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, afterBig 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. (306.7 x 385.4 x 80.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee. Art © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All rights reserved / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

25 FIG. 14. Marilyn Minter. The Singer, 1992. Enamel on metal, 36 x 14 in. (91.4 x 35.6 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

26 Minter continued, “I wanted to see what happened if I did artistic circles in the late 1980s and the 1990s.15 This environ- something like that”—in other words, used imagery so utterly ment, in which feminists were so invested in the political fight predictable for a male artist as to be ignored, but taboo for for justice and equality that they were even willing to deny women. “Not soft porn,” she explained, “but hard-­core porn— their own pleasures, was especially hostile to female artists so I did all these cum shots.”8 exploring issues of gender and sexuality. Shaping this context Minter exhibited the first of her porn-­inspired works in 1989 was the feminist anti­pornography movement and a general at the Simon Watson gallery in SoHo and in a number of (though not completely unrelated) feminist suspicion of sex subsequent group shows in New York and Los Angeles, where perceived to replicate oppressive patriarchal gender roles, from they received no critical attention.9 By contrast, she was heterosexual intercourse to lesbian BDSM (Bondage/Discipline/ surprised by the intense blowback from visitors to her studio, Sadomasochism). Known as the “sex wars,” this debate divided who exclaimed that the works were a risky proposition sure to feminists into “anti-­porn” and “pro-­sex” contingents, with “ruin her career.”10 In 1992, Minter exhibited the completed opposed positions on what constituted “correct” feminist series at the more high-­profile SoHo gallery Max Protetch, and sexuality. The antipornography camp entertained a utopian critics took notice. Short reviews were trivializing. About Pink vision of egalitarian feminist sexual relations—the very antithesis Singer and Sepia Singer, a critic writing for the New Yorker of sex with men and mainstream pornographic fantasy—while quipped that they were “so silly that they’re kind of funny.”11 In lesbians and heterosexual women who identified as pro-­sex the same magazine the week before, another critic had pon- accepted potentially “incorrect” sexual pleasures and rejected dered, “Does she mean to humanize—or feminize—sex by “the shaming voices that told them they could not be having making a blowjob look soft-­core? Given its spiffiness, this show these feelings when in fact they did.”16 could be a great storyboard proposal for an adventurous In the early 1990s, concurrent political developments, such cosmetics campaign.”12 Privately, Minter suffered through as the targeting of the National Endowment for the Arts by blistering confrontations with her artist peers, including conservative members of Congress who were outraged over anonymous phone calls and threatening letters about the works’ grants made to support a touring exhibition of the work of perceived collusion with the porn industry and its victimization Robert Mapplethorpe and the performance art of Karen Finley, of women, which left her mortified. At the same time, some added to the antagonistic environment Minter encountered.17 feminists in the art world reached out to her, and she became a Other factors local to the New York art world impacted the regular in a reading group focused on gender, sexuality, and the reception of her porn paintings even more directly. Of particular explicit representation of the body. As Minter recalled, significance was Jeff Koons’s notorious 1991 exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo, Made in Heaven (fig. 15), which This group of women. They got in touch with me. It was included of a group of photographic silkscreens-­on-­canvas, really kind of beautiful because they saved my life, glass figurines, and cast-­plastic sculptures of the artist having basically. There were all these people who had already sex with Ilona Staller, or “Cicciolina,” an Italian former porn star gone through what I was going through—Holly Hughes, who was his wife at the time. And from an entirely different for example—and we started this reading group.13 aesthetic direction, Cindy Sherman’s Sex Pictures, a series of photographs that theatrically explored the dark underside of A more substantial review of the show in the Village Voice by sexual desire with masks, props, and prosthetic body parts Elizabeth Hess, who found the artist’s depiction of sex unper- (fig. 16), debuted at Metro Pictures in April 1992.18 suasive as a feminist statement, validated Minter’s experience In more than one instance, Koons’s exhibition was men- of the reading group as a safe haven. To Hess, Minter’s porn tioned in passing in reviews of Minter’s 1992 exhibition of the paintings were designed to please and thus affirmed contempo- porn paintings at Max Protetch. It was clearly on Hess’s mind as rary culture’s heterosexist and misogynistic values.14 Hess’s well, in the Village Voice review: although ostensibly discussing reaction highlights how Minter’s engagement with hardcore Sherman’s and Minter’s exhibitions side by side, she created a porn—a subject matter few female artists had taken up, let alone triangulation of the three artists that revealed the conditions by received professional recognition for—landed her in the center which female artists in this period were judged when it came to of the heated debate over what constituted a politically correct the use of explicit sexual content. Hess began with Koons sexuality, which dominated feminist academic, activist, and and Sherman:

27 I must confess, the first time I walked through the Cindy the extreme pessimistic edge to the depiction of sex seen in Sherman show I found myself thinking about Jeff Koons. Sherman’s photographs, did not provide a sufficient critical Both artists use explicit sexual imagery to confront remedy to Koons’s pornographic fantasy. “Marilyn Minter, aesthetic and ideological debates from pointedly different unlike Sherman,” Hess wrote, “turns the volume down on her perspectives. The gap between Sherman and Koons sexual rage,”25 and without the appropriate rage on which to pin makes the Grand Canyon look small. Nevertheless, both the works, Hess could not imagine a reason for their existence. take X-­rated pictures that attract and repulse viewers. She continued, Seeing them in public at all is the first humiliation. While it’s beneath dignity in certain feminist circles (like my There are no people in these pictures, just sexual own) to even mention Koons, he and Sherman have a few gestures. . . . Minter removes all context from these porn nasty traits in common. Their works jump out and bite clips, as if to purify them. But what are we left with? Fuzzy viewers. The artists also frequently star in their own views of orgiastic moments, which have been stripped of photographs and delight in shocking us with gooey, their erotic power. The work argues, almost inadvertently, dripping sex. Koons, of course, has good sex, while for the banality of pornography, yet the artist refuses to Sherman has bad sex. I mean really bad sex.19 rewrite the traditional script. . . . Sherman’s work inten- tionally leads us to despair, while Minter’s wants to Hess went on to describe how she “gagged” at Koons’s Playboy-­ please. Minter describes her images as “sex positive,” Disneyesque version of heterosexual fornication with his wife, in yet she depicts rote sex. Sex by the book.26 which he “remains in the driver’s seat.”20 By contrast, Sherman’s work provided a corrective indictment of the patri­archal, hetero- What Hess found good and bad in Sherman’s and Minter’s normative culture reflected in Koons’s work. Sherman, in the work, respectively, reflected the point of view of many feminist critic’s view, “refuses to represent sex as an ideal, heterosexual viewers at the time. For Hess and others, Sherman’s work union,”21 a world in which women “are devoured like meat.”22 provided a compelling critique of heterosexual sex and the male Whereas Koons celebrated his sexual prowess, “the penis is one power and privilege it represented. It dovetailed with a broader of [Cindy Sherman’s] latest and most evil protagonists.”23 feminist fantasy about politically correct sex—what the theorist Next to Sherman, a powerful “sex terrorist” who “captures us Jane Gaines, writing in Critical Inquiry in 1995, shortly after and takes us to a prison where sex is so degrading that the the completion of Minter’s porn paintings, described as “the degradation becomes the essential act,”24 Minter was set up to antithesis of sexual relations with men,” which some feminists fail in Hess’s review. Her paintings, which (purposefully) lacked expected to “appear after the revolution.”27 Sherman’s work was

FIG. 15. Jeff Koons.Made in Heaven, 1989. Lithograph billboard, 125 x 272 in. (317.5 x 690.9 cm). © Jeff Koons

