by M. G. Lord
Most of Latimer-Sayer's patients are not like Cindy—who, because of her consumer watchdog organization, gets celebrity treatment. "I think I'd starve to death waiting for the models and actresses to show up," he told me. "The majority of my patients are housewives, nurses, hairdressers, secretaries. Ordinary people. They don't want to be out of the ordinary, but they just feel that one particular part lets them down. An attractive young girl with a big hooky nose doesn't feel normal."
Significantly, Latimer-Sayer's patients don't choose their doctor; he chooses them. A satisfied patient, he believes, is one with realistic expectations. When, for instance, I told him about my fear of pain, he suggested I might be a poor candidate for surgery. Some procedures require greater screening than others. "Liposuction is an operation where you really have to choose your patients well," he said. "You get a bulky patient and you try and get the fat off them, it simply doesn't work. You end up with lumpy, irregular areas and the skin hanging in folds.
"I identify with the patient what the aims of each particular operation are," he told me. "I mean, I don't mind patients having lots of operations. After all, I've got children to send through university." Latimer-Sayer also believes in using his time efficiently—especially with things like breast implants. "Some people fiddle about for hours—one wonders what they're doing. . . . But once you've done a few hundred, you ought to know where to cut the pocket and what size fits the pocket. In the main, operations take less time this side of the Atlantic than they do in America. Because American surgeons are looking over their shoulder for the lawyers all the time."
In talking with Latimer-Sayer, I got the sense that the hows of surgery were more important than the whys. Decisions to, say, westernize Asian eyelids should rest with the patient, not the surgeon. "If you have the double fold—what they call the European eyelid—you are considered more trustworthy, higher class, and you're more likely to do well in life," he told me. "If you have the Oriental eyelid with the thick upper lid with no fold, it's like being a second-class citizen. . . . Now if there's a little simple cosmetic operation to make somebody go from a second-class citizen on appearance to a first-class citizen on appearance, no wonder it's popular.
"If for instance, someone had developed a technique to make black people white . . . they would have been swamped, wouldn't they? Not because there's anything wrong with being black, but it's nicer to be white in a white society."
There is, however, one process he wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole: penis enlargement. "A lot of men seem to want it," he said. "You take a bit of fat from somewhere where there's a bit to spare and put it in the penis and it's fatter. But the trouble is that fat doesn't stay there; it tends to absorb, and sometimes you can get all sorts of other troubles with it. It can generally turn into a horrible mess."
Cindy concurred: "As far as I'm concerned, with men who aren't very well endowed, it's cheaper to buy a Porsche and probably more safe."
Latimer-Sayer did not install Cindy's breast implants; they were put in as part of a BBC documentary on the process. And they have begun to cause trouble. They were supposed to have been placed behind the chest muscle, but one migrated; it has also hardened, a process known as capsular con-tracture. "I'm not happy with the encapsulation of my own implants," she told me. "I'm having them out." And yet, she said, pausing, "it's better to have had them and liked them than never to have had them at all."
In her role as watchdog, Cindy is also following the class-action suits filed by unhappy implant owners against Dow Corning, a maker of silicone implants. In April 1994, about a year after she and I had dinner, The New York Times reported that the lawyers representing the patients had unearthed a 1975 study by company researchers that showed that the silicone in the implants harmed the immune system in mice. Whether this fresh detail will slow recruitment for her bionic army remains to be seen.
One thing, however, is certain: there are already a lot of bionic women out there. "I don't even think I want to walk down the street in California," Cindy told me. "They've all done what I've done. Over there I'm just another Barbie doll."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BARBIE OUT OF CONTROL
In December 1993, a platoon of bellicose Barbies mysteriously appeared on toy-store shelves in forty-three states. Their fluffy skirts and lace-trimmed leggings were identical to those of their sister Talking Barbies, from whose microchips the nettlesome "Math class is tough" had been newly purged. But their voices were different. "Eat lead, Cobra," they bellowed. "Vengeance is mine!" Meanwhile, in the boy-toy ghetto of the same stores, a few "Talking Duke" characters in Hasbro's G.I. Joe line began to exhibit acute testosterone deficiencies. "Let's go shopping," they chirped. "Wrill we ever have enough clothes?"
