The model: Nykhor Paul
“I came as a refugee from South Sudan to Nebraska, and I used to joke it was there that I first felt like a top model, because I stuck out. Walking down the street with long limbs and black skin, I couldn’t hide. But I never questioned my beauty. It comes from confidence, something that you focus on within. Sure, there’s still one blonde and blue-eyed definition of beauty in the media, but on the street we all know it’s a different story.
“When I said on Instagram that I’m ‘tired of apologising for my blackness’ to make-up artists, it came out of that frustration. If a make-up artist comes to me in the chair with the wrong colours in her palette, it becomes an educational process. I suggest she look at the undertones in my skin, suggest she add a drop of red, of orange. I’m a mannequin, but I talk.
“It’s still hard for a black model to get booked, but I’ve felt supported for speaking up. People in the industry are opening their eyes to different types of beauty. We’re not just expected to be silent bodies any more. We’re activists, too. We’re role models. And I like where we’re heading.
“We should use our beauty. That’s what it’s for.”
The artist: Orlan
“When I embarked on my project The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN in 1990, I had a series of operations that had never been done before.
“I wasn’t using plastic surgery to bring me closer to a norm of beauty. I wanted a procedure that would disrupt the very idea of what beauty is.
“The first thing I agreed with the surgeon is that there wouldn’t be any pain. Over nine surgery sessions and five years, I asked to be given the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the lips of Boucher’s Europa and the brow of the Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
“The little changes I made to my face caused a lot of chatter. People often focus on the implants I had put in on my temples in 1993. They’re meant to permanently heighten the cheekbones, but I had them inserted on each side of my forehead. When people describe me without seeing me, I sound like an undesirable monster. But when they see me it’s different.
“Art is not simply decoration for apartments. We already have doilies, curtains and furniture. It should be a conscious positioning in the history of art. When I asked the surgeon to give me a chin like Botticelli’s Venus, it was a political act.
“I discovered Botticelli when I was very young, in the history of art books I read in the library. Botticelli, with his brushes, did what modern photographers do with Photoshop — he elongated some body parts, he smoothed out others and he removed all imperfections: spots, wrinkles, stray hairs. The figures surrounding Venus in The Birth of Venus are full of movement, in contrast to her fixed pose. They seem affronted by her nudity and are carrying a coat to suggest she cover herself.
“In one of my artworks, I recreated The Birth of Venus using Photoshop. Instead of idealising her, I deconstructed her by creating a hybrid between myself and her with morphing software. I decided to scream, and make her scream with me, against the pressures that preside over her body and mine — the pressure to conform to an ideal.
“Beauty is an ideology inscribed in the body. It varies depending on place and time: just look at the differences in bodies depicted by Renoir, Cranach, Rubens, or in David Hamilton’s photography. When I see early ethnographic pictures of the Surma people, with their enormous lip plates, or the Padaung women who wear neck rings, I think of how self-assured and seductive these women look. However if women in the west today were to insert these lip plates or wear those rings, they would be considered ugly monsters.
“All through time, civilisations have re-imagined the body, through tattoos, scarring, modifications to the skull. Now, we can replace teeth when they fall out or fix a cleft lip and other deformations — nature’s horrors. Nature shows us what a complete transformation looks like: a baby’s head becomes a teenager’s and an adult’s head becomes that of an old woman or man. To transform one’s body, to cross-dress, to change the colour of one’s hair, to me doesn’t seem so different.”
The photographer: David LaChappelle
“I’m known for working in the fashion world, an industry that promotes certain ideals. But by the end — I stopped in 2006 — I was questioning what I was doing. It no longer felt right. Ad campaigns and magazine work are rigid, and you have to stay within the parameters of what is thought of as beautiful at the time. And our definition of beauty is cyclical. From the Renaissance to the ’90s waifs and curvy Barbie, it’s ever changing.
“When I’m creating my own work I can redefine what beauty means all the time. I find it in the unexpected and the imperfect. When it comes to humans, healthy people tend to be beautiful — they shine in a certain way — and we react to healthy people. The ageing process can be beautiful, too. My mother and I were very close, and I found her the most beautiful person right up until the very end, when she died last Christmas.
“I was first struck by Botticelli in the 2000s. It was quiet in the National Gallery and I had Venus and Mars to myself. I stood in front of it for what felt like forever. What struck me was the Greek idea of the God of War and the Goddess of Love, together, and how our basic nature is the same: greed and war versus love and beauty. I created The Rape of Africa, based on that painting, after reading about the African gold mines and being moved by the human suffering and desecration to the land. I get asked why I used a supermodel [Naomi Campbell] to represent Venus. To put it simply, it was because she is a great beauty of our time.
“Our notions of beauty have changed radically in the past 10 years. The rise of social media has made it acceptable for people to take hundreds of photos of themselves, retouch them and post them for the world to see: behaviour that would once have been viewed as narcissistic and vain, but it’s now normalised. We’ve become self-obsessed.”
The plastic surgeon: Angelica Kavouni
“When we have a consultation with a patient, it’s not always that they want to look ‘beautiful’ as such. Ultimately we are trying to work out what the patient finds unpleasant about themselves. They might have a bend in their nose, or some other ‘imperfection’ that they are quite happy with, but they don’t like some other thing, like the lines on their face.
“I think it’s deeply inherent: we know what beauty is when we look at it, but there are lots of other factors putting pressure on it, too. Beauty is something that makes you feel good: when you look at a beautiful face you feel optimistic, positive, happy and so on. Otherwise it’s hard to categorise, because there are so many variables. There are various classical ideas, about symmetry, high foreheads, the shape of the eye, etc, but then you have to think about race, sex, age and cultural influences. It gets very complicated.
“Recently there has been a shift towards a leaner, more sporty look. And even the supermodels now, like Kate Moss or Cara Delevingne, have ‘interesting’ features rather than being classically beautiful, like someone like Christy Turlington.
“Sometimes patients want something that just doesn’t suit their face: fuller lips is a common example. Some patients want to conform to an ideal even if it’s not going to suit them. You tell them that you won’t do it, but they don’t listen, and they find a doctor that will do what they think they need. You’ll always be able to find someone willing to do what you want. Perhaps a third of the patients I see do exactly that.
“Working as a plastic surgeon probably does make me think harder about my own appearance. I’m vain, and I would like to look well groomed. But I think that it’s a cycle: if you feel good, you look good, and if you look in the mirror and look good then you feel better. I used to do a lot of work with HIV patients: the early medications could cause significant disfigurement, and there was a stigma associated with the skeletal look they got. People might argue that the surgery was ‘cosmetic’, but it drastically improved their quality of life. It wasn’t an added extra, it was central to their character.”
Botticelli Reimagined is at the London’s V&A from March 5 to July 3. Visit vam.ac.uk.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd, 2016
