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By Root 697 0

tacks when it comes to representing Barbie. There are the reverential ones, who idealize the doll, and the angry ones, who use the doll for social commentary. Warhol was perhaps the first of the reverentials—the sardonic self-censorers—who managed to convey even greater vapidity in his portrait than exists in the doll's actual face. He was not happy with the image. "The portrait looks so bad, I don't like it," he recorded in his diary on the day of its unveiling. "The Mattel president said he couldn't wait to see it and I just cringed." Once an illustrator himself, Warhol and his scions are rooted in the tradition of commercial art; they include Mel Odom, whose pastel renderings of Barbie are as sleek as the design of a corporate annual report. But to Odom, the seductive surface is ironic. "I want to capture the soul of plastic," he told me.

Seattle photographer Barry Sturgill, whose work appears frequently in Barbie Bazaar, is also part of the reverential school. Widely regarded as the Irving Penn of Barbiedom, his photographs, characterized by dramatic, high-fashion lighting, are about female glamour. He makes the doll look like a top model from the 1950s. "I like the oldest face—the shelf-eyelash face," he explained. "She has a real 'don't mess with me, I'm Barbie' attitude. She was supposed to be a teenager and she looks like she's thirty-five."

The angry artwork is usually not so polished; nor does it critique the same things. Some artists use Barbie to comment on gender roles; some on colonialism and race; some on the consumer culture. Others, like Dean Brown and Charles Bell, use Barbie to comment on art history.

Maggie Robbins, a 1984 graduate of Yale University, is one of the angry artists. By day, she answers the telephone and edits copy at McCalVs magazine. By night, she hammers hundreds of nails into Barbie dolls. The effect of her hammering has been to transform the dolls into unsettling pieces of sculpture. How the dolls are displayed dramatically affects how the viewer interprets them. Mounted on a wall, they are images of female strength, curvaceous suns emitting potent metallic rays. On their backs, however, they suggest other things: victimization, vulnerability, impalement by what Virginia Woolf termed "the arid scimitar of the male."

It's hard not to view Robbins's work without asking: Is it art or therapy? But after seeing her Rotating Barbie in a group show at Richard Anderson, a SoHo gallery, in 1993, I had to vote for "art." The piece, which she made as a birthday present for her ex-husband, is a kinetic sculpture involving reassembled Barbie parts; when activated, the figure lurches about as if it had been battered and is trying to crawl from its assailant. I couldn't take my eyes off it; nor could anybody else. People talked about it outside the gallery—sighing with relief because the artist was a woman. Had it been executed by a man, it might have been read as an exhortation toward violence, instead of a critique. "It's about being angry about everybody wanting to look like a Barbie," Robbins told me. "It's definitely much more anti-the-society-that-brought-you-Barbie than it is antiwoman. Because Barbies aren't women."

Yet to observe Robbins's work is to be curious about the gender of the artist. Christopher Ashley, who directed Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey off Broadway, owns one of Robbins's Barbie Fetish series—the dolls impaled with hundreds of rusty nails. As Robbins tells it, his visitors become visibly less tense when they learn it is the product of female hands. But even Robbins isn't entirely at ease with the ferocity in her work. "Putting the nails into Barbie's face, into her eyes, was really, really hard to do," she said. "And the weird thing was: She didn't stop smiling."

When I visited Robbins in her Brooklyn studio, I found some of her Barbie mutilations so brutal I could scarcely look at them. In one, titled Berlin Barbie, Robbins has used carpet tacks to pin a blond doll to a pre-World War II German map. The glossy black tacks encrust the doll like a fungus; they suggest the eruption