“the Eye craves what it can’t see.”

A Conversation with Marilyn Minter

Interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

MARILYN MINTER is an artist practicing her medium in the last miasmatic gasp of the patriarchy’s gilded, moated castle. Her contrarian, rebellious nature (perhaps a vestigial remnant from her upbringing as a self-proclaimed "bad kid" in South Florida) has added a militarized charge to her hyperrealistic, obfuscated paintings of the naked female form. Paintings that require multiple layers, of digital manipulation as well as finger smudged enamel on aluminum, and take an entire year to make. Her unmanipulated photographs are protected by the same fuchsia and lilac cocoon of condensated glass and raw femininity. These images thus become templates – for the deconstruction of society’s projection of glamour, for the politics of sexuality, and for womanhood in a century of algorithmic and logarithmic self-improvement. In her new exhibition at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, the simple and oft explored trope of the bather in art history is examined in this feminist context. In a new video work, entitled My Cuntry, 'Tis Of Thee, Minter studies this trope with a surgical knife-edge, as various models, like the poet Eileen Myles, write variations of the word ‘Cunt’ in frozen glass: Cuntrarian, Cuntridiction, Cuntrol, Cuntsent and so on. 

Minter's views on female sexuality were not always celebrated. In 1989, her pornographic still lifes based on images of hardcore pornography, cum shots and all, that exerted her firm belief that no one has politically correct fantasies, were immediately panned. It took the revival of a series of images taken in the 1970s of her drug-addicted mother to defibrillate and shock her career back to life. Since then, Minter has been constantly pushing boundaries where boundaries need to be pushed – both in her artistic practice and in her socio-political pursuits, whether that be fighting for the basic principles of democracy or for Planned Parenthood. Slowly, but surely, the world is catching up to Minter's crusade. Pubic hair, tumescent nipples, pearls, slime, condensation, dirt, diamonds, lipstick, and eye shadow are all symbols of Minter’s highly-intentional psychological apparatus, tightly strung between the border of figurative art and abstraction. I got a chance to sit down with Minter before her exhibition. 

OLIVER KUPPER: My first question has to do with copying things; you have an incredible gift for it. Did it ever enter your mind to become a forger? 

MARILYN MINTER: When I was a teenager I got busted and put in jail because I was changing people’s driver’s licenses. At sixteen I was put in jail, it was a scandal. I could draw typed letters. Because if you typed it, it looked so phony. This was before lamination. It was in the ‘60s. And people just had regular driver’s licenses. I took an X-Acto knife and scratched off the letters. And I always thought I was gonna be a forger. I thought, “Well, this is how I’m gonna make a living.” 

KUPPER: How much money did you charge for a license?

MINTER: It was $5 for a license. They just mailed it to me in an envelope with a 5-dollar bill. I wasn’t trying to do it to make money, though. I was doing it because I liked doing it. It was just something to do, it was a challenge. I met so many artists that did this. I actually got busted for it. 

KUPPER: How did you eventually get busted? 

MINTER: It’s so embarrassing. I had braces on my teeth. [laughs] I had my license, and I went into a liquor store and a cop pulled in and saw me walk in and waited ‘til I came out with the bottles because I had a whole car full of friends waiting for me. They all gave me money and I walked in and he said: “Let me see your driver’s license.” I showed it to him, and he said: “How old are you?” I said 21. But my license said I was 23. It was my license and he kept saying, “Whose license is this?” And I wouldn’t tell him. It said it was mine but I wouldn’t tell him I’d forged it, because it was perfect. And they put me in jail until I told them. The cops kept all the liquor and I stayed all night in jail. 

KUPPER: What initially sparked your interest in art? Do you remember when that romance began?

MINTER: I was a little girl, and I was drawing Brownies, which are baby Girl Scouts. I was like five or six. I was stunned that my Brownies were so much better than my two friends. I thought: “Wow, I can do something better than my friends.” So, I asked everybody in my family to show me everything they could draw. I went through that really quick and then I started drawing from comic books. I learned how to draw from Brenda Starr: Girl Reporter...and Prince Valiant. Comics came in the newspaper every day. 

KUPPER: So that’s how you first started to experiment with pop art?

MINTER: You know when I first went to art school, the teacher was of the school of thinking that if you weren’t an abstract painter, you weren’t a real artist. So, we actually didn’t know anything about painting. We didn’t paint from still life, or the body, or anything...just blank canvases. I was terrible. I’m not an abstract painter. I need an image. I got a C in painting and I got an A in photography. So, I majored in photography. But I had to take one more painting course before I graduated and that teacher was teaching painting from still life. I learned how to paint with complimentary colors, I learned how to make different shades of gray and I just loved it. With photography you really couldn’t alter anything. Back in those days it was black and white, and it was a really good technical school. With painting I could change the image, and I started taking photos and painting them. 

