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Barbie.
Like Cher, Madonna and Diana, the flesh-and-blood People's Princess,
this simple doll has obtained the status of mononymity usually
reserved for the ultra-famous.
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Plentiful
Barbie, 1996
Chris Saruk Reid
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Barbie, however, is
even more ubiquitous than her human counterparts. While Madonna
has sold millions of albums, and Diana still graces tabloid cover
pages around the world, Barbie has infiltrated the homes and hearts
of three generations of girls. Two Barbies are sold every second
somewhere in the world. Because millions of children have owned
at least one Barbie doll, and millions of parents have bought
at least one, people of all races, incomes and political agendas
have a stake in the vinyl goddess, how she is represented, and
who she represents. Barbie's body, clothes, even the colour of
her home and accessories, have been the focal point of discussions
in department store aisles and the hallowed halls of academia
alike.
Artists have found
the eleven-and-a-half-inch fashion doll to be a particularly compelling
agent to use as a symbol of misguided feminine representation,
an icon of unbridled commercialism, a signal of racial inequity
or a kind of barometer of pop culture. Famous examples include
Todd Haynes' Superstar, an independent film of the Karen
Carpenter story enacted by fashion dolls; and Andy Warhol's painting
simply entitled, Barbie. Also part of Barbie art lore is
the public action staged by the Barbie Liberation Organization,
a collective of concerned citizens who secretly switched the "voice
boxes" of talking Barbies and GI Joes and then returned them to
store shelves. Web sites dedicated to Barbie abound, or at least
they did, until Mattel began serving site administrators with
injunctions, denying the use of images that "unlawfully dilute
the BARBIE trademark."
Mattel, the inventor,
producer and owner of all that is Barbie, controls her image with
tenacity. As M.G. Lord writes in her excellent book, Forever
Barbie, "The corporation cannot have any old Tom, Dick, or
Jane promulgating his or her personalization of a corporate-owned
icon." In its efforts to keep Barbie beautiful, straight, and,
most importantly, profitable, Mattel does a balancing act between
promoting its product as an Everygirl icon, and stifling the expressions
of those very same people who acknowledge, whether they like it
or not, the mega-celebrity status of a doll.
The People's Plastic
Princess
is a group exhibition that brings together painting, photography,
sculpture and digital work by twenty-one artists from Canada,
the United States, and Europe to show how the world's most popular
eleven-and-a-half-inch fashion doll, Barbie, can reflect society
in imaginative, provocative and critical ways.
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