by M. G. Lord
It's hard not to view Robbins's work without asking: Is it art or therapy? But after seeing her Rotating Barbie in a group show at Richard Anderson, a SoHo gallery, in 1993, I had to vote for "art." The piece, which she made as a birthday present for her ex-husband, is a kinetic sculpture involving reassembled Barbie parts; when activated, the figure lurches about as if it had been battered and is trying to crawl from its assailant. I couldn't take my eyes off it; nor could anybody else. People talked about it outside the gallery—sighing with relief because the artist was a woman. Had it been executed by a man, it might have been read as an exhortation toward violence, instead of a critique. "It's about being angry about everybody wanting to look like a Barbie," Robbins told me. "It's definitely much more anti-the-society-that-brought-you-Barbie than it is antiwoman. Because Barbies aren't women."
Yet to observe Robbins's work is to be curious about the gender of the artist. Christopher Ashley, who directed Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey off Broadway, owns one of Robbins's Barbie Fetish series—the dolls impaled with hundreds of rusty nails. As Robbins tells it, his visitors become visibly less tense when they learn it is the product of female hands. But even Robbins isn't entirely at ease with the ferocity in her work. "Putting the nails into Barbie's face, into her eyes, was really, really hard to do," she said. "And the weird thing was: She didn't stop smiling."
When I visited Robbins in her Brooklyn studio, I found some of her Barbie mutilations so brutal I could scarcely look at them. In one, titled Berlin Barbie, Robbins has used carpet tacks to pin a blond doll to a pre-World War II German map. The glossy black tacks encrust the doll like a fungus; they suggest the eruption of rot from within. Robbins began the piece in the summer of 1991, while she was going through a divorce. She had spent time in Berlin with her husband in May and went back alone in August. She wanted the piece to address not only her personal upheaval but also the doll's Teutonic roots. (Mattel will no doubt be pleased to learn that Robbins has temporarily shelved her Barbies to work with another iconic female. She wrote the libretto for Hearing Voices, an opera about Joan of Arc, with music by composer Robert Maggio, which premiered at the University of West Chester in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in December 1993.)
Robbins is one of a number of young female artists who use the doll to critique women's societal roles. Susan Evans Grove, a photographer and a 1987 graduate of the New York School of Visual Arts, is another. In her Barbie work, shown at Manhattan's Fourth Street Photo Gallery in 1992, Grove takes Barbie out of the sanitized "America" that Mattel invented. She succumbs to the blights that afflict real women: homelessness, drug addiction, rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, menstruation, skin cancer— a glossary of female misfortunes. "It was definitely cathartic for me to make all these bad things happen to her," Grove told me. "The one that got 'skin cancer' actually was my Malibu Barbie. She developed mold, poor thing." Grove's anger stemmed from the fact that she herself was dismissed as a Barbie. "Because I was short and light and fair, people assumed I couldn't do anything," she said.
Julia Mandle, a performance artist and 1992 graduate of Williams College, understands Grove's irritation. Although she now sports a Susan Powter haircut, she was once very Barbie-esque, which provoked incidents that caused her to revise her look. The first occurred when she was a high-school senior visiting colleges and a male upperclassman helped her gain admission to a campus pub. " 'Do you have any female friends who look like me so I can borrow their I.D.?'" she asked him. "And he said, 'Oh, there are probably a thousand girls here who look like you.' "
With her long blond hair and perfect figure—she had been bulimic since adolescence—Mandle admitted that there probably were. But the remark "stuck with her," and contributed to her anger, which erupted in a 1992 performance piece called Christmas Consumption.
Mandle, a Washington, D.C., resident, mounted the piece at the height of the December shopping season on a Georgetown sidewalk. To set the stage, she filled a shopping cart with diet literature and encrusted it with Barbies and Barbie-like dolls. She chalked eating-disorder statistics on the pavement. Then she transformed herself into a grotesque parody of Barbie— donned a lime-green bikini, platinum wig, and flesh-tone body stocking— and performed calisthenics to "Go You Chicken Fat Go," an exercise anthem. "The top kept slipping down," she recalled, "and guys would sort of come across and look, because from across the street it looked like I was wearing nothing." Fox News filmed her and shoppers, seeing the wire cart and assuming she was homeless, gave her money. "One reaction I had was a boyfriend pulling his girlfriend over and saying, Tm trying to get her to exercise, too; what should I do?' He was completely oblivious," she said.