KUPPER: One of your first photographic series were images of your mom...

MINTER: My drug addict mother. 

KUPPER: What was that relationship like? 

MINTER: Terrible. I’m the worst kind of kid to have if you’re a drug addict. I knew at one point, by the time I was in sixth grade that I couldn’t count on her, to do anything. She was just so out of it. Did you ever see that movie, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death by Arthur Jafa? There’s a scene where a little boy is going, “Mommy! Mommy wake up!” That was me. “Mommy, mommy wake up!” That movie just floored me. I had a fucked up mother, all the time. Anything she thought...I would do the opposite, which was counter-productive and self-sabotaging. It would have been very smart for me to learn how to do typing and shorthand. My mom wanted me to take classes for typing and shorthand, so I could have gotten a job when I was out of school but I refused. I didn’t learn how to type until I got a computer, which is really self-sabotaging. 

KUPPER: So, do you think photographing your mom was a way to get closer to her? 

MINTER: No, I wasn’t even thinking about it. I just took a camera and I said: “Mom, let me take your picture.” I never thought anything of it. And then I went to school and I showed the proof sheet to my teacher and the students were like:” Oh my god that’s your mother?” I grew up in South Florida; there were a lot of mothers like my mom. My friends and I were wild kids. We stayed out all night, went to the beach, did drugs. This was the land of no parents. 

KUPPER: There was a lot of freedom. 

MINTER: You can see the after effects, everything bad happens in Florida you’ll notice. 

KUPPER: Florida man, Florida woman. 

MINTER: They gravitated there in the sixties. Miami was the Wild West. I got my driver’s license taken away three times and I just paid somebody to pull a ticket for me. 

KUPPER: That’s why Castro was just like, “Send ‘em to Florida. No one will notice.” 

MINTER: Yeah, yeah. We moved there so my dad could go to Cuba to gamble. 

KUPPER: What did your dad do? 

MINTER: He was a compulsive gambler. He said, but he could have been lying...because he was such a compulsive liar...one of the promoters for the Cassius Clay versus Sonny Liston fight. That’s when I knew not to count on him, because he said that Sonny Liston was going to win. I told everyone Sonny Liston’s gonna win...and obviously, he didn’t [Laughs]. 

KUPPER: How did your mom feel about being photographed at the time? 

MINTER: She didn’t care. She didn’t know. She paid no attention. I had such shame come over me because I went to the University of Florida, which was much more conservative, it was like being in the Deep South, and they had that reaction. And, I had waves of shame coming over me, and I never showed the pictures. 

KUPPER: What happened in 1995 that made you decide to show these photographs of your mother? 

MINTER: Annie Philbin and Linda Yablonsky, who’s a writer, would do these readings at the Drawing Center and Linda was a pro-sex feminist - one of the few at that time - and she would have artists make some kind of environment for the readings. There were a lot of drawings up so I thought, “Well, I’ll make some giant photos.” And the only photos I had were of my mom. So I thought I’d just pin them to the wall, on top of the drawings, and all of a sudden people were like, “Whoa, those photos are great!” Eventually it occurred to me: people believe artists that come from dysfunction are serious. So I was taken seriously again. 

KUPPER: It seems like those photographs were offering you a little bit of salvation in the art world at the time.
MINTER: It did, yeah, because I had just done a porn show and it was my way back in. I thought everyone thought like me, there are no politically correct fantasies, women should have sexual agency to make pictures and films for their own amusement and your generation, you take that for granted. My generation comes from me taking an abusive history and repurposing it. Taking the word “cunt” and repurposing it. Owning it. It was such a hurtful word, but if you own it, you take the power away. 

KUPPER: I actually had a question about the word “cunt,” about the sensitivity and your use of it.

MINTER: It’s so loaded. And I thought if we’re going to be called cunts then let’s just shove it down their throats, you know. My generation are all appalled at the word. It’s a hurtful word. That’s why I decided to repurpose it. I’m taking my cues from Queer Theory, “faggot” you know. They’re different words here than they are in England. Everything’s cunty in England. 

KUPPER: And “fag” too! 

MINTER: Yeah, and it’s not even gendered. But I let everyone in the film pick what they wanted to write and I let their own personalities come through. No one was really doing that before. Women had never touched hardcore. I was doing cum shots. 

KUPPER: And Betty Tompkins I think did a little bit of stuff like that.

