Last week I visited the Wellcome Collection to see their new exhibition The Cult of Beauty, a show which examines notions of beauty across time and cultures. Coincidentally, I also recently finished the book Disobedient Bodies, by Emma Dabiri, who contributed to the exhibition. As there is so much crossover between the two, I’ll discuss them here together.
In her book, Dabiri begins by pointing out the long tradition in Western discourse of the body and the mind as inherently separate, something I’ve discussed a few times here before. In her view, a ‘disobedient body’ is one that instead sees a person as a whole, with a mind and body which are interrelated, without privileging one over the other. She hopes that we can “take pleasure in the experience of our bodies”, despite the pressures of a system which seeks to scrutinise, hate and punish our bodies.
She also discusses the tension between seeking to refuse to comply with society’s expectations about how we present our bodies, while also taking up space with our bodies and taking pleasure in practices of adornment and beautification. That wearing lippy does not necessarily mean we are vacuous and concerned with trivialities.
Dabiri calls for us to cultivate a kinder relationship with our bodies, seeing them as a source of pleasure and inspiration. She charts some of the history of embodiment, and the gendered, classed and racialised inequalities that post-enlightenment views of the body cultivated. In particular the ways in which women’s bodies have been framed as ‘dangerous’, and sexuality as something which needed to be controlled. She also covers ‘pretty privilege’, fatphobia, radical self-care and solutions beyond simply attending to representation politics. She wants more than simply including different bodies in visual imagery: instead, she calls for us “to transform the world in which objectification of women is the default”. Beauty as a verb, as dynamic and culturally situated. Beauty in community, in mutually reciprocal work. Beauty in connection, instead of seeking ‘perfection’.
Similarly, the Wellcome exhibition problematises socially constructed images of beauty, exploring how people have spoken back to beauty norms, and claimed their own beauty in difference. We are invited to flip the script of an etching from the 1600s, likely intended to mock an older woman for being concerned with her appearance. Instead, the exhibition’s curators invite us to re-read it as “a self-assured woman taking pleasure in the beauty of her post-menopausal body”. Gendered norms of beauty are problematised with the juxtaposition of the artist Cassils’ self-portrait, ‘Sleeping Hermaphrodite’ with two classical sculptures from 500BC.
Daibiri contributed to a section about race and beauty, and I loved Brazilian artist Angelica Dass’s work ‘Humanea. Work in progress’, a mocking look at racism.
One of my favourite things about the exhibition was the number of specially commissioned artworks. The video projection, ‘An Algorythmic Gaze II’ was mesmerising, showing constantly morphed bodies created by AI, inviting us to contemplate beauty norms. And Narcissister’s huge sculpture, ‘(Almost) all of my dead mother’s beautiful things’ gave us a contemplative space in which to consider the ways in which beauty ideals are transferred down generations.
The Cult of Beauty is on at Wellcome Collection until April 2024.
Disobedient Bodies by Emma Dabiri is available at all good bookstores.