Curator’s Notes, Pt. 1: Straight Outta Sacramento: 25 Years Before Gerwig’s Discordantly-Coiffed Weird Barbie Hit The Screen, Pop Art Founding Father Mel Ramos Painted a Quartet Suite of Chopped-Hair, Wierdified Barbie Paintings PLUS: Mark Ronson’s 2007 NYC Debut (EXCLUSIVE VIDEO)
By Michael Vazquez
As with his stunningly prescient 1962 The Joker paintings — the savage impasto of which make most eminently manifest how the Pop artist-as-curator knew, long before the disruptive blockbuster films (or even the first TV show, for that matter), that comic book lore’s most legendary villain’s make-up, (just like Barbie’s — and one says this ever-appreciatively — psycho-chopped hair) symbolized a hubristic, chaos-creating identity crisis, and was ready for its close-up — Mel Ramos’ suite (three watercolors and one oil) of weirdified Barbie paintings also posited a cultural touchstone-cum-future-box-office-supernova for heady, canonical contemplation, again, well before there would be a Pop-cinema vehicle in which a jarringly-shorn Barbie would emerge as a morally discomfited anti-Yoda agent of subversion, guiding the film’s protagonists’ (and global viewers’ — especially females’) essential Socratic reexamination toward authentic, existentially heroic self-actualization, thusly ushering the phrase “Weird Barbie” into the Pop-Cult lingua franca’s nomenclature.
And within the semiotic parlance of Mel’s signature renderings of uber-brands and nudes in conceptual dialectic and sometimes surreal interplay of form (the lucid decodings of which make him Pop Art’s Prometheus), this denuding finds his unique mind’s picto-forensic paintbrush-as-magnifying glass surveying a brand whose stature exists far beyond his oft-stated prerequisite of logo/brand ubiquity for subject selection: Barbie — which is to say, a brand-as-human-identity; an insidiously, alternately empathic-alienating existential imprimatur of sorts, culturally absorbed on an order of global magnitude, in and of itself dually imbued with that innate, resonant identity-transference humans have since time immemorial projected onto totems in their likeness, whilst also burdened with countless (subject to scrutiny) hyper-constraining modern discomforts and comforts, the deliverances and accoutrements of which would seem as literal magic to the expressers of the first totems (and also any cereal-sugar-blitzed kid watching the weekend’s cartoons…and attendant commercials).
And so then, what to make of the sugar-crash and the anticlimax of lapsed magic, exposed ideals of beauty (and the institutional machinations fostering same), come adolescence, and post-adolescence — and adulthood, for that matter? These and other questions are of course, entirely matters for gallery visitors to decide. In the service of same, herewith, Mel Ramos’ Still Life #2:
In Still Life #2, there is perhaps much to contemplate, before or after meeting Barbie’s gaze and engaging in (and losing, though Mel’s rendering of dolls’ eyes are existentially different from his human subjects’ eyes, which also win) the Sartreian battle of “The Look” (instead — or rather — in addition to the male gaze and the aforementioned Barbie totem projections, I posit, grade, the potent gazes of many of Mel’s subjects’ eyes as existential gender-power-imbalance-leveling — sans any denialist recompense in favor of any party whosever — by way of J.P. Sartre’s proposition, paraphrased herein: “He who looks, possesses; he who is looked upon, the possessed.”, from Being & Nothingness).
One might then discern, yonder in the Hills Bros coffee can — and certainly Mel’s “Art about Art” reference-heavy subjects and syntax throughout many of his works supports this — a humorously counter-polemical, symbolic replacing of fellow Pop OG Jasper Johns’ Savarin can and fetishized tool — the sanctified paintbrushes — with the (figuratively and literally) eternally plastic ready-made: a Barbie (denuded, and thus both canvas and subject), seeming to rise and shine (per the product function), as if sprouting from the corrugated aluminum — the can delivering an inevitable look at local history by way of the coffee brand’s namesake San Francisco city-founding Hills family, which one might presume inherent in Mel’s awareness of item selection (though it would also likely be readily available and “On Special”, stacked neatly in a pyramid at the local supermarket), ergo one might subsequently ponder matters of American global import (the coffee), and export, (the Barbie) when surveying the placement and scale betwixt figurine and logo icon: a friendly giant, seductively-posed (perhaps suggesting tempting, seductive trade policies, rather than Eve-as-Original Sin), thigh-high in product, dwarfing the regionally-flavored local whose body language suggests a humble, almost pious gratitude in taking a sip from a demitasse, standing outside the perimeter of the storehouse, essentially existing at the feet of the towering figurine. Incidentally, this can emblazoned in their vintage logo (since replaced by the company) sells for around ten dollars on ebay. I’ll be publishing my longer notes on these works in the show book and also online. Of course, the only really interesting question is: What do YOU see in Still Life #2?