Over a decade earlier, SoHo-based photographer Ellen Brooks, who received her M.F.A. from UCLA in 1971, critiqued the glorification of women's helpmeet status with fashion dolls. Three of her pieces—Balancers, Guarded Future, and Silk Hat—appeared in the 1983 Whitney Biennial. "I wanted the doll to symbolize this kind of glamorous but secondary position," Brooks told me. In Guarded Future, a sinister-looking magician and his female assistant hover over a malignant, spherical egg. Revolvers, which was not included in the Whitney show, explores a similar power relationship: a seated male orders his female assistants— festooned with showgirl feathers— to balance, like seals, on spinning balls.
Brooks did not, in fact, work with Barbie, but with Kenner's Darci— applauded by doll expert A. Glenn Mandeville as "the outstanding fashion doll of the late 1970s." As far as Brooks was concerned, however, a Darci was a Barbie was a problem, and she didn't want her preschool daughter going near any of them. "But I couldn't very well say to her, you can't play with these," Brooks recalled. "Because she's watching me play with them—creating these worlds." Brooks hasn't worked with dolls since 1984, but she has had oblique contact with Barbie: Ken Handler's daughter frequently babysat for her.
Gender is also a concern of Bolinas, California, photographer Ken Botto, whose photographs of toys were included in the 1992 "Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort" show at New York's Museum of Modern Art. But unlike Brooks and her aesthetic successors, he doesn't see the early Barbies as constrained by their femininity. To him, they are powerful, dominatrix figures, sexually linked to Nazis and robots, looming portentously over impotent Kens. "The early Barbie had an attitude on her face; it wasn't blank," he told me. And his compositions, described by writer Alice Kahn as "Barbie Noir," were derived from the Helmut Newton S&M aesthetic that cropped up in late-seventies fashion photography. His current work focuses on ancient matriarchal power. Influenced by the writings of Camille Paglia, he has linked Neolithic goddess imagery to modern pornography to Barbie.
For Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Hollywood's invented "America"—the "America" of cowboy heroes vanquishing Indian villains—is a myth to be exploded and mocked. She does this in her 1991 piece, Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by U.S. Government. The work features "Barbie Plenty Horses" and "Ken Plenty Horses"—Mattel archetypes customized with names from the Flathead tribe to which she belongs. The doll's outfits tell the story of what happened to her tribe over a century ago, when the U.S. government forced it to move from its traditional home to a reservation several hundred miles away. Smith's humor is mordant: her doll accessories include "small pox suits," a by-product of infected blankets issued by the government, and one of several tribal headdresses "sold at Sotheby's today for thousands of dollars to white collectors seeking Romance in their lives."
Produced to coincide with the quincentennial of Columbus's arrival in America, or as Smith puts it, "five hundred years of tourism in this country," Paper Dolls sprang out of the "trickster" or "coyote" component in her personality. "I always think that you can get your message across to people with humor better than you can in politicizing it in a dour sort of way," she told me. She also felt that "telling a true story about the reality of my family" would be more affecting than compiling a "laundry list" of complaints.
Some artists have used the dolls to make personal rather than political statements. Roger Braimon, who received an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, used Ken and Ken-like dolls for a series of representational paintings stylistically evocative of the work of fidouard Manet. Although the dolls are fully dressed and their poses not sexually explicit, the paintings have a powerful homoerotic charge—in part because of a narrative element he repeated in the images, what he terms the "glossy decapitated portrait of a hunky male" that is packaged with Calvin Klein underwear.
"Coming out in my second year of graduate school was a big thing for me," Braimon told me. "I was comfortable with it—but not in my painting. So these Ken dolls were a perfect tool for me to express how I felt about male relationships. And sort of distance myself—by not actually painting a real person."
