Lipsticks and Bullets
2014
Excerpted from
Baker, Cindy. “The Missing Body: Performance in the Absence of the Artist.” MFA thesis. University of Lethbridge, 2014.
Lipstick factories making bullets. Bullet factories making lipsticks. Factories that produce both lipsticks and bullets which shift during the war to producing only bullets. Factories that produce bullets during the war which shift to producing lipsticks after the war. People pretending to make lipsticks in order to covertly make bullets. Lipstick tubes recycled into bullet casings. Lipstick sold wrapped in paper to save brass for bullet casings. Used bullet casings saved during the war for makeshift lipstick cases. Unused bullet casings factory-crimped into lipstick cases. Bullet factory workers encouraged to wear lipstick. Free lipstick provided by cosmetics companies to bullet factory workers. Creation of demand for lipstick by newly-out-in-the-workforce women. Creation of demand for lipstick by women whose men have returned home and taken over their jobs. Bullet-shaped lipstick swivel tubes. Lipstick-shaped bullets. Women working in bullet factories. Men working in lipstick factories. Official US Marines uniform lipstick colour: Montezuma Red. In peacetime, bullet = bad guy. In wartime, bullet = good guy. In peacetime, lipstick = bad girl. In wartime, lipstick = good girl. The term for a molded piece of lipstick is a “bullet”. The term for a lipstick mold is a “bullet mold”. The Red Cross considered lipstick an “essential” toiletry and provided it to women in service during wartime. 30 brass lipstick tubes could be recycled into 20 brass bullet casings. “The lipstick effect” refers to the economic upturn seen by the cosmetics industry during recession and wartime. The US Director of Economic Stabilization ordered factories to stock women’s rooms with free lipstick to improve efficiency. Wartime novelty lipstick shaped like binoculars, flashlights, switchblades. Lipstick as mandatory corporate uniform. 1941: US women spent $20 million on lipstick. 1946: US women spent $30 million on lipstick. 1959: US women spent $96 million on lipstick. 2005: US companies sold $9.4 billion in lipstick to women worldwide. The average woman buys 4 lipsticks per year. 4 cosmetics companies account for 75% of all lipstick sales worldwide. 10 cosmetic companies account for 89% of all lipstick sales worldwide. “The lipstick wars” saw mass corporate espionage and violent destruction of product. The first lipstick tube was invented by a man working at a munitions factory. Lancôme lipstick makes a “definitive, well-engineered click.” Givenchy lipstick makes a “heavy click, more metallic than plastic.” Clinique lipstick makes a “resounding snap.” During WWII, European countries placed restrictions on lipstick ingredients to save fat and brass for the war effort. During WWII, the US considered lipstick a household necessity and placed no restrictions on its production. In London during WWII there was a burgeoning lipstick black market. In the US during WWII cosmetics companies reported that their sales doubled. In Germany during WWII backlash against the lipstick ban by women refusing to work under such “harsh conditions” forced the government to relent. A federal US luxury tax on lipstick allowed the US to collect $6 million per year during WWII. During the depression, women reported applying lipstick more often than they brushed their teeth. Industry leaders Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden opened their first beauty salons in the 1930s. The KGB invented a gun concealed in a fully functional tube of lipstick, called the Kiss of Death. Navy nurses in WWII polled about what one item they would save if they received orders to evacuate overwhelmingly chose their lipstick. American cosmetics companies advertised lipstick as being an important part of the war effort. The names of lipstick colours change to reflect the social and political climate; “hussy” red becomes “courage” red. The first law regulating lipstick ingredients was passed in the US in 1936. The phrase “the generation gap” was coined in 1925 by a marketing company to explain the difference in lipstick habits between women and their daughters. The New York Board of Health tried to ban lipstick out of concern for the health of the men who kissed women wearing it. The California Women Legislator’s Caucus gives out “Read My Lipstick” shame awards to politicians who demean women. Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi calls lipstick the “post-modern veil.” Resistance to cosmetics regulation caused the US Pure Food and Drugs Act, 1897 to drop its cosmetics provision when the act eventually passed in 1906. Under prohibition, lipstick was the US’ fourth biggest industry, after cars, movies, and bootleg liquor. Companies advertised that lipstick would prevent women from inhaling germs and the fumes of industrial society. Bavarian Red Liquor was advertised as promising to turn women’s lips red whether they rubbed it on or drank it. The Malaysian government banned lipstick, rationalizing that it inspires “illicit sex.” The Iranian government punished lipstick-wearing women by having their lips rubbed with shards of glass. The women’s suffrage movement appropriated lipstick as an emblem of women’s emancipation and wore it with the express purpose of evoking disgust. A bill introduced in the Kansas legislature’s 1915 session would have made it a misdemeanor for any woman under age 44 to wear cosmetics if “for the purpose of creating a false impression.” Historic Catholic texts declared lipstick use a mortal sin. In Elizabethan England, lipstick sometimes served as currency. Queen Elizabeth believed lipstick had lifesaving properties; upon death, her lips were caked with nearly a half-inch of lipstick. In 1770, the British Parliament passed a law that said a woman wearing lipstick could be tried for witchcraft. Victorian women traded recipes and produced them together in underground lip rouge societies. In 1770 the State of Pennsylvania passed a law stating that a man could have a marriage nullified if the wife had, during courtship, deceived the man by having worn lipstick. In Edwardian England, lip rouge peddlers were hanged as sorcerers. Lipstick formulas from Ancient Egypt and Victorian England to mid-20th century America have been found to contain many deadly poisons. Egyptian lipstick cases were made of brass. Under Greek law, prostitutes could be punished for improperly posing as ladies if they appeared in public without their lipstick. In the 1300s AD lipstick merchants were jailed for witchcraft. Early lipsticks, like bullets, were made primarily of lead.
• Plastic toy lipstick
Real nontoxic toy children’s cosmetic lipstick
Candy lipstick in plastic case
Sample lipstick in plastic case
Antique sample lipstick in plastic case
Antique sample lipstick in brass case
Antique full size lipstick in brass case
Antique miniature lipstick in brass case
Rounded bullet tip lipstick
Pointed bullet tip lipstick
Chisel tip lipstick
Angled tip lipstick
Plastic toy bullets
Antique metal toy bullets
Antique plastic toy bullets
Antique wooden toy bullets
Resin replica antique wooden toy bullets
Resin replica antique plastic bullets
Antique metal collector commemorative bullets
Antique metal toy bullets cast from wooden original
The artist's engorged clitoris
The artist's left index finger
The artist's partner's right index finger
Lipsticks and bullets that look like each other (mostly like bullets)
Things that are neither lipsticks nor bullets (lump of metal, fingers, clits)
Lipsticks that look more like bullets
Lipsticks with their lids on
Lipstick containers with no lipstick in
Lipsticks and bullets that are malformed
Candy lipsticks
Lipsticks that, because of the shape of the makeup itself, look distinctly like lipstick
Bullets that require assembly/lone ranger bullets
Bullet tips out of a bullet mold
Lipstick tips only
Cast in bronze
Cast in aluminum
Lipstick cast into bullet mold and fitted into bullet casings
Lipsticks made out of ceramic
Bullets made out of ceramic
Lipstickbullets made out of ceramic
Bronze candy lipsticks put back into plastic candy containers
Bronze bullet tips put into plastic lipstick containers
Bronze bullet tips put into brass lipstick containers
Bronze lipstick tips put into brass lipstick containers
Bronze lipstick tips put into brass bullet casings
Bronze bullet tips put into brass bullet casings
Bronze “silver bullet” tips put into cast aluminum casings
Aluminum “silver bullet” tips put into cast bronze casings
“When doing our job on munitions, we don't neglect our appearance - but still keep our feminine charm by always having Escapade lipstick with us.
For a while, she has said good-bye to her old self… You see her, trim and jaunty in her uniform, doing a thousand vital jobs, and doing them well. Driving trucks and service cars… slogging away at barrack-room desks… packing a parachute on which a precious life may depend… tapping urgent messages from hot, tin-shanty towns. Working wherever possible to free a man for the grimmer, sterner tasks of war. The float-y evening gown has been laid aside. She has said good-bye to coiffures intricate and beflowered, to happy leisure hours in a room of her own and to many things so dear to the feminine heart. Her country needed her and cheerfully she answered that call. Our thanks and gratitude go out to these daughters of Australia, who are playing so great a part in winning the war. Let us do all we can to hasten the day when she'll be free to return to her former self and grace our homes and hearts in all her womanly charm.
