“Pink”, “Blue”, and Yellow Sienna Marble: the Liminal Spaces of the Gendered Object

REBECCA ELISABETA MARYA RIBEIRO

| “We can acknowledge not only the plurality of attitudes that third-wave feminism has reconciled with regard to issues of pop culture, pleasure, and the representation of the female body, but the variety of voices that always characterized feminizations...the pluralism of feminism itself.”​ |

Kalliopi Minnoudaki, “Pop Proto-Feminisms: Beyond the Paradox of the Woman Pop Artist”

Women are like artists: they are often being critiqued by those who are not them. Dash, like many modern and contemporary works by female artists, turns this notion on its head, and opens up space for its audience to discuss and potentially critique these past criticisms posed towards women and female artists alike. 

Barbara Ségal’s sculpture Dash (1994), a marble detergent bottle, holds many female-coded labor associations through its silhouette, inlaid patterning, and title. The domestic act of laundry, combined with Dash detergent’s marketing strategies, speaks to and about the history of women’s labor. The work is both about—and not about—Dash in the way Ségal’s autonomy over and through her personal experience can point to the critique of both social engendering and art production.

Kalliopi Minnoudaki’s 2010 essay, “Pop Proto-Feminisms: Beyond the Paradox of the Woman Pop Artist,” offers an analysis of female artists who speak to consumerism in their works and in turn emphasize the significance of plurality—both in feminism and the lived female experience. Culture-jamming, and its spirit of plurality, became one of many trademarks of the 1990s, moving through realms of the fine arts, literature, cinema, and the punky, amateur, girl zine. Culture-jamming clashes and combines high and low cultural, social, political, and economic symbols in ways otherwise not normally brought in conjunction.

Dash, a marble-inlay sculpture of a laundry detergent bottle, blurs the line between mass-production and craftsmanship, conformity and individuality; it is a culture jam through its immediate clashing of what is deemed high— the expensive, heavy marble art form—and low—the disposable, bargain brand consumer product. While Dash does not quite fit neatly into the category of readymade or culture jam, that which we presume to be more amateur, rough and maladroit in assemblage and aesthetic, the work preserves the differences between “high” and “low,” relying on the rebellious, fun spirit of cultural critique.   

But even within the white cube of the museum, this stone detergent bottle toes the line between high and low value. Dash balances the revered reputation of Italian marble, and the humility of the everyday object—an artwork, calling to an object of domestic work. But for whom and why? Is Dash about its eponymous brand, people associated with using laundry detergent, or something else?

Both Ségal and Dash rely on past histories and cultural criticisms in order to question them.

| “‘I think I’m a post-feminist. It’s okay to like lingerie and be sexy when it’s coming from a position of being a female and being powerful.” |

Barbara Ségal, The New York Times, August, 2000

Ségal is well-known for her critique of mass-consumerism in the realm of gender, often pointing to a feminine experience: little girls’ dresses, lingerie, and luxury handbags [as discussed in an interview with The Curator’s Salon in 2018]. Similar to how Dash speaks to the advertising history of a well-known brand associated with particular forms of domesticity, the silhouettes of dresses and lingerie create dialogue with generational expectations for women. Ségal—by inlaying marble—immortalizes and commemorates the “concentrated power” by which the actual Dash detergent was marketed as an object of American culture to American consumers, thereby showing how specific cultural values exist within it—even as social norms continually change over time.       

Ségal’s personal experience stems from the nuclear gender roles within a wealthy, white, American family in Westchester. Mid-century American advertising persuaded young girls and grown women alike to embody the domesticated housewife—and that alone.  Following her father’s death during childhood, Ségal saw her mother as both head of the household, tackling financial and domestic responsibilities, and as a woman that kept her elevated taste. In her complex, personally nostalgic works, the artist uses marble as a medium to empower and embolden the traditionally feminine, simultaneously countering the social pressures that often follow a standardized female experience. By the mid-1990s, other women were explicitly connecting with the “post-feminist” ideals from Ségal’s matriarchal childhood.

Not all women that partake in housework do it for their husband or children—some women have made a career out of it and do it for other people’s husbands and children. Some don’t do it at all. When a role is placed onto an individual, their power can be lost. It is a reclaimed feminine authority promoted by Ségal that brings domestic empowerment to the forefront. Starting with a raw stone base for her sculptures, the artist controls every aspect of the work’s creation, from color to detail, making the assembly-line product become highly specific.

| “The thing is important insofar as it can bear content, but the reason it can bear content is because it is empty, fillable, manipulable, subject to external motive force.” |

Fred Moten, A Poetics of the Undercommons

Despite potentially appearing as one at first glance, Dash is not a readymade. While the readymade—that which is already produced, and then reassigned in value—can have multiple meanings coexist within it, the mimicry of a readymade object can do the same. In A Poetics of the Undercommons (2016), Fred Moten claims that we as a society rely so heavily on meaning that even nothingness is something - more specifically, Moten states, the “nothingness” of the Black identity. In relation to women, however, Moten’s statement sheds light on the history of women being “fillable, manipulable, subject to external motive force” via patriarchal capitalism. The riff on the readymade, as Dash offers, holds and preserves “nothingness” in multiple ways: one, the simultaneous erasure and reworking of the female identity done by consumer brands; and two, the “nothingness” that is an object. Once stripped of the work done by consumer brands, the object in its purest form is devoid of meaning, holding a “nothingness” that one feels compelled to insert meaning into, even if that meaning stems from its lack of connection to something that was once given valued meaning.    

