Marilyn Minter was born in Louisiana and raised in Florida in an upper middle class household. Her father was an alcoholic, compulsive gambler, and occasional boxing promoter while her mom was a drug addict. When she was an undergrad at the University of Florida she took some photos of her mother which Diane Arbus, a visiting instructor at the time, saw the proof sheet and proclaimed it to be the only student work she gave a damn about that year. and so mortified her classmates with the end results that she didn’t show them again for nearly thirty years.
Minter moved to New York City in 1978, after finishing an MFA at Syracuse, and promptly entered what she calls a “coma”: nights touring the clubs of late 70’s-early 80’s downtown Manhattan, marathon boozing, and narcotic picnics back in an era when blow wasn’t supposed to be addictive. It was the perfect time to have a job teaching in a Catholic boy’s school, where she would chug Cokes and catch up on sleep in the minutes between classes. She’d been getting wasted since childhood, “on anything I could get my hands on,” and finally discovered in 1985 that the drugs had stopped working. Minter began the long, torturous task of cleaning up.
In 1989, after experimenting with dot screens and Pop Art, Minter felt compelled to do something completely new. “I thought, ‘I know—I’ll do pornography. I’ll do hardcore pornography!” If other women artists were exploring the erotics of objects, the erotics of consumption, then why not investigate the erotic itself? Scouring New York’s sex shops and adult bookstores for inspiration, Minter carefully selected and painted a series of close-ups that were compelling or funny to her. Three women croon over an erect penis in one painting titled The Supremes, which, with the exception of the solid white streaks projecting from the “microphone” onto willing fingers and tongues, is painted in seedy benday-dot fashion, as if seized from the back pages of a newsweekly, and presented on a bulky metal first-aid kit.
“I did these cumshots and thought they were really funny. I thought, ‘What’s the big deal?’ but people went nuts. Everybody likes to look at porn. I mean, the Internet’s there because of pornography. Let’s get real.”
Minter had no interest in the polite or tame. She zoomed in on blowjobs and masturbating women. She obscured faces, fragmented bodies, and made sexual anatomies seem like contraband, as if welcoming the charges of hegemony and objectification they would produce. Surely people would see the humor and irony behind them.
Minter’s 40-year career has only recently reached its zenith. After winning back the admiration of critics, the artist has had a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a much-envied spot in the 2006 Whitney Biennial in which her work was the invitation image. In 2007, her first retrospective monograph was published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., and she had shows in Sweden, the U.K., Spain, and France. Her photos of Pamela Anderson were commissioned by the art quarterly Parkett, later featured on the cover of Zoetrope: All-Story, which she guest-designed, and following that were used in paintings.
Supreme will release a series of limited edition skateboard decks designed by Marilyn Minter. The series will consist of three decks designed by Ms. Minter.
Available at the NY and LA stores on April 10th and online April 17th.
Japan will release the project on April 12th.
