{"id":14197,"date":"2012-09-11T18:57:45","date_gmt":"2012-09-11T18:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artmur.com\/?page_id=14197"},"modified":"2013-08-24T17:43:41","modified_gmt":"2013-08-24T17:43:41","slug":"in-the-dollhouse","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/artmur.com\/en\/artists\/dina-goldstein\/in-the-dollhouse\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Dollhouse"},"content":{"rendered":"
May 4 \u2013 June 22, 2013
\nOpening reception: May 4th from 3-5pm
\nArtist talk: May 4th at 2pm<\/p>\n

The Transgendering of Barbie\/Ken: Dina Goldstein\u2019s (De)constructed Dollhouse
\nText by Vincent Marquis<\/p>\n

At last! The veil has been lifted on Barbie\u2019s emotional distress and Ken\u2019s genuine sexual interests. In her photographic series In the Dollhouse, Vancouver-based artist Dina Goldstein chronicles the unhappy marriage of the two most iconic, played-with, and, some would say, socially problematic dolls ever designed. Through her ten-part story, she peeks into the private life of the couple, dismantling the sacred aura surrounding these symbols of popular visual culture.<\/p>\n

In the late 1980s, picking up on the claim of Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that the body is a historically contingent site of meaning, feminist theorist Judith Butler offered a reconceptualisation of gender as a \u201ccorporeal style,\u201d the cultural and performative interpretation of the facticity of the body. Furthermore, Butler argued, if gender performance eventually leads to the sedimentation of the roles ascribed to biological sexes, then \u201cperforming one\u2019s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is with the possibility and implications of subverting \u201csedimented\u201d gender behaviour that Goldstein is primarily concerned in the Dollhouse. Surprisingly (and, hilariously) enough, what we see is a transgender Ken reading The Oprah Magazine, wearing Barbie\u2019s stilettos, and leg shaving in the bath. Devastated by the news of her husband\u2019s gay affair, we later find Barbie shifting to a boyish appearance by cutting her iconic hair and putting on a suit and tie.<\/p>\n

What is especially noteworthy about the proposed articulation of gender roles is precisely the use of Barbie and Ken, as they have continuously embodied the epitome of popular gender expectations throughout their fifty years of imposed partnership. Thus, just as we slowly realize that the subjects of the photographs are not really plastic toys, the Dollhouse series becomes a site where behavioural expectations flicker and traditional gender roles are reshaped in creative ways.<\/p>\n

And yet, as we encounter Barbie\u2019s despair, we are just as much encouraged to reflect upon the implications of \u201cperforming one\u2019s gender wrong,\u201d upon what we need to sacrifice in order to give way to something new. In the Dollhouse is also, more broadly, a questioning of the (anachronistic?) place of marriage as an institution in our contemporary period, as well as of the value we place on beauty and the weight that it carries \u201cwithin the interior walls of our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, as we sneak into Goldstein\u2019s dollhouse and ponder what it communicates, it is ultimately at ourselves, our practices and behaviour, that we are being prompted to look\u2014as is revealed, in the haircut scene, by the (our?) scrutinizing eye reflected in Barbie\u2019s mirror…<\/p><\/div>

\n\t\t\t