Perfection, Melbourne University Science Gallery: beauty no longer truth

The image of beauty promoted today is an impossibly amplified versio­n of the ideal. This show examines what is possible.

Matt McMullen’s Harmony. All artworks from the exhibition Perfection, at the University of Melbourne’s Science Gallery.

The disparity between the models of beauty that are held up to us by the mass media and the reality of the people we see around us is all too obviou­s. Most people, for reasons that are partly beyond their control but also partly their own fault, fall far short of the ostensible ideal. But the answer is neither to reassure them that they should be happy as they are, especia­lly when they are obviously not healthy, nor to urge them to live up to an impossible image. The first thing to do is to ask why the image is impossible and indeed spurious.

The problem is that the ideal promoted by commercial culture today is completely different from the conception of the beautiful body first developed in Greece and later inherited by the renaissance and modern Europe.

The classical ideal can be most clearly understood in the formulation of Sir Joshua Rey­nolds, the first president of the Royal Academy in 1768. Beauty consists in the central form, from which devia­tion is deformity: in other words, beautiful proportions in the human body are essentially the same as the average proportions of a healthy body.

This is why already, in the 16th century, Michelang­elo’s pupil Vincenzo Danti characterised beauty as la perfetta forma intenzionale della natura — beauty is what nature aspires to produce in every case, but does not always achieve because of the intractability of matter.

And it is why, within the classical tradition, beauty is in no sense a substitute for reality or a pleasing but deceptive fiction; on the contrary, as the 17th-century theoretician Monsignor Agucchi wrote, even in portraits a degree of idealisation, as long as it does not compromise likeness, leads to images that are piu riguardevoli del vero — closer to the truth; or, as John Keats wrote in Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819), beauty is truth.

In contrast, the image of beauty promoted in the fashion world and in the mass media in gener­al is not just an impossibly amplified versio­n of the classical ideal, but one that depart­s from it in fundamental respects. The figure and the features of a successful model, for example, are in no sense average. She needs to be taller, thinner, and with longer legs, which means that the upper and lower parts of her body are no longer symmetrical (the midpoint of our height is generally the pubic bone).

Her features too need to be bigger than usual, her mouth wider, her eyes larger and furthe­r apart. That is why models off the catwalk and in everyday clothes can look slightly awkward or even freakish; they are not harmon­ious and well-proportioned, for they are not meant to look normal, as in the classical ideal, but to strike us as exceptional, to capture the attention of viewers jaded by the overload of media spruiking, to fascinate us even at the cost of verging on the monstrous.

Hence we can also understand the recent popularity of male-to-female transsexual model­s: the male body allows for greater height and strength, and when this is feminised it can produce a sort of extreme but paradoxical and ultimately parodic image of the feminine, like that associated with female impersonators.

Nor is it even surprising that Cosmopolitan in Britain recently had an obese model on its cover: this was not in any way a renunciation of the model of commercial beauty, but simply added a surprising new twist, with the thrill of the grotesque, much like the corresponding exces­s of anorexic models.

These unattainable images inevitably have a harmful effect on the self-perception of girls and young women, especially in the culture of narcissism in which they are relentlessly in­doctrinated by consumerism and social media. If the images were, like those of classical beauty, ultimately realistic and achievable, they might be motivations to healthier eating and intelligent exercise regimes to maintain the body in a sound condition. But because they are inherently impossible to match, they seem to lead many to give up and, on the contrary, collapse into physical deliquescence and the inevitable coroll­ary of self-loathing.

At the same time, the lure of the unattainable has led to an explosion in the field of cosmetic surgery around the world. In Venezuela, in spite of the catastrophic state of the economy, about 85,000 women a year have breast implants. Buttoc­k reshaping is a huge business in Brazil. In South Korea — the contrast between East Asian and Latin American cultures is telling — the emphasis is on the face and the changes sought are much subtler: making the nose slightly longer, modifying the folds of the eyelids, producing in effect a slightly more Eurasian set of features.

A fascinating exhibition at the University of Melbourne’s new Science Gallery, temporarily housed in the School of Design building behind the Ian Potter Museum, considers some of these issues with a variety of displays ranging across the fields of art and science in a way rarely seen since the Renaissance period. The Science Galler­y itself is part of an international network sharing ideas and expertise with other nodes around the world, and the many young attendants in the exhibition are all science graduates or postgraduates, mostly working in the fields represented in the exhibition.

Lucy McCrae’s Biometric Mirror.