Being in the Army doesn't mean that a girl should neglect her appearance and risk losing her feminine charm. In fact, it is quite the opposite. We have to do justice to the uniform we wear. The finishing touch to my "make-up" is Escapade Lipstick. Escapade is made from the formula of our principals, who are one of America's foremost cosmetic manufacturers.
Even if you are working harder than ever before for victory there's no reason why your extra war-time duties should stop you from looking attractive. You can look lovelier than ever… and without expensive beauty treatments. Pond's Powder and Pond's "Lips" are inexpensive to buy, economical to use and definitely beauty-making. Pond's Powder clings for hours and hours… it's made with the softest, finest texture. Pond's "Lips" stay on and on and on - to the very last kiss. All chemists and stores sell Pond's Powder and Lipstick. Six exquisite shades to choose from.
By day she serves… by night she fascinates… With Pond's Lips and Pond's Powder. When you step out of your Service clothes - uniforms, dungarees, or office frock… you deserve to look your loveliest. And that means Pond's "Lips" and Pond's Powder. Ponds "Lips" not only always get their man, but they stay on longer - noticeably longer. And Pond's Powder gives your skin that irresistible 'orchid' look - no male can resist for long. No wonder - Pond's Powder has the softest, finest texture of all. It's glare-proof, and it clings for hours. Six smart shades of powder and lipstick to choose from at all chemists and stores.”
from “Lipstick, Bullets and Bombs”
Collecting Lipsticks and Bullets
My interest in lipsticks and bullets stems from the fact that they are so visually similar and yet, to me, represent opposite ends of the gender socialization spectrum. When I started my thesis work at the University of Lethbridge, I began collecting lipsticks and bullets as a way of thinking through this conundrum. Initially, I was interested in collecting toy lipsticks and bullets; in part because when translated into plastic toys via a design process that would highlight each object’s most familiar characteristics, I knew that their similarities would be heightened and that the two objects would be easily confused. I also started collecting sample lipsticks, of the kind that I used as toys as a child once they had been used and/or rejected by my mother, because of their similarity in size to the other toy lipsticks and bullets that I was collecting and because of their proximate use as toys. The collection started to organize itself into apparent logical categories, as my collecting habits became more refined. Toy lipsticks and bullets are no longer made in the same size they once were (i.e. similar in size to the real thing) due to regulation regarding concerns over possible choking hazards. I was never interested in oversized/artificially unwieldy objects, so I avoided these, and collected old and antique toys. Girls’ toy sets usually contained one toy lipstick whereas boys’ toy sets contained 6 or more bullets each, so finding old toy bullets is relatively easier than finding old toy lipsticks. Add to that the fact that toy gun sets are incredibly collectible, and the market for these bullets is actually vast. One can find bullets for their antique toy guns in dozens of gun makes and models, and from dozens of original manufacturers. Due to the fact that there is a burgeoning market, however, prices are high. There is a thriving replica market to serve those whose toy bullets are rare, and I collected those as well.
This collection fed my interest in the simulacra; the symbol; the signifier; as listed above, I found original wooden toy bullets modeled after real lead-and-brass bullets, resin collector replicas of those original wooden toy bullets modeled after real lead-and-brass bullets, plastic replicas of original plastic toy bullets, plastic toy lipsticks, “real” child’s lipsticks to be used for play but which contained real cosmetics, and lipstick samples which were used, in real life, as toys. Some toy bullets, in attempting to replicate the brass casing/copper head look of the real bullet, used yellow and red plastic, unwittingly moving closer to their toy lipstick counterparts which employed yellow and red plastic to approximate the brass and scarlet of the lipsticks they were mimicking.
