All The Rage

Marilyn Minter has been pushing boundaries both as an artist and an activist for decades. On the eve of her first solo exhibition in Asia, she talks to Oliver Giles about pornography, protests and an encounter with Ivanka Trump

- Oliver Giles

When I call Marilyn Minter in her New York studio, she is not painting, taking photos or doing any of the things you might expect of an artist preparing for their first solo show in Asia. Instead, she is planning a protest. “Donald Trump is a monster, he’s my worst nightmare,” Minter exclaims. “We’re fighting fascism now in the United States. I’ve never seen democracy so fragile—and I’m old. I saw Nixon, I saw the AIDS crisis, I saw Reagan, and this is the worst it’s ever been. I’m planning something with [the political action committee] Downtown for Democracy at the moment, but I’ve always been an activist, it’s just that nobody knew my name.”

That’s changed. Minter, who turned 70 this year, is one of the most famous feminist artists in the US—and the world—one of the few who is both taken seriously by critics and loved by the public. The work of the self-confessed ‘radical bad girl’ is collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Beyoncé; she has given academic lectures at UCLA and hosted panel discussions with Madonna.

This success is hard-won. In the early days of her career, when the young artist was scraping a living in New York in the 1970s and ’80s, she was slated for her glossy paintings incorporating imagery from fashion advertising and pornography. “I’m drawn to things that people find contemptible or shallow,” Minter explains. “Pornography is one of the giant engines of our culture—there’d be no internet without pornography. And the fashion industry and glamour is another giant engine of our culture. It’s a billion-dollar industry.”