Photographer Dean Brown also makes a personal statement with Barbie, but it is about art history. He began using her as a model in 1980, while he was stationed with the United States Information Agency in Pakistan. Americans were not popular there at the time, and Barbie was less likely to smash his camera in a rage than were the people he photographed on the street. The result of his efforts was A Capricious History of Western Art, a portfolio that begins with a pastiche of the Lascaux cave paintings and ends with a variation on Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. Brown also includes a gallery scene in which contemporary Barbies and Kens gaze at miniatures of his pictures.
In addition to Brown's wit, the first thing that strikes the viewer is how far the 1950s ideal of female beauty, which Barbie embodies, deviates from the classical ideal—not to mention from Vitruvian mathematical standards of human proportion. No way is that doll's foot one-sixth of her height; at just under an inch, it is closer to one-twelfth. The second is the extent to which Barbie is a natural model for works that derive their erotic energy from the display of breasts: Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Manet's Olympia, and the Venus de Milo.
Painted by Eugene Delacroix, whom Anne Hollander termed "the greatest Romantic expositor of complex passion through mammary exposure," the original Liberty's fascination owes much to "her gloriously lighted bare breasts." Brown's Liberty does not thrust her flag forward as Liberty does in the Delacroix version. She demurely picks her way over a sprawled G.I. Joe. She is above the battle, not within it; the vacuity of her expression precludes passionate engagement. She is a distant Liberty for a distant video-game war—and, significantly, the photograph is now in the collection of a female reporter to whom some Iraqi soldiers had surrendered during the ultimate video skirmish, the Persian Gulf War.
The Venus de Milo is another sculpture in which breasts are strongly eroticized, though Brown's version is more unnerving than voluptuous. Barbie is way too skinny to pass muster as a Greek goddess; she looks as if she has been placed on a rack and stretched. Nor does Barbie's legginess work for her. Draped female legs, like those of the original Venus, were considered beautiful in classical art; exposed ones, by contrast, connoted not beauty but strength, and were found on depictions of Artemis, a hunter and warrior.
Brown worked hard to transform Barbie into Venus; he chopped off her hair, wrenched off her arms, and bundled her legs in "a man's big white handkerchief" slathered with Elmer's glue. From clay he fashioned arm shards, nipples, and a navel; then he covered his handiwork with white paint. None of these affectations, however, diminished the perkiness of her expression or, for that matter, of her breasts.
In terms of body type, Barbie was far more suited as a stand-in for Manet's Olympia. Manet had painted a contemporary courtesan; in Brown's version, Barbie has never looked tartier—every bit a descendant of the sleazy Bild Lilli. By shrewdly posing his Olympia with crossed legs, Manet managed to avoid the issue of depicting pubic hair, eliminating what would have been a dramatic contrast between a human model and Barbie. And of course because Brown has used a current edition of the doll, his Olympia fixes the observer with the dead-on stare that so flustered viewers of Manet's original.
Now retired and living in suburban Maryland, Brown is currently working on "the original women's lib thing," Judith with the head of Holofernes, for which he bought a detached Ken head at a Barbie convention in 1987. Far from wishing to extirpate her eleven-and-a-half-inch rival, Brown's wife is trying to dissuade Brown from his latest venture: Barbie's funeral. "I've got a casket all made, and my wife doesn't want me to do it," he complained. "She doesn't like the idea of Barbie dying." But having given Barbie a navel—and, by implication, mortality—Brown has made the macabre scene logically inevitable.
(Photographer Felicia Rosshandler, by contrast, has had no inhibitions about killing Barbie and her kind; her chilling Twilight of the Gods features a close-up of an arched fashion-doll foot, tagged as if it were on a slab in a morgue. "To me, Barbie dies when she puts on her wedding dress," Rosshandler said. "She never ages; she never becomes a mother.")
