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News / Biography / Text
Plastic Surgery
“There is a modern type of beauty and heroism: and the nude, this subject so dear to artists,
is still an indispensable element of success – whether in bed, in the bath, or in the medical theatre…
One of the privileges of art is that what is horrible, if artistically rendered, becomes beautiful.”
Charles Baudelaire, ‘Of The Heroism of Modern Life’
As Naomi Wolf has remarked bluntly:“we live in a surgical age”. Jenny Nordquist’s series of life-size
portraits of sitters undergoing cosmetic surgery bring a radically new approach to the tradition of emphatetic,
humanist documentary photography exemplified by Rineke Dijkstra and Walker Evans.And yet these are
almost anti-portraits, undermining every aspect of the expected relationship between the sitters’identity and
appearance, between their body and self,and between self-presentation and social status. Rather than a
conventional ‘portrayal’ of an individual’s stable identity, fixed for posterity through a record of their
appearance,Nordquist examines her sitters’quests to re-imagine themselves, through a process of bloody
and painful metamorphosis.
Our attempts to ‘know’ the identities of her sitters are also frustrated by the concealment of their faces
by folds of fabric: we confront fragments of a body, rather than their ‘person’. Nordquist notes that her
photographs depict a moment of irreversible change in the sitter’s identity: “the physical metamorphosis
only represents one side of the act. The metaphysical element of the operation is just as important.
Bigger breasts do not make the physical body healthier. With plastic surgery, you are operating on
a healthy body and technically making it less healthy.”
Seen at life-size, Nordquist’s images elide the lushly painterly and the intrusively graphic.
She accentuates the vivid colours of the operating theatre, and the play of natural light across them,
which creates an almost religious atmosphere. The sharp foreshortening with which we approach the
unconscious body also recalls Rembrandt’s life-size studies of dissections, such as ‘The Anatomy
Lesson of Dr Tulp’’,to which Baudelaire refers. This perspective makes us confront the patients’
recumbent bodies from an unsettlingly intimate angle. These are images that might best be seen as
an updated form of Dutch ‘vanitas’ painting. When the dominant culture of images positively excludes
anyone not possessed of youth and beauty, Nordquist’s evocation of an older pictorial tradition directs
us to the ethos underpinning ‘vanitas’ paintings: “For all flesh is as grass. The grass withereth.”
[Peter, 1.24-1.25]. She provides us with a salutary reminder of the sheer novelty of our belief in
the perfectability, rather than the fallibility of the body.
The depiction of aspects of ourselves we never normally see, recalls Voltaire’s dictum that “we enjoy bodies,
without knowing what they are composed of”. Confronting these images, we are jolted into a shocking recognition
of the sheer ‘otherness’ of our physical selves. Nordquist’s intimate, keyhole views reveal how strange we now
find the pulsating interiors of our bodies. More importantly they provide a dual orientation for our imagination.
As the artist notes, “the viewer is confronted with the nauseating processes that people have to go through in order
to become idealised objects of attraction”. We’re caught between the imaginative anticipation of beauty – the ‘rewards’
of the operation – and the ‘repellent’ means to this end, “where breasts become bare lumps of meat”.
Jean Baudrillard also advocates adopting a position of strangeness to our ‘selves’ in ‘Plastic Surgery for the Other’:
“In facial traits, in illnesses, in death, identity is constantly ‘altered’. But it is precisely that which must be exorcised…
If the body is no longer a place of ‘otherness’, of a dual relationship, but is rather a locus of identification then we must
perfect it, make it an ideal object.”The commodification of our bodies, Baudrillard suggests, has fundamentally
transformed our relationship to the idea of ‘self’.
Nordquist’s sitters are stormtroopers of a new generation adopting ever more extreme measures to transform themselves
into objects of desire, and whose expectations of the umbilical link between body and self are different to those of
earlier times. Whilst we now have ever-extended possibilities of self-transformation at our disposal, we may be
persuaded of Geraldine Bedell’s analysis that “cosmetic surgery is kind of political defeatism: a recognition
that it’s easier to change oneself than to change the world.”
Text by Alistair Robinson, programme director, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art. Sunderland, UK
Exit Here
There is something magical about silver Airstream caravans. Their voluptous apperance fits perfectly
into awesome American scenery. The interaction between vehicle, nature and fake garden ornaments
creates a dream-like simultation, a strange hyper-reality where nature becomes artificial and
artifice becomes natural.
What drives these people to eschew the conventions of home and household and take their American
dream out on the road? As I talked to caravan owners throughout America, I began to appreciate
that this was not a simple question of isolation as escape from traumas of middle-class existence
or the daunting obligations of civil society. The motivations for inhabiting the limited space of
a recreational vehicle appeared o relate less to any thirst for seclusion and much moreto the pursuit
of adventure in mystical hybrid that is America, an adventure that is worth being shared in a mobile
community.
In parallel with those that Alex De Troqueville encountered on his journeys into the vastness
of nineteenth century America in ' A forthnight in the Wilds', the 'caravanners' seek the edges of this
great nation in which to live out their dream. America, the beautiful! America , the desert! Only this
strange landscape of vast ambiguity does the caravan and its people justice. Only out here, at the outskirts
of human control, does the beauty of a sublime collaboration between the infinity of the natural and the
artificial emerge. In his book, America, Jean Baudrillard touches upon this notion of the deserts as an endless
neutrality.
"Why are the deserts so fashinating? It is because you are delivered from all dept there - a brilliant,
mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture,
an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no reference-points."
Yet on the concrete of Las Vegas parking lots or in the deserts of Arizona, the next generation of caravan
parks are arising on the American frontier offering caravan owners a more comfortable and stylished alternative
to the utopian notion of nature's own camp gound.