One of the most popular items with visitors is a scanner that analyses the subject’s face and then, applying an algorithm said to have been developed by a well-known Hollywood plastic surgeon, demonstrates how that face can be made more beautiful. Perhaps the settings need to be recalibrated, but when I was there the result­s were shockingly caricatural: faces tended to be reshaped to make foreheads broader and the lower face slimmer and finer, and to make the eyes larger and a bit wider apart, but the adjustments were so extreme that the final result was absurd in every case.

Nearby was a display devoted to the French performance artist Orlan, who has made a caree­r out of serial plastic surgery on her face, demonstrating once again how performance art can be an outlet for narcissism, exhibitionism and masochism. Downstairs, in a hall filled with everything from models of the graphite and diamond molecules to an ark for preserving bio­diversity in the face of a hypothetical dystopian future in which we are all genetically modified to be identical and flawless, there is also a remarka­ble display about what genetic modifications are in fact possible.

The modifications are arranged from easiest to hardest, beginning with tinkering with the genes for determining sex, and then on to ones that control weight gain, which might be able to allow one to eat anything without growing fat, albeit at the cost of a metabolic acceleration that would probably increase the likelihood of cancer. Further down the list are things that few of us may have seriously considered, such as “thigh gap” and, among the hardest to engineer, longer legs.

Nearby is one of the most intriguing works in the exhibition: what at first sight appears to be a series of portrait photographs turns out on close­r inspection to be composite images of couples, mostly but not exclusively male-female pairs. One half is thus generally male and the other female, but the two sides have been digit­ally blended in a seamless way. Most of them are surprisingly plausible, perhaps because we are used to asymmetrical faces, and it is only when we isolate one side at a time that we becom­e fully aware of their distinct qualities.

Jane Sverdrupsen’s Symbiotic Ones.

The work, Jane Sverdrupsen’s Symbiotic Ones, is based on the tendency for people to be attracted to others who look like them, but also for couples to grow more similar over years of living together. Each picture includes the length of time the couple has been together: as sexual differences wane with age, some older couples grow surprisingly close. But most simil­ar of all are in fact a young Asian man and woman whose features are already so close that they are hard to tell apart even when each side is examined separately.

One of the most disturbing exhibits in the show is the head of the personal companion — or, to put it more bluntly, sex robot — called Harmony­, which has already been commercially released, so what may have seemed a futuristic fantasy is now already a consumer reality. Harmony is part of a new industry that is meant to provide robotic company for the lonely or those who are too busy for relationships and want an option with no strings attached and no ethical or legal boundaries.

Harmony comes equipped with Venezuelan breasts, Brazilian buttocks and even a thigh gap, but as this is an exhibition for the general public, including children, only her head is shown, and more particularly her face, made of flesh-like silicon and animated inside by tiny movements that emulate the movement of the lips in speech and of the features in emotion. The neck and a fraction of her torso are included, with a hint of cleavage to remind us of her ultimate vocation. She has no hair, and a clear perspex skull reveal­s the machinery inside her head.

Visitors flock to Harmony. Picture: Nicole Cleary

Harmony is equipped with the same kind of advanced algorithms used in personal assistants and other contemporary devices, so she recognises speech, answers questions, and is capable of learning and remembering things that she is told. As a companion, she can apparently be set to different levels of discourse, from more cultiv­ated to more earthy, depending on the taste of her owner, and with an “X-mode” to allow for a special range of conversation in the bedroom, though sex with a robot must still feel uncomfortably close to necrophilia.

When I first arrived in the exhibition, Harmon­y was engaged in conversation with a group of visitors, but towards the end of my stay she was suffering from brain overload and had become rather catatonic. Even at her most animated, however, there was something disconcertingly absent in her gaze that reveals a fundamental fallacy of AI, or at least of discussions about the possibility of machines being ­actually capable of thinking.

The question is ultimately a philosophical one about the nature of mind and consciousness. Machines can be taught to assimilate data, make calculations and even learn from experience. But such functions represent only one layer of what the human mind does, and indeed the most mechanical one.

Behind these processing operations, which can so easily be perturbe­d in us by anxieties and depression and other malfunctions, lie non-rational feelings and instinctual drives, ranging from crude to subtle.

And at the deepest level there is something that lies beyond thought and beyond feelin­g, which is consciousness or awareness; without parts and without motion, consciousness cannot be simulated by a machine.

Perfection
University of Melbourne Science Gallery

Until November 4