Charles Bell's mural The Judgement of Paris also deals with death—and love. The famous scene, rendered by dozens of painters, depicts the first beauty contest, in which Paris, portrayed by a Ken doll, is forced to choose between Minerva, portrayed by a Barbie doll; Juno, portrayed by a Miss America doll; and Venus, portrayed by a Marilyn Monroe doll. Paris, of course, selects Venus—that is to say, love—and his choice leads to a megadisaster, the Trojan War.
The painting is different from Bell's other work—huge, photorealistic canvases of metal toys and pinball machines. And it is bittersweet; the myth he dramatizes is about opting for passion, even when it is fatal. "In the era of AIDS, I'm overwhelmed by the temporariness of life," Bell told me. "In the context of discovering our own mortality, things that had seemed important become less important. Eventually human kindness—and love—are the only things that really endure."
If Mattel has its way, however, corporate control of its icon will endure. A mere note from the toy company squelched The Barbie Project, an unauthorized theater piece that dramatized Mattel's corporate history and how children play with the doll, which was produced in 1980 at the Theater for the New City on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The show's director, Lauren Versel, who had initially petitioned Mattel for permission to film a documentary, didn't think her vision would ever be compatible with the company's.
Mattel has frozen other projects—Robin Swicord's musical comes to mind—but with visual art, its current tack seems to involve sponsoring authorized shows. In 1994, Mattel Germany opened a display of corporate-approved Barbie art in Berlin. Exhibited at the Werkbund-Archiv in the Martin-Gropius Bau (a gallery with a history of interest in commercial design), the pieces tended to be flashy but empty. Most involved clothing Barbie in exotic outfits. Yet there were a handful of images that made one look twice, and that might have raised Jesse Helms's blood pressure. These included depictions of lesbianism (after commenting in the exhibition catalogue that Barbie, at thirty-five, was "at last grown-up," artist Elke Martensen showed her in a leather helmet caressing the bare breast of another Barbie), fetishism (artist Holger Scheibe constructed an image of a sweaty, bare-shouldered adult male directing his puckered lips toward a Barbie clutched in his fist), and bestiality (artist Peter Engelhart placed Barbie in a "lovematch" with King Kong). And for crude sexual puns and sick-making imagery, Frank Lindow's Barbie, ich hah dich zum Fressen gem! (Barbie, I would like to eat you!) stood out: It featured blond Barbie and Asian brunette Kira "pickled" like fetuses in mason jars. But with these exceptions, the overall effect was bland.
American photographer David Levinthal was not included in the German show, but he is among the artists participating in Mattel's upcoming official coffee-table book—and the difference between the images he produced for that project and the ones he did for himself says much about the problems of working with corporate-controlled icons.
Levinthal is perhaps best known for Hitler Moves East, a book collaboration with Garry Trudeau that he began while at Yale Art School, from which he receiv
ed an M.F.A. in 1972. In it, he photographs toy soldiers so that they look like real ones, ominously charting the course of the Second World War. His subsequent work has also pushed boundaries. In 1991, he executed a series called Desire, made up of enlarged Polaroids of miniature Japanese dolls that depicted Caucasian women in bondage. In soft focus, their surface was beguiling and seductive, but their content was disturbing— particularly to women. "I wanted people to look at these images, which I thought were very beautiful, and sort of halfway think, 'Wait a minute, I'm looking at an image of a woman tied in a chair, there's something wrong.'''
In graduate school, Levinthal began investigating sensitive sexual themes with Barbie and G.I. Joe. "I did a sort of narrative where Barbie had this straight preppie boyfriend. But she's attracted to this rough Vietnam vet," he explained. "The 'seventy-two ones just hit you because it's right there. . . . The race thing was very much in evidence in the late sixties, early seventies— the idea of Barbie as the Aryan virgin, and this character breaking through that. I called him G.I. Jose—that was at the height of my political incorrectness."
Yet his work for the authorized project, while it has an abstract beauty, lacks bite. "There was in the contract that there would be some editorial review, and I think anyone could use their own good sense and realize that you would try and make the work more accessible and less confrontational," he told me. "I wasn't going with the idea of saying, 'Let's really challenge with what we've got here.' " And he didn't.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN