Tanya Sheehan spoke on plastic surgery, and its relationship with art and human nature, and the interaction between them all. Her first image was a self-portrait of an artist before she undergoes plastic surgery. This all naturally led to the association of the human body with a canvas.
I could not help but link the discussion with an earlier discussion on mimesis or mimicry. I found it amazing that the human being is so obsessed with perfection (or its construction) in the human body and yet not in art.
For example the impetus behind mimesis as a style is that the individual artist aspires to recreate the natural. This is why we have individual eyelashes painted with a single strand of badgers fur. The artist will spend hours attempting to match the tone of their subject’s wart, and yet spend millions of dollars in the pursuit of flawless skin.
The human being wants to be perfect and flawless, but we are not and so in order for art to be flawless it must mimic human imperfection.
This perfection that we chase however seems to not only be fake, but also socially constructed. For example Tanya Sheehan spoke on the use of Fotoshop on magazine covers. This in turns shapes our perceptions of what beauty is, and ultimately makes perfection unachievable.