Marilyn Minter: Billboards, Chelsea, NYC, March 2006
Jovana Stokic
Ubiquitous as it is today, an obsession with glamour has produced multifaceted reflections in contemporary art production. Hence this year’s Whitney Biennial catalogue cover adorned with Marilyn Minter’s luscious painting–art that specifically thematizes this phenomenon. In her paintings, Minter uses a highly polished photorealist technique that evokes commercial fashion photography, a medium she doubles in. Her fashion magazine spreads that consist of close-ups of shoes are a tour-de-force of fetishization. The most lavish, gem-encrusted designer shoes are shown on well-pedicured delicate feet, which are stepping in puddles of clear water. But then, in her work commissioned by Creative Time–three photographs of designer shoes for the billboards installed in Chelsea–she substitutes clear for dirty water, thus creating representations entitled Shit-Kicker, Splish, Splash and Run, and Mud Bath. In this seemingly simple transmutation (clear water to dirty mud) lies Minter’s subversion.
Minter is interested in precisely tracing where the fiction of glamorized representation breaks off–how close we need to get to the shiny surface in order to see the cracks in a perfect(ed) image. The artist explains her interest in going beyond perfect image of the body: "I am interested in what’s real, like the sock line you get when you pull down your sock." Literally, by walking through the city, shoes get dirty, no matter how expensive they are.
Norman Bryson has aptly posited that in glamorous fashion photography all aspects of building an image serve to create "visual fascination, and its tendency is to stun and mesmerize its viewer." For Bryson, glamorous representation forecloses the space of reflection or criticism–I would argue, however, that Minter uses its power to counter this fallibility. Proscribed as a shiny surface–a blind spot–glamour, and by implication female narcissism, was frowned upon by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s. Minter’s representations are embedded in today’s climate, in which many female artists seem to re-discover what Marina Abramovic has recently described as "the desire for glamour." As such different artists as Abramovic and Sylvie Fleury are proving so compellingly, glamorous representations can be seductive and critical at the same time. Minter successfully mimics the allure and dazzling power of commercial fashion photography to simultaneously draw attention to and reveal the other side of glamorous representation. The artist chooses to depict the most expensive high heels on Earth today–the epitome of the ultimate consumerist fetish (related specifically to female consumerism)–only to debase them by soaking them in mud. Then, she erects these larger than life images way above our heads, on billboards in Chelsea. The context in which these works are presented to public view is not devoid of irony–it recognizes seductive power of glamour and gives us opportunity to indulge in it, but at the same time makes us aware of our own compliance.
Again, a question can be raised in terms of Minter’s critical engagement (against commodification in representation) and our passivity: Are we just mesmerized with the glamorous vision of the shoes, or is Minter opening up a site of resistance? Moreover, are we just smugly pleased with ourselves for recognizing her subtle subversion that still lets us indulge in the guilty pleasure of shoes: mediated here via a blown-up image of them. In Chelsea, a place where art market reigns, these billboards managed to have it both ways–to dazzle viewers via a glamorous image of commodity and to pose a slight barrier to the easy flow of art as commodity.
