MARILYN
MINTER BIOGRAPHY:
Born 1948,
Shreveport,
Louisiana; lives in
New York, New York
Marilyn Minter has been considering
representations and
ramifications of
glamour for the last
thirty years, but it
is worth considering
just what is
connoted by the
word. Minter, it
seems, defines this
concept by the book,
or at least
intuitively leans
toward its
etymological truth,
which aligns glamour
with magic spells
and illusory
attractiveness—never
with fictional ideas
that propose glamour
as some kind of
natural condition.
All of which is to
say that Minter has
been plumbing the
depths of (al)chemical
beauty (and its
breakdowns) for a
very long time.
In one of her
earliest series of
work, a group of
black-and-white
photographs from the
late 1960s, Minter
went right to the
source—her own
mother. Snapping
pictures of her
aging,
substance-abusing,
bedridden parent,
Minter captured the
queasy day-to-day
undoings and
recastings of
physical appearance.
Obsessed with tasks
of pruning and
priming, Minter’s
mother, clad in
nightgown and
propped with
pillows, refused to
let even a stray
eyebrow lay seed.
The photographs, at
once gorgeous and
grotesque, made
nearly everyone who
saw them so
uncomfortable that
the artist hid them
away in a drawer for
the next three
decades.
In conjunction with
her practice of
photography, Minter
makes paintings
(enamel on metal),
showing a special
interest in
Photo-Realist
methods of
representation.
Culling imagery from
cooking shows, porn
videos, and beauty
advertisements, the
artist posits a
visual continuity
between seemingly
disjunctive sensual
experiences. By
intentionally
conflating the
pleasures of cuisine
and cunnilingus,
Minter renders
straightforward yet
ambiguous images
that shore up the
constructed nature
of their meanings.
In Minter’s hands, a
lobster tail is apt
to become infinitely
sexier than a penis,
and the
accoutrements of
beauty will never
ensure perfection.
In recent works, she
paints
hyperrealistic
images that look
more photographic
than photographs,
and snaps
photographs that
look utterly
painterly. Choosing
models whose race
and gender are open
to interpretation,
Minter hones in
(literally and
figuratively) on the
imperfect trappings
of high couture in
large-scale color
photographs and
paintings that at
once magnify,
fetishize, and
abject their
subjects. Plumped,
rouge-stained lips
drip with slimy egg
yolk; the glittered
eye of a model is
accompanied by a
peach-fuzzed face;
the wearer of
studded Christian
Dior pumps has
apparently been
doused in mud, and
dirt infiltrates
every crease of her
perfectly manicured
feet. The
ambivalence in
Minter’s works does
not leave us any
less seduced by
them: we simply have
a harder time
cleaning up and
simplifying the true
nature of our much
more complicated
desires. JB
JM
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Courtesy:
whitney.org