28 okay because in it, sex was dismal; Minter’s work, which openly supporters. One critic at the time, Faye Hirsch, recognized the explored and even affirmed the pleasures of mainstream erotic artist’s work as attempting an “alternative to the moralism and fantasy and obviously lacked such a critique, was not. Further- didacticism” of the feminist critique of pornography. Writing in more, in this context, the notion that Minter was interested in 1995 for Art in America, Hirsch noted that Minter, when she was representing her own heterosexual desire as a legitimate feminist “at her most perverse, at once intimate and greedy, . . . evokes sexuality was inconceivable.28 For “those of us who came into a unique blend of discomfort, pleasure and esthetic reward.”30 feminism in its heyday—the 1970s and early 1980s,” Gaines It is with this brand of perversity that Minter found critical and acknowledged, “not only is heterosexuality politically suspect, commercial success a decade later, in the new millennium, with it is also unthinkable within feminism in both senses of unthink- her series of large-­scale paintings and photographs that delved able—it cannot and should not be thought.”29 into fashion’s depictions of femininity—along with porn, “the While Hess’s review and the attitude described in Gaines’s most debased imagery around,”31 according to the artist. By essay represent one feminist context in which Minter’s porno- this time, the thin membrane separating her work from the graphic works were received, the artist also had her feminist imagery generated within the fashion industry itself was part of

FIG. 16. Cindy Sherman. Untitled #261, 1992. Chromogenic color print (edition of 6), 68 x 45 in. (172.7 x 114.3 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

29 FIG. 17. Still from Green Pink Caviar, 2009 (cat. 45)

its appeal, as opposed to an automatic political or aesthetic Minter’s oeuvre is a compelling take on the feverish liability, as the porn paintings’ perceived coincidence with the obsessions with body, perfection, femininity, and surface industry’s own degrading representations of women had been. in the fashion and beauty industries, pornography, and These works—her now-­iconic paintings and photographs of erotica. She deftly infects these images of flawlessness designer shoes ruined on the streets of New York by mud with the more sordid details of reality beyond the glossy puddles and heels encrusted in grime after a decadent night pages of a magazine. out—were included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and graced Gaze and drool.33 billboards in Chelsea in partnership with the arts organization Creative Time. Minter now felt free to speak openly about her The fervor of the feminist debate over a politically correct works’ ability to lure us in and then leave us stranded, without sexuality may have waned, but today, the issue is as unresolved any reassuring lesson regarding consumption or perfection. as ever. Christopher Bedford, writing for Artforum in 2010 about “I’m not making a critique,” she said in an interview. “It’s more Minter’s spectacularly libidinous video Green Pink Caviar (fig. 17; about our love-­hate relationship to this ideal [of high fashion], cat. 45), commissioned by Creative Time and broadcast for the and how the pleasure we feel as a viewer is ultimately about first time on MTV’s digital billboard in Times Square, expressed constant failure.”32 The political and critical ambiguity of the contemporary uncertainty over what counts as a feminist Minter’s appropriation of pornographic imagery—once viewed form of female sexual agency:34 as a kind of betrayal of the feminist cause—could now be viewed as, at once, a response to the impossible ideals promoted by the Can a high-­definition video, shot from under a glass plate, use of the female body to sell commodities and an implication of that shows an ample set of fleshy lips and a playfully individual viewers in the collective lascivious gaze, mesmerizing roving tongue spitting, slurping, and licking a Technicolor them through scale, framing, and surface effect. Rosie Spencer, array of cake decorations suspended in vodka, be said writing for the magazine Contemporary in 2005, described the to make a feminist statement in 2010? Your response to power of Minter’s work as this very combination of forces: that loaded question is likely to be roughly congruent

