The highly anticipated film from director Greta Gerwig Barbie (2023) officially hit theaters today, July 21. Toy maker Mattel spent about $145 million make the movie and $100 million to market it, and Barbie could bring as much as $500 million — all actors and screenwriters continue their prolonged strike for better pay and working conditions.
Hollywood’s treatment of its employees contrasts with the optimistic – and very rosy – cultural moment surrounding Mattel’s new film, largely boosted by the film’s extensive marketing campaign: enthusiastic fans are throwing Barbie-themed parties and the internet is flooded with memes. But long before Gerwig took on Barbie, visual artists were incorporating, critiquing, and reimagining the doll to challenge gender roles, bodily expectations, and double standards surrounding female sexuality.
Barbie is still 19, her molded plastic face protects her forces of gravity and the slowing down of collagen production. In a 1994 work called “Aged Barbie”, artist Nancy Burson used a so-called “aging machine” – which she helped create – to accumulate the years on the doll’s face. She did the Polaroid Spectra photography on commission for a book titled barbie art (1994). Burson’s image was rejected.
“They were horrified,” said the artist Hyperallergic. “One of Mattel’s top executives said, ‘No, that never happens. “”Ironically, Burson’s aging machine actually played well with Barbie. The doll maintains her expertly executed eyeliner. His perfectly plucked eyebrows point in two wisely skeptical arches. She also has smile lines and crow’s feet, universal signs of a life well lived.
The rejection wasn’t the first time Mattel has disapproved of an artist’s use of Barbie’s image. In 1999, the company sued artist Tom Forsythe for his series of 78 photographs showing the doll in and around household appliances, including in a fondue pot and wrapped in tortillas and topped with salsa in a casserole dish for “Barbie Enchiladas” (1997). THE case hinged on whether Forsythe’s photographs constituted fair use, since Barbie and her likeness were invoked in the service of cultural criticism.
“I thought the photos needed something that really said ‘gross consumerism,’ and for me, that’s Barbie,” Forsythe told the New York Times in 2004. In the end, the salsa-slathered Barbies prevailed: Culinary Barbies were unlikely to to understand a “substitute for products in Mattel’s markets or in the markets of Mattel’s licensees”, the court ruled and Mattel was ordered to pay $1.8 million in the artist’s legal fees.
In 2005, curator Leonie Bradbury organized a Barbie exhibit at Montserrat College of Art in Massachusetts that included some of Forsythe’s images. “Part of the reason I was interested in Barbie as art is that until 2001 when Utah photographer Tom Forsythe won the lawsuit Mattel had brought against him, this type of artwork was considered illegal, which to me was an intriguing concept,” Bradbury said. Hyperallergic. The case had opened a legal door for artists to use Barbie as a symbol of cultural criticism.
In his 2004 work “Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie”, artist Ghada Amer printed two costumes with the phrases that make up the title of the installation. The outfits are both onesies – garments that should exist genderless, as there are no skirts, heels or suit jackets to reference traditional clothing for women and men. Still, it’s obvious whose onesie is whose. Amer transferred Barbie’s body proportions onto her costume, making her exaggerated body proportions even more startling.
Other artists have physically incorporated the ubiquitous doll into sculptural representations of daily life. In a 2021-2022 exhibition at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati titled The Barbie is her/me: a reflection of black women during quarantine, artist Kandice Odister used Barbies to depict real-life women who had inspired her during the height of the pandemic. The exhibit included a series of stylized portraits and intricate dioramas depicting scenes from daily life. A Barbie sits on a Zoom call; another holds Lysol wipes above two paper bags filled with groceries. In “Voice Over Queen (Tori Wilkins)” (2021), a Barbie appears to be filming a TikTok video, her face illuminated by the timestamped glow of a COVID-era ring light. The show also draws attention to the relative lack of black dolls for young children, an idea also explored in a 2021 exhibition by Betye Saar titled Black Doll Blues.
In 2007, artist Rachel Harrison presented an exhibition titled Voyage of the Beaglereferring to the name of boat who sailed Charles Darwin around the world. The series of 57 photographs features a seemingly random selection of images (including mannequins and a bronze statue of Gertrude Stein) that reflect the artist’s own expedition to create an investigation into sculpture. One image shows Barbie wearing a hooded fur coat: it’s a close-up portrait that portrays the doll as if she were a real person. Loose hair tickles her forehead and her eyes are dusted with shimmering eyeshadow. Harrison humanized the doll, but ultimately Barbie is just another form of sculpture, as still and enduring as the rest of the works displayed alongside her.
Like Burson with his “Aged Barbie”, artist EV Day also explores the notion of the doll’s eternal youth. Since 2001, Day has created a series called mummified barbies which she sees as a commentary on Western society’s obsession with women who have been exaggerated and sexualized to the point of fantasy. With Barbie’s body covered, Day hopes to draw a comparison between Barbie and the long line of mythologized women before her, all the way back to Venus and Aphrodite. Wrapped in sparkling linen and beeswax, Barbie becomes another relic of antiquity, dehumanized and exposed by contemporary society.
In his sculptural work “Venus Milo” (2022), the French artist Alben also drew parallels between Barbie and Venus. The doll and resin piece takes the form of ancient Greek “Venus of Milo(circa 150-125 BC). The iconic image of Barbie doesn’t seem out of place in famous antiquity – the 2,000-plus-year-old statue and 64-year-old plastic doll, it seems, have become equally iconic.
With over one billion dolls sold, the toy lends itself to accumulation in sculpture, as seen on a large scale in Annette Thas’ two-part Vague series, which were exhibited in Sydney, Australia, in 2014 and 2015. The first sculpture was made with 3,000 dolls; the second with a whopping 6,000, ominously dominating viewers in a way that subverts Barbie’s individual scale.
No discussion of Barbie art could be complete without Argentinian artists Emiliano Paolini and Marianela Perelli. series of Barbie and Ken dolls dressed as religious characters. Their planned 2014 exhibition at Buenos Aires’ POPA gallery was canceled after it garnered backlash from religious figures, but the works found at least one devout fan. Matt Kennedy, director of Gallery 30 South in Pasadena, Calif., which exhibited the series in 2016 and 2019, says one of the artists’ handmade “Virgen de Luján” Barbies eventually made its way into Pope Francis’ art collection.
The start of the actors’ strike has ended the press tour for the new film, but for now, Hollywood’s unions are on strike did not declare that watching the new movie means crossing the picket line. However, some artists have recently targeted Mattel: Stuart Semple launched a pink paint in defiance of the company’s trademark on Barbie’s signature pigment. that you jump Barbie whether protesting her mega-corporation or lining up for the movie as we speak, it’s worth remembering how the 64-year-old doll has cemented unattainable societal expectations into our mainstream consciousness, and how artists have used Barbie to dismantle the very ideas she represents.
