While reading Chapter 1 of
Digital Art by Christiane Paul, I was intrigued by Nancy Burson's
Beauty Composites: First and Second because there have been many interpretations throughout art history of ultimate beauty (or the lack thereof.) Specifically, female beauty. In Burson's interpretation, she digitally combines images of film stars Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelley, Sophia Loren, and Marilyn Monroe for the first composite, and Jane Fonda, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields, and Meryl, Streep for the second. The composites mesh cultural icons of beauty to speak about historic trends in attractiveness, while simultaneously diluting the individuality of each star.
Immediately, the French artist Orlan came to my mind. She literally made herself into a composite of art historic beauty via plastic surgery. She documented the surgeries as performance pieces into videos and photographs during the early 90's. Using pieces of specifically male artists' portrayals of female beauty, including the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Jean-Léon Gérôme's Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana (as depicted in a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting), and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Orlan has transformed her own face into something of questionable beauty rather than ideal beauty.
Vanessa Beecroft's version of beauty is not a composite per se, rather a performance of beauty. Her pieces include a room full of "ideally" thin women, usually nude, all wearing the same chosen garment (boots, wigs, or stockings.) There is a strong reference to the fashion industry in Beecroft's works, and the fashion industry has a strong influence on the cultural "goal" of ultimate beauty. They are all beautiful, together though, they loose their individuality, which Beecroft exaggerates in the 2001 piece I chose
VB 47(VB 47.378.DR) from the Peggy Guggenheim. The women become just bodies, a collection of objects of beauty, without faces. Contrasting the previous two pieces, the viewer can only imagine how beautiful the individual faces are.
Finally, I travel back in time to the "origin" of ideal beauty, or at least the question of it. Da Vinci's
Mona Lisa is the most obvious composite I could mention. She is the most famous image of intriguing and mysterious beauty. There is debate about where her image came from though, it has been said over time to have come from the artist's idea of the most beautiful woman, more recently as from a sitter, Lisa del Giocondo, and it is also argued that Da Vinci used his own image in the painting. All of these ideas could be true, at the same time forming a composite of legend, beauty between genders, and a sense of anonymity.
The well known saying is that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Which leads us to understand there is no perfect universal beauty, only infinite attempts to achieve it and subsequent interpretations of it. It seems though, that every time ultimate beauty's epitome is attempted, it is simultaneously undone.
