Tunic Song for Karen Carpenter Museum of Modern Art
A Former Bimbo Becomes a Muse
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September 29, 1991
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She doesn't walk in beauty similar the night. She stands there, broad-eyed and frozen, like an animal caught in the headlights. Her smile is as ambiguous equally the Mona Lisa's. Her breasts accept been more talked virtually than Helga's. She is the very palette on which recent generations of children have worked out their fantasies. She has even been defendant of dissentious the psyches of the young.
She is Barbie, needing only 1 name, like Madonna or Elvis or Picasso.
Painted past Warhol, featured in film and hung in museums, Barbie has gradually broken out of Toyland and entered Artville. In the 1980'southward, artists began exploiting her as a cultural icon, and so as a feminist argument about cultural icons, and recently as night avatar of a menacing culture. Cheap, plastic, female and nude, Barbie combines elements of pop art, classicism and surrealism.
The director Todd Haynes used defaced Barbie dolls to act out his critically acclaimed 1987 cult documentary, "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story." "I was sitting in a cafe in New York hearing 1 of those Carpenter songs," said Mr. Haynes, "and realized you go through this miniature experience from laughing at its maudlin, constructed sentimentality to actually feeling sad. The dolls have a similar kind of ironic and sentimental interplay."
Concluding jump, the functioning artist Jeffrey Essmann dressed as Barbie for "Bogus Reality," his New York Theater Workshop programme. "It's a comedy/ horror piece," said Mr. Essmann. "Barbie struck me every bit this icon of American womanhood who seemed to take it all. For my Method player stuff, I bought a Superstar Barbie and good moving like her."
Other signs of an emergent Barbie esthetic include the novelist Rudy Rucker'south 1988 cyberpunk archetype, "Wetware," which features a character named Kendoll; the frequent use of the phrase "Barbie-inspired" in haute couture, and Barbie'south entry into the museum globe. In 1990, Barbie dolls were included in exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Several photographs using Barbie were on view at a contempo Oakland Museum exhibition, and more Barbie is displayed -- in deconstructed domestic tableaux -- in the exhibition "Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Condolement," which opened Thursday at the Museum of Modernistic Art (through December. 31).
Maybe toys really are u.s..
In America, where civilization is art, anything that survives becomes archival. Refrigerator magnets, lunch boxes, even handbags are exhibited. An original Barbie in its original box once sold for $two.99. Today information technology tin can command a price nearly 1,000 times that.
Since her introduction in 1959, Barbie has grown in stature even as her 11 3/4-inch frame remains inert. The date is pregnant for she arrived a fully adult nymphet, described at the New York Toy Fair that year by Mattel Toys as: "Barbie, a shapely teen-historic period mode model. She'due south grown upwards!" This would place her actual year of birth at effectually 1945, making Barbie the original baby-boomer. No wonder a generation of artists now achieving prominence have embraced her -- women who acted out their start stories with her, men who were denied the right to play with her.
Barbie's miniature life reflects what has been called the Buddenbrooks Cycle, in which the kickoff generation makes the coin, the second contributes to the civic practiced, and the 3rd becomes artists. From shirt-sleeves to berets in three generations.
For well-nigh of her first decade, the 60's, Barbie worked difficult, whether in her Balenciaga-manner suit as "Career Girl Barbie" or her "Barbi-Q" apron or her 1961 stewardess outfit. Throughout the seventy's, Barbie took upwardly the mission of social responsibility as she acquired new friends of color. The blond Malibu Era began to boss in the eighty's, as Barbie left the Eastward Coast piece of work ethic and entered the third phase of the Buddenbrooks Wheel, equally beach baby, rock vocalist and, ultimately, art object.
In 1987, a self-confessed Barbie bedlamite named BillyBoy published a large-scale art book called "Barbie: Her Life and Times" to explain, or at least exult in, the phenomenon. BillyBoy had been a style designer who worked for Mattel and helped organize an exhibition called "The Barbie Retrospective and New Theater of Fashion," which included 60 original Barbie creations from the globe's greatest couturiers. It opened with much fanfare in New York in 1986, later a European tour.
In his book, BillyBoy describes the event, with its $1.v one thousand thousand in Mattel-financed, multimedia, life-size Barbie environments and holograms. It was here that Andy Warhol unveiled his Barbie painting, described by BillyBoy equally a "clin d'oeil masterpiece of popular imagery." It is an uncynical portrait of a smiling young lady -- something yous would expect a hired artist to create at a Sweet 16 political party. Here also, Emilio Pucci and Geoffrey Beene and numerous "androgynous punk designers," forth with 1,300 other guests, partied until 3 A.M. to the music of Barbie and the Rockers.
This animated video presaged Barbie'southward current compact disk, "The Expect," which includes versions of pop hits like "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun."
BillyBoy helps us run across the significance of Barbie in fun and manner just sheds no light on her dark side. What is information technology that makes mothers Barbinoid? Some even forbid their daughters to play with the doll, fearing a contagious bimbosity or a mortiferous accident to a kid's self-esteem. The term Barbie doll has become generic, synonymous with vacuous femininity.
It is this nighttime side of the doll that has been exploited by artists working in various media. Mr. Haynes makes the singer Karen Carpenter's death from anorexia nervosa seem fifty-fifty more poignant and senseless by having a Barbie doll deed out her story. Although some saw the doll equally Mattel intended -- a sunny miniature of the successful and beautiful young woman -- others run into in her something smaller than life and ominous.
