Four Legs Good: In Memory of Lisa Bufano

Lisa Bufano (1972 - 2013)
 Photo by Gerhard Aba

www.lisabufano.com

Part Queen Anne table, part Louise Bourgeois spider, part Hans Bellmer doll, American performance artist Lisa Bufano remained at all times completely fabulous and wholly inspiring to those with or without prosthetic limbs. 

Born in Connecticut in 1972, Miss Bufano lost both legs below the knee (as well as her fingers) due to a bacterial infection at the age of twenty-one. As a bilateral amputee, she could have chosen to just sit on her arse and weep - as I suspect I would have done - but, instead, this former child gymnast and go-go dancing college student, decided to bravely explore the freaky possibilities opened up by disease and disability for corporeal experimentation.

Fascinated by a combination of elements that included the creepy, the cute, and the erotic, Bufano developed an uncanny valley aesthetic that was not only deeply disturbing at times, but also very beautiful and strangely seductive. Admired by the LGBT community for her work to do with sexual identity, she was also a pin-up for acrotomophiles and photographed by Gerhard Aba who has made a career from taking pictures of female amputees.  

Ultimately, despite her own terror and discomfort in being looked at, Bufano found it empowering to be a model and performer who used her body to produce a magnetic tension between herself and the audience. Exaggerating her physical difference and celebrating abnormality of form, she left us all open-mouthed and persuaded that whilst two legs aren't bad, in some contexts four can be even better.

On Babes With Braces etc.

Photo: www.dailymail.co.uk (03/01/13) 

The other day, on the metro in Barcelona, I saw a young woman wearing dental braces, which, somewhat perversely, only served to enhance the loveliness of her smile and transform her somewhat conventional and nondescript beauty into something provocative and challenging. 

And so, without claiming or wishing to be thought a genuine devotee of babes with braces, I can understand how one might become fixated with the look - as with other signs of attractive imperfection or desirable disability, such as spectacles and hearing-aids. 

Ultimately, men who don't make passes at girls who wear glasses, for example, are the kind of sexually unsophisticated dullards that even the most myopic women can see for what they are.