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Portrait of MARILYN MINTER. Photo by Nadya Wasylko. All images courtesy the artist; Lehmann Maupin, New York/Hong Kong/Seoul; and Salon 94, New York.
Grit underpins Marilyn Minter’s success. Over several decades, her bold depictions of female sexual independence and expression have pushed an urgent discussion on how women do and do not own their bodies in the public sphere. Her iconic photorealistic paintings, which appropriate the glossy aesthetics of advertisements and mainstream visual representations of women, subvert subliminal tactics in stereotyping female beauty and sexuality, identifying the social and political structures that have embedded the stale, pale, still very male gaze across films, advertising and art worldwide. Minter’s first solo show in Asia opened at Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong in late August. I spoke with the artist on the exhibition’s first day about her new photographs and paintings, her process, as well as her will to uplift, empower and celebrate women and their social agency across the globe.
For your exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong, you introduced new photorealistic paintings and recent photographic prints from your series depicting women behind steamy panes of glass. Why did you initially choose to focus on the subject of bathers and steam?
Historically, female bathers were among the most traditional artistic subjects, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque for example, all made works with them. But that didn’t carry on in contemporary painting. I just wanted to see what it would look like, bringing the bather into the 21st century. The only way I thought I could do that was through steam and glass. I always wanted to make a picture of something we all know—be it sock lines on our legs, or the dirt between our toes—but that we’ve never paid particular attention to before, you know? All my works look like that. When you were five years old, you licked the steamed glass pane, or you touched it, or you drew in it, but you’ve never saw a picture of it. So I wanted to make that picture.
Are all your paintings based on the photographs you take?
Yes, I make a photo first. If I like the photo, I just crop and edition it. My paintings are combinations of several different photos. They’re cobbled together with different negatives to create the reference image, which takes about a week. All the paintings here at Lehmann Maupin were created by referencing between 10 to 80 negatives. Not in These Shoes (2013), for example—that’s about 80 negatives pieced together.
Installation view of MARILYN MINTER‘s Not in These Shoes, 2013, enamel on aluminum, 411.5 x 274.3 cm, at the artist’s solo exhibition, Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong, 2018.
Unlike your bright and intimate depictions of the bathers in the exhibition, Not in These Shoes portrays a darker, grittier scene with an sense of chaos. It’s an abstracted close-up image of a women’s feet in her bejeweled pumps, obscured by several elements: graffiti, mist, moving water and glass cracks. What are some ideas behind this image?
I based the painting off old ads. You know, like the fliers and advertisements that are discarded in the streets and pasted up on the walls of abandoned buildings. I was also thinking of bus stops that have been broken or graffitied. I did a bunch of graffiti paintings between 2009 and 2013, using it as a means to obscure the figure and eliminate the narrative of the picture. It added another layer to it that invited multiple interpretations of the image. Later, the graffiti turned into steam, basically.
Currently, I’m working on this really beautiful redhead in the shower; I’ve been shooting her for a while. I’m planning to do a whole exhibition of bathers and they’re all redheads! It’s a continuation of this series at Lehmann Maupin.
When did you first start painting with enamel?
It was when I stopped collaborating with a fellow painter in the East Village in New York in the mid-80s. We didn’t make big sales at the time but we had a lot of press, so I had to create something that didn’t look like our collaboration. I decided to change mediums, and was confident in my skills to paint with anything, so I chose enamel. I’ve never put it down since then. I like tapping the paint down so that the painting doesn’t have streaks. Working with enamel makes that easy, since it dries much quicker than oil paint, making it easier to layer, and it also provides a real depth in the colors with its translucency.
You began your artistic career working in photography. Your black-and-white photographic series “Coral Ridge Towers” was taken when you were just a student studying fine art at the University of Florida in 1969, but the works were hidden from the public eye for three decades. What compelled you to take the photos at the time and why did you wait to reveal them?
You have to remember the 1960s in Florida. It was before Oprah. People didn’t talk about anything.