Although the aforementioned semiotics in the language of advertising informed a large series of Mel’s pioneering Pop Art conceptual nudes series (hence, again, my earnest insistence that Mel Ramos is Pop Art’s Prometheus), the catalytic creative act and initial license for mass-produced-object of object-subject-self-scrutiny for the Barbie series was actually authored by Ramos-the-younger — his daughter, Rochelle (she of course, being among the legions through generations of figurine re-mixers, re-makers and re-modelers) whose chopped-hair Barbie provided the ready-made for Mel’s creative act. Some Dads fix Barbies, some buy replacements, some juxtapose ’em with coffee cans and make…Pop Art.
By way of an additional curator’s note, I’ll add that it was this incredible watercolor that inspired me to make the case to my Barbie-remixing colleague Rochelle Leininger, that we bring out this first set of new prints. As it turned out, it was a painting she’d gotten print requests for previously, and so we decided to introduce these rarely-seen works in an edition, and she subsequently took on the ever-serious work of designing and proofing the prints in California.
At the time he created the Barbie series over the course of the 90s’, Mel — who painted and showed works here and overseas yearly until his unexpected death in 2018 — was an august-if-irreverent, highly active elder statesman of Pop Art, just approaching sixty and now finding himself receiving, to his bemusement and indeed, glee (perhaps differing from the ever-expressedly-befuddled M.C. Escher, when receiving queries from The Rolling Stones), requests from rock stars of a much younger generation, for album cover art.
Most famously, Rage Against The Machine requested the second of his Crime Buster paintings for their iconic Evil Empire album art (the origin story of which you can read HERE). Requests also came from The Strokes, The Soul Sugar mix and events series, and Blur – whose use of Mel’s Hippopotamus, again, in living manifestation of Mel’s dicta about, well, Art about Art, was also subsequently reworked and transposed for an official Buckingham Palace publication of the UK Olympics events program, featuring Mel’s exquisitely-rendered artiodactyl, atop of whom the Brits pasted a tuniced, shielded, tridented, helmeted female Greco-Roman warrior.
Hippopotamus is itself a work within a beguiling canonical series for which I’ve respectfully originated the label, Mel’s Charismatic Megafauna series, the motif of which is first seen in Gorilla, then Rhinoceros, two of several in this suite to feature legendary muse Leta, a painter and accomplished photographer who did the history of Pop Art a favor when she chronicled the life-altering, now-legendary cross-country trip she and Mel took with fellow married couple Wayne and Betty Jean Thiebaud, on a mission — fueled by Cali moxi and a trunk full o’ now-canonical Pop Art canvases — to meet with gallerists and artists’ reps in New York, where Mel had previously travelled to, staying with Roy Lichtenstein, who helped champion his work, recommending him to Ivan Karp and Leo Castelli. Leta’s photography can currently be found in two newly-released books from the Thiebaud and Lichtenstein foundations, and her in-situ portrait of Roy and then-fiancée Dorothy Herzka at his Bowery studio circa ’67 is featured in the 1960 section of the timeline at the beautifully-arranged Lichtenstein catalog raisonné website.
For this show, Leta, who at the very outset of, and all throughout Mel’s career (their lifelong partnership beginning when they were high school sweethearts) was the subject of countless, often series-launching paintings, appears in the rarely exhibited print, Leta on Durer’s Rhino, an etching with UV-cured acrylic ink over a woodcut impression in black relief. The print’s detail, coloring and mise-en-scene make it a terrific piece to exhibit in a tattoo parlour, and a fun challenge to tattoo artists, methinks.
Returning to the Barbie series, through three oils and one watercolor, we see the rendering of a physical feature as narrative and character illuminator: her hair is partially, discomfitingly (self-?) sheared, her factory-settings, mold-injected corpus denuded, delivering an edgy scrutiny of myth versus reality, exaggerated (a formula also informing Warhol’s various Marilyns’ garish make-up), making stark the question and endless self-questioning that her fully-dressed person created/creates for countless children, adolescents, post-adolescents and adults, still endeavoring to understand what they were, and also what they were/are in relation to her, all acting on a universal developmental impulse to denude a figurine.
