2-Brice Peterson: Amanda Lear

A lot of you would probably recognize Amanda Lear as the cover model for this Roxy Music album. She did get a lot of work in the 70s as a model. But her origins are a little less clear.


In the 60s, she met Salvador Dali. The official story is that she was his muse, his apprentice, a daughter figure. But there have been many rumors (supported in many ways by Lear's reluctance to offer firm details on her birth and early life), that Lear is a transsexual, and her transformation from man to woman was facilitated as a "creation" of Dali. Check out her wikipedia page. Her story is really fascinating.

She is an artist in her own right. In the late 70s, she started a music career as a disco singer who embodied the camp stylings of the genre. She also has become a fairly serious painter (her work above). When questioned about her gender, Lear always asserts she is a woman, claiming that the rumors were fabrications made by Dali as a publicity stunt (I guess he of all people should know how to attract attention), making up for her admittedly lousy yet intriguingly deep and mysterious singing voice . She also wrote a biography of Dali that I just started reading.



So, I guess I'm posting about Amanda Lear because in my eyes she is really an example of the ultimate form of hybridity in art: the created (or recreated) human being. Whether she really is Dali's "Frankenstein" or merely the result of an out of control publicity stunt, she is in many ways a fabricated being. I've been very interested in how personality and self are really our most profound creations. Lear and other image conscious celebrities (like Grace Jones, who I posted before) really got me thinking of this possibility in the first place.