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

Art in America, April, 2001 by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler

Venezuela obssession with physical beauty has turned the beauty pageant into something between an art form and a blood sport. A recent exhibition devoted to the subject offered a bit of both.

The idea of an art exhibition on the theme of beauty pageants might seem odd at first, but in Venezuela, to a degree unique in the world, beauty queens are a national obsession. There are beauty contests in elementary schools, in the military, in homes for the aged and even in prison. Plastic surgeons do a lively business, and it is not uncommon for even domestic servants to have undergone two or three major cosmetic procedures, paid for with whatever they could save from their earnings. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, an astonishing two-thirds of Venezuela's women and almost half its men report that they "think about what they look like all the time," making Venezuelans the world's vainest people.(1) (The global average of people acknowledging the same was quoted at 23 percent for women and 18 percent for men.) By 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 presented "90 60 90," a contemporary art exhibition devoted to beauty queens 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 show bore Hispanic names, the idea of the exhibition sprang from Alfons Hug, the director of the Caracas branch of the Goethe Institut, a global network of German cultural centers. (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 South America.) Hug, who with regard to the visual arts is an educated layman, relied on the advice of Venezuelan curator Elida Salazar.

Before leaving Frankfurt for Caracas, I assumed that the show's Venezuelan artists would render homage to their beauty queens, while their European counterparts would dismiss the whole phenomenon as a cultural aberration to be deconstructed. 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 by definition entail. One of these artists, Muu Blanco, laid out in a vitrine 15 hammers, new and used, large and small, intact and defective; they were meant to signal the brutal "finishing" process that Venezuelan beauty contestants undergo at the school where they are groomed for competition. One might also see the tools as representing two contrasting groups of contestants: on 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, on the other hand, who are seduced into leaving their homes, often in the most remote corners of the country, to serve as a sample of that area's beauty standards, which will then be tested against the prevailing norm. An initial pool of some 4,000 young women from all over the nation is rounded up by scouts, then successively winnowed down by judges, first to 80 contestants, next to 40 and at last to 26 finalists--one for each state in Venezuela. These finalists then attend the "finishing" program, where they undergo whatever plastic surgery might be deemed necessary, exercise at least five hours a day, live on a near-starvation diet, consume diet pills and powders, and are taught how to carry themselves. The goal is not only to perfect the body but also to remove any traces of individual character that might distract the viewer from enjoying that perfection. Commenting on this obsession with "perfect" beauty, New York-based artist Yucef Merhi turned the 90-60-90 ideal into a kind of mobile, hanging three chrome rings of those dimensions, one above the other, from the museum's ceiling, as if to imprison the body within them.

Some of the European artists concerned themselves directly with the beauty contestants themselves. Berlin photographer Frank Thiel succeeded in spiriting off most of the state-contest winners to a studio session in which each was obliged to wear an identical sleeveless white tank top. The use of a neutral studio backdrop and even lighting caused the approximation of the ideal look 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 pool is black. Identified by the photographer and herself as "Miss Cloaca"--Miss Sewer--she was evidently cast in the role of a punk alternative to the other contestants. Guilarte surfaced again in a black-and-white video by Rosemarie Trockel, this time as a rapper. She was shown frontally and then in profile, followed by a nighttime pan across the light-dotted hills of Caracas, where the shantytowns of the poor spread out. (When by chance I ran into Clara during my rounds in Caracas, I learned that she had grown up in Hamburg and speaks excellent German; she seems a kind of anti-beauty queen, more an icon of intercultural transfer.)