30 with your position on the ubiquitous Lady Gaga and her features artist-­conceived photo spreads.36 Minter’s proposed hyperbolic, sometimes eccentric, expressions of female contribution, wittily titled “Bring Back the Bush,” was a series sexuality. If you are among those who believe that today’s of close-­up photographs of female pubic hair variously unofficially anointed queen of pop is an icon of female adorned with flowers, pearls, and gold chains and, more empowerment, chances are that Marilyn Minter will, in raunchily, microscopically examined, fingered, and viewed your conception, be right there beside her. After decades through panty­hose (figs. 18, 19; cats. 32–35). Inspired by of condemnation and neglect at the hands of the art-­ her own distaste with the popular practice among a younger world establishment, particularly feminist critics, Minter, generation of shaving and, in some cases, permanently lasering at sixty-­two, may have arrived at last.35 away their pubic hair (a trend influenced by pornography in the first place), the photographs contribute to the small but vocal Indeed, Pretty/Dirty is an endorsement of Marilyn Minter’s opposition to the practice, expressed by women ranging from complex vision of sexuality and the erotic. While it is not easy to the British media personality Caitlin Moran to the Hollywood say what is good or bad about her work, it is next to impossible stars Cameron Diaz and Gwyneth Paltrow to the Canadian artist to ignore one’s pleasure in looking at it. Possibly the most Petra Collins.37 On the other hand, they are Minter at her finest radical evidence of what this new—if ideologically unmoored— and most perverse: images that simultaneously seduce and context might mean for a feminist artist interested in the repel in their erotic subject matter, alluring framing and surface, presentation of gender and eroticism is Minter’s commission for and graphic overarticulation of a private—generally considered a 2014 special edition of Playboy magazine. Organized by the obscene—part of the female body.38 Compared to the depilated curator Neville Wakefield,Playboy’s Creative Director of Special female bodies of pornography or the classical female nudes of Projects (and a contributor to the present catalogue), the issue Western art, these images fall somewhere between imagined

FIG. 18. Marilyn Minter. PLUSH #1, 2014. Archival inkjet FIG. 19. Marilyn Minter. PLUSH #12, 2014. Archival inkjet print, 19 x 13 in. (48.3 x 33 cm) print, 19 x 13 in. (48.3 x 33 cm)

