Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [113]
This outbreak of gender trouble was no accident. A group calling itself the Barbie Liberation Organization revealed that it had surgically swapped hundreds of Barbie talk mechanisms with those of G.I. Joe. Loosely organized by a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego, the BLO claimed to be made up of artists, professionals, and concerned parents across the country. "One of our members is eighty-seven years old," a BLO spokesperson told me. "And she helped when we were brainstorming the switch. She didn't have that much of a problem with the Barbies. But she is a Hungarian Jew who had nearly all her family killed in World War Two. So she had a very strong reaction against the war toys."
Befuddled consumers brought the doctored dolls to the attention of the press, which, in the boring week between Christmas and New Year's, lavished attention. Not enough to justify the BLO's $9,000 out-of-pocket expenses perhaps, but quite a bit. Enough to make Mattel cross, particularly two weeks later when its big winter media event—the presentation by Jill Barad of a $500,000 donation to the South Bronx Children's Health Center, founded by singer Paul Simon—was upstaged by natural disasters. Part of Mattel's plan to contribute $1 million to various children's health clinics in 1994, the philanthropic photo opportunity had been scheduled for January 18—the day after Los Angeles was hit by a major earthquake and New York City paralyzed by a winter storm.
The BLO calls its surgery "political art," a critique of gender stereotypes in toys. Mattel calls it "product tampering," which, in fact, it is. The disparity between these perspectives is why the use of Barbie by artists will never be a simple affair.
There are many doors through which one could enter a discussion of Barbie in visual art. One could begin by dropping names—mentioning Andy Warhol's 1986 portrait of the doll or photorealist Charles Bell's wall-sized Judgement of Paris, also from 1986, which featured Barbie, Ken, and G.I. Joe. One might talk about how in the early eighties, photographer Ellen Brooks used fashion dolls to comment on gender roles, and that three of those photos were included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1983 Biennial. Or one could cite Scottish sculptor David Mach, who used hundreds of Barbies to critique consumer capitalism in a piece called Off the Beaten Track. Installed in 1988 at the University of California at Los Angeles's Wight Art Gallery, it involved a horde of blond, plastic caryatids propping up a giant shipping container—literally "supporting" the consumer economy.
Another door would lead one through the history of doll images in art. Freud's essay on the uncanny would, of course, reappear; one would talk about the creepiness of lifelike dolls and automata. One would mention, among others, German Surrealist Hans Bellmer, who in the 1930s photographed parts of female mannequins assembled in impossible configurations— legs sprouting where arms should be—as well as nude females wrapped with string to create the effect of misassembled joints. One would move the story to the present with one of Bellmer's aesthetic heirs—Cindy Sherman—whose deliberately nauseating photos of genital prostheses in the 1993 Whitney Biennial were appropriately placed near an installation by another artist that featured a "puddle" of rubber throw-up.
These are not, however, the doors that interest me. Unlike icons such as Elvis and Marilyn, Barbie is a corporate property. And what distinguishes much of the best art using Barbie is that it has had to