‘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