This is the second in a series of experimental, satirical treatments that began with Perfunktory. I have long been a fan of Negativland, Phineas Narco and many other âsound collageâ artists, who piece together bits and pieces of âdetritusâ from popular culture and edit them within a repurposed framework to come up with surprising and sometimes startling results. Some of the greatest fun for me is doing sound collage. Also, sound collage, or âfound soundâ creation can allow for making political or philosophical statements that have much more power than a lecture or treatise, because often youâre taking the original content and spinning it for your own purposes. The media does this for a living, but I do it for fun in my own way.
The Secret Life of Implants (no offense to the wonderful book by Peter Tompkins & Christopher Bird or the album by Stevie Wonder, both of whom I admire tremendously) is about the insanity we call popular culture, or a media circus oriented propaganda machine. This is about the messages drummed into our consciousness at the checkout stand in grocery stores, about the infinite vacuity of mass media. Breast implants are to me symbolic of a deep sickness in our culture. They speak volumes about the male dominated universe in which we unfortunately live. The idea that oneâs body (that is, a womanâs) is not perfect unless it is artificially enhanced stems from a male oriented bias. And who decides that the standard of female beauty is an anorexic heroin addict? Does a woman decide this? I doubt it. According to John Calvin Klein and the rest of the industry the ideal woman has the body of a toothpick, but with fake breasts that look as though grapefruits are protruding from her sternum. This is not âfashion.â This is stupidity, and this is sickness. I long divorced myself from this propaganda, and killed cable years ago. I canât tell you how freeing this can be. When I overhear people talking about the shows they watch and how they hate these shows but they watch them anyway, I am relieved that I no longer allow that chain of visual chicanery into my life.
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