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n still base their worth on how much a man values them, and on precious little else. Barbie may be a 21st century astronaut, but unless she is busty and beautiful, Ken will not be interested, and Barbie will be worthless, both in her own eyes and those of society.

In this essay, I propose to explore how feminism and post feminism have influenced my development as an artist, and to question how the media's continued portrayal of women as a commodity has affected other contemporary artists, both positively and negatively.

'The goal of feminism,' said an early spokeswoman, 'was to change the nature of art itself, to transform culture in sweeping and permanent ways by introducing into it the heretofore suppressed perspective of women.'

Barbie as a symbol of woman as object can be found not only in contemporary art, but also in contemporary literature; she has moved into everyday speech as a contemptuous comment on glamorous women ('She's nothing but a Barbie doll!' is a derisive criticism aimed at a woman perceived to be beautiful but dumb, ironic when one considers how it is precisely this image that is being sold to us by the media!) Mattel may market Barbie as a modern career girl, far more independent than the original 1950s clothes horse, but is she as complicit in the objectification of modern women as Mary Wollstonecraft stated over 200 years ago?

The London based photographer Alex Kliszynski would seem to agree with Wollstonecraft, and has directly questioned such attitudes in a body of work that combines the imagery of pornography with Barbie dolls.

The instant reaction of the spectator is one of revulsion, a feeling that something is not right. Such a highly sexualised child's toy is obscene, but maybe that is the intended point of the artwork? Barbie is the ultimate commodified, sexist, male-fantasy view of what women should look like. She has a tiny waist, long legs, and enormous breasts. However, oddly, if you think about it, this highly sexualized body actually lacks sexual parts, or the parts of the body we would see if she were fully nude. She has no vagina. Her breasts have no nipples. In addition, Action Man, an idealized, sexualized male specimen, has no penis and no scrotum. By placing a sexless doll in a lascivious and crude position that should show all the sexual organs but doesn't, Kliszynski is making a comment on the dehumanising of women (and men) by media led objectification; it is his intention to call attention to that disconnection , to make the viewers aware of the sexualized images of women and men that Barbie and Action Man dolls trade in.

However, I think there is another, yet more sinister, way of reading Kliszynski's art work. The dolls are a monstrous combination of human and plastic; even the title of the work is 'Human Barbie Dolls', suggesting an abnormal mixture of the two. It is possible to understand Kliszynski's piece as a comment on the modern phenomena of body dysmorphia, a disorder that causes a person to believe there is something terribly wrong with an aspect of their face or body, and which often leads them into a series of cosmetic surgeries. Kliszynski's human Barbies symbolise this body dysmorphic tendency prevalent in so much of (western) society, this desire to turn the human body into a work of art, a perfection of flesh and p本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。