Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [118]
Gender is also a concern of Bolinas, California, photographer Ken Botto, whose photographs of toys were included in the 1992 "Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort" show at New York's Museum of Modern Art. But unlike Brooks and her aesthetic successors, he doesn't see the early Barbies as constrained by their femininity. To him, they are powerful, dominatrix figures, sexually linked to Nazis and robots, looming portentously over impotent Kens. "The early Barbie had an attitude on her face; it wasn't blank," he told me. And his compositions, described by writer Alice Kahn as "Barbie Noir," were derived from the Helmut Newton S&M aesthetic that cropped up in late-seventies fashion photography. His current work focuses on ancient matriarchal power. Influenced by the writings of Camille Paglia, he has linked Neolithic goddess imagery to modern pornography to Barbie.
For Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Hollywood's invented "America"—the "America" of cowboy heroes vanquishing Indian villains—is a myth to be exploded and mocked. She does this in her 1991 piece, Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by U.S. Government. The work features "Barbie Plenty Horses" and "Ken Plenty Horses"—Mattel archetypes customized with names from the Flathead tribe to which she belongs. The doll's outfits tell the story of what happened to her tribe over a century ago, when the U.S. government forced it to move from its traditional home to a reservation several hundred miles away. Smith's humor is mordant: her doll accessories include "small pox suits," a by-product of infected blankets issued by the government, and one of several tribal headdresses "sold at Sotheby's today for thousands of dollars to white collectors seeking Romance in their lives."
Produced to coincide with the quincentennial of Columbus's arrival in America, or as Smith puts it, "five hundred years of tourism in this country," Paper Dolls sprang out of the "trickster" or "coyote" component in her personality. "I always think that you can get your message across to people with humor better than you can in politicizing it in a dour sort of way," she told me. She also felt that "telling a true story about the reality of my family" would be more affecting than compiling a "laundry list" of complaints.
Some artists have used the dolls to make personal rather than political statements. Roger Braimon, who received an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, used Ken and Ken-like dolls for a series of representational paintings stylistically evocative of the work of fidouard Manet. Although the dolls are fully dressed and their poses not sexually explicit, the paintings have a powerful homoerotic charge—in part because of a narrative element he repeated in the images, what he terms the "glossy decapitated portrait of a hunky male" that is packaged with Calvin Klein underwear.
"Coming out in my second year of graduate school was a big thing for me," Braimon told me. "I was comfortable with it—but not in my painting. So these Ken dolls were a perfect tool for me to express how I felt about male relationships. And sort of distance myself—by not actually painting a real person."
Photographer Dean Brown also makes a personal statement with Barbie, but it is about art history. He began using her as a model in 1980, while he was stationed with the United States Information Agency in Pakistan. Americans were not popular there at the time, and Barbie was less likely to smash his camera in a rage than were the people