Masks of Myth

By Katia Canton*

 

Every second, two Barbie dolls are sold somewhere on the planet. These statistics, found on a web research, give us an idea of the power of this myth which, over the last nearly fifty years, has become the paradigm for female beauty.

 

Barbie was created in the late 1930’s by Ruth and Eliot Handler, whose daughter Barbara liked to

dress up her dolls.

 

The Handlers, owners of Mattel toy manufacturer, decided to launch the dolls at the 1959 New York Annual Toy Fair, selling them for 3 dollars each. The first edition of 340,000 Barbies quickly sold out and new models followed over time, thus exponentially increasing the dolls’ popularity.

 

A historical irony: the doll appeared in the 1960’s, a decade marked by struggles for personal freedom and by feminism, which, among other issues, disputed the passiveness of objectified women. Well, while North-American feminists publicly burned bras, Barbie started to take privileged spots in toy store shelves with her blonde-haired, blue-eyed figure. She was sexy, at a time skinny and full of curves, dressed in exuberant, preferably pink outfits.

 

The major feature making Barbie an instant hit was the fact that she’s not a girl-doll, but a woman-doll. Her developers have realized that, in the context of modern society, girls want to grow up and become desired adults as soon as possible.

 

It leads us to think about the sexualization of children, a widespread issue in younger generations. Children TV show hostesses are blonde, wear sexy clothes etc. At the same time, we can also reflect on the infantilization of adult life.

 

For if the female beauty model is a doll, whose proportions are impossible in real women, we’re all projecting on the mirror the idealized image of a plastic creature, sold together with other attached values in her accessories and outfits: the designer clothes she wears, the Ferrari she drives, her extremely-high-heel shoes, her blonde straight shiny hair, her fashionable iPod.

 

Patricia Kaufmann has chosen Barbie, seduced by the power and complexity of this symbol, as the framework for her artistic creation.

 

When four years ago she started using the dolls as a theme, her images were paintings, with stencils that reproduced the dolls’ front or side contours.

 

These contours were taken to the canvases like trademarks, patterns that covered the surfaces painted in shades of red and pink, thus emphasizing the impersonality of the symbol. The stencils became mythical masks, for they resisted time, a concept that was embedded in the several paint layers which covered the canvases, thus revealing and hiding new combinations of shades, like ancient palimpsests.

 

It must be noted that the artist does not use readymade paint. Each of her colors is unique, manufactured in loco, by mixing pigments and acrylic binders. There are moments when she gets inspired and loses her formula, thus effacing the possibility to use the same shade again. This form of painting counterbalances the massification of the Barbie symbol.

 

Over time, as the concept gained force in her work, the need emerged to articulate other notions of shape and identity in the doll. Patricia was attracted to the idea of leaving painting behind and taking her emblematic figure to tridimensionality.

 

Patricia Kaufmann’s career so far had been aimed at bidimensional creation. She devoted herself to painting, with teachers such as (among other) Beatriz Milhares from the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, in Rio de Janeiro. In São Paulo, at FAAP, she also devoted herself to engraving, having Cláudio Mubarac as a reference professor.

 

To articulate the object itself would be a major challenge from that point on.

 

With generously extravagant images, which often remind of films by Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, the artist’s work develops a certain amount of humor, all the while it becomes more fable-like and critical.

 

A kind of case with six partitions in it seems to reproduce the windows of the so-called Red Light District  in Amsterdam, where prostitutes display themselves as objects, showing their bodies and inviting potential clients through the transparent windows. Each small environment created by Patricia displays one or more dolls dressed in lingerie made with sequins and glass beads, thin heels and excessive fashion items. All this is surrounded by a carefully drawn environment with miniature objects, from furniture to little liquor bottles.

 

A very unique combination of critical and ludic force is articulated in this miniaturization of eroticism. Indeed, one of the characteristic features of Patricia Kaufmann’s work is precisely her humorous gentleness in touching one of the softest spots concerning education and the sexual position of women in today’s society.

 

Go, go!  is another sculpture-object which causes a mixture of attraction and negation. A Barbie doll wearing a red-bead lingerie and high heels holds a pole and spins around on a stand, bathed in halogen light.

 

Here, the objectification of women meets mass pop culture, displaying a scene that greatly reminds of pole dancing, an erotic dance performed around a pole by a character in Globo’s prime-time soap opera, and which was set to become a trend in gyms.

 

Playboy  is the most humorous and also the most disturbing of her works. The legendary magazine comes carefully packed in a nice box, as if it were a treasure. The artist has remade the whole issue, placing Barbie as the great protagonist.

 

Sayings such as “We want Barbie” or “Yes, the girl has made it there” become headlines for colorful pages, showing the doll in sexy poses, relating to the Brazilian capital and epitome of modernist architecture: Brasília. Among the buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the doll emanates a simulacrum of power. It’s an innocuous, infantilized power, with Esplanada for a background.

 

On the magazine’s fourth cover, Barbie Proxac crudely depicts the everyday use of antidepressant drugs — the name of the product invented here replaces the z with an x — that compose the scenario of present-day life, increasingly dependent on apparatuses and artifices for sustainment.

 

Whereas Attention, a box with six dolls, exposes the reverse of Barbie’s forced femininity. Max Steel action figures, those super virile masculine counterpoints, full of muscles and dressed in army clothes, are equipped with Barbie heads, which are transplanted onto their male bodies. They all reveal to be dangerous, efficient social stereotypes.

 

Alongside the paintings and objects, Patricia Kaufmann shows a series of drawings on handcrafted papers with various patterns. Always chosen from a combination of shades, going from pink to red, the papers become backdrops for black Barbie silhouettes.

 

The artist tells us she was inspired by the striking work by black North-American artist Kara Walker, whose work often articulates silhouettes, as in a puppet theater. Barbie is clearly a puppet, an articulation of male fantasy which has also been bought by women.

 

​