Anthropology of the human body

Osvaldo Sanchez

Published in the catalog Antropología del Cuerpo Moderno (Anthropology of the Modern Body), edited by FONCA and Galeria Acceso A, Mexico, 1999

The human body has always been a cultural construction, perhaps ever since the Venus of Willendorf and despite the harsh rigors of an arbitrary nature. The canons which have reigned through history, from chapiter to floral arrangements, have taken from the body, with its fashions and artifice, a paradigm of order as well as all possible license for flirting with chaos.

Mariana Dellekamp’s photography uncovers for us the blind field of the body, assuming its nature as a system of connecting tubes for an ever fleeting desire, held within its specific weight, liquids inside of liquids, capable of recording a miniscule space where something uncertain dissolves. And that field has functioned for Mariana the same as a blurry mark of identity—identifiable in her self-portraits in water—than as a seal inscribed through the clinical tidiness of bodily fluids.

The interventions which in the form of a canon constitute the narrative of these bodies—bodies dreaming of themselves—find in virtuality their scalpel and in any store window, television channel or magazine their surgery. The people interviewed for this project map in their imaginary the desire to be different, to incarnate Perfection. Which? May this obsession to attain the divine—at least through embodying beauty—be a legacy from our Greek and Latin ancestors? We heard Constantino Cavafis, still in the grip of that Greek anguish, state: “He is neither one of ours nor beautiful”. Perhaps the rigor of today differs from that of other ages—like the corporal patterns established by a sumptuous and implacable court—in the ever-present watch upon us of the beauty canon. A divine canon whose requisites assess our social worth and which today issues judgement like a faceless voice. The industry of looks rests not only on the bulimic bodies of the stars . . . its power breaks up and reigns through the billionaire billing of corporation advertising, the fashion industry and modeling, all of Hollywood, the empires of magazines and journals disputing for the subtleties of this register, the Royal Houses and even the polished and up-to-date image of political campaigns.

The process used by Dellekamp to digitalize the implant and take the body as raw material or base upon which to intervene is no more no less than the technical process used today in any process of remodeling: houses to be furnished, mass-produced Barbie noses, silicon breasts for the new young Lolobrigidas, phallus fascinated with the amplified view of the porno video . . . in short: the body has become an undifferentiated erogenous territory, marked as the object of an implacable desire. Under this dictatorship of poise and appearance flourishes a crisis of self-esteem which prompts us compulsively to go shopping. A perfect circle.

Beauty as a fallacious construction which joins, in macabre conspiracy with the canon, Barbie to the lady peddling quesadillas.