Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [119]
In addition to Brown's wit, the first thing that strikes the viewer is how far the 1950s ideal of female beauty, which Barbie embodies, deviates from the classical ideal—not to mention from Vitruvian mathematical standards of human proportion. No way is that doll's foot one-sixth of her height; at just under an inch, it is closer to one-twelfth. The second is the extent to which Barbie is a natural model for works that derive their erotic energy from the display of breasts: Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Manet's Olympia, and the Venus de Milo.
Painted by Eugene Delacroix, whom Anne Hollander termed "the greatest Romantic expositor of complex passion through mammary exposure," the original Liberty's fascination owes much to "her gloriously lighted bare breasts." Brown's Liberty does not thrust her flag forward as Liberty does in the Delacroix version. She demurely picks her way over a sprawled G.I. Joe. She is above the battle, not within it; the vacuity of her expression precludes passionate engagement. She is a distant Liberty for a distant video-game war—and, significantly, the photograph is now in the collection of a female reporter to whom some Iraqi soldiers had surrendered during the ultimate video skirmish, the Persian Gulf War.
The Venus de Milo is another sculpture in which breasts are strongly eroticized, though Brown's version is more unnerving than voluptuous. Barbie is way too skinny to pass muster as a Greek goddess; she looks as if she has been placed on a rack and stretched. Nor does Barbie's legginess work for her. Draped female legs, like those of the original Venus, were considered beautiful in classical art; exposed ones, by contrast, connoted not beauty but strength, and were found on depictions of Artemis, a hunter and warrior.
Brown worked hard to transform Barbie into Venus; he chopped off her hair, wrenched off her arms, and bundled her legs in "a man's big white handkerchief" slathered with Elmer's glue. From clay he fashioned arm shards, nipples, and a navel; then he covered his handiwork with white paint. None of these affectations, however, diminished the perkiness of her expression or, for that matter, of her breasts.
In terms of body type, Barbie was far more suited as a stand-in for Manet's Olympia. Manet had painted a contemporary courtesan; in Brown's version, Barbie has never looked tartier—every bit a descendant of the sleazy Bild Lilli. By shrewdly posing his Olympia with crossed legs, Manet managed to avoid the issue of depicting pubic hair, eliminating what would have been a dramatic contrast between a human model and Barbie. And of course because Brown has used a current edition of the doll, his Olympia fixes the observer with the dead-on stare that so flustered viewers of Manet's original.
Now retired and living in suburban Maryland, Brown is currently working on "the original women's lib thing," Judith with the head of Holofernes, for which he bought a detached Ken head at a Barbie convention in 1987. Far from wishing to extirpate her eleven-and-a-half-inch rival, Brown's wife is trying to dissuade Brown from his latest venture: Barbie's funeral. "I've got a casket all made, and my wife doesn't want me to do it," he complained. "She doesn't like the idea of Barbie dying." But having given Barbie a navel—and, by implication, mortality—Brown has made the macabre scene logically inevitable.
(Photographer Felicia Rosshandler, by contrast, has had no inhibitions about killing Barbie and her kind; her chilling Twilight of the Gods features a close-up of an arched fashion-doll foot, tagged as if it were on a slab in a morgue. "To me, Barbie dies when she puts on her wedding dress," Rosshandler said. "She never ages; she never