I was a photography major, so I had my camera at home one day and I just said, “Hey mom, will you pose for me?” and she said sure. She was always wandering around in a negligée, and the photos captured her everyday look. She never got dressed because she’s a drug addict. When I took the photos to my very conservative school in Gainesville my classmates said, “My god, that’s your mother?” They were shocked, as if they had never seen high-end addiction in a home. People were used to seeing images of addiction portrayed as someone with a needle in their arm in the street. I was ashamed, and after that, I kept the images to myself.
Twenty-four years later, I was invited to exhibit my works in a show at the Drawing Center in New York. A friend of mine was doing readings there, Linda Yablonski, she’s a writer, and she had authors come in and read to the public. She asked me if I wanted to do an installation there and I said sure. But since there were drawings by other artists already hanging on the walls, I wanted to find something that wouldn’t require me to take them down. So I thought, okay, I have these photographs from the ’60s; I’ll just print them really large and I can tack them on the wall on top of the drawings.
I was surprised, because everyone loved these photos. I got offered two shows from that event. That’s when I started exhibiting them more widely.
Your work advocates for the empowerment of women—for women to speak out, to embrace sexuality, and to reclaim their own representation in the public sphere. But it wasn’t always received that way. In the late 1980s, your group of paintings, “Porn Grid” (1989), which were based on still images from hardcore pornography, were heavily criticized by sex-negative feminists. Now, the same work is framed as addressing women’s rights, reclaiming sexual imagery from its misogynistic history, and interrogating the gender tropes that are represented in popular culture. Could you speak a little more about how this work came to be?
I didn’t think of them as seminal works at the time; I was just asking questions. I made them after seeing the early works of Mike Kelley; specifically his animal sculptures, stuffed animal paintings and felt banners. I thought, here’s this really smart guy from Michigan, working with throwaway objects, mining something that I knew was real: tween culture. It occurred to me that the only thing women artists have never touched is pornography, and I wondered if it would change its significance if a woman painted it. I wasn’t directing them at anybody. I just started painting them.
When I showed the work to the public in 1990 at Simon Watson’s gallery in SoHo—my third solo show in New York—I was criticized by anti-pornography feminists, denounced as a traitor and shut out from the art world. Strangely, I was let back in when I showed the photos of my mother. What’s that about? The art world loves you if you come from dysfunction. It’s a cliché. Vincent van Gogh? Lee Miller? It’s a funny thing (laughs).
I’ve always been interested in things that are not talked about, especially the ownership of female sexual imagery. In my work, I was taking it from an abusive history and repurposing it. And it came as a shock to those feminists who were in my generation that couldn’t wrap their mind around pro-sex feminism. I was really shocked at the fact that my paintings were so objectionable to someone. I thought everybody thought like I did. I didn’t expect that to happen, and it wasn’t like I could do anything about it because I had already made them.
Pro-sex feminists were a nascent group then, but we won. It was the beginning of women owning sexual imagery.
You collaborated with Miley Cyrus and Marc Jacobs for Planned Parenthood to advocate for reproductive rights, and spoke to Madonna about feminist politics at a panel discussion at the Brooklyn Museum last year. What drew you to work with celebrities?
The celebrities I’ve worked with own their sexuality. They decided that they’re not going to be objectified. Male artists, singers, can grab their crotch, and nobody thinks anything of it. But as soon as Miley started owning her own sexuality, she was shunned, and the same thing happened with Madonna. Pamela Anderson is someone I worked with too. It’s a real glass ceiling for women, especially if you’re young and beautiful. If you’re an old lady like me, you can do anything. It’s true. (laughs)
You’re a visual artist, but also a professor and an activist. What do you hope the future generation will take away from your work and teachings?
Since I was 16, I’ve been an activist. It was civil rights, anti-Vietnam, then women. And now, anti-patriarchy and Trump. Maybe there’s always a level of politics in everything I’ve done. I would like to change art history. I want to see women collectors step up. I want to see all women step up and start being their own, and each other’s, power engines. I think we’ll all be happier. It’s healthier for everyone. Women, people of color, and youths—we’re the majority, you know? I feel like finally we’re coming together and speaking out.
Julee WJ Chung is ArtAsiaPacific’s assistant editor.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Marilyn Minter’s solo exhibition is on view at Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong, until October 27, 2018.
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