One of FIU’s Frost Art Museum exhibitions on display right now centers on the idea of body transformation today and throughout human history, why we do it and how it shapes our identity.
It occurred to me that even before we are capable of consent, our bodies are already in some way mutilated and modified, whether it’s circumcisions for boys or ear piercings for girls—already our culture acting upon our bodies, forming our sense of self to fit the world we happen to have been born into.
Later as teenagers our desire to stake some claim of our own identities is so strong that we pierce, mark, and morph ourselves to embody the ideologies we’ve embraced. Hence all the bright-colored hair-dye experiments and unexpected styles that are meant to distinguish us from one group and ground us in another.
At this time we want to shout to others THIS is who I am though we don’t yet have a solid grasp on it, so we “try on†all kinds of different bodily selves to help us figure that out—our internal struggle to find our identity becoming visible in our ever-changing styles.
Then as adults we begin to settle into a look we feel comfortable with but continue the negotiations of embodied experience in a world that has its particular standards. The rat race to have the most fit, young, and “hot†body begins and plastic surgery ensues.
The exhibition’s emphasis on various forms of physical mutilations resonates with Miami considering our city’s see-and-be-seen culture where tattoos, Botox, implant, etc. are the norm. We are willing to do a lot of violence to our bodies to be a desirable member of our sexy community.
The exhibition shows us that actually many pre-columbine cultures considered body alterations to be symbolic of high social status probably because unlike today, few could afford them.
For us, the economizing of physical modifications has opened up more freedom and options but perhaps also more ambivalence and angst, more questions about what exactly we want to present to the world, which gender or race we want to perform for instance.
It’s interesting to me as well, the ways in which our bodies and thereby our ever-evolving identities, are pierced, marked, and morphed by the simple act of living in the world, without any purposeful doing of our own.
Think about all the lines across our skin that start to deepen as we age…the injuries we inevitably endure and the operations we must go through in our efforts to lengthen our lives.
 The mark of time and lived experience continually imprinting on our bodies like a story of who we are, where, and how we have lived. Which is, I think, the biggest take-away from this impactful exhibition, that our bodies and the things we do and are done to it shape who we are as much as the other way around, the mind- body dualism of Descartes debunked.
*Pierce, Mark, Morph will be on display at FIU’s Frost Art Museum from now until February 2017.*
