Ever the glowing Bride followed by happy, but somehow less attractive Maids, Barbie is the embodiment of our desire. A woman, really no more than a girl. Tall, slim, blonde, blue eyed, with pixie nose, large breasts and an hour-glass figure. Forever casually balanced in high heel shoes she sweeps through life until the final "Wedding Fantasy" is consummated.
Barbie lives in the best of all possible worlds. She will never have a reason to cry, nor will a frown of disapproval cross her face. Other dolls attend her every move, allowing her to glide through life on a cloud of delicious enjoyment. Her seemingly male companion is ever at her side while siblings and friends bring ice cream and candy for her approval. Always ready for fun, and to be dressed appropriately, she plays at every game.
One of the Barbie Doll's original design criteria was to present an expanded set of positive role models to American girls of the 1950s. The usual model was the loving wife and mother as portrayed in the television shows of the day.
POSITIONS HELD
Now, Barbie and her playmates can be placed in any occupation and go to every party. They can be Medical Doctors by day and Disco Dance Queens by night. Barbie is able to effortlessly fulfill the most complicated fantasy lives for her Human friends, as long as she has the right outfit and accessories. Always the vision of femininity and competence, the entire world revolves around her. Her playmates can create roles and share the vicarious thrills of every new experience. This role playing is carefully guided by the myriad costumes and environments available for Barbie and her friends. She is a testing ground for the life of an adult as seen through a child's eyes. Barbie has become the ideal woman, both for the girls with whom she plays, and for the boys who will eventually replace her. The world of our dreams, in miniature, is waiting for us with Barbie. A Utopia of fun and excitement not to be found anywhere else.
Like all of us, Barbie is a product of her environment. A triumph of nurture over nature, she reflects all that our culture wills us to be. Young girls are given a role model on which to focus their budding desires. They can grow up to be this leggy girl-next-door with the glow of contentment. They can have any of those exciting careers (except, as yet, Senator or President). They can even play out sexual relations when no adults are looking on. They will always get the man of their dreams in the most fantastic wedding imaginable. Young boys, by dint of repetition, have come to expect their girls to be these glowing beings of desire. Perhaps they will even find the Doll's vacuous expression to be the most erotic component of all.
Not only can we grow up to inhabit these fantasy worlds that are created for us, but we must. If we don't there will be no future consumers for the commodities modeled in the Doll world. We can have it all. All those careers, all those clothes, all those romantic dates with destiny, but there is a price to pay. The very act of becoming an adult is a process of elimination. All the 'undesirable' traits in the child are trained out, and proper ones are encouraged. We are manipulated by our social context.
If we step back from ourselves we can act like anthropologists sorting through the artifacts of an unknown culture. Placing the Barbie Tribe on a neutral-grey background, the underlying rituals of our lives are mirrored in the toy world. Little girls throughout the free world believe they will someday be Barbie. Men, everywhere, wish women were. Examples are ubiquitous in the adult toy world. Fashions in clothing, photographs of men and women with incongruous objects, even the shapes of automobiles, all can be seen in this reflecting pool.
When we isolate Barbie from her environment and try to recreate her source some bizarre scenes begin to appear. There is never any trouble or pain because no one ever gets fat or mad. Even the occasional minority person smiles along with her jokes. However, the characters in this Predominantly Pink universe participate in 'fun' activities which are unproductively simplistic.
The entire sub-culture is a one dimensional point centering on the idealized Barbie figure. She seems to have the power to continually create herself, and the power to dominate us with that creation. In a strange reversal the men stand ready to serve their mistress' whim. But we know from the text that the mistress will soon serve her master. The focal point radiates in all directions but has no power of her own.
Both Barbie and her playmates are actively placed in appropriate fantasy situations by the concepts embodied in the toy system.
