100 personality». From personage to person, and to the recognition of his dignity through art, the picture gallery of alter-egos embellishing the walls of history of art is breathtaking. It is a question of delving deeply into one's unconscious, openly declaring a position, starting from the representation of one's identity as it is self-perceived, literally putting oneself out there for that, through the drawing of a body that – by virtue of the symbolic function of art – is always a political outpost, be it Eden or battlefield. There is Michelangelo in the Last Judgment (1541), self-depicted as an involucre of flesh, devoid of backbone and body mass; there is Caravaggio in the severed head of Goliath (1610), a declaration of repentance by the artist for having committed a murder that sentenced him to be beheaded; there is Marcel Duchamp, portrayed by Man Ray in his female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy (1921), a stance against anti-feminism and anti-Semitism (the name and surname with which Duchamp rebaptises himself is Hebrew); there is Frida Kahlo, split between her Mexican origins and her European ramifications, torn and bloodless for the love with Diego Rivera torturing her (The two Fridas, 1939). Choosing only one contemporary artwork for this tòpos would be reductive, because I believe that it really represents the ridge between ancient and contemporary: it is the freedom to search for the self as a human in order to rejoin humanity, sacrosanct right, none excluded, which includes an important number of noteworthy artworks. Of variations on the theme. Following the path traced by Marcel Duchamp/Rrose Sélavy, there are Claude Cahun in the Thirties and Urs Lüthi in the Seventies, with their photographic research which is first and foremost claim to a fluid, over a rigidly binary, gender. There are Luigi Ontani and Cindy Sherman, the constant avatarization they make performing and photographing themselves in a kaleidoscope of well-known characters in Ontani, of human archetypes in Sherman, because diversity means richness. There is Matthew Barney's oneiric, dyschronic Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002) – five feature films defined by the curator of that temple of contemporary art represented by the Guggenheim in New York as a self-extinguishing aesthetic system, given Barney's ability to to create ex-novo an absolute aesthetic vision and its desire to be unavailable in the market – populated by cyborg, post-human, mythological, transgenic and transgender characters, hybrids or in continuous metamorphosis, many of whom played by Barney himself. And then there is ORLAN, who wants her name to be capitalized as well as her body to become what she imagined for it, writing on her own skin the battle fought against a paralyzed and stereotyped idea of beauty, with blows of new implants and prostheses such as faunal horns, for which surgical operations are performed as if they were artistic performances; and finally there has been that cursed, damned authentic icon called Genesis P-Orridge (1950-2020), to whom we owe the entire industrial and acid music scene, experimental in mind as much as in flesh, that in the name of pandrogyny – the most radical stance on gender in contemporary culture, together with the philosophical thematization by Paul B. Preciado – also subjected his body to plastic surgery as if this were nothing more than a threshold, a border area between what is given and what is desired. But as much as I can try to tell you about the search for identity, I believe that no one will ever be able to do it better than that overwhelming and poetic cantor, like only certain southern sensibilities are, which is Pedro Almodóvar, through one of the most poetic characters, a transgender, that cinematography has ever hosted. «They call me La Agrado, because I’ve always tried to make people’s lives agreeable. As well as being agreeable, I’m very authentic: look at this body, all made to measure. Almond-shaped eyes: eighty thousand. Nose, two hundred thousand – a waste of money, another beating the following year left it like this. It gives me character, but if I’d known, I wouldn’t have touched it… I’ll continue. Tits – two, because I’m no monster – seventy thousand each, but I’ve more than earned that back. Silicone: lips, forehead, cheeks, hips and ass. A litre costs about one hundred thousand, so you work it out because I’ve already lost count. Jaw reduction, seventy-five thousand, complete laser depilation (because women like men also come from apes) sixty thousand a session, it depends how beardy you are, usually two to four sessions – but if you’re a flamenco diva, you’ll need more, of course. Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, ma’am, and one can’t be stingy with these things, because you are more authentic, the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being».
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