Marilyn's Mansion

When the art provocateur Marilyn Minter needs to chill, she heads north to Cold Spring, New York. Pilar Viladas drops in.

Marilyn Minter has to be the friendliest provocateur you’ll ever meet. “I’m considered controversial,” she declares. “But I’m Southern and sociable. I’m a bad girl, but I’m always polite about it.” A bubbly, welcoming figure in person, the artist seems a far cry from the firebrand who challenges cultural perceptions of the female body (take her “Plush” series of photographs of women’s pubic hair, a commission for Playboy that never ran), and the fashion and beauty industries (in erotically charged, lush yet disquieting paintings like 2007’s Blue Poles, a close-up of heavily shadowed eyes). Those works—along with many others, like the 1969 photographs Minter took of her alcoholic and pill-addicted mother, or I’m Not Much But I’m All I Think About, a 2011 video in which the letters M and E, along with a pair of silver M&M’s, are repeatedly dropped into an oozing mixture of vodka and silver food coloring—are currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, in “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty,” a retrospective that originated at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

“The ongoing theme in my work is fashion and glamour,” Minter says, adding that she takes a lot of flak for her depictions of women’s bodies, clothing, shoes, and jewelry, which comment on fashion photography and our attitudes toward female sexuality. “I’m always looking for the paradox. The idea of glamour is so shallow, so debased, and yet it gives people so much pleasure and is a huge industry. I have a love/hate relationship with it.”