"But this is just what art is -- the manipulation or social ordering of desires, and therefore of the laws of supply and demand. Art gives values which are not those of the market but are use-values. Art makes 'cheap' things precious and a few splashes of paint a social treasure. Hence the market is the fierce enemy of the artist. The blind working of the market murders beauty. All social products, hats, cars, houses, household utensils, and clothes, become in the main unbeautiful and 'commercialized', precisely because the maker in producing them does not consider social process, does not scheme how to order socially their affective values in accordance with their use, but merely how to satisfy a demand for them with the maximum profit to himself. This extends finally to those products which have no other purpose than affective ordering -- paintings, films, novels, poetry, music. Because here too their affective ordering is socially unconscious, because it is not realized that beauty is a social product, there is a degradation even of these 'purest' forms of art products. We have commercialized art, which is simply affective massage. It awakens and satisfies the instincts without expressing and synthesizing a tension between instinct and environment."
Caudwell (c 1937)
This 'Art' is the product of a 'culture industry' devoted to the manipulation of its audience. The tool of this manipulation is a 'mass culture' which is artistic sensibility directed towards ideological ends. In the western world, mass culture is created by a culture industry motivated by profit. Under 'communist' rule the motivation is for the purpose of social progress. Third world countries have just begun to make the transition to culture industries, by supplanting and subverting the local mythologies. When our childhood socialization is accomplished through the means of a mass culture devoted to control of habits, be it purchasing of commodities or adherence to some other ideology, we are the subjects of a form of brainwashing.
"The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the greater is the worker's lack of objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside of him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien."
Marx (1844)
The alienation we feel in our daily lives, the distance we feel between our Self and our livelihood or those Others that surround us, is part of the mass culture we inhabit. Artists living in these worlds feel the need to break free of the culture industry's apparent manipulations. But, if they are not careful, they fall prey to the non-apparent undercurrents in their lives. The act of existing in a society, by any means, forces one to be affected by its ideology.
"Art provided a medium for critical thinking by upholding images of life which contradicted the existent. But art's affirmative vision inevitably assumed an 'escapist character.' Men and women 'had fled into a private conceptual world' and arranged their thoughts in anticipation of a time in which aesthetic could be systematically incorporated into reality. Art anticipates the good life. It preserves an ideal in danger of being forgotten. But this is all it can do. To the extent that it suggests utopia can be realized in the aesthetic realm, or that its images are the avenue to an ideal community, it is idealist and false. Bourgeois art often advances one of these ideas."
Held (1980)
The grown child looks back on a simpler life with a fond sense of loss. Our emotions are manipulated in absentia by our memory, and an artifact from the past can trigger those associative sequences. Many of these memories were created by mass cultural artifacts.
"Mass culture is psychoanalysis in reverse."
Leo Lowenthal quoted in Held (1980)
When we allow our emotions to be manipulated because of learned responses, we become sentimental. If we find the invoked emotion pleasant we become attached to the object. The sentimental attachment to an artifact of mass culture allows the object to become Kitsch.
"Kitsch is the element of evil in the value system of art."
Broch (1950)
Kitsch objects are often signs of 'non-organic' mythologies forming in the culture. They are symbols which do not develop over the centuries, but spring up suddenly, often in support of an emerging ideology. The Crucifix and the Star of David are religious artifacts that can become Kitsch with use. The Swastica and Mickey Mouse are ideological artifacts, religious Kitsch without cultural substance. Perhaps they lack a mythic sense of mystery.
"Nowadays, whenever art has to bow to politics -- or generally speaking, to some sort of ideology, even a religious one -- it immediately becomes kitsch."
Dorfles (1969a)
Kitsch is an artistic device which can be used by the culture industry to manufacture tradition for an ideology. In this case the artistic device is the Doll. The ideology is her fantasy life, the lifestyle espoused, by her marketing forces. Even those who did not have a Barbie have experiences to relate, so there is no way to pretend that we are not affected by her ideological stance.
When taken at face value these objects appear to be simply in poor taste. They are common, mass produced, and have no intrinsic value. The sentiment engendered by their ideology endows them as Kitsch.
