in her performances. How does she do?

In her performances she shows “painted-up” girls who are dressed the same and all look identical to one another so that their individuality seems to fade away. In this way, presenting a ton of women who are very similar, quiet and unmoving, sometimes with blank expressions, the artist alludes to images that we already know about from different means of communication, such as images of fashion runways or scenes from films. The ideal beauty, to which all the participating models adjust, converts them in some moments into mannequins, into objects of fashion that do not have life of their own. (Via: Transversalia)

Martha Rosler: reflects on the consequences as much for men as for women of the excessive idealization of the feminine body. The woman becomes always an object of desire when she submits to the laws/norms of fashion and her body is classified inside the limits considered beautiful.

In this work, you can see different collages. She has arranged a large number of women cut out from erotic magazines. They represent male desires and all of them show ideal bodies and attitudes of seduction. By putting them on top of one another and stacking them in this way, Martha Rosler demonstrates the body and the flesh and ridicules in a certain way those prefabricated stereotypes that have converted them into consumable objects. She doesn’t criticize eroticism, but rather the commercialization of beauty.