DAILY SERVING » femininity

Fan Mail: Molly Dierks

Mailee Hung — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 07:00:34 +0000

In her work, Molly Dierks forces together concepts of normative femininity and elements of industrial fabrication—sometimes uneasily, other times uncannily well. Using saturated and pastel hues typically associated with women’s products in combination with hard metals and unyielding forms, Dierks makes associations between femininity and fabrication that describe complicity rather than contrasts. Her sculptures do more than point out the labor intrinsic to the production of femininity; they implicate an unseen ecology of machine manufacturing behind it.

Molly Dierks. Parts, 2010; car parts, paint, metal and wood bases; dimensions variable; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist.

In her installation Parts (2010), Dierks erects three metal objects with evocative but nonspecific shapes and details. Painted a warm coral hue like lipstick or rouge, the forms suggest sections of mass-produced, utilitarian objects. Strangely feminized by their shapes and color, they appear like hybrids of car parts and pantyhose, fenders and legs. But what is strangest about them is how surprisingly natural it feels to a viewer to see both a car door and lipstick in the same object. Parts goes beyond a mere feminizing of typically masculine objects—the maligned “shrink it and pink it” ethos applied to marketing products to women. The congruity of these readings reveals a deeper entanglement between them, of seeing the production of a concept of a woman in the production of a car.

Molly Dierks. Parts, 2010 (detail); car parts, paint, metal and wood bases; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

The artist intensifies this entangled reading through her Hardbodies series (2012), in which the chromed and car-paint-dipped sculptures look like lipstick, pills, hair curlers, or vibrators. This linkage suggests not only that the ideation of woman is a cultural production, but also that industrial modes are required to effect it—that it’s not just the curled hair, the colored lips, or the Prozac smiles that produce the Stepford Wife aesthetic of normative femininity, but also the factories, machines, and electronics that make the objects that produce the curls and the colors. The end result, Dierks suggests, is like the attractively bright and unyielding Hardbodies. The shaped mirrors under these objects possess a seminal quality: They reflect the image of the sculpture, a commodity produced to reflect heteronormative male desire.

Molly Dierks. Hardbodies, 2012; wood, automotive paint, lathed aluminum, mirrors; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Dierks’s Test Tube Babies (2016), meanwhile, appear to be failures or byproducts, the tailings of feminine production. These silvery, molten masses are squished, pitted, and burned, like ingots subjected to forces much greater than they can bear. They are also peppered with incongruously girlish details: pastel blotches like gobs of melted candy, tubing like a half-dead glow-stick bracelet, a pink plastic bag like a bubblegum balloon, sparkling rhinestones. They seem to be the tortured remnants of the ore of femininity, the raw material from which the commodified female is crafted.

Molly Dierks. Test Tube Babies, 2016; cast aluminum, paint, resin, urethane found objects; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

But whereas Parts and Hardbodies explore a relationship between the production of femininity and industrial goods, Test Tube Babies offers a way out of this bleak vision. The Test Tube Babies works do not evoke a sense of completion, unlike the sleek forms of the earlier works. Instead, they are abject and grotesque, a rejection of easy modes of consumption. As test forms for normative femininity, they may be failures, but as failures they express the possibility of liminal positions within industrial manufacturing, either of ideas or objects. For those seeking a path away from classification and gender essentialism, the Test Tube Babies offer a template—one less recognizable and perhaps more appropriate—for modes of being and becoming.

Molly Dierks. Test Tube Babies, 2016; cast aluminum, paint, resin, urethane found objects; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Molly Valentine Dierks received a BA in behavioral psychology from Dartmouth College, a post-baccalaureate degree in sculpture and extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MFA in art and design from the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. She has participated in exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her work has been included in exhibitions by such institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, University of Michigan Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. She is currently an assistant professor of fine arts at Tarleton State University, and she lives and works in Texas.

#Hashtags: Masculine-Feminine

Anuradha Vikram — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 08:00:37 +0000

In response to the Trump administration’s ongoing display of toxic masculinity at work, the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art has taken the unusual but vital step of incorporating a project about male identity into their “Year of Yes” thematic takeover of the museum. Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller is an inquiry into the nature of manhood, corroborated with art-historical artifacts from the museum’s collection. Inviting a group of artists of varying ages, races, and genders to draw the notorious proto-punk rocker from life, Deller positions the male body at the center of questions about bodily self-expression and autonomy. Yet this gesture is less a reversal than a restoration, pointing to the central role that the male nude has played in academic art from Classicism to Modernism.

Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, February 21, 2016. © Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Elena Olivo.

Deller is an artist who consistently returns to themes of masculinity and its obstacles. In his 2014 installation in the UK pavilion at the Venice Biennale, he juxtaposed archival photographs from the 1972–73 miners’ strike with images of David Bowie on his final, concurrent Ziggy Stardust tour. The contrast between miners, whose rough skin and clothes bespeak a hardscrabble working-class existence long associated with masculine attributes, and Bowie at peak androgyny, is a dynamic that Deller replicates in Iggy Pop Life Class. A key difference between the projects is that the masculine and the feminine impulses of the earlier work are explored simultaneously through examination of the rock star’s singular body.

In Deller’s words from the Brooklyn Museum website, “Iggy Pop has one of the most recognizable bodies in popular culture. A body that is key to an understanding of rock music, and that has been paraded, celebrated, and scrutinized through the years in a way that is unusual for a man.” Two aspects of this statement warrant unpacking: First is the assumption that rock music has a body, and that body is male and white. The second is the assumption that scrutiny of Pop’s body tracks with the same kind of body-image policing that women and people of color experience daily.

