A Grim Look at the Standards of Beauty
Claudia Huidobro’s “Faite Main”
By Alyssa Lapid
Height: 180 cm. Waist: 65 cm. Bust: 88 cm. Hips: 90 cm. Shoe: 41.0 Eu. Hair: Brown. Eyes: Green.
This is Claudia Huidobro. At least it’s how Huidobro, the model-turned-artist, is described and marketed by Martine’s Women Agency, a Parisian modeling agency that lists her as part of its current roster — as if the sum-total of her being were the sum of her parts.
Faite Main (Hand Made), Huidobro’s solo exhibit that debuted on September 22 and runs until October 13 at the FIAF Gallery, criticizes this dehumanizing cataloguing of beauty in a series of stark photographs. Most, if not all, of her photographs feel fragmented: Some depict detached body parts or accoutrements — limbs and wigs, for instance — suspended in space. Some use a cut-and-paste technique, collaging bits of photographs and magazine clippings.
In 2014, Huidobro first appeared at Crossing the Line in Olivier Saillard’s video, Models Never Talk, in which former supermodels narrate their experiences working with the fashion industry’s most illustrious designers. In Faite Main, she talks a lot less but says a whole lot more.
The biggest photograph features various cosmetic tools and spans the gallery’s entire back wall. On the surface, the collage appears innocent: it shows blown-up over-the-counter makeup implements like eyelash curlers and lipsticks and tools used in commonplace cosmetic procedures like scalpels and needles.
The photograph takes on a darker meaning when viewed in relation to its neighboring photographs: Four arrayed above it depict cropped out, floating arms, and two adjacent negatives show portraits of a woman about to go under the knife. One displays calculation, her face clamped by a tool measuring distances between features. The other portrays precision, her face meticulously marked by drawn-on incision guidelines. I felt like I was looking at a woman being prepped for surgery to turn her into a Stepford wife, but instead of arming her with the skills to bake the perfect pie, the operation would yield the perfect eyebrow arch.
Huidobro’s fuller self-portraits register as elegantly bleak. In most of the black-and-white photographs (four of which were previously shown at a solo exhibition in Vichy, France in 2014), Huidobro’s face remains concealed: veiled by her own hands, hidden behind objects, or shielded by deliberate body contortions. In the sole image of her visible face, it presses against a windowpane, blurring out her features. Even the space around her, a small room, reads as oppressive and suffocating.
One large collage of photos features floating hairdos of varying shapes, styles, and colors, sans the heads. Another, the most disconcerting to view, depicts almost 100 white pairs of floating hands, mid-action — sewing, cutting, pressing, and more — against a black backdrop. The hands and the implements are violently severed: fingers, tools, and wrists are cut out of the photos in sharp, jagged angles. Both collages include shards of magazine cutouts scattered throughout. The modestly sized gallery adds a haunting dimension to the exhibit because there seems to be no escaping the photos spatially—glossy back floor tiles eerily reflect the images.
On the whole, Faite Main takes a grim view of the impossible standards of beauty. Huidobro offers a stoic observation of a woman being built piece by flawless piece from a catalogue of hairstyles, cosmetics, and available treatments through a methodical — even surgical — production line whose workers mold the woman to perfection by hand or by scalpel. And even after that process, the woman’s face stays hidden. The person herself remains irrelevant — a dispensable, replaceable entity easily molded by quick nips and tucks.
The first line of Huidobro’s bio, displayed on a wall near the entrance to the exhibit, describes her being a muse to fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier. In the context of the exhibit’s silent protest against an industry that manufactures and perpetuates myths of perfection, the emphasis seems counterintuitive, as if Huidobro herself allows beauty — and others’ perceptions of her beauty — to take precedence over the way she describes her own life, as if the value of being a muse weighs more than that of being an artist, a photographer, or even a model.
One black-and-white photograph — the first a viewer sees upon entry — depicts Huidobro’s legs pouring out of a picture frame and not much else. In Faite Main, Huidobro effectively captures how ideals of beauty — even her own, even for someone publicly heralded as a muse — have always been reductive in their tendency to revolve strictly around measurements and body parts. Apparently, in the discourse of beauty, parts can be greater than their sum.
