essay / photo: katalin pusztaszeri
A few fragments of thoughts on body-(unleashed)
I would rather leave this body topic without words...
Where vanity rules, dignity won't remain.
I can’t be poetic neither stoic.
In the age of corporal extensions, high-definition porn culture and the distorted dictatorship of social media, body is not a burden anymore it has become a surface of manipulation, oppression and (self)-destruction.
Talking about the XXI. Century body is a painful and unpleasant act, almost as displeasing as being undergone an aesthetic surgery, like a lip tuck, a nose job or a deep vacuum liposuction treatment, not to mention those expensive extra-large buttock implant-placements or fat-transferred breast augmentations.
How did we become so greedy and dissatisfied concerning our own body in the same time?
All corporeal misery and discomfort of humankind (especially womankind) rooted from Internet, Social Media or TV screen.
Today, the body itself is no more than an object, a toy or a tool used by extraneous intangible online superpowers and Janus-faced algorithms.
We think ourselves strong, invulnerable, unsusceptible human beings but by the permanent inordinate consumption of pictures, dictated products of social media, false images of beauty- and fashion-industry we could easily losing the ground and falling into the trap of our own vanity, and become victims of our own compulsion of conformity, mostly in case of if we are not aware of our own limits, body- limits.
There is no point about envisioning a perfect body-image, this imago had been dead from the beginning. We would never find it on the covers of endless tabloids, on village-sized billboards or in small stringent oblongs of mass-media which presume prolonged unfulfilling expectations of the spectators ad infinitum.
These meticulously created unreal picture-slivers are sliding and sticking into our eyes...settling in the retina to finally cause minuscule micro-wounds in the self-esteem or in the perception of our own bodies. These optical illusions are generating involuntary, unconscious waves in the brain. The brain permanently sets comparison between our genetically disposed physical traits and the supposed idealistic body-image.
The result is: uncertainty, discomfort, constant discontentment with our own figure originated from the feeling of imperfection, inferiority and defeatism.
The avalanche has begun sliding...in various forms of overcompensation; from online
extreme exhibitionism or/and voyeurism (peeping or pathological ostentation) to aesthetic surgical interventions without self-limitation by forgetting the fact that displaying our own body, showing off ourselves, proving our personal presence in the online social media means that we are exposing our whole entire self. Physical and mental self are not separated from each other.
Sisters! We all know that we turned into silent witnesses of our own free-body-fall or unknowing victims of skulking evil-eyes.
I am not a third person, nor an outsider or a prophet-nun. My eyes have already been paid, my soul has been sold for long time. I am a flasher and a lurker in one person. The social media avalanche has carried me away… however I am searching the light…the transparent, irrefutable truth I became covered and buried …my eyes have been filled up with snow…I have a malaise and feel guilty as fuck.
about the writer and artist: katalin pusztaszeri
Katalin Pusztaszeri is an art professional and photographer living in Budapest, Hungary. She started taking photographs in 2013, as a part of her recovery from a spinal cord surgery. In the beginning, she used photography as neuro-feedback to alter her attention from pain and anxiety. She realized that by means of creation, she has been able to release all of the suppressed and latent feelings she felt were clogged in her body throughout the years. At this point, creating pictures has become an urgent and utmost need to convey her thoughts and ideas toward the outside world.
