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Visual Arts

Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, Brooklyn Museum — ‘tender and tough’

Part pop artist, part conceptualist, she’s also a feminist with a soft spot for pornography

‘Blue Poles’ (2007) © Salon 94/Regen Projects

NOVEMBER 25, 2016 by: Ariella Budick

“You can make pictures of anything as long as you make them beautiful,” the artist MarilynMinter has said. “I’m making images of things that might be disgusting even, like strings of spit,but I’m trying to make them gorgeous.” That attraction/repulsion dynamic energises the hypnoticretrospective of Minter’s paintings and photographs now at the Brooklyn Museum. Sexy lips partto disgorge glistening streams of something vile, pimples rise majestically to reddened peaks andall this gut-churning magnificence is rendered in glowing, sensuous colours. You’ll want to lookaway, but all you can do is watch and squirm.

The show’s title, Pretty/Dirty, is perfect for an artist who renders filth with such bravado.Minter’s affinity for the beautifully bad has left art history’s canon-makers confused. Part pop

artist, part conceptualist, she’s also an assertive feminist with a soft spot for pornography,advertising and fashion. She calls her turf “the pathology of glamour”, and you can tell she lovesits sordid crannies even more than its sunlit heights.

The show opens with a series of photographic portraits Minter shot of her mother in 1969, whenshe was still an art student. Like her hero, Diane Arbus, Minter tracks her prey across its hometerrain, taking advantage of domestic ease to catch her off guard. Again and again, she finds hersubject making feeble attempts to look presentable. There’s “Mom” lounging in a négligée, “Mom”lying in bed, smoking theatrically, or lacquering her face with make-up. Dozens of mirrors echothe woman’s infinite emptiness, amplifying her limitless narcissism.

‘Soiled’ (2000) © Jenny Antill

Minter learned from Arbus how tiny details can accrue into a pageant of despair. The olderwoman in bed is encircled by barbarous apparatus of beauty: flasks of hair and eyebrow dye, blowdriers, hairbrushes, creams, lotions and, of course, mirrors. “She was a beautiful woman. She wasalways grooming herself,” Minter has said. “She had me late, at 40. By the time I was payingattention, everything was all wrong, off somehow. She would wear these acrylic nails and therewould be fungi underneath.” It takes a special kind of honesty — or is it cruelty? — to study yourmother and detect a whiff of the senior stars Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, playing out theircampy endgame in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.

The black-and-white photos horrified Minter’s art school classmates, and she stashed them awayuntil the mid 1990s. But that early experiment in clarity distilled the power of what Arbus called

“the flaw,” and it shaped her subsequent career. Later, she adapted Pop Art’s dot screens to herown gothic ends. In “Little Girls #1” (1986), a three-part set of variations on the theme offunhouse mirrors, she focuses on deformed reflections rather than the preening original. Thepretty creature in her print dress looks at herself and sees an anthology of grotesques. If Minter’s“Mom” pictures were portraits of self-delusion, these are the opposite, a commentary on society’smonster-making lens. Females can’t escape the distorting mirror of culture.

Minter takes disguise as a challenge. She picks at the sutures where the mask of femininity isattached to the skin. In “Pit” (2004), a disturbingly intimate view of a shaved armpit, a shock ofstubble looks like a seam of thread sewing up a wound. “Clip” (2005) homes in on the spot whereplastic and metal dig into soft scalp. “Blue Poles” (2007), a close-up of two heavily shadowedeyes, pinpoints the junction of freckle, pustule and hairy brow, all blanketed by the sheen ofglitter and sweat. In retrospect, this vignette of hopeless self-adornment reads like a dispatchfrom reality’s last days. Soon after, technology gave everyone the tools to cleanse blemishes fromtheir self-portraits, making the appearance of imperfection all but obsolete.

Marilyn Minter in her studio in 2015 © Nadya Wasylko

Step in close to “Blue Poles” and the painting dissolves into a wild festival of splodges and dripsreminiscent of Jackson Pollock. Move away, and its melancholy becomes apparent, beforesplintering again into kaleidoscopic decoration. Minter performs a skilful balancing act, lettingthe eye slip back and forth between abstraction and pitiless realism, between machoexpressionism and the shiny surfaces of Pop. She coats her metal canvases with enamel,toughening them into shellacked vehicles for emotion. Her paintings are at once tender andtough.

Perhaps because she indulges in irony, Minter has been censured by other women for insufficientfeminism. Some writers have considered her hand-painted pornography from the 1980s and

1990s too objectifying, too male. But that criticism misses the undercurrent of rage that pulsesbeneath her work’s glossy crust. Yes, she treats human beings as anonymous assemblages of skinand flesh, but she does it with defiant pride. You can almost hear the implicit challenge: Exploitthis!

The show’s most chilling moment is the video “Smash” (2014), which stars a pair of monumentalfeet dancing in high-heeled sandals. The atmosphere is high-glam fashion shoot: slow-motiondrama, woozy music and a palette of bloodless silver punctuated by scarlet toenails andkaleidoscopic bangles. Soon, though, fury bubbles up. Steps become stomps, causing anklebaubles to bust off. The foot strains against its straps, and the silvery spray of water starts to looka like viscous puddle. Finally, Minter weaponizes her tormenting footwear: one shoe swingstowards the camera and shatters glass we didn’t know was there. The idol metamorphoses into anasty woman, and the world had better watch out.

A still from ‘Smash’ (2014) © Salon 94/Regen Projects

To April 2, brooklynmuseum.org (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org)

Salon 94 Exhibition

Marilyn Minter is currently exhibiting at New York commercial gallery Salon 94. The series ofintimate portraits of women’s pubic hair began life as a rejected Playboy editorial.

salon94.com (http://www.salon94.com), to December 22

Photographs: Salon 94/Regen Projects; Nadya Wasylko

Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more todistribute to others. © The Financial Times Ltd.

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