Exhibition Review: Marilyn Minter "Smash"
Green Pink Caviar (video still), 2009, HD Digital Video, Running Time: 7:45 minutes.
Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, NY. © Marilyn Minter
Written by: Andy Dion
Marilyn Minter’s latest exhibition, Smash, opened on Friday, April 2nd, 2021 at MoCa Westport, featuring new iterations of her distinct concepts. For the first time, Minter’s videos are all viewable in the same room. Making a bombastic addition to an already smashing show is the artist’s custom AMC Pacer, fitted with a surround viewing of her work Pink Green Caviar.
Installation shot of Marilyn Minter’s custom-designed AMC Pacer featuring an interior, surround viewing of her work Green Pink Caviar, exhibited for the first time.
Courtesy of the artist and No More Rulers © Marilyn Minter
Known for her fresh and uncompromisingly visceral work, Marilyn Minter is a veritable contemporary multidisciplinary artist. Her images grapple with topics of the body, low culture, filth, and feminism, and Smash showcases her latest forays in the video format. The familiar Pink Green Caviar can be seen through the windows of her souped up Pacer, the eight minute long video depicting lips sucking, kissing, and playing with fluids of various colors and viscosities behind a glass screen. The video is both hyper and hypo-sensual, filled to the brim with abandon yet obscured and impersonal. Colors bleed from dingy green and salmon to metallic silver and gold. Here, Minter mixes luxury with the base and profane. A persistently gesticulating mouth savors yet never ingests golden caviar that shines like a precious metal.
Smash (video still), 2014, HD Digital Video, Running time: 7:55 minutes, Ratio 16:9.
Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, NY. © Marilyn Minter
Minter typically declines the idea that many of her images are intentionally sexual. In Smash, high-heeled feet dance to a minimal techno beat over a silver puddle, splashing and sliding into the fluid in slow motion. The video’s subject exhibits a forcefulness and intensity that clashes with the delicacy of the high-heels, as if Minter directed the dancer to smash convention and crumble expectations of femininity. Much of Minter’s work starts as a photograph and ends as a painting, and many of Minter’s video works reveal another layer lurking within her art. Smash, along with other videos shown in this exhibition, feel like Minter’s paintings in motion.
Green Pink Caviar (video still), 2009, HD Digital Video, Running Time: 7:45 minutes.
Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, NY. © Marilyn Minter
The videos on display do not merely explore a kinetic angle to Minter’s work. Behind each moving picture is a unique score — typically ambient, but evocative of what each piece sets out to achieve. The artwork is loud, colorful, and occasionally gritty, while the sound oftentimes clashes with what’s on screen. Pink Green Caviar’s score is a constant low, warm ringing of bells and chimes, which may come as a surprise to some considering its visuals. The audio’s calmness creates dissonance with the abandon seen in the video. Similarly, Smash’s score deliberately clashes with the intensity of the film’s sopping wet high-heeled feet shattering glass — it is intense, but muted, like being unable to throw a punch in a dream.
Green Pink Caviar (video still), 2009, HD Digital Video, Running Time: 7:45 minutes.
Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, NY. © Marilyn Minter
MoCa Westport’s specially designed exhibition space for Minter’s video work leaves no stone unturned, capturing the impressive scale and intimacy of her work. Minter’s images speak to a fundamental aspect of the human experience, while also commenting on excess and social ritual. There is an unattainable beauty and simultaneous facelessness central in these pieces. This dreamlike yet unmistakably human approach feels all the more relevant in such a dire time of required social isolation, sequestering much of our desires to a limbo. We have grown accustomed to seeing unrelenting advertisements and idealized selections of others’ lives on social media, and Minter’s work acknowledges that ever present glamour, that comparison, that unattainability, that want.
Smash is on view to the public until June 13th at MoCa Westport. Marilyn Minter will be holding an artist talk on Instagram Live on 4/22 at 1pm EST. For news and updates on the event, visit @marilynminter and @mocawestport on Instagram.
