THESIS. ABSTRACT.



The human body has always been an object of study. It has also been used as a way of expression by artists in its continual rediscovering that is seen through its different representations of its charming beauty, its carnal nature, its mortality, its aggressiveness…

At present, when the definition of "Art" is more and more blurred, the artist is inspired by the body to express the transgressions of the convencionalities that go around illness, death, sexuality or violence. The artist also feeds on human body that comes out from its limits and that has caused an expansion of the collective imagination through a series of news myths that have been spread by the mass media.

The several conceptions that have been going around the corporal subject for the last years have been promoted to the other spaces out of elitist fields such as art, philosophy, sociology or medicine. They are open spaces that feed on any kind of cultures, theories, laws and representations just to create their own ideas.

Nowadays the mass media have become an attractive field for the new representations of the human body which are inspired by the differents concerns and worries related to the human body (both as an individual and as a society). These new representations try to show other corporal realities which question ideas and concepts related to previous myths, which, in turn, give way to both new models of beauty displayed as a pure suggestion to a public consumer, and to new terrors through the different stages of crisis represented in a body which is becoming more and more denatured and in a constant crisis of its own re-definition.

As a result the body is seen as an apocalyptic entity which is doomed to its own extinction and which can be manipulated or commercialized or rejected. Besides, the body also becomes a metaphor of something unlimited and changeable which reveals as an addictive and sublime territory, that is unlimited in its physical nature, renewal and wickedness.