Does Your Make-up Drawer Look Like This?
© 1996 Ginger Henry Geyer
glazed porcelain with gold and platinum
30 pieces, 3 ¼" x 12 ¼" x 12"
Adaptation of Velasquez's Rokeby Venus
This peculiar piece of art was inspired by a peculiar Bible verse: "A beautiful woman without discretion is like a gold ring in a pig's snout." (Proverbs 11:22)
Hence, Miss Piggy's snoze is enfleshed as a hardware pull that opens a disheveled drawer full of cosmetics. Stuck to the rear wall of the drawer is a "postcard" of Velasquez's Rokeby Venus of 1651. In 1914 this masterpiece hung in the National Gallery, London, where a hatchet-wielding suffragette vandalized it. The woman equated the portrayal of nudes with the British government's antifeminist policies. Had the suffragette understood the painting's meaning she might have left the hatchet in her muff. Velasquez shows us a Venus who is not preening but is pensive, whose beauty is not provocative or exploited, but is contemplative. Venus’ mirrored face is blurred and older than what her youthful body suggests--indeed, it is a hazy image of fading beauty, one that seems to accept the transitory nature of beauty and life. This painted lady was comfortable in her own skin, confident as a feminist.
At times are we akin to the suffragette, attacking before thinking? How easy it is to confuse image with reality, aesthetics and politics. Sometimes art can cut through the spillage by provoking us to pay attention and see differently. Velasquez shows us that seeing anew begins in the mirror. Historically, mirrors are symbolic of the all-seeing eye of God. The challenge to face mirrors is found throughout the isms of art, and is part of Paul's discourse on love in 1 Corinthians 13:12: "For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
In the poem for this piece, four disparate artists who have shaken up our complacency and our sense of beauty are evoked. It heads off with a quote by Renoir, which applies both to beautiful art and beautiful women.
Does Your Make-up Drawer Look Like This?
I swore I saw a metaphor
Tucked inside my make-up drawer--
Could be just an aesthetic war
Smeared around by Auguste Renoir
..."Why must beauty be suspect?"
Do rolls of fat imply neglect?
Mistaking Venus for a whore
A suffragette supplied some gore
Velasquez mirrored a blushing roar
What were you painting women for?
...The image dims, the glass is dark
Hard to face our beauty mark.
But secrets never smelled before
Pollock spilled them on the floor
So off we go on a spiritual soar
To purchase more at the corner store
...Provoked by beauty, the latest ism
The piercing art, self-vandalism.
Ah! Delete the crud!
Cries Donald Judd.
Go powder your pig snout discretion--
A make-over war
Might jam the drawer
And freeze your facial expression!