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of rot from within. Robbins began the piece in the summer of 1991, while she was going through a divorce. She had spent time in Berlin with her husband in May and went back alone in August. She wanted the piece to address not only her personal upheaval but also the doll's Teutonic roots. (Mattel will no doubt be pleased to learn that Robbins has temporarily shelved her Barbies to work with another iconic female. She wrote the libretto for Hearing Voices, an opera about Joan of Arc, with music by composer Robert Maggio, which premiered at the University of West Chester in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in December 1993.)

Robbins is one of a number of young female artists who use the doll to critique women's societal roles. Susan Evans Grove, a photographer and a 1987 graduate of the New York School of Visual Arts, is another. In her Barbie work, shown at Manhattan's Fourth Street Photo Gallery in 1992, Grove takes Barbie out of the sanitized "America" that Mattel invented. She succumbs to the blights that afflict real women: homelessness, drug addiction, rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, menstruation, skin cancer— a glossary of female misfortunes. "It was definitely cathartic for me to make all these bad things happen to her," Grove told me. "The one that got 'skin cancer' actually was my Malibu Barbie. She developed mold, poor thing." Grove's anger stemmed from the fact that she herself was dismissed as a Barbie. "Because I was short and light and fair, people assumed I couldn't do anything," she said.

Julia Mandle, a performance artist and 1992 graduate of Williams College, understands Grove's irritation. Although she now sports a Susan Powter haircut, she was once very Barbie-esque, which provoked incidents that caused her to revise her look. The first occurred when she was a high-school senior visiting colleges and a male upperclassman helped her gain admission to a campus pub. " 'Do you have any female friends who look like me so I can borrow their I.D.?'" she asked him. "And he said, 'Oh, there are probably a thousand girls here who look like you.' "

With her long blond hair and perfect figure—she had been bulimic since adolescence—Mandle admitted that there probably were. But the remark "stuck with her," and contributed to her anger, which erupted in a 1992 performance piece called Christmas Consumption.

Mandle, a Washington, D.C., resident, mounted the piece at the height of the December shopping season on a Georgetown sidewalk. To set the stage, she filled a shopping cart with diet literature and encrusted it with Barbies and Barbie-like dolls. She chalked eating-disorder statistics on the pavement. Then she transformed herself into a grotesque parody of Barbie— donned a lime-green bikini, platinum wig, and flesh-tone body stocking— and performed calisthenics to "Go You Chicken Fat Go," an exercise anthem. "The top kept slipping down," she recalled, "and guys would sort of come across and look, because from across the street it looked like I was wearing nothing." Fox News filmed her and shoppers, seeing the wire cart and assuming she was homeless, gave her money. "One reaction I had was a boyfriend pulling his girlfriend over and saying, Tm trying to get her to exercise, too; what should I do?' He was completely oblivious," she said.

Over a decade earlier, SoHo-based photographer Ellen Brooks, who received her M.F.A. from UCLA in 1971, critiqued the glorification of women's helpmeet status with fashion dolls. Three of her pieces—Balancers, Guarded Future, and Silk Hat—appeared in the 1983 Whitney Biennial. "I wanted the doll to symbolize this kind of glamorous but secondary position," Brooks told me. In Guarded Future, a sinister-looking magician and his female assistant hover over a malignant, spherical egg. Revolvers, which was not included in the Whitney show, explores a similar power relationship: a seated male orders his female assistants— festooned with showgirl feathers— to balance, like seals, on spinning balls.

Brooks did not, in fact, work with Barbie, but with Kenner's Darci— applauded by