Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [120]
Charles Bell's mural The Judgement of Paris also deals with death—and love. The famous scene, rendered by dozens of painters, depicts the first beauty contest, in which Paris, portrayed by a Ken doll, is forced to choose between Minerva, portrayed by a Barbie doll; Juno, portrayed by a Miss America doll; and Venus, portrayed by a Marilyn Monroe doll. Paris, of course, selects Venus—that is to say, love—and his choice leads to a megadisaster, the Trojan War.
The painting is different from Bell's other work—huge, photorealistic canvases of metal toys and pinball machines. And it is bittersweet; the myth he dramatizes is about opting for passion, even when it is fatal. "In the era of AIDS, I'm overwhelmed by the temporariness of life," Bell told me. "In the context of discovering our own mortality, things that had seemed important become less important. Eventually human kindness—and love—are the only things that really endure."
If Mattel has its way, however, corporate control of its icon will endure. A mere note from the toy company squelched The Barbie Project, an unauthorized theater piece that dramatized Mattel's corporate history and how children play with the doll, which was produced in 1980 at the Theater for the New City on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The show's director, Lauren Versel, who had initially petitioned Mattel for permission to film a documentary, didn't think her vision would ever be compatible with the company's.
Mattel has frozen other projects—Robin Swicord's musical comes to mind—but with visual art, its current tack seems to involve sponsoring authorized shows. In 1994, Mattel Germany opened a display of corporate-approved Barbie art in Berlin. Exhibited at the Werkbund-Archiv in the Martin-Gropius Bau (a gallery with a history of interest in commercial design), the pieces tended to be flashy but empty. Most involved clothing Barbie in exotic outfits. Yet there were a handful of images that made one look twice, and that might have raised Jesse Helms's blood pressure. These included depictions of lesbianism (after commenting in the exhibition catalogue that Barbie, at thirty-five, was "at last grown-up," artist Elke Martensen showed her in a leather helmet caressing the bare breast of another Barbie), fetishism (artist Holger Scheibe constructed an image of a sweaty, bare-shouldered adult male directing his puckered lips toward a Barbie clutched in his fist), and bestiality (artist Peter Engelhart placed Barbie in a "lovematch" with King Kong). And for crude sexual puns and sick-making imagery, Frank Lindow's Barbie, ich hah dich zum Fressen gem! (Barbie, I would like to eat you!) stood out: It featured blond Barbie and Asian brunette Kira "pickled" like fetuses in mason jars. But with these exceptions, the overall effect was bland.
American photographer David Levinthal was not included in the German show, but he is among the artists participating in Mattel's upcoming official coffee-table book—and the difference between the images he produced for that project and the ones he did for himself says much about the problems of working with corporate-controlled icons.
Levinthal is perhaps best known for Hitler Moves East, a book collaboration with Garry Trudeau that he began while at Yale Art School, from which he received an M.F.A. in 1972. In it, he photographs toy soldiers so that they look like real ones, ominously charting the course of the Second World War. His subsequent work has also pushed boundaries. In 1991, he executed a series called Desire, made up of enlarged Polaroids of miniature Japanese dolls that depicted Caucasian women in bondage. In soft focus, their surface was beguiling and seductive, but their content was disturbing— particularly to women. "I wanted people to look at these images, which I thought were very beautiful, and sort of halfway think, 'Wait a minute, I'm looking at an image of a woman tied in a chair, there's something wrong.'''
In graduate school, Levinthal began investigating sensitive sexual themes with Barbie and G.I. Joe. "I did a sort