Transformation VS Trash-Formation – The Pop-Porno of Beauty

We’ve just left the Creative Pois-On October month dedicated to the theme of Transformation. We fathomed the subject in all its different declinations, from a cultural perspective to a business one, from folklore to fashion, iconography and the perks of reinvention. Pop culture is another one of those arenas where Transformation plays a big role. And reflecting on the transformation of the Criteria of Aesthetic Beauty, an image kept on popping into my mind… the 2014 Paper Magazine cover of Kim Kardashian… and I couldn’t help but wonder: either if you are horrified by it or not, either if you Like it, or not, are we in the presence of a Trash-formative Aesthetic Fact?

By Tommaso Cartia

In 2014, at one of the heights of her public overexposure, Kim Kardashian posted on her Instagram profile the artistic picture below, (I guess that is how she would describe it); shot by the well-known, well-respected photographer Jean-Paul Goude. She is all smiley and proud of graphically showing off all the splendor of her full-frontal body hyperbolic bum, oiled and retouched by the Photoshop genius for the occasion. 

The post immediately hit over a million of engagements, it went vertiginously viral, generating converts and desecrations, intrepid emulations and thousands of comments all over the social media, newspapers, TV shows: it was a case. Now, as long as you want to ignore the umpteenth excessed of the Reality TV star par excellence, you can’t ignore the fact that this image, like many others bombarding our eyes with daily, incessant rhythm, is definitely an aesthetic fact. This picture is certainly not more provocative than others, and also, is not an original concept. It’s indeed a remake of an old Goude’s photo-shoot, But it certainly got under the skin and subliminally deep into the conscience of the millions of people who commented it and discussed its aesthetic criteria of Beauty, with the modern criteria of today: I Like it. I Don’t Like It. I Heart It. I Don’t Heart It.  Beauty. 

Considering all the hearts she collected with the post, did she equally receive the same amount of love? It is sort of a paradox in fact; if you go through the comments and behind the profiles who wrote them, most of the time you get a negative comment from the ones who hearted it. We should assume that liking is fundamental than, either if you like something or not. So, is it still possible today to contemplate absolute criteria for aesthetic Beauty? 

One sure thing is that the Kardashian’s, is definitely a pop image and an even more a pornographic one in its most artisticassumption. It’s the so-called aesthetic of the Pop-Porn which is deeply rooted in the progressive deconstruction of the conforming paradigms of the bourgeois society throughout the 20th and 21st century. However, the ground-breaking turning point of our contemporary days is how viral these pornographic images can go and the possibility not only to process them at the speed of light but to be ourselves authors of those images, selfie-portraitists and post-artists of our own pornographic images, of our own ravenous voyeurism. 

If I were the curator of the Museum of the Pop-Porn, I would expose one next to the other these grand masterpieces: Ingres’s Grand Odalisque, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a pop-art Marilyn, a Grace Jones shot by Goude himself, a Madonna, a Lady Gaga, a Miley Cyrus and a Kardashian. 

The subtle transformation between these images of Beauty leads to a progressive abandon of the subject, of the Ego and its symbolic world. La Grande Odalisque is a subject of sophisticated eroticism and an icon of a still timid female emancipation just right after the dogmatic veto imposed on the unveiling of the human body by the Catholic Church in the sacred depictions. The grotesques Demoiselles unnerve the eye and investigate the meta- dimensional metamorphosis of the human being. The advent of pop art transfigures and objectifies the images which don’t refer to profound identities anymore, they refer just to themselves; but here the individuality of the Ego is not totally dead yet because there will be who will dress up this pop aesthetic to customize, in provocative trends, their own identities: Grace Jones, David Bowie, Madonna, George Michael among others. 

Lady Gaga – the personage that Miss Germanotta constructed at the beginning of her career – is still a symbolist. It’s a well thought conceptual mask, shimmering and grotesque, but here the individuality of the Ego is undone, you don’t see almost anything of the woman underneath the mask. But Gaga is still an artist of the Self. From who covers up everything to who shows everything, it is time for the pop-pornography that has its own muses and incarnations: Miley Cyrus in the era of her wrecking bum, Kim Kardashian and many others of that kind. What is left of the Ego, what is left of the Self? Now the image is just functional to the fattening of a viral hysterical aesthetic that doesn’t relate anymore to a Criteria of Beauty but to a Criteria of Cool or to one of its subcategories: Trash. Beauty can be marvelous like a Monet painting or disturbing like a Francis Bacon one, Cool is just Cool or eventually, Trash, the Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit.

Perhaps, the plasticity of these empty carcasses still hides and muffles the Munch’s Scream of our subconscious crisis. This profanation of the persona and of the intellect that diverts our attention from the preoccupation of our wandering in the darkness of a society of fragmented individuals, buries or maybe sadly amplifies in this necromancer’s process, our troublesome mysterious Ego, that more than being lost, it seems at times, like it had never existed in the firs place. 

The tool of this aesthetic of Cool is the plastic hyperrealism of Photoshop, a fatal chisel that shapes everything it touches into Influencers Barbies and Kens. And what is Goude’s Kardashian image if not a Pop Porno Barbie, and her bum an alive metonym of its vacuum shell? Kim Kardashian here is a victimized offender of her own eagerness to display and a naïve victim of an artistic offense perpetrated against her by the genius of Jean-Paul Goude who immortalized with a similar motif the iconic and revolutionary Grace Jones. But there is really nothing gracious about this reinterpretation by Kim Kardashian. These Pop-Porn images are freed from their essence, they are reproducible merchandise, ironical paradoxes, a simulacrum of their lack of contents: sexy bodies, provocative, sacrilegious, that passively play, unaware of playing, with archetypical symbols but displacing them, draining them out and hybridize them into something mute and inconsistent. 

 “Profanation is not a negation of mystery, but one of the possible relationships with it” (E.Levinas)