By Michael Miner
Chew on that if you will. But I’m going to push on to what was most interesting about the issue–its pictures, and not a one of them more provocative than the cover. To sell the magazine, the New Art Examiner picked a print by Inez van Lamsweerde of a pink, rouged, crimson-lipped, shirtless prepubescent girl fingering a pale blue guitar. “Kick Ass!” asserts the instrument’s gleaming shell.
“Actually,” says Hixson, “it’s not a very good picture, but we didn’t tell Paul that. It’s advertising–right?–not editorial, so it’s not a freedom-of-speech issue. We said, ‘Look, we think this will be bad for your artist because it’s in this particular context. We’re critiquing the objectification of the female body–and you’re showing it.’ The second choice wasn’t much better, but she was upright, and a grown woman, and she had arms.”
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Hixson doesn’t think much of Cook’s work. “It’s like that level between pornography and fine art that’s black-and-white and looks serious, but it’s just pictures of naked ladies.” But if Half Submerged doesn’t meet what she calls the New Art Examiner’s “standard of visual excellence,” how does she distinguish it from the Lamsweerde print on the cover, which is more disturbing by leaps and bounds? She replied, “If you notice, in the picture on the cover there’s a female character with a head and arms in an active pose addressing the viewer. The artist is self-consciously aware of the stereotypes operating in the reception of that piece.”
“Right,” she said.
While taking its lumps for “disgusting titillation,” the New Art Examiner has no interest in also catching it for censorship. When I called Hixson, advertising director Mari Eastman and business manager Joshua Rothkopf also invited themselves onto the phone; they wanted to weigh in on the ad Berlanga insisted on turning into a censorship issue. “It definitely looks like an outtake from Silence of the Lambs, except it’s hipped up,” said Eastman. “It’s just cheesy.”
He also proposed running the original ad with a disclaimer next to it announcing that the New Art Examiner was printing it under protest.
