UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology Fall and Winter 2022 - Flipbook - Page 8
UCLA RADIATION ONCOLOGY JOURNAL
MARILYN MINTER
To examine engines of culture and to second guess received ideas of contempt
A
t seventy-three, Marilyn Minter is an
icon. Perhaps her longevity has as much
to do with her attitude as her undeniable
talent. She fixes her lipstick in the Zoom camera,
and I realize I’ve forgotten to gloss my own lips
with something akin to her standard red. She
encourages me to do so as we get started (“Aren’t
we a little naked without it?”), and I, too, use the
Zoom camera for application, saying, “Now I can
say I’ve put on lipstick with Marilyn Minter.” Her
Manhattan studio bustles with activity behind her;
she and her assistants are preparing her mid- and
large-scale paintings for her March 2023 exhibition,
and endeavor several years in the making as it can
take her a year to complete one piece (she works
on multiple pieces simultaneously). The new works
consist primarily of photo-realistic paintings of
women bathing or grooming, and while Minter
concedes that she paints what she sees, what
surprises her, and the different tropes of beauty
that are definitively of our current era, she is
thrilled that viewers read into her work a claiming
of power and wellness: women taking control of
their bodies, their mental and physical healthcare,
and their self-care.
female doctors, particularly those handling
women’s sexual health such as UCLA Department of
Radiation Oncology’s Dr. Puja Venkat, have changed
how women’s care is approached, carried out, and
followed up. While access to female physicians
and surgeons in no longer an anomaly, and while
it is no longer seen as subversive for galleries and
museums to exhibit provocative figurative work by
female artists, a stigma remains within enough of
the population that work about and for women by
women remains stymied from full bloom due to
being discounted. Minter and Dr. Venkat are prime
examples of how women in traditionally maledominant fields are still breaking new ground.
Although I’d followed her work for several years
prior to walking into her 2005 exhibition at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, nothing
could have prepared me for experiencing Marilyn
Minter’s enamel on aluminum paintings in person.
The sheer scale of her paintings engulfs the viewer,
and while the print-ad-glossiness of women’s feet
in bejeweled high heels and mouths with jewels
cascading from them seemed familiar in how they
might be sensuously selling luxury or fashion,
spending more than a magazine-page flip with
The relationship between art and medicine has
them revealed layers. In Strut, a woman's heels and
always been imperative; access to dissected bodies
Dior mule stilettos are smudged with city grime and
to draw and having the drawings to present findings detritus, as are the folds of skin at and above the
is one very simplistic example. However, the
ankle that appear a bit swollen from her night out.
current promotion of self-care and self-awareness
There is moisture on all, an ever-present dewiness
for women spotlights the parallels that make
or encounter with a recent rain puddle.
conversations between the two fields not only
relevant but imperative. Artists such as Barbara
Simply put, Minter refuses to obscure reality,
Krueger and Kara Walker take very political
refuses to blend or filter out any filth or
approaches, while Jenny Saville and Marcine
“imperfections” in the women she paints. She
Franckowiak lean into emotional unlayering.
admits that “scale does make a difference,” and at
Yet all four endeavor to ensure there is a “female
the scale she paints, the perceived imperfections
gaze,” a “gaze” that is no longer a distinctly male
are owned, are nothing to be ashamed of or to
blanket term for how art is viewed, especially when hide. While Minter says she feels what she paints
approaching the female form. Simultaneously,
rather than intellectualizing it, and while she leaves
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