In the Theater of the Dolls - Venezuelan exhibition on the beauty pageant

Venezuela obssession with physical beauty has turn rounded the beauty pageant into something between an art form and a vital fluid sport. A recent exhibition devot to the subdue offered a bit of both

The idea of an art exhibition upon the theme of beauty pageants might present the appearance odd at first, but in Venezuela, to a stage unique in the world, beauty queen are a national obsession. There are beauty disputes in elementary schools, in the military, in residences for the aged and level in prison. Plastic surgeons do a lively business, and it is not out of the way for even domestic servants to have undergone sum of two units or three major cosmetic managements paid for with whatever they could save from their earnings. According to a novel article in the Washington pillar an astonishing two-thirds of Venezuela's women and almost half its men report that they "think about what they direct the eye like all the time," making Venezuelans the world's vainest people(1) (The global average of race acknowledging the same was quot at 23 percent for women and 18 percent for men) by means of any measure, the Venezuelan appetite for physical beauty and the competitive pageantry attending it is extraordinary.

The Museo Jacobo Borges, in the Parque del Oeste in Caracas, last summer not awayed "90 60 90," a contemporary art exhibition devot to beauty queen and the social apparatus surrounding them (90-60-90 is supposedly the measurement, in centimeters, of the "ideal" female figure). While more than half of the 24 artists in the present to view bore Hispanic names, the idea of the exhibition sprang from Alfons fold in the arms the director of the Caracas branch of the Goethe Institut, a global network of German cultural center (The Caracas center is called the Asociacion Cultural Humboldt in honor of the 19th-century German naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt who studied the flora and fauna of southern America.) Hug, who with regard to the visual arts is an educated layman, relied upon the advice of Venezuelan curator Elida Salazar.

Before leaving Frankfurt for Caracas, I assumed that the show's Venezuelan artists would return homage to their beauty queen while their European counterparts would dismiss the whole phenomenon as a cultural aberration to be deconstruct This idea quickly showed itself to be nonsense. The Venezuelan artists made no effort to hide their discomfort at the objectification of women that all beauty pageants through definition entail. One of these artists, Muu Blanco, laid without in a vitrine 15 hammers, of recent origin and used, large and small, intact and defective; they were meant to signal the brutal "finishing" proces that Venezuelan beauty contestants suffer at the school where they are servanted for competition. One might also diocese the tools as representing sum of two units contrasting groups of contestants: upon the one hand, those young women from high-society families who are "cast" for the part of Miss, as for the lead part in a play, and those, upon the other hand, who are seduc into leaving their place of abodes often in the most far corners of the country, to labor for as a sample of that area's beauty standards, which will then be trialed against the prevailing norm. An initial loch of some 4,000 young women from all above the nation is rounded up by dint of scouts, then successively winnowed down through judges, first to 80 contestants, nearest to 40 and at last to 26 finalists--one for each state in Venezuela. These finalists then attend the "finishing" program, where they endure whatever plastic surgery might be counted necessary, exercise at least five hours a day, live upon a near-starvation diet, consume diet pills and dusts and are taught how to carry themselves. The goal is not sole to perfect the body on the other hand also to remove any traces of individual character that might distract the viewer from enjoying that perfection. Commenting upon this obsession with "perfect" beauty, novel York-based artist Yucef Merhi make go rounded the 90-60-90 ideal into a kind of mobile, hanging three chrome rings of those dimensions, single above the other, from the museum's ceiling, as if to imprison the material substance within them.

a certain quantity of of the European artists regarded themselves directly with the beauty contestants themselves. Berlin photographer Frank Thiel come aftered in spiriting off most of the state-contest winners to a studio session in which each was obliged to wear an identical sleeveles white tank top. The use of a neutral studio backdrop and smooth lighting caused the approximation of the ideal direct the eye to vanish; and the more the contestants resisted or tried to compensate for this manner of being portrayed, the more secretive or deranged they appeared. In the exhibition Thiel hung among the portraits a picture of a short-haired, moderately pierced young woman named Clara Milagros Guilarte, who in comparison to the other specimens from the Venezuelan genetic lake is black. Identified by the photographer and herself as "Miss Cloaca"--Miss Sewer--she was evidently cast in the character of a punk alternative to the other contestants. Guilarte surfaced again in a black-and-white video by means of Rosemarie Trockel, this time as a rapper. She was shown frontally and then in profile, followed by the agency of a nighttime pan across the light-dotted hills of Caracas, where the shantytowns of the poor spread without (When by chance I ran into Clara during my circulars in Caracas, I learned that she had grown up in Hamburg and speaks superior German; she seems a kind of anti-beauty queen more an icon of intercultural transfer.)