I also discovered easy access to lipstick samples, both historical and contemporary. These samples were often available by the dozen or even by the gross, at very low prices; new lipsticks because the cost of production is very low and because the samples act as an effective form of advertising, and old samples because, I suppose, the market for collecting old mouldering lipstick is soft nowadays. (Interestingly, I discovered that the copper content of old lipsticks must be very high, as many of my old lipstick samples – named “soft peach” or “sunset,” for example – have turned a vibrant shade of green.) Having fallen down the rabbit-hole of online lipstick sales, I also discovered (and purchased) several beautiful old full-sized lipsticks in brass cases. These lipsticks resembled bullets in shape and detail more, even, than most of the other lipsticks I had collected. Their waxy tips were molded to a sharp point; their brass cases looked quite exactly like bullet cases. Upon doing some research into the history of lipstick production, I found this to be no coincidence. Perhaps the reasons for casting lipstick into a perfectly bullet-like tip were less conscious, but I soon discovered that the first brass lipstick cases were produced on exactly the same machinery that produced munitions during World War II, that they were invented by a bullet-maker, and that the histories of lipsticks and bullets were more entwined than I could ever have imagined.
Methods of production
Interestingly, while the process, machinery, and, often, the specific factories for producing the brass casings for lipsticks and bullets is basically the same, the process for creating the soft/functioning/active/”meat” part of lipsticks and bullets is also the same – cast a molten substance (lead- or wax-based) into a mold, let cool, de-mold, and fit into casings. And while the bottom of a bullet casing contains a cap and/or a propellant to make it go, the bottom of a lipstick case also contains a mechanism to make the lipstick project up and down. Long before lipstick was sold in “stick” format, lip pigments were being made and used – the Mesopotamians and ancient Egyptians both used lipstick. Similarly, bullets were made and used long before guns were invented. In Latin, the word for bullet is literally “glans.” “Sling bullets” engraved with phrases comparing their use to rape have been found in Greece dating back to the 4th century BC. (Friedman 24, Paunov and Dimitrov 44)
History of the Object and its Wearer
Beyond the factual history of the objects, on researching further I read about the violence that the history of lipstick has enacted on women, lipstick’s role in the machinery of both war and the economy, and its powerful social role throughout history.
Once I had amassed my collection and done some reading about its histories, I found I was more interested in confusing the objects than I was in clarifying the differences, in part because I wanted to emphasize how confused and confusing their histories already are. In this decision, some things fell away; I am not focusing in great part on bullets themselves. I feel like their history and their impact has been well-documented and well-felt. Bullets are known to be dangerous, powerful, and masculine. Because lipstick is gendered as feminine, its complicated dangerous and powerful history has been largely ignored, leaving only the spectre of the dangerous lipstick-wearing femme fatale amongst a sea of pretty ladies and their trivial beauty concerns.
The history of lipstick regulation across all cultures demonstrates an overwhelming concern for men who might be ensnared by women and a complete lack of concern for women’s health and safety regarding the makeup’s formulation. Early laws regulating lipstick formulas reference concern for the health and safety of men who might be kissed by women wearing lipstick. (Schaffer 13) Aversion to lip colouring throughout history is firmly grounded in the notion that a woman who paints her lips is hiding her true (implicitly, less attractive) self as a way of tricking men. Whether seen as the sign of the prostitute whose job is to lure men in for profit, the older woman who relies on it to appear less unacceptably aged, the younger perhaps less favourably endowed woman who needs it to attract a husband, or the witch who employs its trickery to appear to be something that she is not, social, political/legal and religious prohibitions against lipstick invariably have everything to do with protecting men from women and nothing to do with protecting women. (Ironically, over time, the angry feminist has been characterized as both a woman who wears garish lipstick and a woman who wears no makeup at all.) Current studies which estimate not only how much lipstick the average woman consumes per year but tally the amount of lipstick consumed by men (teenage boys apparently consume more lipstick than any other demographic) demonstrate that anxiety over men’s health is required to evaluate the level of concern we should have over the ingredients in cosmetics. (Schaffer 60) The poisonous nature of ancient (and not-so ancient) lipstick formulas and the lack of its regulation until very recent times, combined with the fact that cultures have often found lipstick to be the sign of a menacing woman who seriously endangers the man she stalks (so dangerous that to wear it was to be shunned, or worse, put on trial for a crime punishable by death) demonstrates how lipstick’s history marks it as fatal as the bullet.
Masculine Versus Feminine Histories
As much as we understand that war (and the bullet, by extension) is all about economics, cosmetics are usually not understood to be as implicated in the economic or war machine. The concept of makeup as frivolous is deeply inaccurate.