This outbreak of gender trouble was no accident. A group calling itself the Barbie Liberation Organization revealed that it had surgically swapped hundreds of Barbie talk mechanisms with those of G.I. Joe. Loosely organized by a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego, the BLO claimed to be made up of artists, professionals, and concerned parents across the country. "One of our members is eighty-seven years old," a BLO spokesperson told me. "And she helped when we were brainstorming the switch. She didn't have that much of a problem with the Barbies. But she is a Hungarian Jew who had nearly all her family killed in World War Two. So she had a very strong reaction against the war toys."
Befuddled consumers brought the doctored dolls to the attention of the press, which, in the boring week between Christmas and New Year's, lavished attention. Not enough to justify the BLO's $9,000 out-of-pocket expenses perhaps, but quite a bit. Enough to make Mattel cross, particularly two weeks later when its big winter media event—the presentation by Jill Barad of a $500,000 donation to the South Bronx Children's Health Center, founded by singer Paul Simon—was upstaged by natural disasters. Part of Mattel's plan to contribute $1 million to various children's health clinics in 1994, the philanthropic photo opportunity had been scheduled for January 18—the day after Los Angeles was hit by a major earthquake and New York City paralyzed by a winter storm.
The BLO calls its surgery "political art," a critique of gender stereotypes in toys. Mattel calls it "product tampering," which, in fact, it is. The disparity between these perspectives is why the use of Barbie by artists will never be a simple affair.
There are many doors through which one could enter a discussion of Barbie in visual art. One could begin by dropping names—mentioning Andy Warhol's 1986 portrait of the doll or photorealist Charles Bell's wall-sized Judgement of Paris, also from 1986, which featured Barbie, Ken, and G.I. Joe. One might talk about how in the early eighties, photographer Ellen Brooks used fashion dolls to comment on gender roles, and that three of those photos were included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1983 Biennial. Or one could cite Scottish sculptor David Mach, who used hundreds of Barbies to critique consumer capitalism in a piece called Off the Beaten Track. Installed in 1988 at the University of California at Los Angeles's Wight Art Gallery, it involved a horde of blond, plastic caryatids propping up a giant shipping container—literally "supporting" the consumer economy.
Another door would lead one through the history of doll images in art. Freud's essay on the uncanny would, of course, reappear; one would talk about the creepiness of lifelike dolls and automata. One would mention, among others, German Surrealist Hans Bellmer, who in the 1930s photographed parts of female mannequins assembled in impossible configurations— legs sprouting where arms should be—as well as nude females wrapped with string to create the effect of misassembled joints. One would move the story to the present with one of Bellmer's aesthetic heirs—Cindy Sherman—whose deliberately nauseating photos of genital prostheses in the 1993 Whitney Biennial were appropriately placed near an installation by another artist that featured a "puddle" of rubber throw-up.
These are not, however, the doors that interest me. Unlike icons such as Elvis and Marilyn, Barbie is a corporate property. And what disting
uishes much of the best art using Barbie is that it has had to be produced almost surreptitiously. Mattel wishes to impose its authorized vision on the public, but the public has other plans. Barbie colonized people's imaginations in childhood, and they are impelled to bear witness. Some distort and pillory the doll; others place it on a pedestal. But always, the unauthorized witness-bearers take a risk. The corporation cannot have any old Tom, Dick, or Jane promulgating his or her personalization of a corporate-owned icon.
Such a personalization could "damage" the icon's image, or, worse, divert money away from the corporation. So the corporation has three choices: It must co-opt the artist's work, as, in a sense, was done with the Warhol image; Mattel's permission—not simply that of the Warhol estate—is required to reproduce it. It must commission art and impose "guidelines." Or it must do its best to squash it.