A leading practitioner of Barbie Noire is the California artist Ken Botto. Two of Mr. Botto's Barbie photographs were featured in "De-Persona" at the Oakland Museum. In one photo, "Untitled #2 (Red Chair)," a menacing contour of Barbie's torso, cut off at the head, stands over Ken lying on the floor. The photograph is lit so that Barbie casts a large shadow over him. In another, "Pablo's Other," a clown-masked Ken stands behind a nude Barbie on a wicker settee, with a tiny re-create of a Picasso cocky-portrait hanging on the wall. Both seem to pose the question: Is Ken Barbie's lover or victim?
In the catalogue accompanying the Oakland show, the curator Paul Tomidy wrote: "Ken Botto'due south photographic setups utilise toy figures in lush environments that shine with a disquieting brightness . . . the brittleness of cute and pretty is magnified . . . his doll figures convey an ominous threat. The deadpan irony elicits cultural questioning: What are the toys of our civilisation?"
Mr. Botto has a more mundane caption for how he began using the dolls in his art. "The lady I was with was into them. And they were cheap. You lot could go to the Goodwill and find them. I'd photograph them equally I establish them. It was similar an anthropological dig. Some had their clothes on and some didn't. Sometimes you'd notice them with their fingers chewed off. Some kids were mutilating them like voodoo objects. Other kids were cutting and dying their hair and punking them out.
"I saw her as a reflection on what we call back of femininity," he connected. "It's not flattering."
Mr. Botto saw that the relationship betwixt Barbie and Ken represented the modern male person's worst nightmare: Ken has go just another accessory in the Barbie dream business firm.
"Barbie is a dominatrix," Mr. Botto said. "Ken is a wimp. When I was looking through Faddy in the eighty's, I idea the models had a Barbie look. This is when S & M entered fashion. The strange men in the photographs e'er looked like props, and the women were flaunting their haute-couture, semi-bored looks. Like they're going to eat y'all alive."
Peter Galassi, curator of "Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Condolement" at the Modern, said the doll's artistic value is seen "as a kind of ubiquitous consumer detail found in the abode." In i photograph in the exhibition, Geoffrey Biddle presents a trivial girl with a Barbie between her legs. In Sage Sohier's "Berkeley, Calif., 1987" two masculine-looking women sit on a couch, one touching the other'southward meaning belly, as a little girl dances in the background and a Barbie doll lies on its confront at the foot of the meaning woman.
"I've taken a lot of pictures with Barbies," said Ms. Sohier. "They're wonderful in pictures -- symbolic of order'southward platonic of the perfect woman -- merely I've also photographed kids on the embankment decapitating them, then floating their heads in the water."
Said Mr. Galassi: "Barbie isn't just a doll. She suggests a type of behavior -- something a lot of artists, particularly women, accept wanted to question. There's a largely New York-based school that includes Laurie Simmons and Ellen Brooks that used dolls to criticize domestic stereotypes that dolls like Barbie represented. Simply what's interesting about Ken Botto is that he began every bit a collector, setting up dolls in little tableaux, and gradually his work has become darker, acquired a sharper bite without losing its sense of humour. The dolls are not only feminist props."
An entirely different view of Barbie as art is offered at the tiny Barbie Hall of Fame Museum in Palo Alto, Calif., where Evelyn Burkhalter has been collecting and arranging Barbie dolls every bit art objects since 1984. She now has more than xvi,000 dolls.
Imitating what fiddling girls accept been doing for 32 years, Mrs. Burkhalter periodically rearranges her dolls and their environments, creating new tableaux on which Barbie fantasies can be played out. "It's a slice of Americana," she explained. Visitors from France, State of israel, Arizona and Michigan have signed the invitee volume.
This is not a museum where people stand notwithstanding and quietly nod. Two grown women, Yuka Inami and Kayoko Suzuki, stand in the middle of the room pointing and shouting in Japanese at various dolls. A mother calls to her daughter, "Come see the hippie Barbies!" A tough-looking man says to his daughter, "I retrieve when I was little, there was a Ken doll that could motion his pollex. At to the lowest degree I think I think that."
In a display instance of noncommercial dolls, there are Barbies in nun garb and Kens in rabbi's clothing, specially fabricated by a religious scholar/Barbie creative person in Canada. In another corner are several blackness-leather-clad Barbies and Kens from private collections. This particular day a photographic camera crew comes in and begins setting up for a Telly show in the museum. It is a PBS chapter taping a segment for a show called "Kids' Clubhouse." The 8-year-old anchorgirl, Emily Rosencraft, holds a mitt microphone and does an on-site with Mrs. Burkhalter.
Q: When you were a kid did y'all know you were going to accept a museum? It's kind of weird.
A: When I was a child I was kind of weird and dolls were kind of expensive, so I got paper dolls out of the Sunday newspaper -- Blondie, Betsy McCall, Tillie the Toiler. . . .
And equally if looking through a telescope in reverse, the world getting tinier and tinier, this reporter watches the diminutive host interview Mrs. Burkhalter, asking many of the aforementioned questions the reporter had but asked. This miniature post-modern media moment is caught on tape equally the little Barbies stare blank-eyed out of their cases, their mysterious smiles, their evolving curls, their taut bodies never revealing whether this is a proficient affair or a bad thing.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/29/archives/a-onetime-bimbo-becomes-a-muse.html
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