The Politics of Pink

In the world of contemporary museum design, heavy gilt frames and house museums have largely been relegated to the dusty corners of the past, and austerity seems to be the trending philosophy and the guiding principle. In its grand re-opening, Dartmouth’s Hood Museum has embraced this calculated austerity. The building that it augments and partially replaced, a brick monstrosity designed by Charles Willard Moore and Chad Floyd, was all sloped angles and variable elevations, with strange plays at concrete brutalism and Art Deco brickwork. In comparison, the new Hood is predicated on the idea of minimal hospitality, and its strength lies in the interplay between its cool grey stone, illuminated signage, and the protruding window overlooking the green. Like the Danes, the Swedes, and the Norwegians, the Hood has somehow managed to make grey welcoming. 

In keeping with its exterior, the museum generally tends to let its works tell the story. The interior galleries, furnished with spruce flooring and highlighted with concrete and brick, are mostly painted in inoffensive white, allowing a supreme amount of contrast with the works that hang on its walls. That is why, in recent months, a gallery space, painted in what could variably be called Glossier, light rose, or Spanish pink, has stuck out to anyone walking through the expanisve atrium of the Hood. That space is home to the creation of Charlotte Grussing ’19, The Politics of Pink.

It should not work. On the surface, it opposes everything that tells us what a modern art gallery ought to look like. What we associate with modern art, namely black turtlenecks, sleek, but uncomfortable chairs, and the aforementioned stark-white gallery carry messages of bourgeois taste. On the flip side, painting a gallery pink is embracing a color laden with commercialism and gender-coding, a maximalist tone associated with dyed poodles, ball gowns, and bubble gum. Grussing knows this, and makes the choice to forge ahead regardless. This subversion of tradition and convention creates obvious tension between the exhibit and the rest of the museum, but with the interplay of the works and the walls on which they hang, it is pleasantly surprising to see how much pink becomes a color as neutral as black, beige, grey, or white. What is more, is not the purpose of a student exhibition to show a radically different perspective than the professionals?

Grussing has arranged a relatively diverse group of modern artwork and artifacts in a variety of mediums, from small watercolor images to a massive oil painting by Fernando Botero entitled The Butcher’s Table. The natural starting place of the exhibit is the Botero, for its commanding size and thematic introduction of the exhibit. To say the least, Fernando Botero is an eccentric artist. Known primarily for painting exaggerated human physiques that combine Ruben’s full-fleshed beauties with the comic rotundity of the Michelin Man, in this case, he is not portraying humans at all, but a pig in the midst of being butchered. While Grandma Moses’ winter homesteads and Gauguin’s Breton landscapes comfort and center, Botero’s entire painting philosophy is predicated on disturbing the viewer, and The Butcher’s Table is no exception. His decapitated pig grins jauntily at the viewer, while entrails and sausages sit in bowls and hang from meat hooks, gathering flies. Viewed in context of the rest of Botero’s catalog, it becomes apparent that his absurd human portraits and severed pig head share the same light shade of pink. On examination, these strange bedfellows are not so strange after all.  Beyond introducing the exhibition’s concept of pink as flesh, Botero’s work also has a certain resonance within this particular sphere of elite society. At an selective, heralded institution like Dartmouth, it is simply a reminder that from the process under which you are admitted, to the organizations you join, and the job you eventually get, you are seemingly no more than a participant in the meat market than the fated pig.

In two small watercolors to the left of the Botero, the curator addresses the quandaries of genitalia that have transfixed generations of artists and inspired the Freudian milieu from which contemporary art and academia has emerged. The first, a yonic piece entitled Growing, painted by Sonia Landy Sheridan, mixes explicit anatomical detail with obscured depictions of an idealized female form (you may have seen something similar in your spinster aunt’s apartment.) Unlike some of the other artists working on the same theme, Sheridan makes very little effort to conceal what she is painting. Although a bold and unabashed work, in the wake of O’Keefe, who so famously mixed the floral and the anatomical, it seems impossible for any painting of a similar subject to eclipse her work. The painting directly below it, Azazel, by the British artist Matthew Richie, imagines a minotaur-like figure with a body made up of varying cuts of meat, and a grotesque head from which mushrooms, and at the terminus of the mushrooms, penises, spring. It is a uniquely horrifying painting (which is not to say a bad one) that conjures up reflections of Basquiat and De Kooning. In her curational notes, Grussing places the phallocentrism and gynocentrism (excuse the postmodernisms) of the respective paintings into the context of a political and social environment which is in the process of reevaluating the interrelationships of sex, gender, and genitalia.  What does it mean if the yonic painting, long a symbol of feminine pride, independence, and rebellion against bodily shame, can no longer serve as a universal symbol of femininity and female experience? Although it is harder to associate a message of liberation with Azazel, how does the disconnect of the phallic with the male lead us to reconsider the interpretation of art, but also of brotherhood and the traditional family?

