Ahead of her Hong Kong and Seoul shows, the photographer takes an exclusive self-portrait for Tatler and shares why she shoots raw, distorted photos of the likes of Lady Gaga, Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and Gloria Steinem
Frankly, if I was 21 years old and Bill Clinton wanted to f*ck me, I’d have f*cked him in a nano-second.” Marilyn Minter was characteristically unfiltered when she spoke with Tatler over a video call in November. The conversation was about the 75-year-old artist’s upcoming presentations in Hong Kong and Seoul, but quickly veered into a throng of passionate quips about strong woman figures who have been unfairly and overly scrutinised.
Her thoughts about the saxophone-playing former American president were in reference to a recent portrait she shot of Monica Lewinsky, which was first exhibited at a LDGR gallery in New York last April. “She’s a hero to me, because she went through f*cking hell and she was just 21 years old,” says Minter of the woman whose name for many people, even two decades after she burst into public consciousness, is still synonymous with political scandal.
While contemporary analysis of the debacle no longer portrays the former White House intern as a homewrecker, at the time, mainstream feminists were outraged by her part in the affair. Minter has similarly appalled those who claim to speak for women. In 1989, the artist’s provocative Porn Grid Series was criticised for featuring sexually explicit, pornographic scenes highlighting female desire, rather than the male gaze. “There was an idea of pro-sex feminism that wasn’t accepted at time,” says the painter of her sexually liberal beliefs that emphasised the ownership of female desire and sexuality. “I was [considered] a traitor to a generation of feminists.”
But for Minter, it was a way to prompt viewers to think about the ways in which women do and don’t have ownership of their bodies, and to reclaim agency the way female sexuality is expressed and perceived. It was this point of connection that led her to photograph Lewinsky.
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Minter’s unapologetic, raw frankness is reflected in her work, but in the guise of an obscured, alluring aesthetic—one that she applied to her portrait of Lewinsky. The artist’s portrayal of the woman is starkly different from the way she was depicted in the 1990s and 2000s—it’s a vision of a strong, smiling woman, not a hyper-sexualised caricature in a political cartoon nor a paparazzi shot featuring Clinton. It bears Minter’s visual stamp, developed from techniques and processes that involve the subject being photographed behind a glass screen with an added aquatic element; sometimes water is seen trickling down the screen, or the subject is captured through a haze of steam. Minter subsequently Photoshops the image for desired effects and paints it, yielding a colourful, sensual take on photorealism—a genre in which an artist studies a photograph and strives to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium, and one that perhaps most aptly characterises Minter’s style.
The artist finds beauty in the margins—the unconventional, the non-conformists, the brave, the bold, the raw and the honest. Freckles, follicles, fat rolls—every body part traditionally deemed grotesque is glorified through Minter’s gaze. “I like to shoot things that exist, but that you never see a picture of,” she explains. “I like freckles because you never see them [in mainstream media]. I started shooting freckled models when I was doing commercial work, just because it just throws people to see a chest covered in freckles, and then piled with really fancy jewellery on top.”
This month, she’s opening her first solo exhibition in Seoul, at Lehmann Maupin. She will also be showing with Lehmann Maupin gallery at Art Basel Hong Kong, Asia’s biggest art fair. These presentations are the latest projects to showcase Minter’s documentation of unconventional beauty and the perception of femininity. Operating at the crossroads of critical acclaim and commercial popularity, Minter continues to make her mark with numerous projects, exhibitions and commissions around the world, keeping her plenty busy. Her secret? “You have to just keep doing what you love.”