MINTER: Betty did, but nobody knew she existed. I didn’t know she was doing that. Now we’re good friends but I didn’t have a clue. I knew about two people. I knew about Judy Bernstein and I knew about Carolee Schneeman. Everyone knew about them, but they were sort of softcore. I thought “I wanna see if the meaning changes if I do hardcore.” Because I saw Mike Kelley do stuffed-animal sculptures and stuffed-animal paintings and I thought, “Jesus, if a woman artist did that no one would pay attention.” It hit me: what is the subject matter that women had never touched? And I thought porn. And I thought, “Well we’ve only done soft- core.” So, I had to do hardcore. Betty made me look like a wimp! 

KUPPER: When you first started working with enamel, it seems like your world really opened up. What was it about enamel? 

MINTER: I really don’t know, another organic thing. Everyone wants me to have some intellectual thoughts about everything and I really don’t know. I just go with my instincts.

KUPPER: It seems like a lot of intuition and instincts, the evolution of your work seems very instinctual. 

MINTER: Everyone expects me to be a bitch too. 

KUPPER: What is that about?

MINTER: I’m a bad girl, but I’m very polite because I grew up in the Deep South. And I know that anger doesn’t really work as much as absurdity and humor. There’s this YouTube video in North Carolina of a KKK march, and there’s this guy trolling him, playing cartoon music with his tuba. That’s so much more powerful than people screaming at them. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t look at him. They ignored him. He’s playing cartoon music and making them look absurd. I just grew up in the Deep South. I can do or say whatever I want but I’m very polite about it. 

KUPPER: The first commercial you made, it seemed like it was an announcement to the art world.

MINTER: I wanted to make a TV commercial. That was one of the other reasons I wasn’t taken seriously because we didn’t collapse boundaries like this back then. There was art, and then there was commercial art. It’s collapsing constantly now. Why wouldn’t these boundaries collapse? Why are some artists more privileged than others? I know some commercial photographers-the ones that are good - some are geniuses. Every field has its genius. 

KUPPER: At the exhibition opening, did the crowd seem to reflect a more commercial audience, or was it about the same? 

MINTER: No, it was the same. Nobody knew what the commercial meant. If you didn’t know what it was, you wouldn’t know what it was. There were people wondering what the fuck that was, most people. People also didn’t know it was only $1800 to do 30 seconds on David Letterman. 

KUPPER: Was it regional? 

MINTER: That’s why it was so cheap. No one knew it. No one knows it now. You could buy TV commercials. I did it in LA too. They were really offended here. They have a huge border between high and low art and the commercial people were really offended. They used to put me on the last commercial on David Letterman, the very last one. In LA only, they ran something at the bottom saying: “this is an ad for an art show.” They disclaimed it. 

KUPPER: I want to talk about your rebellious and contrarian nature, where do you think that came from?

MINTER: I don’t know. I don’t even think about it as rebellious and contrarian. I always thought everyone thought just like I did. I’m always shocked when they don’t. It’s not like I ever do anything to be contrarian. Seriously! I thought it made total sense for me to make a Trump plaque. The activist group I’m with decided to wheat-paste them all over the city for International Women’s Day. I think people would get it more now. That’s been my history. Everything I do, people like it twenty years later.

KUPPER: Do you feel like you could make a decision now that people might not like, and trust that later on they will? 

MINTER: You never know what people are going to do. So I have to just let it go. I make what I make. I have to trust my- self. I’m used to being hated and I’m used to being loved. Both of them can’t affect you. Because then you can’t stay right-sized. 

KUPPER: I want to talk about deconstructing glamour and some of the tropes within mainstream media, because your work deals a lot with dichotomies from a feminist perspective. Why do you think this deconstruction is so important? 

MINTER: The eye craves what it can't see. I have all the respect in the world for the Kardashians for being successful, but there is going to be a huge punk backlash to things like having your face just be a suggestion. Is this your suggested face? You could just change it radically. Things like contouring, they’re famous for contouring—and then there is going to be a punk backlash of being gross as hell. Like Petra Collins and Sandy Kim. And I love that, the punks. That’s where I’m at. That’s just always going to happen. We crave what we don’t see. So don’t laser [your pubic hair]!

KUPPER: The layers and layers and layers that you implemented on Photoshop and in the painting - It seems like you’re more of an obsessive artist than a prolific artist. 

MINTER: I’m very obsessive, yeah. 

KUPPER: You go to great lengths to get a certain idea or concept across, can this obsessive process be sort of pernicious to an artist’s trajectory, especially if they’re starting out? 

