Reconstruction restriction

Reconstructed restriction - printed stills from video

Reconstruction restriction

My contention is that waist training and tight lacing is a performance in the public domain, with the function of making a social comment on the tensions that exist between the deployment of female sexuality and its relationship to the development of one’s own identity. Waist training deploys sexuality in a metaphorical and allusive way through wearing a corset which has the connotations of a fashionable, erotic and fetishistic piece of underclothing. Wearing a corset is not necessarily more than that, but waist training can transform the act of wearing it into the performance of live art. Performance art’s main function is to make a social commentary.

Waist training is the act of wearing a corset for body modification purposes. The works in this exhibition explores the impact of culture, as well as the marks that culture leaves on the physical body, -has. The documented performance makes three ironic commentaries. First; on the important social role, that body modification (specifically waist training) has within a performance art context. Secondly; on the extremes of body modification in the fashion and health world as idealized by the mass media. And finally, on the construction of female identity (but an identity which is disguised or screened) and the deployment of female sexuality.

The performance has elements of parody, as the performer deforms the body to fit the extremes of a conceptual model of what is beautiful. By mimicking the elaborate and painful processes, which women use to compel the body to conform to a shape they do not have at the beginning of the process, the performer draws attention to the process. Waist training deploys sexuality in such a way that what is visible is construed as absurd, extremely uncomfortable and shocking by the viewer.

Waist training is a ‘sensual’ experience. Waist training or the act of tightlacing as a continuous process of containment and restriction, associated with pain and erotic discomfort comments on women’s psychological distress. The very tools of eroticism (the corset and the waist trained body) are used as a means to comment ironically on the patriarchal view of the female body as an object of desire and lust. Because the corset and tightlacing have fetishistic overtones, also makes the wearing of it in the public domain an impertinent way of deflating the voyeuristic interests of many viewers. By waist training and documenting the process, then cropping and manipulating the representations of the body so that the viewer does not have the voyeur’s pleasure of seeing the corseted figure as a-woman-in-a-corset, is a way to undercut expectations that viewers have. The abstraction and manipulation of the forms in the videos, stills, photographs and x-rays makes them into patterns, allusive, elegant and slightly mysterious statements.

Metonomy and abstraction are important elements in these artworks. These techniques which can be described in terms of rhetorical discourse stand as metonymies - the part for the whole, of the body, the sexuality of the woman as part of her identity, her pain, and the constrictions on the expression of her identity. Only the torso is revealed in the documentation and performance because it is a metonymic act. By this is meant the part – the torso – stands for the whole – the woman/body. An abstraction of the physical realities which were documented directs the viewer’s attention away form the process of body modification and allows the viewer to draw individual conclusions from the argument which the representations detail The waist trained torso becomes an iconic representation for femininity for a strong, personal feminine identity is most urgent