| Charlie White’s work explores the overlap of the liminal space of adolescence and American consumer culture, and implies that this world cuts to the cultural core of a society shaped by capitalist greed. His latest photographic and video work focuses largely on the life of the teenage American girl, and grapples with pop culture (or lack thereof) through his lens. Through animated video, photographs, and a short film, American Minor, White paints a depressing picture of the young American female’s life, one in which the acquisition of products is more exciting than their eventual use or possession, and where there is a void of personality and substance without the guidance of media, mall, or advertising. |  |
Éva Pelczer
Charlie White’s work explores the overlap of the liminal space of adolescence and American consumer culture, and implies that this world cuts to the cultural core of a society shaped by capitalist greed. His latest photographic and video work focuses largely on the life of the teenage American girl, and grapples with pop culture (or lack thereof) through his lens. Through animated video, photographs, and a short film, American Minor, White paints a depressing picture of the young American female’s life, one in which the acquisition of products is more exciting than their eventual use or possession, and where there is a void of personality and substance without the guidance of media, mall, or advertising. He doesn’t shy away from the Lolita appeal of the subject, either, acknowledging that casual eroticism has become a mainstay of teenage life, though in a way that mimics the manufactured sexiness of product advertisements. These attitudes filter through American society, and play out in the tenets of mainstream culture—in the media, in advertising, in pop songs, in pornography, in blockbuster movies. White’s work confronts head-on the conflation of American social identity and image with its commodification, right at the source: those malleable adolescent years in which Americans learn to shop.
White has long appropriated the visual language of mainstream pop culture in his work. His early Femalien (1996) was a pop-art tribute to pornography involving a half-alien, half-human woman, while his photography exhibition In a Matter of Days three years later portrayed monsters invading L.A., in the style of a B-list horror movie. Understanding Joshua (2001), another photographic series, is a more overt examination of the individual’s sense of self within his/her society—again, a non-human form is the subject of the work, a silly humanoid figure serving as a manifestation of self-doubt amidst the scenes and people around him.
The photographic series Everything Is American (2006) is the first of White’s work that specifically deals with American culture. The photos are tied together by the subject of violence in subtle form, but it is really with The Girl Series (2008) that White hits his stride, by honing his focus to the teenage American female. The series includes the animated short looped film, OMG BFF LOL, in which two girls who have absorbed every hollow message of commodified American femininity go to the mall, hang out at home, and cry in the bathroom. Another component is the short film American Minor, which stars an anonymous, upper-middle-class blonde teenager engaged in various mundane activities around her house. The perfection of everything external—the girl’s surroundings and looks—is oppressive. It’s as if the products have won, and the humanity of a dwelling and its inhabitant has been erased.
The strength of White’s work is the vaguely fetishistic lens through which he has chosen to examine the commodification of adolescence. His work is compelling partly because it involves looking at, judging, and finding the titillating, budding sexuality of young women. This sexuality, by social standards, is supposed to go unnoticed (taboo!) unless it is selling product, which makes its attractiveness acceptable. White’s characters fully embody this paradox; by embracing the consumer culture that caters to them, they are reduced to robotic, cutesy girl-oids who have traded their own opinions and interests for ones prescribed for them by brands. They want things, but only things they can buy, and sexiness is reduced to just one more potential acquisition, eventually benefiting not themselves but the people who look at them. White isn’t saying girls are like this, necessarily—but that they could be, or that they are asked to be, a situation that acts as a bellwether for how much of American culture is becoming just something to be packaged, bought, and sold.