31 perfection and actual flesh and hair, showing us, as all Minter’s Female Sexuality (1984); Susie Bright’s lesbian porn magazine, On Our Backs; Pat best works do, “how it feels to look.”39 In the end, Playboy Califia’sMacho Sluts (1988); Andrew Ross’s No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989); and selected works by bell hooks. Together, the group screened all rejected her series of photographs and substituted a small the pornographic films of Cicciolina, Jeff Koons’s wife, and attended a public reading detail of one of the images, inset into a short article about her. of Sapphire’s novel Push, an Annie Sprinkle performance, and the drag-­king Given the controversy her work has always generated, it is no performances of two of the members of the reading group, organized by Diane Torr. On the subject of the reading group, see also Minter’s statement in “The Question of surprise that it took so long for a proper retrospective of Marilyn Gender in Art,” Tema Celeste, Fall 1992, p. 68, and in the same issue, Jan Avgikos, Minter’s works to come about. “Seeing with Our Bodies,” pp. 38–43, as well as Jan Avgikos, “All That Heaven Allows: Love, Honor, and Koons,” Flash Art, Summer 1993, pp. 80–83. All three pieces provide the flavor of the conversation taking place in regard to the erotic Notes potential of the pornographic for women. 1. For many, such expression is still not okay. On the debates over Lena Dunham’s 14. Elizabeth Hess, “Sherman’s Inferno,” Village Voice, May 5, 1992, p. 108. and Beyoncé’s relationships to female sexual empowerment and claims to a feminist 15. Feminist artists who preceded Minter include Anita Steckel, Betty Tompkins, identity, see, among other commentaries, Linda Martin Alcoff, “The Nerve of Lena Joan Semmel, Judith Bernstein, Eunice Golden, and Sylvia Sleigh. On their work, Dunham,” The Feminist Wire, May 17, 2012, http://thefeministwire.com/2012/05 see Richard Meyer, “Hard Targets: Male Bodies, Feminist Art, and the Force of /the-­nerve-­of-­lena-­dunham/; Emily Nussbaum, “Hannah Barbaric,” New Yorker, Censorship in the 1970s,” in Lisa Gabrielle Mark, ed., Wack! Art and the Feminist February 11, 2013, pp. 100–102; Amy Odell, “Beyoncé Replaces Sheryl Sandberg as Revolution (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, World’s Most Controversial Feminist,” BuzzFeed Life, May 24, 2013, http://www 2007), pp. 362–83. .buzzfeed.com/amyodell/beyonce-­replaces-­sheryl-­sandberg-­as-­worlds-­most 16. Jane Gaines, “Feminist Heterosexuality and Its Politically Incorrect Pleasures,” -­controversia; Janell Hobson, “Policing Feminism: Regulating the Bodies of Women Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 (Winter 1995), p. 390. of Color,” Ms. Magazine blog, June 10, 2013, http://msmagazine.com/blog 17. On the attacks on the NEA beginning in 1989, see Carole S. Vance, “The War on /2013/06/10/policing-­feminism-­regulating-­the-­bodies-­of-­women-­of-­color/. Culture,” Art in America, September 1989, pp. 39–43. See also David Mendoza, 2. Gareen Darakjian, SOMA, no. 23.6 (September 2009), http://somamagazine.com “NEA Four Win Settlement . . . But Government Appeals Decency Ruling,” New Art /marilyn-­minter’s-­pleasure-­principle/. Examiner, September 1993, p. 52. For a broader assessment of the culture wars and 3. B[arry] S[chwabsky], “Marilyn Minter at Xavier LaBoulbenne Gallery,” Artforum their impact on the art world, see Brian Wallis, Marianne Weems, and Philip International, September 1997, p. 128; Kiša Lala, “Court Painter of the Skin Trade,” Yenawine, eds., Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America (New York and SPREAD ArtCulture, September 2010. London: New York University Press, 1999). On Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition 4. Marilyn Minter, in “Marilyn Minter in Conversation with Mary Heilmann,” in Marilyn “The Perfect Moment,” see Richard Meyer, “The Jesse Helms Theory of Art,” Minter (New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2010), p. 17. October, no. 104 (Spring 2003), pp. 131–48. See also Douglas McLeod and Jill 5. Holland Cotter first used this phrase with reference to Minter’s work in a review in Mackenzie, “Print Media and Public Reaction to the Controversy over NEA Funding the New York Times (“Art in Review: Marilyn Minter,” May 5, 2000), and the artist for Robert Mapplethorpe’s ‘The Perfect Moment’ Exhibit,” Journalism and Mass picked up on it and has used it frequently since. Communication Quarterly 75, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 278–91. 6. Minter first exhibited the works in 1995 at The Drawing Center and then in a solo 18. Jeff Koons,Made in Heaven, Sonnabend Gallery, New York, November 1991. show at Postmasters. The story of the reaction to the photographs of her mother Cindy Sherman, Sex Pictures, Metro Pictures, New York, April 11–May 9, 1992. appears in many interviews with Minter. The artist also had the opportunity to show 19. Hess, “Sherman’s Inferno,” p. 107. her contact sheet to the photographer Diane Arbus, who was a visiting artist at the 20. Ibid. University of Florida in 1969. Not surprisingly, given her own dedication to the 21. Ibid. sympathetic representation of marginal people and realities most would find ugly, 22. Ibid. Arbus responded enthusiastically to Minter’s work. 23. Ibid. 7. Marilyn Minter, in “Marilyn Minter in Conversation with Mary Heilmann,” p. 16. 24. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 25. Ibid., p. 108. 9. These shows included Erotophobia, Simon Watson, New York, 1989; The Clinic, 26. Ibid. Simon Watson, New York, 1990; Stendhal Syndrome: The Cure, Andrea Rosen 27. Gaines, “Feminist Heterosexuality,” p. 386. Gallery, New York, 1990; Fragment, Parts, Wholes: The Body in Culture, White 28. Also telling in this regard is the fact that Minter’s work was not included in Marcia Columns, New York, 1990; Something More Pithy and Psychological, Simon Watson, Tucker’s 1994 exhibition Bad Girls at New York’s New Museum, a show curated in New York, and Meyers/Bloom Gallery, Santa Monica, 1991; Abortion Project, Real response to fatigue over the solemnity and moralism ascribed to art-world­ feminism. Art Ways, Hartford, CT, 1991; Pleasure, Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY, 1991;Ho Hum All Ye For Tucker, “bad girls” defined themselves “according to their terms, pleasures, Faithful, John Post Lee Gallery, New York, 1991; Érotiques, Galerie AB, Paris, 1992; interests, and with a humor both delicious and outrageous.” A quick glance at the Ecstasy, Dooley LeCappellaine, New York, 1992; Slow Art, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue suggests that Minter’s work was probably too risqué even for Center, Long Island City, NY, 1992; Painting Culture, University of California, Irvine, this context, and reviews of the show suggest that a critical perspective that could Fine Arts Gallery, 1992; The Anti-­Masculine, Kim Light Gallery, Los Angeles, 1992; accommodate pornography with feminist intentions but without an overt didacticism Tri-­Sexual, TRI Gallery, Los Angeles, 1993; Body Count, White Columns, New York, or irony attached was still lacking. See, in particular, Laura Cottingham, How Many 1993; and Coming to Power, David Zwirner, New York, 1993. “Bad” Feminists Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb? (New York: Sixty Percent 10. Marilyn Minter, in conversation with the author, May 20, 2013. Solution, 1994). 11. “Art: Marilyn Minter,” New Yorker, May 11, 1992, p. 15. 29. Gaines, “Feminist Heterosexuality,” p. 383. Gaines was criticizing this position, 12. “Art,” New Yorker, May 4, 1992, p. 13. not affirming it. 13. Marilyn Minter, in “Marilyn Minter in Conversation with Mary Heilmann,” p. 20. 30. Faye Hirsch, “Marilyn Minter at Max Protetch,” Art in America, May 1995, p. 114. Along with Minter and Holly Hughes, members of the group included Ellen Cantor, 31. Marilyn Minter, quoted in Emilie Trice, “The Road to Harburg,” Paris Review Beth Jaker, Pat Hearn, Jan Avgikos, Deborah Drier, and Peggy Awash. The books blog The Daily, May 12, 2011, http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/05/12 they read and discussed included Carole S. Vance’s Pleasure and Danger: Exploring /the-­road-­to-­harburg/.