Meat, or flesh, is the connective tissue that fuses many of the disparate works in The Politics of Pink into a coherent, mature exhibition. Grussing shows that representations of flesh underpin our oldest and greatest pieces of art, and the depiction of human beings, their tones and shades and infinite variations, are both the building blocks and the stumbling blocks of artistic creation. In what I found to be one of the best curatorial decisions of the entire exhibit, a painting entitled Manet’s Olympia hangs to the right of The Butcher’s Table. 

As the title implies, it is a reworking of one of Manet’s most famous paintings, which depicts a luxuriant, nude young woman reclining, accompanied by a black servant bearing flowers. The original painting was condemned in its own time, largely for its depiction of nudity and the scandalous identity of its subject, who was a prostitute and model (as well as a talented painter in her own right). Despite an originally chilly Parisian reception, the painting’s stock has only risen in the eyes of critics and general audiences, now seen as perhaps the most famous of the so-called odalisque paintings, which feature reclining women in boudoirs, harems, or other scandalous, exotic locations. Mel Ramos’s reworking of the piece strips bare the protective insulation of the past, and lets the viewer see the painting as we might have, had we been the French public of the 1860s. Ramos’s painting replaces the cool Olympia, isolated from our contemporary understanding, with an earnest, perky blond with a swimsuit tan and a bob. Seemingly, what is preventing this new Olympia from being a cast member of the original Dukes of Hazzard is her lack of short shorts and a flannel shirt. While the nudity no longer scandalizes the public like it once did, Ramos’ interpretation calls into question whether there is any difference between the artistic nude and the pornographic nude. Is Ramos’ modern depiction really the contemporary equivalent of Olympia? Was Manet an impartial genius who believed in the truest depiction of human beauty, which he found in the female nude, in which case we should treat Olympia as a profound object? Or was his painting simply a highbrow form of erotica, a Playboy centerfold in oil? 

The original Olympia has become a fixture of contemporary criticism and evaluation not simply because of its depiction of the nude, but also of that of its servant. In the original painting, the dark background almost obscures the face of the black servant, who humbly clothed, attends to Olympia, presenting her with a bouquet of flowers. In the Manet, there seems to be an obvious dichotomy between the beauty of this young, nude white woman, and the dark, clothed maid, who does not stand for, and cannot access beauty, but must tend to it. In Ramos’ interpretation, it is no longer the explicitness of the body which unnerves, but the obvious racial dimension of the painting. With the dark background of the original done away with, the black maid is more visible, and now, she looks at the viewer rather than at Olympia, with an expression that transmits innumerable emotions, none very positive. In the Ramos’ painting, the absurdity of what was once an exotic painting is stripped bare, and the resulting experience is not one of mystical beauty, but of deep discomfort.

This relationship between the Caucasian, “pink” flesh and the darker skin of others is invoked by another unsettling piece, W is for White, from South African cartoonist Anton Kannemeyer. For a work that deals with the concept of whiteness, the illustration, done in the style of the creator of the Tintin comics, Hergé, uses the color only for the character’s teeth. Instead, shades of pink are employed to portray a shiny headed, smiling older man along with the artist’s satirical definition, which describes white as the “colour of milk,” “pure,” “bright,” but also “anti-revolutionary,” “reliable,” and “honorable.” Although it is not on display, the piece’s label contains a picture of its counterpart, B is for Black, in which a horrendous caricature of an African man taken from Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo is accompanied by a definition which reads, “opposite of white,” “dirty,” “illegal,” and “malignant.” The inclusion of Manet’s Olympia and W is for White provides a critique that is both substantive and relatively topical. Grussing is asking the viewer to think about pink as a signifier of flesh, but not as the only signifier of flesh. That argument may seem obvious, but American consumerism, of which pink is an inextricable part, has at times, failed to acknowledge it. In recent years, Rihanna’s makeup, clothing, and lingerie brand Fenty has emerged as a dark horse of the beauty and fashion industry, propelled by star power and an ethos of inclusivity that is proving to be a force for profit and the reformation of an industry. By offering lace and makeup in shades that more accurately represent the woman who wear them, Rihanna is furthering the commentary raised by Ramos and Kannemeyer, namely that flesh is universal, but its color is not.

An exhibit devoted to pink that only focuses on skin, meat, and flesh cannot be said to be a comprehensive one at all. Ask the average American to play a word association game with pink, and they’re likely to return princesses or Paris Hilton. We may live in a time where “real men wear pink” and Barbie is a computer scientist, but in the American imagination, whether out of sincerity, irony, homophobia, or a litany of other factors, pink is an eminently feminine color. To wear pink, employ it in one’s art, or use it in politics is to jump fully into the debate about what femininity, and conversely, masculinity, means in the United States and in its global cultural wake.