"One way out of the Kitsch trap for the artist, is to make the motivation so obvious as to be unmistakable. By turning poor taste into Bad Taste, nostalgia and sentiment can be simply overwhelmed. Blatant overuse of familiar emotional conditionings can achieve this end. "Forced to improvise a plot, the authors [of the movie 'Casablanca'] mixed a little of everything, and everything they chose came from a repertoire that had stood the test of time. When only a few of these formulas are used, the result is simply kitsch. But the when the repertoire of stock formulas is used wholesale, then the result is an architecture like Gaudi's Sagrada Familia: the same vertigo, the same stroke of genius."
Eco (1984)
The Gaudi cathedral is a 'hot' use of artifacts to this end, as are many 'folk' or indigenous arts that work with the detritus of mass culture. They wrap the culture and its history around itself. In a similar manner, Pop Art can be seen as the 'cool' re-appropriation, through focused (re)presentation. Pop folded the culture in upon itself, removing its historical connections.
". . . beautiful as the chance meeting upon a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella!"
Compte de Lautreamont (1870)
The Surrealists adopted objects when their value to the culture industry became nill. The surreal portion of an object is the residue of the commodity left over when its rational life is done. Their causality of desire is attached to the irrational, the irrational desire for things that should no longer be. Surreal objects are dead to their original use but resurrected to a desperate new life in an alternate universe, where meanings are twisted around one another like snakes. The commonplace is inverted through illogic into an unknown knowledge. There is a discontinuity of desire. On the real side is the gritty world once seen, on the surreal side is a world almost seen.
In between . . . a jump of . . . faith?
Fantasies and fetishes are encouraged in this evocation of the marvelous. Death is transformed into desire and desire becomes an end in itself.
In another street at the seashore
The earth was turning in the sea air
A girl singing a nerve-wracking hit tune
Revealed a bit of her softer-than-life-skin
There was hard killing everywhere
Horses escaping into elevators
Laughed like human people
It was a country of wounds where devouring winds blew
Jangled nerves were so widespread
That the trees shattered in the hands of men
Like so many matches
People left their homes no longer caring
How can you wear last night's clothes
Put your pianos on the sidewalk while waiting for rain
Wouldn't it be fantastic to die on a day like today
Aragon (1925)
Because our alienation is not present in toy world, we are attracted to the undisturbed fantasy created by Barbie, our perfect woman of leisure. She represents our sexuality, our happiness, our life. We are drawn to her by desire.
". . . it recalls how the Surrealist principle has given rise to a certain kind of witty appreciation of the derelict, inane, demode objects of modern civilization -- the taste for a certain kind of passionate non-art that is known as 'camp'."
Sontag (1962)
Another way to avoid the Kitsch trap is to simply remove the manipulative significance by isolating the object in one's mind. This strips the sign of its signified and allows us to perceive it in itself.
"16. Thus, the Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice."
Sontag (1964)
This sense of Camp allows us to disconnect, even for a short while, from the pressures applied by the object. It gives us a way to relax and enjoy an object without being threatened by its significance. Just as the Dandy and Epicure of the past ages were able to indulge in pleasures not available to the teeming masses below them in the class structure, so can we distance ourselves from implicit realities.
"46. . . . The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to posses them in a rare way. Camp -- Dandyism in the age of mass culture -- makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica."
Sontag (1964)
The Barbie is a fascinating object. A piece of anthropomorphic plastic that, when properly dressed, can be an amusing decorative device. It can fulfill the dandy impulse in our psyche, both through the extravagance of its attire, and its pleasantly humorous appearance.
"49. . . . Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence [boredom]."
Sontag (1964)
Divorced from its childhood context and content it becomes just another participant in our daily life. Removing a Kitsch object from its ideological surroundings allows us to evaluate it on its own terms. If it has intrinsic interest it becomes Camp. If not, it remains mired in its mass cultural heritage. This detachment gives us a way to become outsiders in our own culture by separating ourselves from our history.
Sometimes it doesn't work.
"The Madonna Inn is the poor man's Hearst Castle; it has no artistic or philological pretensions, it appeals to the savage taste for the amazing, the overstuffed, and the absolutely sumptuous at low price. It says to visitors: 'You too can have the incredible, just like a millionaire'."
Eco (1975)
And sometimes it works all too well.
