Pin-Up
Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture
by Maria
Elena Buszek
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2006
464 pp., illus. 94 b /w, 9 col. Trade:
$89.95; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3734-7; ISBN: 0-8223-3746-0.
Jonathan Zilberg, Ph.D.
Director, Museum Gedungdua8, Jakarta
jonathanzilberg@gmail.com
Pin-Up Grrrls is an ambitious engagement
with 20th Century feminism
through the history of the pin-up. The
title affirms the book’s and the
genre’s central sentiment of expressing
"the growl in each girl." The
study documents the feminist ideal of
"awarisheness" that defined
the pin-up from the beginning, the burlesque
boom from which the pin-up derived its
original force through a daring theatricality,
the war goddesses and the bombshell victory
girls of World War II, the birth of the
1950’s Varga girl soon to be subdued
by post-war suppression, the frowning
whip wielding high-heeled heroine and
the "difficult" woman, the attack
of the 50 ft woman and much more thereafter.
In doing so, Buszek not only provides
us with an encyclopedic historical entomology
of the pin-up but participates in a potent
ongoing reaction to Clement Greenberg’s
Adorno-esque pre-World War II condemnation
of kitsch.
Though everyone knows what a pin-up is,
Buszek methodically lays out what it is
in order to reveal its diversity and the
ways the genre has changed and been variously
received since it first emerged with the
birth of print culture in the 15th
Century. As she acutely describes,
the pin-up is a sexualized burlesque image
of a monster beauty produced for a mass
audience. It is at once a barometer for
attitudes towards sexuality and feminist
responses to those attitudes and has long
been a visual tool for simultaneously
resisting and appropriating the repression
of female sexuality. In necessary labor,
she situates the history of the pin up
within three waves of feminism, the first
beginning with the publication of the
Vindication of the Rights of Women
by Mary Wollstonecroft (1792) and cresting
with Simon de Beauvoir’s The Second
Sex (1949), the second energized by
the labor and civil rights movement and
the storming of the ivory tower, and the
third led by Generation X. There, in the
1980’s, fueled by the Reagan sex
wars, feminists reclaimed the erotic power
of the image hence Judy Chicago’s
"cunt-positive attitude" and
fascist feminism, radical camp and ironic
femininity. In an ensuing pleasurable
confusion of boundaries, race and culture
entered the picture, and a postmodern
"queer" alliance was born.
The pin up genre came into its modern
form during the Industrial Revolution
as the mass produced carte de visite
used by burlesque performers in the
1850’s. Born at the confluence of
audacity and ambition, it emerged in full
force during the 1860’s leg show
boom in which actresses used the genre
to advance a burlesque sexual "awarisheness"
By the 1870’s, it was tamed and incorporated
into Vaudeville after the inevitable backlash
against this "epidemic of ‘flaxen
scrofula’" infecting its bourgeois
victims with a threatening "alien"
sexuality Through her long engagement,
Buszek sets the stage for all that follows.
From Adah Isaacs Menken in the 1860’s
to Madonna in the 1990’s, she deftly
details libertinism and repression and
the genealogy of the pin-up, the changing
politics of sexuality and the commercialization
of images of women.
Through her audacious and playful use
of language, she takes us into both old
and new territory. From mainstream cheese
cake to the ever more daring baring and
spreading of pink, back and forth from
sleazy vagina dentatae to feigned
innocence, the pin up is revealed as insolent
image and 20th Century Odalisque.
It became a critical medium for postwar
artists to destabilize and pleasurably
pervert notions of master narratives and
Greenbergian modernism. In this view,
the Playboy playmate centerfold is today’s
nude and it and the pin up carry an intense
social freight in imitating and repudiating
the classical Odalisque. Moreover, precisely
because the pin up was an object of scorn
as kitsch, it provides the perfect foil
for insolently disposing of moral pretense
and ivory tower elitism in the art world.
The postwar traffic in the use of the
pin-up by the avant-garde provides a potent
trace of the trans-Atlantic fertilization
of images and culture, of the Americanization
of Europe and the subsequent return of
an expanded pin-up to America. Thus though
Andre Bazin conceived of the pin up as
a form of bubble gum for the imagination
in 1946, it carried a far heavier and
more seductive message than the aphorism
implied and presented unusual opportunities
for pumping up the sheen of allure through
excess and exoticism as Eduardo Paollozi
did so famously with his painting I
Was a Rich Man’s Plaything. It
was this Odalisque image that Andy Warhol
subsequently transformed into a Byzantine
Madonna with his Golden Marilyn
(1962), an icon that became an object
of teenage worship and lust, queer and
otherwise. Similarly, Antonio Saura’s
1959 portrait capturing the smoldering
sexuality of Brigitte Bardot inspired
Willem de Kooning’s shockingly brutal
Women Series and — And
God Created Woman. And more, in retrospect,
it seems that Robert Rauchenberg’s
playful manipulations subject — object
relations in the Odalisque tradition constitute
post-modern birth spasms.
Even better still, Buszek constantly connects
the larger art worlds of painting and
film, for instance recalling Fellini’s
playful but dangerous giantess.
From there to Madonna’s performance
in Like A Virgin, we can trace
the Burlesque Bardot alisque onwards through
Catherine Deneuve and Jane Fonda and beyond
into the porno-lisque. But future such
studies will have to contend with how
the combination of art, commerce and the
dangerous pleasures opened wide by the
internet as the ultimate medium for pornography
and predation has inevitably led us down
a dark and difficult crack in the social
imagination. To be Adorno-esque, even
Madonna forbids her own children from
watching her own pulchritude.
Finally, one of the great contributions
of this book is its bibliography and copious
notes. From the slippery issues of pornutopia
and female fetishism, from The Bridge
Across My Pussy to queer monsters,
she-devils and fierce funny feminism,
there can be few books as usefully provocative
as this for an undergraduate or graduate
class on feminism, popular culture and
art history.
