Eξερευνώντας την "όμορφη και τη βρόμικη" πλευρά του ηδονισμού
ΜΕΡΙΛΙΝ ΜΙΝΤΕΡ
Η λαμπερή αλλά και η απατηλή γοητεία των σωματικών ηδονών
“The power of Minter’s work is that it always resonates on two
levels: surface and depth. She is keenly aware of the power of the image
to entice and titillate, but she never lets us stop with just those
reactions,” states OCMA Director and CEO Todd Smith. “She always makes
us dig deeper into the social and personal underpinnings of why we
experience the luscious imagery the way we do.”
From the
beginning of her career, Minter has been embroiled in controversies over
the relationship of her art to feminism, fashion, and celebrity. As an
artist interested in these vexed cultural intersections has grown, her
work has risked looking as effortless as a mirror held up to the most
supercilious aspects of today’s “bling” lifestyle. Yet Minter’s work is
not merely a mirror of our culture. This exhibition provides, for the
first time, a critical evaluation of her practice as an astute
interpretation of our deepest impulses, compulsions, and fantasies.
Marilyn
Minter: Pretty/Dirty includes the artist’s earliest artworks, a
startling photo series titled Coral Ridge Towers. While still in school,
the young Minter shot one roll of film of her mother, a drug addled,
darkly glamorous woman who was “mom” to the artist. Completed in 1969
when Minter was 21, the works were not shown until decades later by
Linda Yablonsky, a lifelong friend of Minter’s who used them as
background images for a reading program. The series’ clear relationship
to the artist’s later themes of degraded beauty has made these
photographs into classics of the Diane Arbus-like genre. In Pretty/Dirty
they are put back into their proper historical sequence as her earliest
extant work.
“These works, like the others from this period,
fused a feminist critique of the construction of gender and femininity
with other postmodernist hallmarks of the 1980s, including the
appropriation of mass-media imagery translated in a cool, detached,
style of painting,” says Elissa Auther, co-curator of the exhibition.
In
every decade, Minter offers a smart woman’s critical look at issues
that are otherwise presented by men for female consumption. The fashion
world is full of male fashion house owners, designers, and photographers
who fabricate images of femininity. Rather than a blatantly naive
critique of fashion, Minter shows the dual nature and slight
imperfections of herself and her fellow women, finding that true allure
comes from the sensuality of imperfections. In one of her best-known
paintings, Blue Poles (2007), Minter takes what is clearly a beautiful
face and reveals flaws: a pimple, errant eyebrow hairs, and freckles. In
real life these so called flaws make us human, attractive, and
loveable, but in the beauty industry these imperfections are eradicated.
In the age of Photoshop, where things such as freckles disappear from
fashion and entertainment magazines, this painting can be understood as
marking a final celebration of the attractiveness of the un-retouched
human face.
Minter’s recurring investigation of how the fashion
industry expertly creates and manipulates desire led her to depict in
many of her paintings an image of gorgeous accessories looking less than
glamorous. In Dirty Heel (2008), viewers are treated to a close up of a
woman’s dirty heel accessorized by an expensive looking pink-lined
high-heeled shoe. In her 2014 video Smash, large female feet in
bejeweled high-heeled shoes appear to be having a hell of a
time—dancing, sliding across the floor, and smashing glass—all in
Minter’s signature silver liquid. As we become aware of the subject’s
tattooed swollen feet, which seem to convey a wealth of experience,
viewers might at first feel a wave of aversion, but the joy of her
smashing time is impossible to resist.
The exhibition explores
in detail the myriad image choices Minter has made as a painter and
photographer, the evolution of her style and technique, and her mode of
production, including her organization of an unusual studio of
assistants trained to create hyper-real, sometimes dizzyingly painted
surfaces. Pretty/Dirty illustrates Minter’s progress from a curious
youth looking critically at the domestic landscape before her to the
media-savvy cultural producer whose images simultaneously define and
critique our times.
For more info on Eric Minh Swenson visit his website at thuvanarts.com. His art films can be seen at
thuvanarts.com/take1
Eric
Minh Swenson also covers the international art scene and his writings
and photo essays can be seen at Huffington Post Arts : http://m.huffpost.com/us/author/eric-...
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