We are constantly creating our own unique interpretations of perceptual experiences. These interpretations are built on prior associations and triggered by active sensory stimulus. We choose to see the way we do because of how we saw and interpreted in the past. The artist is more attuned to this activity.
"Hence an artist's subjectivity does not consist in his experience being fundamentally different from that of others of his time or class, but in its being stronger, more conscious, and more concentrated. It must uncover new social relationships in such a way that others will become conscious of them too. Even the most subjective artist works on behalf of society. By the sheer fact of describing feelings, relationships, and conditions that have not been described before, he channels them from his apparently isolated 'I' into a 'we' and this 'we' can be recognized even in the brimming subjectivity of an an artist's personality."
Fischer (1959)
By communicating her interpretation the artist gives us a concentrated set of experiences. We build on these experiences, adding our own perceptions. When it works we feel, or 'see', something that was not there before.
"Thus the key word in aesthetic theory is not beauty, as has been suggested by traditional aesthetics, but significance. The feeling or perception of significance may be mislabeled beauty, but the two are not the same. Let me emphasize that I am speaking now about significance as a quality of perception and not as a cognitive factor. Of course it may also exist as a cognitive element in the same way that beauty may be understood and known rather than felt, but it is significance as a quality of perception that can be seen as explaining the intensity of the aesthetic experience.
Observable qualities -- that is to say, the sensory aspect of a piece, may be modified in experience by the 'trans-sensory' informational elements. . . . Information may change the character of the experience, making it quite different from another even though the sensory material is identical."
Kirby (1969)
When the sum of our multi-faceted perceptions, of stimulus, knowledge, and prior experience, adds up to more than the individual parts, we sense a significance in an object or situation. Sometimes this significance is called 'beauty', sometimes 'elegance', and sometimes 'horror'. Many times we cannot separate one from another. We slip quietly from idealistic revere, through erotic fantasy, past tongue-in-cheek absurdity, into hardedged reality, and back. Each of these states gives us a different type of experience, all triggered by different facets of our perception of the same object. There is no one single experience. This ambiguity leads us to be more critical of our perceptions.
"The truth-value of art lies in its capacity to sustain a discrepancy between its projected images of nature and humankind, and its objects' actuality."
T. W. Adorno quoted in Held (1980)
We cannot disentangle the web of conditioned responses created by mass culture, but we can become aware of their existance and be ready to challenge them when they occur. To encourage this, the artist acting as a conduit, must present a critical view of the environment in which he or she works, otherwise the work becomes part and progenitor of the mass culture which oppresses it. By the same token, the perceiver must be prepared to engage this critique.
"In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it."
Fischer (1959)
It is now the job of the 'creator' to present the 'object' in a manner which encourages ambiguous interpretation, thus involving the perceiver in the aesthetic process. The task of the artist is to present the object in its full context.
"'Not Art' is similarly impossible, if the object in question can be regarded apart from utilitarian reality; and so is 'unart'. Indeed, anything under the sun can be considered 'art' if either the creator or the beholder wishes to do so. Just as the spectator has as much authority as the artist in bestowing that usually honorific term, so neither artist nor spectator can conclusively deny the affirmations of the other."
Kostelanetz (1982)
Ultimately, it is the perceiver who assigns the title of Art. The creator must become an interpreter, and thus not involved with the creation process (which is acquisition and expression), to gain the same privilege.
Barbie is an anthropomorphic petroleum product. She is flesh colored plastic, not blood colored flesh. She is not a good model for real pleasure in our world. Her mate, Ken, is sexless and Barbie herself doesn't even have nipples. No little family elements will issue from this scene. Nor will Barbie and Ken, when placed in suggestive poses ever achieve climax (even though she can bend over backwards). Her proportions are grotesque when scaled to human size, sort of an anorexic Extra-Terrestrial smuggling cantaloupes in her blouse. But still, she is a real Doll in her own world, as we wish we were in ours.