Domestic paraphernalia—such as a box of Brillo pads and a detergent bottle—hold and access multiple histories and perspectives simultaneously. The way one views laundry detergent in the 1950s differs from how one views it in the 1990s. Moreover, many advertising companies still tokenize minorities as a false means of inclusivity, and quickly return to a narrative that has been promoted for generations. In Ségal’s marble inlay process—while the stone itself is solid—the artist carefully chooses, places, and inserts other external materials into its base. While it presents as cohesive, each facet has significance, both on its own and of the whole. It shifts depending on current cultural context, just as a commercial item remains an open vessel for changing social values. This thinking within multiple histories allows us to not only examine a timeline of attributed values, but also recognize history’s repetition.

| “It is the ability to ride the line between high art and consumer culture, and hence to the permeability and instability of cultural boundaries.” |

Lucy R. Lippard, “Introduction,” from Cécile Whiting’s A Taste for Pop : Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture

Ségal appropriates the physical labor of sculpture to reassociate the physical labor of housework—both having been controlled historically by men. Much like the ever-changing expectations for women, an art medium’s uses can often feel dependent on how they were once controlled by the art world. While Lippard, in her introduction to Cécile Whiting’s A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture, speaks directly to mid-century works existing during second-wave feminism,  artists like Ségal are reinventing and rewriting the expectations for art media and subject matters in the late 20th, and into the 21st, century. Through her classical Italian and French training, Ségal “culture-jams” the medium of marble by acknowledging and denying its entrenched history in religious artworks and monumental architecture.   

Dash’s​ Italian marble challenges the conformity and impersonality of the everyday, household object, contesting Dash’s notoriety as the cheaper laundry alternative in the 1990s. Marble has been used for everything from pagan architecture to mythological nudes to historic monuments—and in Ségal’s work, the form of a cleaning product. Through Lippard’s sentiment, Ségal’s high material and low subject matter blur the line between not only economic—but cultural—value. Dash balances that which is heavy, solid, and expensive, and that which is fillable, ephemeral, and of easy access. Dash required physical strength, precision, and focus in order to be achieved. The specificity of intarsia (inlay) technique not only adds to the quality of the work, but also speaks directly to the artist’s individualized identity: a sculptor classically-trained in Italy and France.  

| “Consider the complex ways in which objects are not only engendered, but also engendering.” |

Tag Gronberg, “The Gendered Object; As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste”

There is something terrifyingly charming about a 1967 Dash advertisement stating: “though dressed like a man, there was no mistaking that she was all female.” The viewer is caught at a crossroads: despite denying gendered clothing trends, how is it that this woman is “all female”? Is it because she is still partaking in the feminized act of laundry, or does she truly have autonomy over her femininity and how she wishes to define it?

For a period of time in the 1960s, Dash’s slogan was “Somebody had to break the rules.” Laundry branding has focused on the female laundress throughout the decades, while simultaneously approving of the modern woman who kept up with the times. Books like [The Gendered Object], and [As Long As It’s Pink: the Sexual Politics of Taste], opened discussion around engendering objects of the everyday, and the binary expectations it creates for the consumer’s gender identity.

As another object of the 1990s, we might ask: is Dash engendered? The second wave of feminism wanted to deny the “pink identity” of traditional feminism, while the third wave reclaimed it; while the second wave promoted the three-piece suit, third wave feminists found empowerment in reappropriating what it means to like “pink.” Dash as an artwork is both “pink” and “blue,” and at the same time, neither. If the act of laundry is “feminine,” it is not synonymous with female identity.

|“We have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived.” |

Judith Butler, “Judith Butler on the Culture Wars, JK Rowling and Living in ‘Anti-Intellectual Times’”

Now, in what we might consider feminism’s fourth wave, many young feminists are finding the binary both claustrophobic and outdated. “Male,” “female,” and binary engendering cannot embody all identities, especially those who refuse a direct connection with terms such as “male” and “female.” Judith Butler, speaking from 2020 asks us to consider: if we are to be postmodern, are engendered ideals extinct?

Not quite.

Like the changing ideological emphases of the feminism movement, and the ever-changing gendered experience, ​Dash ​does not exist in singularity; it is never at any given moment confined to holding one, sole, unchanging meaning. Through its references to high Renaissance art, branding schemes, outdated gender roles, and various forms of physical labor, Dash relies on the recognition of history, and the ways it continually changes while simultaneously preserving its historic associations.

1. Kalliopi Minnoudaki, “Pop Proto-Feminisms: Beyond the Paradox of the Woman Pop Artist,” in ​Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958 - 1968 ; [published in Conjunction with an Exhibition of the Same Title], ed. Sid Sachs (Philadelphia: Univ. of the Arts [u.a.], 2010), 94.

2. Roberta Hershenson, “Works That Appear Soft but Are Posed in Stone,” The New York Times (New York, NY), Aug. 6, 2000.

3. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, ​A Poetics of the Undercommons (New York: Sputnik & Fizzle, 2016), 14.

4. Lucy R. Lippard, “Introduction,” in ​A Taste for Pop : Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture, ed. Cécile Whiting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4.

5. Tag Gronberg, “The Gendered Object; As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste,” ​Journal of Design History 11, no. 3 (September 1998): 264.

6. Alona Ferber, “Judith Butler on the Culture Wars, JK Rowling and Living in ‘Anti-Intellectual Times’,” New Statesman, Sept. 22, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times