I should also note herein that within the Ramos oeuvre, the ’94 — ’98 series is not Mel’s first reference to Barbie — this actually happens twenty-three years earlier, in 1971, in what is for me one of several landmarks, and it does not include the plastic figurine; simply her name within the title, which he portmanteaus into a proto-Punk (and also New Wave) moniker, Barbiburger, ingeniously setting up an elementally profound work of conceptual Americana, netting wholesale thematic deliverance and proof-of-concept through a stark, prima facie triptych pairing of the mythic girl next door, a classic cheeseburger, and the eternally loaded name of Barbie, with many powerful spectral meditations engendered beyond its literalist title — from food fetish, crackling with pre-consumption kinetic energy replete with tactile sensory data and olfactory analogs, through brutally metaphorical indictments of the life-more-ordinary as gristmill for institutionalized entrapment of the girl-next-door-as-beast-of-burden, perhaps an ambitious-if-naïve participant doing what’s expected of her, pre-gristmill, to, yes, happily-ever-after lives amidst white picket fences and barbecues, and also the simple, longing-fueled comfort fantasy expressed in heartfelt “When I get home…” checklists of every GI in every war movie — again, all through a stark, prima facie triptych pairing of the mythic girl next door, a classic cheeseburger, and the eternally loaded name of Barbie. Of course, the only really interesting question is: What do YOU see in Barbiburger?
Prints of Barbiburger don’t exist, however, for this show, I included a Virnaburger print — the original oil painting from ’65 hangs in the permanent collection at the Sintra Museum of Modern Art in the land of Ramos’ forefathers, Portugal. I’ve placed this as the very last print in the show’s sequence, next to an unsigned copy of Donut Doll, which is the final print Mel completed.
The first Barbie in the ’94 — ’98 series — which is also the only work in the quartet to utilize her name — was the Peek-a-Boo Barbie, which updated the continuum of his series from the 60s, adding the fictitious household name to a prestigious gallery of subjects including Marilyn Monroe, Brigit Bardot, Scarlett Johansen, Pamela Anderson (who commissioned Mel to do a nude portrait of her).
In Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, interestingly, his use of voyeuristic vantage points during the Scarlett Johansen-Jason Schwartzman inter-bungalow disrobing scene reminded me in spirit of this Peek A Boo series, just as the color scheme and stenciling for the produce-filled freight train reminded me of Mel’s 1964 oil painting Navel Orange #2 — which is based on an outré, real-life story from Mel’s life, not unlike a quirky Anderson vignette, and perhaps a subject in the next round of curator’s notes which will include closer looks at individual works and essays on Mel’s relevance, circa now.
Speaking of the present, by way of an endnote announcer to this first post, I’m proud to note this humble writer’s coolest bit o’ placement ‘n curation to date: there can now be found in the halls of Congress, amidst the various cornerstone totems heralding our democracy’s greatest traditions, a framed print of Mel Ramos’ canonical Superman. Simply put, as our ever-evolving, eternally stress-tested democracy faces its own current crises, I most earnestly hope that Mel’s human-scale rendering of a national icon and powerful, uniquely American global export might fortify those in Congress through their daily challenges.
Mel’s original Superman oil painting is the unofficial totem of the DeYoung Museum, currently hanging in an exquisite diptych curation, paired with Warhol’s blue-overlaid chiaroscuro of newly-widowed Jacqueline Kennedy, making for a powerful pictographic curation of a nation in crisis.
Lastly, I’d also love to see some of Ramos’ canonical superhero paintings from the heady days of the Big Bang of Pop Art in our embassies overseas — and am currently working toward same — his Wonder Woman would look great in The White House.
BARBIE’S OSCAR-NOMMED MARK RONSON’S LIVE 2007 NYC DEBUT (EXCLUSIVE VIDEO)
NOTE: These were posted when Youtube had no spellcheck, a ten-minute maximum clip length, a tiny file-size limit (hence the mammoth-sized pixels), and even tinier maximum word count, allowing no formatting nor punctuation…And we wonder how we find ourselves in a post-literate, hyper-reactionary age of the hateful pre-narrative.
Extra-credit reading and viewing:
My early notes on pre-release of Gerwig’s Barbie, pts. 1 & 2
My on-camera interview with Greta Gerwig.
Notes on tone: This is a blog — my blog. You can start your own HERE.