Guno Park. Untitled (Seated Pose), from Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller, 2016; ballpoint pen on paper; 15 x 11¼ in. Brooklyn Museum Collection. Photo: Sarah DeSantis.

Looking at the drawings produced by Deller’s twenty-two collaborators provides some clues to deconstruct these assumptions. A life-drawing class requires an artist to take his or her model at face value. Considering the group of drawings as a whole, the most prevalent characteristics that emerge are signs of the rock icon’s age. If the younger Pop was cast as a contemporary David, walking a line between long-haired gender subversion and rippling, virile manhood, the older Pop looks tired, heavy, and saggy. His hair, jowls, and pronounced nose take on symbolic qualities, and slip accordingly, both describing and stripping away the pop star’s allure. Surprisingly, given its centrality to his mythos, Pop’s iconic penis is in short supply. Most of the artists choose not to represent the singer’s genitals at all, while one in particular seems to see only that part and to render it a cartoonish protrusion, like Pop’s nose. One drawing exaggerates Pop’s pectorals and narrows his waist so as to nearly render him anatomically female. Despite the effects of time on his body, perception of Pop’s sexuality remains rooted in an aggression that he no longer seems to possess. Its absence suggests that age might unsex men much as it does women. This would be misleading, given that Pop continues to be lauded as a sexual icon well into his 60s, while female contemporaries like Patti Smith or Wendy O Williams are allotted either sexuality or longevity.

Egon Schiele. Male Nude (Self-Portrait) (Männlicher Akt [Selbstbildnis I]), 1912; lithograph on paper; image: 16 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.; sheet: 17 5/8 x 15 11/16 in. Brooklyn Museum Collection.

A selection of objects from the museum’s collection enhances Deller’s discourse of masculinity and worship. Deller’s artist statement describes these as “devotional” objects, which speaks to the underlying spiritual fervor that informs even our secular and profane notions of the iconic. Works on paper by Egon Schiele and Ernst Heckel attest to the influence of the German Expressionist and Vienna Secession artists on Pop’s own self-image construction by the mid-1970s. These artists, like Pop himself, were considered radical and even scandalous due to their frank depictions of human emotion and behavior of a sexual nature. Many of the images could also be considered homoerotic, such as Horace Bristol’s photograph PBY Blister Gunner (1944) depicting a male nude manning a heavy artillery gun, which is charged with the suggestion that violence is inherent to masculine desire. Said violence is raw in an image by Robert Mapplethorpe, Derrick Cross (1982), in which the decapitated black male model is objectified without his identity or subjectivity. More challenging still is Mapplethorpe’s gesture toward provisional restoration of his sitter’s identity, by naming him in the work’s title and including a note, “for Derrick,” which suggests that the violence has been consensual—or that the photographer must believe it so in order to reconcile his desire with its origins in a power dynamic of white enslavement of Black bodies.

Figures from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. L: Master of Ntem, Fang (Mvai subgroup) Artist. Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema-o-Byeri), Gabon, Ntem River basin, mid-18th to mid-19th century; wood, iron. 23 x 5 7/8 x 5 in. R: Ascetic Sakyamuni. Japan, 16th century; wood with pigmented lacquer, inlaid crystal, metal. 8 1/2 x 6 1/16 x 7 1/8 in.

Sculptural objects from Gabon and Japan articulate the poles of representation of the male nude. A Fang Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema-o-Byeri) made of wood and iron places a rounded head atop a rectangular body with short legs and arms and a fat, squat penis. Eschewing realism, the Master of Ntem who created this object highlighted the parts of the male body that carry the most importance—the mind, the sex, and the cycle of birth and death. Nearby, a rare 16th-century Ascetic Sakyamuni shows the Buddha in a state of near-starvation. Emaciated Buddhas serve two traditional functions: to attest to the triumph of Buddha’s mind over the matter of his body, and to represent and comfort the poor and afflicted, who see in the emaciated deity’s restoration the possibility of their own.

Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller; installation view. Photo by Jonathan Dorado.

Like the Buddha Sakyamuni, the young Iggy Pop practiced a form of asceticism nearly indistinguishable from self-abuse. His unlikely survival and ascent to senior-citizen status represents a restoration as well, the image of which has been as important to poor white men of a certain generation as the Buddha was to 16th-century Japanese. Having graduated from deviant to bard, Pop maintained his signature theatricality throughout. Its absence—his stillness—is perhaps the most surprising aspect of Deller’s installation.

Charlotte Segall. Untitled (Lying Pose), from Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller, 2016; natural charcoal with white chalk on pink paper; 12¾ x 19 in. Brooklyn Museum Collection. Photo: Sarah DeSantis.

Both the Stooges’ name (rumored to be an homage to Larry, Curly, and Moe) and the title of their classic 1970 album Fun House position Pop’s ongoing performance of masculinity as a clown show. Clowns, of course, operate by exaggerating proportions. Today an extreme version of male arrogance, aggression, and insecurity is performed daily by the Clown-in-Chief in the White House, who unwittingly models Judith Butler’s dictum that “all gender is performance.” Our nation is trapped in a spiral of aggression, retaliation, and humiliation that Iggy Pop narrates all too well. We can only hope that, like Iggy, America will survive its current infatuation with self-annihilation.

Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through March 26, 2017.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.