MINTER: Probably. Don’t be an artist unless you have no choice, that’s how I feel. And if you have no choice, then you figure out how to be an artist. Everything is about listening to that inner voice. 

KUPPER: When you meet people who have an art practice, but they are also successful in some other fields, do you ever feel like they should just do their field and maybe not try to create a career as an artist? 

MINTER: There are people that are artists that are really good at everything. I’m just not one of them. I think there is just as many ways to be an artist as there are people making art. I teach and I see people who are just geniuses in grad school and that was it, they had that moment but they couldn’t sustain it. It’s never who you think it’s going to be. The one who’s going to have the vision that will change art history. Sometimes the most intelligent people, the most well-read and the most articulate, that’s what their gift is, they should be making books, not necessarily making 3D art sculpture, plastic arts at all. The best advice to give somebody is really: don’t do this unless you have no choice because your life is going to be a lot easier if you don’t. It’s constant rejection. I’ve actually asked other artists, “Do you agree that every artist has a really hard time either in the beginning or the middle or in the end?” The worst thing you can do as an artist is take your gifts and cram them into the vernacular of the moment. I’ve seen so many good painters become video artists and vice versa. Now, there’s no movements anymore; it’s all pluralism. So I don’t privilege one or the other. I think one of the best videos I’ve ever seen is Love Is The Message... and The Clock, they are the best videos I’ve ever seen. But who tops Guston? I don’t privilege one over the other, and I teach the same way. 

KUPPER: What do you think you can achieve in video that you can’t in painting? Or vice versa.

MINTER: I think they have the same achievements. I like the idea of taking a picture of the time you live in. A video and a painting are that time no matter what. Even abstraction, you will know right away it’s a fifties or sixties abstraction. Nowadays some abstraction comes from working with a computer. You can see right away the non objective imagery coming from a computer instead of nature. 

YKUPPER: our video work here at Regen Projects, My Cuntry, 'Tis of Thee, it’s a pretty politically charged piece. 

MINTER: If you’re not conscious and upset, you’re dead. Your generation really has to make a difference. 

KUPPER: And you’ve always been active politically.

MINTER: Always. My first husband was a Vietnam veteran against the war. I had a boyfriend at SDS. I was into civil rights when I was 16. I've always been an activist. But I’ve never seen democracy this fragile. Your generation’s waking up to that, and I saw it coming. I’ve been watching this for years. When people are dying is when things change. For us it was Vietnam, for you it’s school shootings. There are more kids dying in schools than there are soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. The enemy is here now. The NRA is a terrorist organization. There is this whole idea of the pa- triarchy being torn apart. It feels like they’re fighting for their lives to keep the patriarchy intact. You’re seeing the last gasp. My generation saw the last vestiges of the WWII generation. Trying to constantly have wars. They would have solved every- thing with wars. You’re seeing the last gasp of the patriarchy. Hopefully my generation are the ones that will have to die off and of course I’m a pariah to most of the people my age. 

KUPPER: I want to go back to deconstruction and talk a little about the appearance of the bather in current show. Glass and condensation seem to be fogging up your current series of work. 

MINTER: Yeah, so the bather is not a pure thing anymore. 

KUPPER: Can you talk a little but about the art historical trope of the bather?

MINTER: Let everybody else do it because I’m not so particular about it. You’re gonna do much better than me. It’s more metaphor now. 

KUPPER: Can you talk about where your fascination with all these elements comes from - pearls, moisture, slime, condensation? 

MINTER: Everything I do exists. I just push a little further. It’s my way of creating a 21st century version of everything that’s already been there. That’s the only way I know how to do it. With this piece of glass in front of it. It exists somewhere. I’m always interested in something that I know, and how do I make an image of it? It exists but I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen that image so I try to make that image that we all know exists but hasn't been made yet. 

KUPPER: You were talking about the pubic hair series.

MINTER: It had never existed in all of history. Look at Botticelli. Have you ever seen it except for Courbet? Ruskin ran out of the room because he thought his wife was malformed. True story. Obviously he was gay. He thought she was malformed. 

KUPPER: The Origin Of The World, they’re always trying to ban that painting from museums.

MINTER: That’s the one. Look at art history. Nobody has pubic hair! 

KUPPER: I love your book, Plush. 

MINTER: Thank you, Richard Prince did it. He’s a real iconoclast. And a super feminist! You know why I know? Well, we just raised $300,000 off of his piece for Downtown For Democracy. He made a piece called “Stormy and Friends.” 

KUPPER: Can you tell us a little more about that organization?

MINTER: Downtown for democracy is a super-PAC harnessing the art world to raise money for progressive candidates for the midterm elections and beyond.