32 32. Carlo McCormick, “Fashion Crisis: Marilyn Minter,” Paper, March 2006, p. 18. 2014). On the controversy surrounding the 2013 censoring of Petra Collins’s pubic 33. Rosie Spencer, “Marilyn Minter,” Contemporary, April 2005, p. 18. hair in a photo she posted to Instagram, see Petra Collins, “Why Instagram Censored 34. Green Pink Caviar was subsequently bought by the pop singer Madonna, who My Body,” Huff Post Women, October 17, 2013, updated January 23, 2014, http:// screened it during the first number, “Candy Shop,” on her “Sticky & Sweet” concert www.huffingtonpost.com/petra-­collins/why-­instagram-­censored-­my-­body_b tour of 2008. _4118416.html. See also Kat Stoeffel, “9 Signs Bush Was Back in 2013,”New York 35. Christopher Bedford, “Marilyn Minter: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland,” (magazine) blog The Cut, December 17, 2013, http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/12/9 Artforum International, October 2010, p. 282. -­signs-­bush-­was-­back-­in-­2013.html. 36. “Playboy A–Z,” Playboy, May 2014. Among the artists included were Richard 38. On the treatment of female pubic hair in the history of Western art, which has its Prince, Richard Phillips, Juergen Teller, Jim Krantz, Henrik Purienne, Jeff Burton, and own weird history, see Frédérique Joseph-­Lowery and Charles Stuckey, “The Naked Hans Feurer. Truth,” Art in America, November 2013, pp. 112–21. 37. See Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012), and 39. Marilyn Minter, quoted in Joshua Shirkey, New Work: Marilyn Minter, exh. Cameron Diaz with Sandra Bark, The Body Book: The Law of Hunger, the Science of brochure, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2005. Strength, and Other Ways to Love Your Amazing Body (New York: HarperWave,

FIG. 20. Marilyn Minter. Rosary, 2006. C-print, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, Salon 94, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

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