INTRODUCTION
There is no such thing as the ideal female body. Even the old masters would have agreed that an ideal is a concept not a thing. Some of the famous nudes in art history were thought to be near-perfect configurations of the ideal female form. For instance, Venus de Milo was sculpted for the citizens of Ancient Greece according to the Classical ideal of bodily perfection, and nearly 2,000 years later, Botticelli's Venus of Urbino was painted as a Renaissance version of this ideal for the Medici princes. Executed in a representational style, both works of art served for centuries as interpretations of the ideal, and were endlessly copied in art. Popular fashion and pornography provided a succession of specific cultural fantasies of the female body, which ran parallel to and intersected with this high-art industry. In being sanctified as art, however, 'the nude' became singular, academic, historical and exclusive, a myth that was disqualified as a standard that might be applied to living bodies.

In our own century, the goddesses of the silver screen displaced this high-art tradition, adding voice, movement and the illusion of a closer link to real bodies, while seducing mass audiences on an unprecedented scale. Despite their international fame, few stars from this glittering constellation stand out or are remembered as approximating to the ideal. This may be because movies fracture the woman's body to focus on the face or some erotic part, or because even film stars are condemned to be victims of changing fashion, tarnished with the aura of mortality. Occasionally, as in the case of Marilyn Monroe, who was acclaimed as the ideal of her day, personal tragedy and premature death confirmed this aura. It was as though the designation or symbolisation of a woman's body as ideal forced recognition that her body was only too real and particular, a material fact that would soon 'turn to dust'. In spite of this - or perhaps because of it - Marilyn's image achieved the status of a myth. It was repeated in the prints of Andy Warhol and simulated in the performances of Madonna, thus spawning ever-new formations of iconic, feminine beauty.

Though nudes may belong to history and film stars may be destined for the graveyards of the rich and famous, now fashion magazines, video clips and other forms of popular visual culture dominate unchecked as the purveyors of body image. The 'ideal female body' has become a marketing strategy, and as such it has made international corporations richer than any Ancient Greek or Renaissance prince. Women still try to improve their bodies, but instead of emulating a goddess or saint, they 'work out' according to a promotional theme. Sanctioned by medical science, the 'fit body' drives an industry of gymnasia and sporting products, while 'the healthy body' sustains a vast range of pharmaceutical and health-care products. The 'beautiful body' adds cosmetics and plastic surgery to both of these. Sometimes the themes clash or become confused. Jane Fonda's 'fit body', for example, turned out to be bulimic and therefore not healthy. 'The healthy body', it seems, was not slim enough to qualify also as 'the beautiful body'. It is in the interests of late capitalism to perpetuate this sort of ambiguity, to promote thinness in a culture where obesity is more common and the weight-loss industry prospers. The slim, fit body has become a symbol of self-discipline, and a passport to social and cultural power, but the control required of the individual to maintain it comes at a cost. By inducing women to strive with all their purchasing power towards an ideal that is difficult, elusive and obscure, capitalism ensures that the threat of failure is maintained and the purchasing is never exhausted. On the other hand, recognising that achieving this ideal is more difficult for some than for others, it adjusts the ideal to be more global and inclusive, thus breaking down sexual and cultural boundaries. The promotion of 'the anorectic body', 'the waif', 'the heroin body', and 'the dead body' is the perverse side to this inclusiveness.

Running parallel to this discourse on the ideal female body is a shorter narrative of resistance. Feminist artists have challenged the patriarchal ideal in art as well as commercial norms of feminine beauty. In the 1960s and 1970s, some attempted to replace the Classical ideal of the female body with a positive, feminist ideal, symbolising it with images of the archaic goddess whose maternal body was tied spiritually and essentially to Nature and the Earth. While these images were powerful in some ways, it was not long before they looked anachronistic and crude. Intellectually sophisticated, contemporary women of the early 1980s were uncomfortable with the murky namelessness of maternity, which many of them associated with the sentimentality of regressive artistic modes, particularly painting. These mainly poststructuralist feminists took a different line of attack, re-deploying techniques and images from popular media as well as from modernist art to deconstruct images that had been constructed according to the 'patriarchal' ideal. Barbara Kruger defaced patriarchal representations of the female body in order to obstruct the (male) gaze of the spectator, but did not indicate a positive viewing position for women, or an artistic direction that might lead to positive representations of the female body. Positivity itself was distrusted, as was the sense of sight that established an image or the thing it represents as real.

This was not a crisis for the visual arts so much as a crisis for representation and for the status of the real. It was said that Cindy Sherman's Film Stills showed that her self-presentations, as 'woman', were constituted in and produced by images in the visual media and popular culture, that they were not constructed...