Barbie is the very symbol of the good life in the consumer society. At the same time, she is the result of the real pressures in industrial nations. Plastic production processes. Marketing wizards creating desires in the unsuspecting. Ever expanding wants which do not fill needs in an infinite food chain of consumption. This Doll lives in a world which some of us no longer want to inhabit. Yet, at some point, we all wish that we could be at the top of the chain in blithe ignorance of the battlefield below.
Our fantasy life meets its end when we try to hold the ideal in mind while experiencing the real. The perception of the signifier we are presented, the Doll in her pink universe, comes up against our knowledge of the signified, the world of artificial and unfulfillable desires. It turns out that we want two mutually exclusive constructs. We want to escape from the mass culture chain, but still we want to be comfortable and desirable. Holding these two concepts in mind creates a tension in our experience of the object.
"V. One of the most common criteria for excellence in art is that it serves as a stimulus for intense emotion. Now there are two ways emotion can be elicited; by presenting a sign configuration to which the perceiver is conditioned to respond emotionally, or by disorienting him, by violating his expectations, by offering the occasion for a discontinuity of perceptual experience."
Peckham (1966)
The first type of stimulus is the hallmark of the culture industry. The second is a possible way to undermine that industry. When there is a difference between the expected or implied meaning of an object and the actual or apparent meaning we experience cognitive dissonance. This perceptual tension indicates that there is a problem we need to solve. To alleviate the dissonance we either remove one of the sources or try to synthesize a new cognitive basis. Removing a source reduces the tension but doesn't address the problem. Synthesizing forces us to use a fundamentally different perspective. To address the problem head on, as it were, we must be critical of the entire social system that produces the perception.
By encouraging the dissonance the artist and perceiver, both, can find cracks in the wall of culture which lead to paths of change. Reinvesting a KitschCamp object, our Barbie, with its original content, while maintaining a critical perception of its context is a way to define the scope of this dissonance. A phoenix Barbie rises from the ashes.
Because of our associations with these objects, our history, and our wish to be a part of the world we inhabit, we cannot completely separate ourselves from the desires engendered by them. They are based on real human needs, however manipulative they are in practice, and permeate the signs of our experience. We cannot reconcile the two sides of the coin. When we attempt a solution but find none we are left in the Absurd state.
"At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten. This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend on it. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter -- these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable."
Camus (1955)
Presenting artifacts of mass culture, for which we have a sense of attraction-repulsion, forces us to be aware of our mixed emotions towards the environment that produces them. Our ultimate response is an appeal to the irony of the absurd. An irony which allows us to regain control of objects and attitudes which were meant to control us, without removing their ideological significance.
"But there exist more subtle behaviors, the description of which will lead us further into the inwardness of consciousness. Irony is one of these. In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creates a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness."
Sartre (1956)
Caught between desire and fulfillment, cynicism gives us the power to
respond in a critical manner. We become cynical consumers of our culture,
rather than cynically consumed by it
.
xxx
Aragon, Louis (1925)
excerpt from: The Beginnings of the Fugitive
trans J. Neugroschel from Benedikt, Michael, editor
(1974) The Poetry of Surrealism Little, Brown and Co. Boston
Barbie 30th Anniversary Magazine (1989)
Welsh Publishing Group NYC
quoted in: August 1990 Harpers Magazine
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Notes on the Problem of Kitsch
in Dorfles (1969)
Camus, Albert (1955)
An Absurd Reasoning
in: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Alfred A. Knoff NYC
Caudwell, Christopher (c 1937)
Beauty and Bourgeois Aesthetics
in Lang (1972)
Compte de Lautreamont (1870)
Les Chants de Maldoror
Dorfles, Gillo (1969)
Kitsch, The World of Bad Taste
Universe Books NYC
Dorfles, Gillo (1969a)
Politics
in Dorfles (1969)
Eco, Umberto (1975)
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in Eco (1986)
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in Kostelanetz (1989)
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Prometheus Books Buffalo, NY
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David McKay and Company NY
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in: Tucker, Robert, editor (1978)
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W. W. Norton and Company NY
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in Kostelanetz (1989)
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Dell Publishing NYC
(c) 1990 M. Schippling
first published:
Collages and Bricolages #6 (1992)
Clarion, PA