'Barb'-arians at the gate

Backed by Mattel,the Museo Franz Mayer put on quite an opening last month. Layers of velvet ropes and security guards opened to edecanes and splashy video projections. Two Miss Mexicos and designer Zhandra Rhodes (all three sportingtitty pink) roamed about, as bottomless flutes of pink champagne floated through the halls of Mexico City's esteemed applied arts museum.

Image:Museo Franz Mayer

The Museo Franz Mayer Barbie show is causing quite a stir.

Most notable,however, were the hundreds of attendees--more than I'd ever seen at an "art"opening. The blockbuster? A celebration of Barbie-that perennially well-dressed bit of extruded plastic-on the fiftieth anniversary of her remarkable commercial debut.

The wait to see the dolls approached an hour, as formidable señoras, children, a young gay man, and people more likely to frequent La Merced than the Met queued up without complaint.

Amid this buzzing multitude, for whom a plastic doll is a role model and a fashion and surgery inspiration, I was tempted to lament the city's current cultural ambitions. Earlier that week, Nicolas Sarkozy's state visit to the Senate attracted perhaps ahundred onlookers (even Barbie-like Carla Bruni only gets you so far). An opening of finely executed conceptualist pieces at UNAM's Casa del Lago culledabout fifty guests. A MUNAL lecture, part of its Invención de lo Cotidiano show, attracted a scant twenty arts aficionados, almost half of them from the press corps. But Barbie needs bouncers.

The show's curator, Ana Elena Mallet, likes putting on popular, controversial exhibitions. Unlike many curators she is completely comfortable with art's relationship to commerce. Her Boutique (2001), at the Carrillo Gil, was Mexico's first museum show dedicated to contemporary fashion design; the current Días de Humo, at the Soumaya, explores the allure of smoking and cigarette advertising. Though resistance to her work from traditional "Bellas Artes" circles led Mallet to work as an independent, she's a consummate insider, sharp and sharp-tongued,and the self-described curadora del fango--the "muck curator."

Mattel's sponsorship notwithstanding, she makes an independent reading of the doll and the show. "To me Barbie is just a toy," she says. "I can't say if she teaches girls to be women"--as some fans claim--"or to have eating disorders, any more than, say, images in the media do." When pushed on the tendency for Barbie's young owners to buzz off her hair, roast her in the microwave, or otherwise degrade her, Ana Elena points out these cruelties are less disturbing than what her cousins used to do to their pet baby chicks. "Should we start blaming chickens for our developmental problems?" 

Mallet sees Barbie as more cultural object than work of art, making the Franz Mayer an appropriate venue, as she says the museum is a space where "a supposedly meaningless object, however attractive, becomes something that comments on the society that produced it." Another local museum considered hosting, then found the subject too controversial--or superficial. "From the moment there started to be talk abouta Mexico City Barbie show," she asserts, "I knew I wanted to do the curation."