The Sophisticated Legacy of Barbie in Artwork

Director Greta Gerwig’s extremely anticipated Barbie (2023) formally hit theaters at this time, July 21. Toy producer Mattel spent an estimated $145 million to make the film and $100 million to promote it, and Barbie may gross as a lot as $500 million — all whereas actors and screenwriters proceed their extended strike for higher pay and labor circumstances.

Hollywood’s therapy of its employees is contrasted by the optimistic — and really pink — cultural second surrounding Mattel’s new movie, largely spurred by the film’s in depth advertising marketing campaign: Excited followers are throwing Barbie-themed events and the Web is flooded with memes. However lengthy earlier than Gerwig took on Barbie, visible artists have been incorporating, critiquing, and reimagining the doll to query gender roles, physique expectations, and double requirements surrounding feminine sexuality.

Barbie is endlessly 19, her molded plastic face defending her from the forces of gravity and slowing collagen manufacturing. In a 1994 work titled “Aged Barbie,” artist Nancy Burson used a so-called “getting older machine” — which she helped create — to rack up the years on the doll’s face. She made the Polaroid Spectra {photograph} on fee for a ebook titled The Art of Barbie (1994). Burson’s picture was rejected.

“They have been horrified,” the artist informed Hyperallergic. “One of many main Mattel executives was like, ‘No, that is by no means taking place.’” In an ironic twist, Burson’s age machine really performed good with Barbie. The doll maintains her expertly executed eyeliner. Her completely plucked eyebrows level into two properly skeptical arches. She has smile traces and crow’s toes as nicely, common traces of a life nicely lived.

The rejection wasn’t the primary time Mattel disapproved of an artist’s use of Barbie’s picture. In 1999, the corporate sued artist Tom Forsythe over his 78-photograph sequence displaying the doll in and round family home equipment, including in a fondue pot and wrapped in tortillas and lined with salsa in a casserole dish for “Barbie Enchiladas” (1997). The case hinged on the query of whether or not Forsythe’s pictures constituted truthful use, as Barbie and her picture have been being invoked within the service of cultural critique.

“I assumed the photographs wanted one thing that basically stated ‘crass consumerism,’ and to me, that’s Barbie,” Forsythe informed the New York Times in 2004. In the end, the salsa-slathered Barbies prevailed: The culinary Barbies have been unlikely to comprise a “substitute for merchandise in Mattel’s markets or the markets of Mattel’s licensees,” the courtroom dominated, and Mattel was ordered to pay $1.8 million within the artist’s authorized charges.

In 2005, curator Leonie Bradbury organized a Barbie present on the Montserrat Faculty of Artwork in Massachusetts that included a number of of Forsythe’s photographs. “A part of why I used to be fascinated by Barbie as artwork is that till 2001, when the Utah photographer Tom Forsythe gained the lawsuit Mattell had introduced in opposition to him, one of these artwork work was thought of unlawful, which to me was an intriguing idea,” Bradbury informed Hyperallergic. The case had opened a authorized door for artists to make use of Barbie as an emblem for cultural critique.

In her 2004 work “Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie,” artist Ghada Amer printed two fits with the phrases that make up the set up’s title. The outfits are each onesies — clothes that ought to exist with out gender, as there are not any skirts, heels, or swimsuit jackets to reference conventional ladies’s and males’s clothes. Nonetheless, it’s apparent whose onesie is whose. Amer has transferred Barbie’s physique proportions onto her costume, making the exaggerated proportions of her physique much more startling.

Different artists have bodily included the ever present doll into sculptural representations of every day life. In a 2021–2022 present at Cincinnati’s Weston Artwork Gallery titled The Barbie is Her/Me: A Reflection of Black Women During Quarantine, artist Kandice Odister used Barbies to depict real-life ladies who had impressed her through the peak of the pandemic. The exhibition included a sequence of stylized portraits and complicated dioramas portraying scenes from every day life. One Barbie sits on a Zoom name; one other holds Lysol wipes above two paper luggage filled with groceries. In “Voice Over Queen (Tori Wilkins)” (2021), a Barbie seems to movie a TikTok video, her face illuminated with the timestamped glow of a COVID-era ring mild. The present additionally attracts consideration to the comparative lack of Black dolls for younger youngsters, an thought additionally explored in a 2021 exhibition by Betye Saar titled Black Doll Blues.

In 2007, artist Rachel Harrison offered an exhibition titled Voyage of the Beagle, referencing the title of the ship that sailed Charles Darwin all over the world. The 57-photograph sequence presents a seemingly random number of photographs (together with mannequins and a bronze statue of Gertrude Stein) that mirror the artist’s personal expedition to create a survey of sculpture. One picture depicts Barbie sporting a hooded fur coat: It’s a closeup portrait that portrays the doll as if she have been an actual particular person. Unfastened hairs tickle her brow, and her eyes are dusted in shimmering eyeshadow. Harrison has humanized the doll, however finally Barbie is simply one other type of sculpture, as immovable and enduring as the remainder of the artworks exhibited alongside her.

Like Burson together with her “Aged Barbie,” artist E.V. Day additionally explores the notion of the doll’s everlasting youth. Since 2001, Day has created a sequence titled Mummified Barbies that she views as a touch upon Western society’s obsession with ladies who’ve been exaggerated and sexualized to the purpose of changing into fantastical. With Barbie’s physique lined, Day hopes to attract a comparability between Barbie and the lengthy line of mythologized ladies earlier than her, all the way in which again to Venus and Aphrodite. Wrapped in glowing linen and beeswax, Barbie turns into one other relic of antiquity, dehumanized and displayed by up to date society.

In his sculptural work “Venus Milo” (2022), French artist Alben additionally drew parallels between Barbie and Venus. The doll and resin piece takes the type of the Historic Greek “Venus de Milo” (c. 150-125 BCE). The enduring picture of Barbie doesn’t really feel misplaced contained in the well-known antiquity — the greater than 2,000-year-old statue and the 64-year-old plastic doll, it appears, have develop into equally iconic.

With over one billion dolls bought, the toy lends itself to accumulation in sculpture, as seen on a mass scale in Annette Thas’s two-part Wave sequence, which have been exhibited in Sydney, Australia, in 2014 and 2015. The primary sculpture was made with 3,000 dolls; the second with a whopping 6,000, towering ominously over viewers in a method that subverts Barbie’s particular person scale.

No dialogue of Barbie artwork might be full with out Argentinian artists Emiliano Paolini and Marianela Perelli’s sequence of Barbie and Ken dolls dressed up as spiritual figures. Their deliberate 2014 exhibition at POPA Gallery in Buenos Aires was canceled after it elicited backlash from spiritual figures, however the works discovered not less than one pious fan. Matt Kennedy, director of Gallery 30 South in Pasadena, California, which exhibited the sequence in 2016 and 2019, says one of many artists’ hand-made “Virgen de Luján” Barbies finally made its method into Pope Francis’s artwork assortment.

The beginning of the actors’ strike ended the press tour for the brand new movie, however for now, Hollywood’s placing unions haven’t stated that watching the brand new movie means crossing the picket line. Nonetheless, some artists have taken intention at Mattel just lately: Stuart Semple launched a pink paint in defiance of the corporate’s trademark over Barbie’s attribute pigment. Whether or not you’re skipping Barbie in protest of its mega-corporation backer or standing in line for the movie as we communicate, it’s value remembering the methods by which the 64-year-old doll has cemented unattainable societal expectations into our basic consciousness, and the way artists have used Barbie to dismantle the very concepts she represents.