anti-theatricality and politics : MAGlamA + K-pop

Interesting piece titled "In Your Face: The Brutal Aesthetics of MAGA" by Inae Oh at Mother Jones.  It's about plastic-surgery trends among Republican politicians - the rise of what's been called Mar-a-Lago-face.

She starts by looking at a piece of political theater from January 29, an ICE round-up of undocumented immigrants in New York. A clip of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem talking tough in the Bronx was widely circulated. "She wore a bulletproof vest and a baseball cap, but also dramatic makeup and hair coiled to show off a set of pearl earrings.... Noem would later tell CBS News that the raid was not about creating a 'spectacle''.... Here was a top-ranking Trump appointee asserting the absence of performance after a theatrical show of force. That Noem tagged along for the predawn crackdown in the full glam of a Real Housewife made the claim even more absurd."

Inae Oh notes that Noem is just one of a number of women - and the occasional man - who on entering Trump's orbit underwent "striking physical transformations as the boundaries that once delineated celebrity and political power fully disintegrate. The resulting look has since sparked satirical backlash online, with critics mocking “conservative girl makeup.” 

And then there's the cosmetic surgery, the veneers, fillers and Botox-style injectables.   "What distinguishes Mar-a-Lago face... is the aggressive, overt nature with which MAGA-ites seem to pursue it. “Over the top, overdone, ridiculous,” is how one New York plastic surgeon... described it"

It's a reversal of the trend for plastic surgery that is subtle and barely perceptible: here, you want the work done to be glaringly visible. "The aesthetic is, like Trump’s politics, ridiculously blunt."

Quoted in the piece, a professor of art history, Anne Higonnet, diagnoses the trend as "a sign of physical submission to Donald Trump, a statement of fealty to him and the idea that the surface of a policy is the only thing that matters... These women are performing a key part of Donald Trump’s whole political persona.”

Ronnee Schreiber, a politics professor, is also quoted arguing that the hyper-femininity reinforces the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity....  It reaffirms the femininity of women even if they have power” in the form of a cabinet appointment, administrative power within the Republican Party, or an influential media position. (Although Laura Loomer went too far for even Trump in terms of her worked-over appearance).  The trend thus magically reconciles empowering ambition and  conformist submission in a grand American conservative tradition going back to Phyllis Schlafly.

Horrorshow graphic accompanies the piece, combining the fleshiness and the laceration into a single arresting image. The face shards themselves become the knives. 

The pleased-to-meat-you quality of this collage reminds me of this stuff Americans call "headcheese"  (what an offputting name!) and what we Brits know as "brawn" -  discarded meat bits suspended in jelly, like a paperweight you can eat. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Incidentally the writer Inae Oh has Korean ancestry and winds up the piece  with talking about her visits to hyper-capitalist South Korea, "the plastic surgery capital of the world and my parents’ birthplace. The faces of manipulated uniformity—double eyelid surgery, face-whitening injections, breast implants on laser-toned thin bodies—are jolting to witness. And at first, it’s almost funny; the absolute chokehold is weird to behold! But by the third or fourth day, the ambient sense that I am the odd one, even ugly, starts to creep in. Perhaps a quick visit to one of Seoul’s 600 plastic surgery clinics would fix things."

This inevitably reminded me of K-Pop, which I wrote about in S+A as a form of digi-glam:

South Korean group GLAM – it stands for Girls Be Ambitious - release their third single “In Front of the Mirror”. They’re just one of scores of K-pop acts whose sound mashes together elements of R&B, rap, and Euro club sounds. Video-wise, there’s a similar whirl of decontextualised signifiers: dance-moves and clothing and fetish-objects from skateboarding, Goth/emo, Disney, ballet, ghetto fabulous, dystopian science fiction, fetish wear, retro-vintage, and a dozen more style dialects.  Luxury rubs against the militaristic, American sports juxtapose with Japanese imperial uniforms.  Androgyny is a big element in K-pop – but only for the boys, whose already-perfect skin is digitally sanded to a ceramic glisten. The girls are as hyper-femme as Nicki Minaj’s Harajuku Barbie (probably inspired by K-pop or its Japanese counterpart, J-pop). Perhaps the most intriguing thing about K-pop’s cachet with a select bunch of Western hipsters is its lack of exoticism. Barely perceptible quirks of cultural distance creep in here and there, but for the most part it’s a mirror image of Britney and One Direction type pop, a simulation of a simulation of a simulation. Half-sweatshop, half sweetshop, South Korea’s audiovideo industry churns out the ultimate in digiglam:  eye candy /ear candy so denatured and ultrabrite it’s hard to hold onto the idea that there is a “real” behind the pixie-dust pixels flickering over your eyeballs. Watching G-Dragon or 2NE1 miniaturised on a phone or hand-held, it feels even more like transmissions from some fairy tale world.

Talking about "K-pop’s cachet with a select bunch of Western hipsters"

It struck me that getting into K-pop is really the crack stage of poptimism. 

You started with a few sneaky white lines of Spice Girls and Britney Spears.

Then you're freebasing all kinds of boybands and girlgroups hatched in the managerial lab, choreographed to within an inch of their lives.

And then crack - that is K-Pop.

And perhaps hyperpop (blank as it tries to be, there's meta-intent lurking in there behind the faces - it's simulation pop, there's that tell-tale whiff of art school). 

Whereas K-pop is art-less -  just a hard hard hit of plastic-surface thrill-power, purely mercenary in its motivations, and as devilishly targeting the pleasure centers as the makers of soft drinks and crisps engineering "bliss points" and super-crunch into their products. 

Just as cocaine users (and the same applies for most other drugs, to be fair) don't care about the means by which the powder reaches their nostrils...  narco-cartels and gang warfare, mules and exploited coca peasants, likewise your K-Pop addict doesn't think about how the sausage gets made (high-pressure, suicides, discarded lives). 

Beyond crack? That would be anime popstars that have no physical existence at all. Vocaloids and whatever AI is coming up with next. 

Make-up with no face behind it, motion retouching without anything there in the first place to retouch or tint .... 

It's less exploitative because there's nobody there to be exploited.