What further complicates the relationship of Mattel to the contemporary art scene is that many of Mattel's early corporate products (as well as the doll itself) are themselves works of art—exquisite miniatures that are, with aesthetic justification, preserved by collectors. Then there's the fact that art these days involves borrowing images. From Barbara Kruger's political collages to Richard Prince's manipulations of commercial photographs, "art" is about appropriation. Among its tenets, postmodernism suggests that no work of art or text is anything other than a reassembly of citations; thus, if all art is citations, all art is fair game to be cited.
What does it mean to cite Barbie? For baby boomers, Barbie has probably the same iconic resonance as certain female saints—though not the same religious significance. But how different the art of the Renaissance would have been if the Roman Catholic Church had required painters to place a trademark symbol on frescoes interpreting God and the saints. This is not, however, to imply that the Church would have disapproved of such an arrangement.
"I don't think the College of Cardinals used terms like 'copyright' or 'registered trademark,' but let's face it, the scripture was registered in essence and highly controlled by the Church," said Robert Sobieszek, curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and author of The Art of Persuasion: A History of Advertising Photography. "Somebody like Raphael was perhaps one of the greatest commercial artists who ever lived. He had a great client called the Church; he had a great set of art directors called the College of Cardinals; and he had a great product—salvation. He was doing commercial illustration to sell a philosophy—the history of Christianity or Catholicism. The fact that in the twentieth century, we see genius in that, artistry in that, or invention in that is really beside the point."
Renaissance artists also had a strong inducement to stick close to scripture; those who deviated were dragged before the Inquisition. Substitute law courts for Inquisition and you could be talking about today's corporate icons. Walt Disney's executors, for instance, wouldn't permit his mice or ducks to be reproduced in The Disney Version, Richard Schickel's trenchant 1968 analysis of the aesthetic underpinnings of the "Magic Kingdom." The Disney organization is notoriously vigilant about where and how its characters appear—appropriately, perhaps, licensing Mattel to produce doll versions of figures from Aladdin, Snow White, and Beauty and the Beast. Yet certain emblems and symbols—Frigidaire, Xerox, Jell-0—crop up so often that it would be impossible for a corporation to prosecute every unlicensed use.
What constitutes "fair use" for independent artists is now particularly relevant to Barbie, because Mattel has gone into the Medici business—commissioning artists to use its icon in an authorized context: a picture book, the proceeds from which will be given to an AIDS charity. The project resembles the advertising campaign for Absolut vodka, in which independent artists were commissioned to cannibalize their styles in the service of a product. This is not to say that commercial art—work commissioned for advertising or editorial use—cannot be "art"; photographers like Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, and Sylvia Plachy, a major contributor to this book, all work on commission. But, as was the case with the Renaissance painters and the College of Cardinals, artists-for-hire frequently tailor their work to suit their clients.
Money also plays a part in "fair use." If an artist issues a series of images using a corporate icon exclusively to make a buck, a corporation may have grounds for a case. But when an artist cites an icon in a one-of-a-kind work from which he or she will realize scant profit, it may not be in the company's interest to take the artist to court. Copyright law, however, encourages corporations to fire off cease-and-desist letters at the slightest provocation. "If a company doesn't go after people that it feels are missing its icon, it's to the company's disadvantage," said Deirdre Evans-Prichard, curator of the Language of Objects project at the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum, who has written on art and copyright issues. "In a major court case, it would need to produce a file to show that it's been actively protecting its image."
No one could accuse Mattel of laxity in guarding its icons. Not wishing its trademarked dolls associated with Superstar, it joined A & M Records in sending threatening letters to Todd Haynes. More recently, it silenced Barbara Bell, an editor of the New Age magazine Common Ground, who claimed to channel Barbie, "the polyethylene essence who is 700 million teaching entities." She now channels "a generic eleven-and-a-half-inch plastic essence." Yet Mattel's behavior toward artists can also be baffling and unpredictable. It contributed the dolls for David Mach's Off the Beaten Track, a scorching piece that exposed it and its icons to ridicule.
