Marilyn Minter

NEW YORK—Marilyn Minter has been a part of the New York art scene since the 1970s, though her career has been anything but a smooth ride. She made a series of now-celebrated photographic studies of her drug-addicted mother while still a student in Florida, and in the early ’80s she explored Pop-derived images that often had a sexual undercurrent. Then, at the end of that decade she painted herself straight into fevered and often bitter controversy when she began using imagery taken from porn magazines. Her infamy was exacerbated in 1990 when she produced her own TV ad, 100 Food Porn, which ran during late-night mainstream television shows. The 1990s and the early years of this decade saw her gradually refining her style and imagery so that, while still suggesting pornography, her photographs and paintings seem equally to breathe the atmosphere of high fashion (a world that she claims to know nothing about) and glamour. Her painting technique is equally startling, employing many layers of translucent enamel paint on metal to produce an incandescent, almost hallucinatory finish. Her work came to the attention of entirely new audiences last year, when Creative Time commissioned a series of giant billboards from her that were hung in Chelsea and, a few months later, she was included in the Whitney Biennial. Now, in the summer of 2007, she’s suddenly everywhere. She is guest designer for the current issue of Francis Ford Coppola’s magazine Zoetrope All-Story, and her work is featured on the cover and in the centerfold of the current issue of the art publication Parkett, for whom she produced an editioned photograph of Pamela Anderson that immediately sold out. She shot the campaign images for Tom Ford’s new fragrance, Tom Ford for Men, which will be launched in September, and Gregory R. Miller & Co. has just published a lavish $60 monograph of her work.

Last week, on her birthday, she shared coffee and cake with ARTINFO in her SoHo loft, where three assistants were hard at work on a group of new paintings. We began by talking about the new book.

Marilyn, congratulations on this new book. It really manages to convey the physical character of your work. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book that used such heavy, glossy paper before.

Thank you. Isn’t it great? The designers are pretty brilliant. From day one they said, “We’ll use different papers. We’ll use pink, we’ll use silver. We’ve got this shiny paper, we’ve got paper that feels like it’s wet.” I can’t take any credit for anything of it. It was their idea.

But you must have given them some direction?

I’m a catalog collector. I showed them all the catalogs that I love, and I said to them, “Do what you always wanted to do and no one would let you,” and this is what they came up with.

I can’t imagine that’s how you work with your painting assistants here.

I’m so overwhelmed with everything that’s going on right now. In the last year I’ve been constantly pulled away from painting. I’m at the computer, figuring out what we’re going to do, figuring out images, and ordering prints. If it was just me in the studio I’d be making one painting a year!

I invented the technique, but at this point, I’m their [the assistants’] underpainter. But I am also the director. An assistant might do the painting, but I’m constantly changing what she does. Whether I’m painting on the painting or not, I have the vision of what it’s supposed to look like. I’m still the painter. I know that things are going to slow down, and I’ll be back to painting again.

Can you explain the difference between the photographs that you make and your paintings?

Every photo I take is to make a painting, but sometimes a photo is so good that I don’t need to make a painting out of it. It’s like when a conventional artist makes a drawing and then makes a painting from the drawing. Sometimes the drawing’s just a perfect moment, a finished artistic project, so the painter doesn’t touch the drawing. That’s how I sometimes feel about a photograph: It’s a perfect sketch.