Left: “Wangechi Gold 4”, 2009, C-Print, 152 x 101 cm, courtesy the artist, Salon 94, New York and Regen Projects, LA. Right: Marilyn Minter by Chris Schoonover
“I’m an activist. I make pictures of what I think the world looks like”
Marilyn Minter is in the midst of working on a large-scale canvas at her studio in New York’s Garment District when we first speak. It is midday, and in spite of our temperamental phone connection, the din of house and conversations between Minter’s team of six assistants permeates the line. “As you can probably tell, there’s a real good energy going on here,” she says. “We listen to music all the time, mostly Brooklyn-based DJs that play instrumental tracks. It’s a good stimulus for the work. We start later on in the day, because I’ve never been a morning person. I never will be – I mean, it’s too late now, right?”
It’s hard to believe that Minter turned 67 this year. After four decades of delivering vivid, alluringly debased photographs, paintings and short films, she’s as devoted to expanding her output as ever. “My ideas stem from the culture that I live in,” she says. “I travel a lot, I read, I listen to Podcasts, I surf the net all the time. I also pay attention to what is going on politically, I’m an activist. I make pictures of what I think the world looks like, and I always have done.”
Minter, who was born in Louisiana and raised in Florida, insists that she has always been compelled to make art. “It’s instinctive for me,” she says, her voice deepening in tone. “I started drawing at five years old. I could get by in school, but all I ever wanted to do was draw,” she says. It’s fair to say that her formative years were less than idyllic. In fact, throughout her career Minter has openly disclosed the trappings of growing up with a single mother who battled a turbulent drug addiction. “She was at one time a really beautiful woman, and she was very conscious of the way she looked,” Minter told Lenny magazine earlier this year. “She worked on herself all the time, but it was always off because she pulled out her hair so she had to wear wigs; she had acrylic nails, but she didn’t take care of them so fungus would grow underneath them.”
“Orange Crush”, 2009, enamel on metal, 274 x 457 cm, private collection
“Everything isn’t black and white, there are limits on either side. I want a picture to have multiple reads.”
Indeed, notions of flawed beauty have always populated the artist’s oeuvre, from her 1969 photographic series “Coral Ridge Towers”, which captures her mother performing mundane beauty rituals, to her 2001 enamel on metal paintings and , which display a perfect pedicure on dirty feet, lustrous polish framed by the grimy crevices of toe-nails, Minter’s work also seemingly relishes paradox, at once celebrating pleasure, desire and the allure of high fashion, while simultaneously exposing its pitfalls. It glorifies trivial objects – aluminium foil, paper curls, washed-up remnants of food at the base of a kitchen sink – elevating the everyday into something extraordinary. “I’m not convinced that everything is in black and white. I know there are limits on either side of the scale, but I like working with two opposing ideas at the same time,” she reveals. “I want a picture to have multiple reads.”
Right now, Minter is gearing up for two pivotal exhibitions. The first will debut some new paintings “about frost and steam” at Salon 94 in New York in October. While the second will stage her first retrospective “Pretty/Dirty”, which has travelled from the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston to the Orange County Museum of Art, before finally hitting New York’s esteemed Brooklyn Museum in November. The show will display 45 of her seminal works from the 30 years, substantiating her influence on contemporary art. It is a significant moment for Minter, who only began receiving the critical acclaim a decade or so ago – as is, regrettably, so often the case for women artists. “Success came in later life for me. The art world loves young bad boys and old ladies,” she says with a dry, hearty laugh. “Certainly the work I did early on is far more appreciated now.”
Fittingly, the Brooklyn Museum is executing a larger selection of Minter’s paintings from the 1970s than CAMH and OCMA, which has pleased her immensely. “I love my early work. I think those paintings [from the 70s] are really smart,” she says. “I was just making black and white paintings of photographs, keeping them on the raw canvas.”
“100 Food Porn #9”, 1989–90, enamel on metal, 61 x 76.2 cm, Hort Family Collection
A lesser-known but equally captivating chapter in her career features in the exhibition courtesy of her Pop Art-inspired paintings from the mid- 1980s, which provide a critical look at representations of the female body and celebrity. One such work, Big Girls from 1988 presents a dot-screened collage of a photograph of vivacious screen sirens Jayne Mansfield and Sophia Loren, their buxom bodies and idolised faces obscured by an opposing image of two innocent young girls, marking the plight between adolescence and sexual awakening. And the heady dose of provocation that pervades her infamous ‘porno paintings’ from the early Nineties are likely to spark a debate among visitors, just as they did when they were first unleashed, causing outrage amongst feminists who saw the visceral, close-up crops of sexual acts as abusive to the women at the mercy of the porn industry. (Minter’s apparent intention was in fact to define the conventions of art that a modern woman could create – after all, what was so wrong about expressing eroticism and desire?) “It is still so curious to me,” she recalls of the backlash. “It’s very easy to put down the porn industry, when in fact we wouldn’t even have the Internet without porn! Like I said, it gives so many people pleasure. It seems to me that this should be something that should be examined by artists. It’s the same with fashion, which is often dismissed by the art world as being trivial and shallow, when it’s this giant engine of culture and a major business.” She pauses, before pointing out that within both of these gargantuan industries, the common denominator is women.
Though Minter dismisses being influenced by fashion per se, she cites the glamour of the genre – whether channeled through the filter of punk, gothic romance or even classic elegance – as being a major source of inspiration. “I continue to be interested in all subject matter that’s considered shallow or debased, that the world deems ‘not important’ or unable to give credence too.” A pertinent example of this sentiment is expressed in 2006’s Armpit, which showcases the sweating, surface of a woman’s underarm, outstretched by two fingers manicured in a neon green nail polish.
When she’s not painstakingly applying layers of enamel to one of her pieces (which, she confides, “take a good year or so to complete”), advocating women’s reproductive rights, or teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York, she enjoys nothing better than a good biography. “I’m a voracious reader,” she says. At the moment, she’s infatuated by a study of the pioneering American photographer Diane Arbus. “Yes, and [photographer] Lee Miller’s biography is going to blow your mind too! But I like to read about all kinds of artists, because it’s the same story, time and again, “ she explains. “It made me realise that it’s always hard to realise your individual vision. But when you get so much pleasure out of it then it’s not an option – it’s a calling. It’s my calling.”
Left: “Torrent”, 2013, enamel on metal, 243 x 152 cm, private collection, Palm Beach, Florida. Right: “Clip”, 2005, enamel on metal, 76 x 61 cm, collection of Gregory R. Miller and Michael Wiener, New York
Taken from SLEEK 52
“Pretty/Dirty” by Marilyn Minter is on display at the Brooklyn Museum until 2 April 2017