Sugar and Spice, but Who's Playing Nice?
By Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, Jan. 16, 2009
Call a grown woman a "girl" and you're liable to rile her.
When a man drops the g-word, he comes off as a heel at best, sexist at worst. But what if the fellow is good buddies with the "girl"? How about when the "girl" is a grown woman who slaps the label on herself? That's okay, right?
Such semantic minutiae have their equivalent in pictures, too. Today, when a man paints women -- clothed, unclothed, whatever -- he engages not only the ghosts of feminism past but also their latter-day iterations. Yet whatever wave today's women's rights advocates surf -- it's a decidedly choppier barrel than the 1960s-era version.
A solo exhibition at Flashpoint featuring pictures of "roller girls" -- the female roller skaters who compete in packs for paying audiences -- reveals the fault lines of contemporary feminism. It's the kind of show that will incite the haters and delight the grrrls.
These paintings and digital prints by area artist Cory Oberndorfer riff on a roller derby subculture that's blossomed in recent years. The local league calls itself the DC Rollergirls. In name and attitude, the group broadcasts decidedly mixed messages: Imagine women in their 20s and 30s wearing kohl eyeliner and Bettie Page bangs as they elbow each other in the guts. All this while dressed in fishnet stockings and miniskirts.
Oberndorfer quite clearly fetishizes women's roller derby; the theme appears in nearly all his recent exhibitions. He paints the girls in a candy-bright palette and depicts them in monochromes inspired by old magazine ads. When rendering their outfits he spares no detail: Each girl is kitted out in knee and elbow pads, skirts or negligee-like dresses, torn fishnets and crash helmets.
We could stop here and compare this small show to Oberndorfer's most recent exhibition, held at G Fine Art last fall. Though that earlier show felt premature (he was charged with opening the fall gallery season at a major venue and he was too green to pull it off), in many regards its tight hang had an energy the current show lacks. But this Flashpoint show doesn't invite discussion of Oberndorfer's budding artistic capacities, his weaknesses and strengths.
Instead, the current show -- it's called "Flavor of the Month," about which more shortly -- poses a different set of questions. It invites us to think about context and how it shapes the way we feel about what we're seeing.
At Flashpoint we stand around scratching our heads, given that:
Oberndorfer is young. He's a man. Nearly half of his pictures pair women with sweets -- facing down phallic lollipops, ready to rumble in front of soft-serve ice cream cones or turning backs to Gummi Bears. He's prone to showing women in multiples, like assembly-line products. He titled his show "Flavor of the Month."
Should we laugh? Sigh? Take offense? Do we suddenly care -- too much, and inappropriately -- about Oberndorfer's sexual orientation?
To be fair: Oberndorfer doesn't paint these women as cheesecake. They are tough girls, to be sure. Yet still he pairs them with confections as if equating them with sweets. And his pop-art-style multiples suggest both sameness and commodification (check out the orgy of girls in "Lollipop Swirl" to see what I mean).
And then there's that "Flavor of the Month" business.
As a gesture of (seeming) reassurance, the gallery press release acknowledges these sticky issues. The artist is aware, we are told, of issues of commodification. Presumably we're to be comfortable with him because the release tells us that one of his very favorite things is "badass women." Here in the gallery text we are directed how to read this work.
And the works, too, are sometimes more complicated than simple girl-equals-edibles arrangements. The trio of women facing three lollipops in "Pop (multiple)" stand with hands on hips as they face down the sweets. The angle of the pops suggests they might belong to these women, hinting at an androgynous power.
Yet. The take-back-the-pejorative movement -- for women, for minorities -- is hardly uncomplicated. By repeating patronizing words and images, aren't we -- and here I mean "us girls" -- just maintaining the low status quo? Roller derby participants, per the rules of their sport, are not children under the age of 18. Yet they call themselves "girls," and Oberndorfer jumps in to create visual equivalents of the term.
Maybe it's not context that matters, but the beholder's state of mind. Perhaps Oberndorfer's pictures are a litmus test. Today's art historians teach history's greatest nudes -- Titian's "Venus of Urbino," say -- as courtesans legitimized by equating them to goddesses. But weren't they really just Renaissance cheesecake? Before feminism, Titian's painting was just another no-big-deal nude. Today we call her out for what she is.
Today we also call ourselves "girls." And even as we participate in brutal sports like roller derby, we dress in hot pants and fishnets. Could we be undermining ourselves as we make these great strides?