Lars Eriksen for Themepark magazine 2001
“There is a modern type of beauty and heroism: and the nude, this subject so dear to artists,
is still an indispensable element of success – whether in bed, in the bath, or in the medical theatre…
One of the privileges of art is that what is horrible, if artistically rendered, becomes beautiful.”
Charles Baudelaire, ‘Of The Heroism of Modern Life’
As Naomi Wolf has remarked bluntly:“we live in a surgical age”. Jenny Nordquist’s series of life-size
portraits of sitters undergoing cosmetic surgery bring a radically new approach to the tradition of emphatetic,
humanist documentary photography exemplified by Rineke Dijkstra and Walker Evans.And yet these are
almost anti-portraits, undermining every aspect of the expected relationship between the sitters’identity and
appearance, between their body and self,and between self-presentation and social status. Rather than a
conventional ‘portrayal’ of an individual’s stable identity, fixed for posterity through a record of their
appearance,Nordquist examines her sitters’quests to re-imagine themselves, through a process of bloody
and painful metamorphosis.
Our attempts to ‘know’ the identities of her sitters are also frustrated by the concealment of their faces
by folds of fabric: we confront fragments of a body, rather than their ‘person’. Nordquist notes that her
photographs depict a moment of irreversible change in the sitter’s identity: “the physical metamorphosis
only represents one side of the act. The metaphysical element of the operation is just as important.
Bigger breasts do not make the physical body healthier. With plastic surgery, you are operating on
a healthy body and technically making it less healthy.”
Seen at life-size, Nordquist’s images elide the lushly painterly and the intrusively graphic.
She accentuates the vivid colours of the operating theatre, and the play of natural light across them,
which creates an almost religious atmosphere. The sharp foreshortening with which we approach the
unconscious body also recalls Rembrandt’s life-size studies of dissections, such as ‘The Anatomy
Lesson of Dr Tulp’’,to which Baudelaire refers. This perspective makes us confront the patients’
recumbent bodies from an unsettlingly intimate angle. These are images that might best be seen as
an updated form of Dutch ‘vanitas’ painting. When the dominant culture of images positively excludes
anyone not possessed of youth and beauty, Nordquist’s evocation of an older pictorial tradition directs
us to the ethos underpinning ‘vanitas’ paintings: “For all flesh is as grass. The grass withereth.”
[Peter, 1.24-1.25]. She provides us with a salutary reminder of the sheer novelty of our belief in
the perfectability, rather than the fallibility of the body.
The depiction of aspects of ourselves we never normally see, recalls Voltaire’s dictum that “we enjoy bodies,
without knowing what they are composed of”. Confronting these images, we are jolted into a shocking recognition
of the sheer ‘otherness’ of our physical selves. Nordquist’s intimate, keyhole views reveal how strange we now
find the pulsating interiors of our bodies. More importantly they provide a dual orientation for our imagination.
As the artist notes, “the viewer is confronted with the nauseating processes that people have to go through in order
to become idealised objects of attraction”. We’re caught between the imaginative anticipation of beauty – the ‘rewards’
of the operation – and the ‘repellent’ means to this end, “where breasts become bare lumps of meat”.
Jean Baudrillard also advocates adopting a position of strangeness to our ‘selves’ in ‘Plastic Surgery for the Other’:
“In facial traits, in illnesses, in death, identity is constantly ‘altered’. But it is precisely that which must be exorcised…
If the body is no longer a place of ‘otherness’, of a dual relationship, but is rather a locus of identification then we must
perfect it, make it an ideal object.”The commodification of our bodies, Baudrillard suggests, has fundamentally
transformed our relationship to the idea of ‘self’.
Nordquist’s sitters are stormtroopers of a new generation adopting ever more extreme measures to transform themselves
into objects of desire, and whose expectations of the umbilical link between body and self are different to those of
earlier times. Whilst we now have ever-extended possibilities of self-transformation at our disposal, we may be
persuaded of Geraldine Bedell’s analysis that “cosmetic surgery is kind of political defeatism: a recognition
that it’s easier to change oneself than to change the world.”
Text by Alistair Robinson, programme director, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art. Sunderland, UK
Exit Here
There is something magical about silver Airstream caravans. Their voluptous apperance fits perfectly
into awesome American scenery. The interaction between vehicle, nature and fake garden ornaments
creates a dream-like simultation, a strange hyper-reality where nature becomes artificial and
artifice becomes natural.
What drives these people to eschew the conventions of home and household and take their American
dream out on the road? As I talked to caravan owners throughout America, I began to appreciate
that this was not a simple question of isolation as escape from traumas of middle-class existence
or the daunting obligations of civil society. The motivations for inhabiting the limited space of
a recreational vehicle appeared o relate less to any thirst for seclusion and much moreto the pursuit
of adventure in mystical hybrid that is America, an adventure that is worth being shared in a mobile
community.
In parallel with those that Alex De Troqueville encountered on his journeys into the vastness
of nineteenth century America in ' A forthnight in the Wilds', the 'caravanners' seek the edges of this
great nation in which to live out their dream. America, the beautiful! America , the desert! Only this
strange landscape of vast ambiguity does the caravan and its people justice. Only out here, at the outskirts
of human control, does the beauty of a sublime collaboration between the infinity of the natural and the
artificial emerge. In his book, America, Jean Baudrillard touches upon this notion of the deserts as an endless
neutrality.
"Why are the deserts so fashinating? It is because you are delivered from all dept there - a brilliant,
mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture,
an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no reference-points."
Yet on the concrete of Las Vegas parking lots or in the deserts of Arizona, the next generation of caravan
parks are arising on the American frontier offering caravan owners a more comfortable and stylished alternative
to the utopian notion of nature's own camp gound.
Lars Eriksen for Themepark magazine 2001