One of the strongest pieces in the exhibit, Dearest Art Collector, by the radical art coalition The Guerilla Girls, is a wonderful example of the ironic usage of pink in feminist media. Founded in the mid-Eighties in New York, the Guerilla Girls waged public campaigns for female visibility and representation in the arts. In one of their most famous pieces of protest art, they depict an Olympia-like odalique with the head of a Gorilla, asking in bold-face, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” and presenting damning statistics about the prevalence of female artists in the world’s most prominent museums. The exhibit’s featured piece takes the form of a letter addressed to prominent art collectors, telling them that the group has been informed that their collection “does not contain enough work by women,” and that they should “rectify the situation immediately.” Although the threat borders on the absurd, it is a wonderfully clever piece. Set on lavender-pink stock, and complete with girlish cursive and a drawing of a frowning daisy, the Guerilla Girls appropriate themes of delicate femininity to push a message that is decidedly not delicate, but certainly feminist.

Hanging on opposite sides of the gallery are two further works which seek to comment on the associations of the color pink. On the left wall hangs Pink Gun, a watercolor by Maya Schindler, while on the right, Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair. Both the electric chair and the handgun are masculine symbols of killing and war, of which men have held the dominant share throughout history. I’m not sure if Electric Chair, with its silkscreened flashes of yellow and pink is trying to feminize death, or if death is attempting to doom the feminine, but it is compelling regardless. In opposition to the master of Pop Art’s roaring depiction of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility’s execution chamber, Schindler’s painting, which features a fuchsia Glock in an expanse of white space, simply cannot compete with the energy and magnetism of the Warhol.  That is not to say that it is not a compelling subject or a good painting; the historical relationship of women and guns in America is an interesting one, and rates of female gun ownership, especially handgun ownership, are beginning to climb. I simply wonder if the exhibit would be better off with a sociological, photographic depiction of women using guns, rather than forcing Schindler and Warhol to duel for our attention.  

 In the furthest section of the exhibit, on the other side of the entranceway, Grussing places a photograph, a political poster, and three of the infamous “pussy hats” from the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. The photograph is taken from a series by photographer Martín Gutierrez, whose work grapples with idealized notions of gender, sexuality, and class. This particular photo, Raquel 3, is of a series in which Gutierrez painstakingly transforms himself into a series of Real Dolls, sex dolls which offer the detail of an expensive mannequin with the anatomical completeness of the baser variety. In the photo, Gutierrez (as Raquel) reclines mechanistically at the table, draped in pink chiffon. In this case, Raquel is a feminine construction of a man, Gutierrez, but she is also more generally a feminine construction for a man, who having domain over her appearance, has decided to dress “her” in an ideal, womanly pink.  Raquel’s clothing, chosen and applied to her by, and for a man, represents an uncritical embrace of pink as a gendered color. As for the other objects that surround it, a political poster by Favianna Rodriguez, and three hand-knit “pussy hats,” pink is employed not because of dominant cultural tropes, but despite them. Although the poster, entitled Occupy Sisterhood, features an interesting abstraction of a female protestor, and the “pussy hats” are undoubtedly an important artifact of our current political times, I can’t help but feel that the works that deal with the metapolitics of art are more thoughtful and cohesive. For example, the “pussy hats” are presented without any sort of provenance. Who knit them? Who originated the pattern? The answers to these questions would add personal context to what has been an indominable symbol of the resistance against the Trump Administration. Without it, the poster and the hats feel like they have been included out of necessity, rather than care.

In totality, the Politics of Pink is an impressive, thought-provoking freshman foray into the world of curation. Grussing does an excellent job mixing known artists with the obscure, and pop art with painting. That is not to say that it is a perfect exhibit. Some pieces, like a plate by Jeff Koons, the “pussy hats”, and Schindler’s Pink Gun fall flat, or seem uncomfortably shoehorned into the exhibition. Feminist critics may take issue with the fact that the exhibit is dominated by male artists. But its excellent discussion of the politics of gender and race in artwork, especially in its selection of works by Ramos, Kannemeyer, and the Guerilla Girls, is only hindered by its physical space and scope, although this proves to be a minor issue. The consequence of such a small, yet provoking installation is that it leaves us with more questions than answers, and questions that don’t stay contained within the three walls of the installation.  An exhibit like Grussing’s greatly overshadows its physical footprint, following you as you move from minimalist gallery to minimalist gallery, whispering to you about flesh and femininity as you look at O’Keefes, Picassos, and Samples.