Barbie has interested artists virtually since her inception. Second-generation abstract expressionist Grace Hartigan was perhaps the first significant painter to incorporate Barbie imagery in her work. Her 1964 painting Barbie was inspired by a Life magazine article on the doll and its $136 wardrobe. "When I was a little girl, I had 'Patsy Ann,' a doll that was about my age," Hartigan told me. "But here you had this doll with boobs and this castrated man and a wedding gown, and I just thought: 'That's our society.' I try to declaw the terribleness of popular culture and turn it into beauty or meaning. And I feel that I have won—I've triumphed over it. It's witchcraft in a way. The triumph of this is that it's a terrific painting. I've used the image, which I think is debasing to women, and I've turned it against itself and made it powerful."
With Hartigan's guidance—and the illustrated Life article in front of me— I managed to locate the representational elements in her painting: a pink face in the upper-right-hand corner; a floor-length evening dress in the left foreground; a lone eye in the upper-left-hand corner; and in the center, a single disembodied breast. "The final painting comes from the original imagery," she explained. "It's just highly abstracted."
Tomi Ungerer, who is perhaps best known for his whimsical children's book illustrations, also gravitated toward the doll in the early sixties—not, however, producing objects for kids. Ungerer decapitated and dismembered the dolls, reassembling them—a la Hans Bellmer—in constructions with sadomasochistic and coprophiliac themes. Perhaps inspired by Freud's Little Hans and his investigations of doll "genitalia," one sculpture features a female torso hacked between its legs with a saw. Some constructions consist only of the doll's legs in spike-heeled shoes; in others, tubes link the doll's genital orifices with its mouth. Ungerer's "erotic doll sculptures" are now housed in the permanent collection of his work in the Musee de la Ville in Strasbourg, France.
By the late seventies and early eighties, when the first generation of Barbie owners had grown up, unauthorized Barbie art began to proliferate. Independent artists have taken essentially two tacks when it comes to representing Barbie. There are the reverential ones, who idealize the doll, and the angry ones, who use the doll for social commentary. Warhol was perhaps the first of the reverentials—the sardonic self-censorers—who managed to convey even greater vapidity in his portrait than exists in the doll's actual face. He was not happy with the image. "The portrait looks so bad, I don't like it," he recorded in his diary on the day of its unveiling. "The Mattel president
said he couldn't wait to see it and I just cringed." Once an illustrator himself, Warhol and his scions are rooted in the tradition of commercial art; they include Mel Odom, whose pastel renderings of Barbie are as sleek as the design of a corporate annual report. But to Odom, the seductive surface is ironic. "I want to capture the soul of plastic," he told me.
Seattle photographer Barry Sturgill, whose work appears frequently in Barbie Bazaar, is also part of the reverential school. Widely regarded as the Irving Penn of Barbiedom, his photographs, characterized by dramatic, high-fashion lighting, are about female glamour. He makes the doll look like a top model from the 1950s. "I like the oldest face—the shelf-eyelash face," he explained. "She has a real 'don't mess with me, I'm Barbie' attitude. She was supposed to be a teenager and she looks like she's thirty-five."
The angry artwork is usually not so polished; nor does it critique the same things. Some artists use Barbie to comment on gender roles; some on colonialism and race; some on the consumer culture. Others, like Dean Brown and Charles Bell, use Barbie to comment on art history.
Maggie Robbins, a 1984 graduate of Yale University, is one of the angry artists. By day, she answers the telephone and edits copy at McCalVs magazine. By night, she hammers hundreds of nails into Barbie dolls. The effect of her hammering has been to transform the dolls into unsettling pieces of sculpture. How the dolls are displayed dramatically affects how the viewer interprets them. Mounted on a wall, they are images of female strength, curvaceous suns emitting potent metallic rays. On their backs, however, they suggest other things: victimization, vulnerability, impalement by what Virginia Woolf termed "the arid scimitar of the male."