We are told that the bullet is a phallus; we are told that the lipstick is also a phallus. Mountains of psychoanalytic-based readings of both objects agree on this: a cursory search of digital academic library JSTOR uncovers hundreds/thousands of results for academic papers referencing “lipstick” or “bullet” against the words “phallus” and “psychoanalysis,” and a simple internet search uncovers millions, broad categories of which include artworks, opinion pieces, fiction and pornography, as well as several brands of “novelty” (penis-shaped) lipstick. Just a few academic articles and books which tackle the topics include such titles as “Lipstick Ascending: Claes Oldenburg in New Haven in 1969” (Williams), “Pipilotti’s Pickle: Making meaning from the feminist position” (Mangini), “Giggles and Guns: The phallic myth in Unforgiven” (Kelley), Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (Greven), Taking it Like a Man: White masculinity, masochism and contemporary American culture (Savran), Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, masculinity, meaning (Aydemir), and “The illusions of Phallic Agency: Invisible Man, Totem and Taboo and the Santa Claus Surprise” (Steward 529) – the titular “surprise” being that the main female character was “raped” by Santa Claus using a lipstick on her belly. Relevant internet results include “Retail therapy: How Ernest Dichter, an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, revolutionised marketing” (The Economist), “Getting the Id to Go Shopping: Psychoanalysis, advertising, Barbie dolls, and the invention of the consumer unconscious” (Bennett), “Subconscious Seduction: Phallic Signifiers in Cosmetic Advertisements” (melpinto), and “Lipstick: the ultimate phallic symbol” (menstuff.org).
Both lipstick and bullet are objects designed to penetrate the soft flesh of the body. Both are cylindrical, rounded at the tip, contain a “head”; are “penis-shaped”. Both are powerful, “virile,” sexy objects. A man shooting a gun is demonstrating his masculine prowess. A woman applying lipstick is acting out a sexual performance whereby the lipstick/penis penetrates her mouth/vagina. Powerful images, all.
What I find interesting about these readings are that both the lipstick and the bullet are gendered masculine; they do not in fact represent, in psychoanalytic terms, opposite ends of the gender socialization spectrum. As powerful, sexual objects, both must be rendered male. However, it is possible to read these objects in a different way, one that challenges the traditional heteronormative male reading. Both objects can indeed be read as extremely sexual; the bullet is meant to penetrate the body, the lipstick is designed to be dragged around the perimeter of the mouth. However, both are designed to be able to be used with as little force as possible: a gun is fired with the slight squeeze of one finger, and lipstick is applied with a light touch. The words one would use to describe each – sleek, smooth, rounded – are associated with the “fairer sex.” Both objects are small; so small, in fact, that if we are being truthful, they more closely resemble the clitoris. (If the reader thinks I am stretching this point based on images of bullets in their minds that do not align with the ones I am picturing, I would solicit them to recall all those objects in our world that have been claimed for the phallus, such as the Washington Monument, and allow me a small fraction of the leeway afforded that image.) To be blunt, I cannot think of another phallic object besides the bullet for which claims of smallness equals power. It is perhaps for this reason that I am less interested in an examination of large munitions, though similarly-shaped: huge bullets, missiles, rockets, warheads and mortars, which are meant to symbolize our “bigger is better” giant-penis culture. I am also less interested in examining art and cultural imagery of the lipstick-as-missile phenomenon, though examples abound. Where lipstick and bullets are conflated to the benefit of engorged penis phallus symbology, I think whatever content is there has been well mined, and I am just not that interested.
Try as I might, I just cannot shake the image of the bullet as clitoral. So much energy in such a tiny package; (the glans of the clitoris contains a greater concentration of nerve endings than any other human body part, if popular science is to be believed;) the shape, the size. Lipstick, too; it is not meant to be shoved into and out of the mouth, it is to be rubbed gently. In fact, I think both lipsticks and bullets are actually very queer objects and could use a thorough queer reading. As a symbol of potent male virility, why does a man only ever shoot a man? It is culturally forbidden for a man to shoot a woman, under any circumstance. The demonstration of a man’s phallic potency which can only be used against another man is incredibly homoerotic; one man’s bullet penetrating deep into another man’s guts. Even in hunting imagery, the conquest is always for the male of the species (e.g. the 6-point buck), and the bigger the better.
