Creative Time

In March 2006, Marilyn Minter’s seductive and hyperrealistic photographs towered over four art galleries in Chelsea as spectacular billboards. Recreating the lush images she shot for fashion magazines, Minter substituted mud for water, transforming an ideal fashion object into a messy, flawed, and very human form. Legs became splattered with dirt while perfectly pedicured toes oozed with grime, as if they had been walking through the city in a storm.

For Minter, the billboards were an outgrowth of her interests in blurring the boundaries between fine art and commercial art and co-opting commercial genres and spaces for her artistic practice. Both attractive and repulsive simultaneously, Minter’s billboards ultimately seduced viewers, who, complicit in their own dirty secrets, succumbed to the guilty pleasure of looking at the tainted object of desire.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels