Marilyn Minter's Politically Incorrect Pleasures

MARILYN MINTER’S POLITICALLY INCORRECT PLEASURES ELISSA AUTHER of Lena Dunham and Beyoncé, gaze as much as they invite it. Furthermore, her interest in IN THE AGE it is hard to imagine that only two physical flaws and soiled elegance undermines the illusions of or three decades ago, progressive- minded people derided the perfection normally promoted by the glossy commercial image. free display of female sexuality.1 But that is exactly the unfriendly Minter often reveals much more than we want to see. It is in the context in which Marilyn Minter first offered up her body of collision of these two powerful aesthetic forces, the beautiful technically virtuosic and openly erotic paintings. Minter’s and the grotesque—what Minter has described as the “path- career- long exploration of beauty, desire, and pleasure- in- ology of glamour”5—that the artist presents her compelling looking has occupied, at best, an uneasy place within feminist visual investigation into the nature of our passions and fantasies, art history and criticism. Her painted and photographic appro- finding them unruly and highly resistant to ideological correction. priations of pornographic imagery, physical flaws, and high From Minter’s earliest forays as an artist, the female body fashion never function as easy, straightforward critiques of has been the primary vehicle through which she has addressed patriarchal culture. As one critic has remarked, “It is difficult to issues of beauty and desire. Her series of black- and- white tell if Marilyn Minter’s subjects are meant to make viewers photographs of her mother (cats. 1–5), shot in 1969, when uncomfortable—or turn them on.”2 That Minter’s work insists she was still an undergraduate at the University of Florida, on both has always been a challenge for viewers who require Gainesville, went straight to the heart of the conventions and confirmation that she is on the correct side of the political artifice of feminine beauty. The artist captured Honora Elizabeth debate over the representation of the female body. This retro- Laskey Minter applying makeup and dyeing her eyebrows, spective exhibition, Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, which brings wearing a wig and a negligee, gazing into the mirror of a together over four decades of Minter’s paintings, photographs, well- appointed dining room, and smoking in bed with the air and videos, finally makes it possible to appreciate and assess of a 1940s Hollywood star. Closer inspection of these works her critical contribution to this fraught zone of image making. reveals a female body with slack, freckled skin and a decidedly On the one hand, Minter’s signature style features the unglamorous, forlorn demeanor—a sad reflection, in fact, of her fetishistic fragmentation of the body that is the stock-in- trade of mother’s reclusive existence as a prescription- drug addict. commercial titillation, from the advertising of food and cosmet- What to Minter at the time was just “Mom at home” was, to her ics to the creation of explicit representations for the purposes of student peers, an indecent revelation of a sordid existence. sexual arousal. Her painting technique—the application of Minter claims to have been nonplussed by the negative reaction, several layers of high- gloss enamel to metal—creates a surface and it took her another twenty- five years to print and exhibit the that critics have variously described as “juicy” and “hallucina- photographs, which are the source of the theme of the ugly tory”;3 like a glossy advertisement, it is designed to seduce the underside of beauty that has been a constant of her career.6 eye. Minter herself has said, “I do try to seduce people with my In 1976, after completing her MFA program at Syracuse paintings. I want you to get sucked in by their lusciousness.”4 University, Minter settled in Manhattan and produced a number Yet, an equally powerful aspect of Minter’s style is her applica- of works that explored conventional gender roles. In the Pop- tion of scale distortions to isolated body parts, from dizzying inspired caricatures of domestic life in her Task series foreshortening to nauseatingly extreme close- ups that repel the (figs. 9–11), manicured female hands neaten a pile of towels, 22 FIG. 9. Marilyn Minter. Hands Painting, 1988. Enamel on metal, 30 x 24 in. (76.2 x 61 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York FIG. 10. Marilyn Minter. Hands Dumping, 1988. Enamel on metal, 24 x 30 in. (61 x 76.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York FIG. 11. Marilyn Minter. Hands Folding, 1988. Enamel on metal, 24 x 30 in. (61 x 76.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York 23 wipe a light switch, or paint a wall. In Big Girls, Little Girls, of the female body, a sensibility that would remain central to a series of more monumental works of the mid- 1980s, Minter the artist’s practice from that point forward. Without such a created multiple canvases of girls looking at their distorted condemnation—or any clear sense of irony to signal that she reflections in funhouse mirrors. One painting in the series, Big was appropriating pornographic imagery as a form of critique— Girls (1986; cat. 12), combines the motif of the little girl gazing the works exposed a painful fault line within the art world’s at her reflection with an image of Sophia Loren anxiously peering feminist community in the late 1980s and early 1990s over the at Jayne Mansfield’s voluptuous breasts, spilling out of her dress. issue of the body and female desire. These works fused a feminist critique of the construction of Minter’s Porn Grid (1989; cat. 27) is representative of the gender and femininity with other postmodernist hallmarks of the earliest works in the series. In the piece, the penis plays a 1980s, including the appropriation of mass- media imagery and starring role in four loudly colored, tightly cropped compositions a cool, detached style of painting. in which it is gripped, licked, and otherwise stimulated by a In the late 1980s, after Big Girls, Little Girls and a subse- woman or, in the upper left painting in the grid, by a man. In quent series of well- received paintings known collectively as some places, a milky white paint reminiscent of ejaculate trickles Food Porn (cats. 14–25), in which elegant male and female down the metal panel. In other areas, paint runs more densely, hands split open succulent lobsters, tomatoes, and other recalling the drips of an Abstract Expressionist painting but delicacies, Minter embarked on a series of more typically creating an allover wetness that is even more a cliché of porn pornographic paintings. These works, colloquially called the than it is of abstract painting. Minter contrasted these expres- “porn paintings” (cats. 27, 29–31), feature money shots, blow sionistic drips with areas that resemble the Benday dots of jobs, gaping female mouths, panty- clad crotches, and giant the printed page, creating a further push and pull between the nipples borrowed from straight and gay hardcore magazines. immediacy offered by photography and the distance of the mass- Together, they represent a turning point in Minter’s career, produced magazine. Minter pitched this tension even higher in not only for the attention they garnered but also for the way other works in the series, such as The Supremes (1990; fig. 12), they refused to simply and clearly condemn the objectification Pink Singer (1992), Sepia Singer (1992), and The Singer FIG. 12. Marilyn Minter. The Supremes, 1990. Enamel on metal (first- aid kit), 14 x 101/2 x 3 in. (35.6 x 26.7 x 7.6 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York 24 (1992; fig. 14), by injecting a sense of humor into what was decoupage- decorated chests of drawers; all the works traded in originally a hardcore context. In all four works, the close cropping questionable forms of taste, including feminine sentimentality, and proximity of open female mouths to erect penises transform abject craft, and juvenile humor. Minter was especially taken with the erect male member into the head of a microphone. Another the decorated dressers and stuffed animals and homemade dolls group of works in the series employed a more subdued palette salvaged from thrift stores. In her own words, on a metal surface that was distressed through sanding and etching with acid. The subject matter was an even more provoc- [Kelley] was basically mining the contents of a thirteen- ative mix of blow jobs, lascivious female mouths, white- panty year- old girl’s bedroom. There were stuffed animal crotch shots, and, in one particularly edgy example titled paintings and stuffed animal sculptures. There was a Chiaroscuro (1991; cat. 29), a close- up of female masturbation. “how- to” sex manual taped to the bottom of a chest of Minter has explained that the inspiration for her porn paint- drawers covered with decoupage images of eyes and ings came from a 1988 exhibition of Mike Kelley’s work at Metro mouths. It was so funny. The way [he] took this Pictures in SoHo. For the show, Kelley installed works from his debased segment of our society—little girls, whom we project Half a Man (fig. 13), which consisted of his (now iconic) make fun of . —and put his own spin on it.7 felt banners, stuffed- animal- and- afghan assemblages, and FIG. 13. Mike Kelley. More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987. Stuffed fabric toys and afghans on canvas with dried corn; wax candles on base of wood and metal; overall 120¾ x 151¾ x 31¾ in.

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