The lipstick is potentially just as queer, or at least female-empowered; if a woman’s lips are a surrogate vagina, and rubbing the lipstick (clitoris or penis) on them causes them to be redder/engorged, then the sexual imagery of lipstick application implies that it is the woman/receptive partner who derives sexual pleasure from the encounter, not the man/active partner. Because the woman usually applies her own lipstick without regard for an outside actor (as opposed to the bullet, which is usually used between two partners), I would say that the lipstick is an apt symbol of female sexual empowerment and self-satisfaction.
The Artwork
The objects that I have been making in this project embody all of the above discoveries, ideas and thought processes. I decided to work in bronze for a number of reasons. First, I wanted to learn new materials skills during my MFA, and I had never cast in metals before. Second, I wanted to work in a medium that would allow me to make many multiples of the same object. Third, I was interested is using a material which would reference the original object, and I knew that bronze could look very much like the brass of bullet and lipstick casings. I was also interested in butting up the loaded history of bronze as a high art medium with the mass-produced pop cultural objects I was reproducing, creating a clash between thingness and objecthood, handmade and mass-produced, precious and disposable, craftsperson and factory which seemed to get at the heart of everything I was already thinking about lipsticks and bullets, and more, adding layers of meaning and clarity and confusion to the project.
Part of the way I wanted to get at that confusion and clarity of meaning was by creating masses of the objects. Lipsticks that looked like bullets, bullets that looked like lipsticks, objects that could not be reliably identified as either, and just dozens and hundreds equaling information upon information so that it was overwhelming and contradictory and might seem to add up to some sort of coherent story but really just was a cacophony of meaning. David Cross describes how confusion can be employed to allow for increased levels of access to an artwork, rather than a prescriptive response; “By destabilizing the conditions by which the art is experienced, it is more difficult to distinguish between different categories. As stated, rather than simply defining what is beautiful and what is grotesque, I am concerned to shift the participant’s decision making to a level of uncertainty.” (Cross 13) By eschewing lucidity in favour of ambiguity, space is opened up for the creation of new kinds of knowledge.
As I worked with the materials, I also became interested in the material translation – from plastic toy to silicone or plaster mold to wax to ceramic shell to bronze (and further, from original brass and lead bullet to wooden replica to plastic cast toy to silicone mold to was to ceramic shell to bronze…) Each of those steps and the meaning behind them fascinated me, and I wanted them to be visible within the work as a part of the retelling of their history. When deformations happened, I kept them as testament to that process. Somehow those deformations and imperfections spoke simultaneously to their thingness – signs of having been “produced” via a process of reproduction rather than hand-made, and their objecthood – signs of their being imperfectly made by hand, rather than machine-produced. The fact that none of the objects are exact replicas demonstrates that they are not true reproduction; that there is no such thing as a true reproduction. The intention is carried within the form. Through this project, then, I managed to accomplish one of the main goals of my MFA – to challenge my typical working method whereby I read and research and write and theorize a project until I am satisfied with it before I start to produce it. By the time I am finished making a work of art, I usually find that its physicality is so far removed from its intellectual underpinnings that while it may be a successful project, it is no longer about what I originally thought (or intended). I have a much more physical, a much more intimate relationship to these objects already than I do to most of my previous works. Because of this, it has enabled my thinking about affect, embodiment, and performativity; the work itself has helped guide me to the sources I have used as a foundational theoretical framework.
Production as Performance, Objects as Performance
In terms of how this body of work relates to my thesis, I spent so long making it (working on it steadily throughout my entire degree) that I had the opportunity to think a lot about creation as performance. Readers will note that creation-as-performance is not a methodology I discuss as one of the four strategies underpinning my thesis. Creation as performance has been used by artists and theorized about artists at least since the action painting of the 1940s, and, like many other potential types of performance, is not specifically relevant to my thesis. But it did give me a lot of time to think about performance, and to feel that I was performing while I created the work, helping me work through ideas of artist-as-factory, production, and the role of the artist. In my artistic practice, I have often made work in which the ‘hand of the artist’ is both apparent and important to the understanding of the work (most of the time I actually made that work myself, but not always). I have also often employed industry in the production of my work, hiring companies who would be much better at making the object I want made when the object itself is what is important, and not how it was made (or when it is exactly important that it was factory-made). It is a much rarer occasion that I have made art that is meant to straddle those lines, and thinking of production-line as performance has been helpful to the process. Though I did not particularly consider the production of this work as performative, that does not mean that the production-line system of production was not an essential element of the work. Because of the history I discovered about the production of lipsticks and bullets, that they were made in the same factories, that men made lipsticks and women made bullets, and because of all the interesting and confusing history connected to not only the objects but the factories and the people that worked in them, becoming a factory not only allowed me to try to embody that history, but it left traces of that production on the objects themselves in a way that enriches the work.
