Pamela Anderson and Barbie, Two Dream Girls in New York
“A heap of broken images:” Sara Cwynar’s Baby Blue Benzo
Fueled by the seductive gloss of mass-circulated images, Baby Blue Benzo probes the semi-lucid drug-addled dreams that take hold in the absence of sleep. At 55 Walker, David Zwirner’s Tribeca outpost, Sara Cwynar has effectively transformed the space itself into a collage by mapping blown-up images culled from WCVB-TV and Getty Images onto walls layered with photographs leveraging ultra-familiar imagery to probe the collective consumer consciousness.
The kaleidoscopic exhibition centers on the 16mm film Baby Blue Benzo (2024), installed in a makeshift drywall structure in the middle of the gallery. Conspicuously divorced from any actual person or object, images of Pamela Anderson and a 1955 Mercedes-Benz—“dream girl” meets “dream car”—repeatedly appear in both the video and photographs as icons of insatiable desire. The Toronto-born, New York-based artist complicates notions of the “real” by pairing footage of the sportscar alongside convincing cutouts of the vehicle—circulating images of images. The steady voice of actor Paul Cooper poses the central question: “Is it just as good to have a picture of a car?” This voiceover—which weaves anxieties of insomnia with vexing realities of commodity fetishism—haunts the space at large, rendering even images of bright blue skies unnerving. Through tactics of collage in both the video and the irregularly spaced photographs, Cwynar accentuates the constructed-ness of commercial media. Crosses of yellow tape and thumbtacks—what the exhibition text dubs “seams”—deny the seamlessness of digital media, while images of green screens and production equipment further signal the non-neutral frames that mediate visual perception.
With layered vignettes of the Brooklyn Bridge, the film is ideally situated in the city “that never sleeps”—a billboard-saturated metropolis promoting the wildest of late-capitalist fantasies. Through the looping of the video and the layered repetition of ultra-familiar imagery, Cwynar equates the disjointed conditions of the media landscape today with the temporal distortions of insomnia, days blending without the cyclical reset of sleep. Through the array—or perhaps better put, disarray—of overlapping imagery, the exhibition as a hyperbolic exercise in media literacy effectively channels our media culture in which the relentless inundation of imagery becomes, rather paradoxically, monotonous.
-Aidan Chisholm
65 Years of Barbie Fashion, Feminism, & Female Entrepreneurship at MAD
Founded to represent fashionable adult women within children’s toys (no longer only teaching children how to care for infants as generations of dolls before), Barbie aimed to inspire dreaming. Barbie®: A Cultural Icon at the Museum of Arts and Design charts the iconic growth of founder Ruth Handler’s vision and Mattel’s legacy across fashion, feminism, and female entrepreneurship. What may seem like a superficial exhibition aiming for mass appeal to boost vistorship, actually reminds us about key moments in American history.
Launched when the majority of Ivy League schools did not co-educate women and women were restricted from full participation in the banking sector, imaginative play was a progressive avenue to envision a world where women could achieve any pursuit. Handler embodied this vision becoming a self-made multi-millionaire alongside her Mattel co-founder and husband Elliot Handler. These progressive values allowed Barbie in 1965 to become an astronaut—four years before Neil Armstrong’s successful moon landing—as well as launching Barbie’s friend the black Christie doll in 1968, just three years after the Voting Rights Act was passed federally protecting against racial discrimination. The exhibition presents the Barbies that responded to America’s history, becoming a bellwether of dialogues about women’s rights.
A section titled From Fashion Model to Fashion Icon, presents a selection of dolls for Versace, Coach, Karl Lagerfeld, and a video interview with Jeremy Scott designer for Moschino, stating Barbie is the muse for his Spring 2015 line that debuted in Milan with a lifesized pink cropped motorcycle jacket and mini skirt on view in the vitrine. For me the dolls encapsulate the pop culture ethos of my childhood, a no-apologies-allowed maximalism of girlie-girl naiveté—Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” Alicia Silver Stone’s “Clueless,” and Madonna’s “Material Girl.” Sparkles and color can brighten any day. Inspired by the seismic success and aesthetic of the film Barbie, this ethos came to life in Barbie’s life-size Mirror-Pink Corvette, Mattel’s walk-in Barbie box, and interiors from Barbie’s first DreamHouse.
I don’t know enough young girls who play with dolls today to know if Barbie is still relevant. However, the popularity of Barbies as collectors’ items has steadily continued to increase. Looming over the doll, however, are controversies surrounding negative stereotypes about women’s bodies. Yet, many people I spoke to at the opening did not enjoy the Barbie produced in the 1990s to the present, as the company changed the product to combat critiques that Barbie’s silhouette was anti-feminist, causing more harm than good for young girls. By becoming more realistic they lost touch with the magic of what made Barbie a fantasy to begin with. Perhaps people are just nostalgic for the designs of their adolescence in earlier decades. The exhibition makes a point of calling out the timeline for and the company’s inclusion of ethnically diverse doll bodies since 1968, but it is up to the viewer to decide if it is too little, or too late.
-Carson Woś
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