Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [115]
Money also plays a part in "fair use." If an artist issues a series of images using a corporate icon exclusively to make a buck, a corporation may have grounds for a case. But when an artist cites an icon in a one-of-a-kind work from which he or she will realize scant profit, it may not be in the company's interest to take the artist to court. Copyright law, however, encourages corporations to fire off cease-and-desist letters at the slightest provocation. "If a company doesn't go after people that it feels are missing its icon, it's to the company's disadvantage," said Deirdre Evans-Prichard, curator of the Language of Objects project at the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum, who has written on art and copyright issues. "In a major court case, it would need to produce a file to show that it's been actively protecting its image."
No one could accuse Mattel of laxity in guarding its icons. Not wishing its trademarked dolls associated with Superstar, it joined A & M Records in sending threatening letters to Todd Haynes. More recently, it silenced Barbara Bell, an editor of the New Age magazine Common Ground, who claimed to channel Barbie, "the polyethylene essence who is 700 million teaching entities." She now channels "a generic eleven-and-a-half-inch plastic essence." Yet Mattel's behavior toward artists can also be baffling and unpredictable. It contributed the dolls for David Mach's Off the Beaten Track, a scorching piece that exposed it and its icons to ridicule.
Barbie has interested artists virtually since her inception. Second-generation abstract expressionist Grace Hartigan was perhaps the first significant painter to incorporate Barbie imagery in her work. Her 1964 painting Barbie was inspired by a Life magazine article on the doll and its $136 wardrobe. "When I was a little girl, I had 'Patsy Ann,' a doll that was about my age," Hartigan told me. "But here you had this doll with boobs and this castrated man and a wedding gown, and I just thought: 'That's our society.' I try to declaw the terribleness of popular culture and turn it into beauty or meaning. And I feel that I have won—I've triumphed over it. It's witchcraft in a way. The triumph of this is that it's a terrific painting. I've used the image, which I think is debasing to women, and I've turned it against itself and made it powerful."
With Hartigan's guidance—and the illustrated Life article in front of me— I managed to locate the representational elements in her painting: a pink face in the upper-right-hand corner; a floor-length evening dress in the left foreground; a lone eye in the upper-left-hand corner; and in the center, a single disembodied breast. "The final painting comes from the original imagery," she explained. "It's just highly abstracted."
Tomi Ungerer, who is perhaps best known for his whimsical children's book illustrations, also gravitated toward the doll in the early sixties—not, however, producing objects for kids. Ungerer decapitated and dismembered the dolls, reassembling them—a la Hans Bellmer—in constructions with sadomasochistic and coprophiliac themes. Perhaps inspired by Freud's Little Hans and his investigations of doll "genitalia," one sculpture features a female torso hacked between its legs with a saw. Some constructions consist only of the doll's legs in spike-heeled shoes; in others, tubes link the doll's genital orifices with its mouth. Ungerer's "erotic doll sculptures" are now housed in the permanent collection of his work in the Musee de la Ville in Strasbourg, France.
By the late seventies and early eighties, when the first generation of Barbie owners had grown up, unauthorized Barbie art began to proliferate. Independent artists have taken essentially two