As it relates to my four stated methodologies, this body of work functions both as a stand-in for my body and as an opportunity for audience transgression via “the squirm.” It does this in several ways. I created the works as a literal stand-in for my body through the inclusion of several additional pieces – bronze casts of clits and fingers. These were added in order to make quite literal reference (in case it wasn’t clear enough) to the sexual imagery that lipsticks and bullets have been loaded with. These are sexual objects, they are genitalia, and more specifically, they are clitorises. The inclusion of clits in the work make quite clear the fact that bullets and lipsticks are more female than male, speaking in terms of cisgender anatomy: one will have to look quite closely in order to find those lipstick/bullet hybrids which feature replica genitalia. They are not just sculpted clits or random clits, they are casts of my own. They are truly stand-ins for my body.
They are stand-ins for my unapologetically sexual/ized body, using the strategy of hiding my taboo body in order not to alienate the audience. They are stand-ins for a performing sexual body, the bullet and the lipstick being potent symbols of active sexuality; the inclusions of my and my partner’s fingers a tacit symbol of queer sex. They perform my feminine virility, acting as a phallic symbol would (and not how a yonic symbol might perform my fertility), announcing my size, my strength, my sexual power!
Phelan talks about the phallus-as-bullet, as that which wounds, in Unmarked. She references MacCannell’s Figuring Lacan in a psychoanalytic description of our culture’s need to obliterate the Mother’s genitals in order that the phallus reign supreme. (Unmarked 151) Judith Butler and J. Jack Halberstam, however, theorize the “lesbian phallus” as a potential byproduct of socialization, in Lacanian terms. (Failure 140) (Butler 43-56) My clitoral bullets literally stand off against the phallus, offering a resistance against the phallocentric. The power of a man wielded by a woman is socially threatening; the power of a man invisibly wielded by a femme is simply deadly.
There is also an opportunity for the audience to literally perform the work by taking away and wearing the lipstick cast in bullet molds and held in brass bullet casings, by putting a bullet right to their lips while they consider its complicated history.
Finally, the work provides an opportunity for audience transgression through the creation of embodied affect (the squirm) through the discovery of any (or all) of the layers of meaning within the work that might connect with them.
The Lipsticks and Bullets series is meant to embody all of these facts, all of these claims, all of these histories and theories and memories and feelings. I wanted to melt them all down and spit them out one at a time as newly-minted amalgams which clarify at the same time as they confuse – by placing facts and ideas in close proximity they shed new light on one another, yet by mixing them all together create a bewildering set of concepts. I am not interested in discovering a “truth” because I do not believe there is such a thing. To attempt to create something authentic in the place where the histories of lipsticks and bullets collide would be beside the point; it is all simulacra, all symbol, all representation, all performance.
Works Cited
Aydemir, Murat. Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, masculinity, meaning. Minneapolis: UM Press, 2007. Web. 11 May 2014.
Bennett, David. “Getting the Id to Go Shopping: Psychoanalysis, advertising, Barbie dolls, and the invention of the consumer unconscious.” Public Culture Winter 2005: 1-26. Web. 10 May 2014.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.
Cross, David. “Some Kind of Beautiful: The Grotesque Body in Contemporary Art.” PhD thesis. Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Research Centre School of Visual Arts. 2006. Web. 18 Oct. 2012.
Friedman, David. M. A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis. New York: Free Press, 2003. Print.
Greven, David. Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush. Austin: UT Press, 2009. Web. 12 May 2014.
Halberstam, J. Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. 2011. Print.
Kelley, Susan M. “Giggles and Guns: The phallic myth in Unforgiven.” Journal of Film and Video Vol 47 No 1 01 April 1995: Web. 12 May 2014.
“Lipstick, Bullets and Bombs: Women at Work in World War Two.” National Centre for History Education. Australian Government Department for Education, Science, and Training, n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2012.
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