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lynn crosbie: pop rocks

"I'll never look like Barbie," laments Sid and Nancy's drug- and violence-shattered heroine. "Barbie doesn't have bruises."

That was 1986 and this is now. This week, Tyler Shields, the California-based artist, posted shots on his website of Glee's Heather Morris with a black eye and the following descriptor: "Even Barbie gets bruises!"

As with last fall's Glee scandal – when the cast posed for racy shots in GQ magazine that were widely described as pedophilic – the Shields pictures have created a new controversy, regarding women and domestic violence. In the series, Morris appears in a variety of poses that show her capering with a hot iron, and bound by its cord.

In response to outraged activist groups and commentators, the nervous Shields has promised to sell the bruise pictures and donate the proceeds to "a top domestic abuse charity" (none of those tacky little shelters, please).

Still, online posters pour out their discontent. On Shields's website, "survivor of domestic abuse" writes: "UNBELIEVABLE you are obviously obsessed with abusing women. why in the hell do you think this is art? my children and i are survivors of domestic violence and i think you are a disgusting human being."

One feels her pain, and then some. Shields, who photographed Lindsay Lohan last year being shot in the mouth, then lying in the bloody aftermath in lingerie, is so largely trivial that the survivor's question about art is, perhaps, the most salient of her remarks.

Shields's images have also brought attention to Fluid, the Edmonton-based hair salon which also just debuted an image of a battered woman in its "Look Good in All You Do" campaign (which has also featured shots of a homeless woman and of a woman crawling through the monstrous Plains Midstream Canada oil spill in northern Alberta).

The images, which promote fabulous hair above all things, are "cutting-edge" and "satirical" looks at "real-life situations," says salon owner Sarah Cameron, sounding like Cruella De Vil – viciously fashion-forward, that is. The Edmonton Sun quoted Cameron saying that her ad "might strike a chord, but as the way our society and community is getting, we keep tailoring everything because everyone is getting so sensitive."

Here, Cameron summons the spectre of political correctness to explain ads best understood in the cultural landscape of Natural Born Killers. And after she received her publicity, she became a little soft herself, promising to donate an undisclosed amount of money to a women's shelter each time a customer mentions the advertisements.

Whatever their intended message, these ads must be dismissed on the grounds that they are poorly photographed, and therefore are hostile to style – the only criterion in the matter of art and "tailoring."

Returning to Shields's shots of the glorious Morris, which are far more critical (unless stylizing battered women is trending, which means we, as a civilization, are doomed): The couture and hair is the 1950s at its most banal; the aesthetic is playful S/M. Overall, it is less shocking than a badly conceived and executed attempt to enter the fashion- noir world that Helmut Newton began assailing us with in the 1970s. Newton, the King of Kink, shot beautiful women in morbid and louche manners, always drawing attention to the fine lines between beauty and ugliness, between Eros and Thanatos.

Does Shields accomplish so much in his work? Or is he just another Tom Ford, who edited the highly provocative and oddly bland shots of 10-year-old Thylane Blondeau for a recent issue of Vogue Enfants?

Blondeau's are luxurious fashion shots. The nymphet herself is limpid-eyed and beautiful. There is nothing sexy about her image: She does and doesn't look like a grown woman, a paradox which draws attention to the willful perversity of the shoot. Ford is not simply reprising Pretty Baby (in which 12-year-old Brooke Shields plays a child prostitute). He is offering us a rare look at the machinations behind the massive industry of beauty and fashion; he is letting us see a glimpse of the illusion.

Is it an unsettling glimpse? Yes. One feels, as with the fine art of Henry Darger, that the child's beauty is linked, morbidly, to fixation, even predation.

Still, pedophiles generally like to see children dressed as children, which is why the Glee Gone Wild GQ shoot, of actresses nearing their 30s dressed as young schoolgirls, caused so much trouble.

Shields's shots are strange attempts at wit (Morris drinks water from the iron in one; and places it against the photographer's crotch in another). And they are less about domestic violence than fleshing out, so to speak, tired images of the Fifties housewife. Here, this domestic Betty Cooper is seen to be sexual, sinister and, most importantly, alive – the bruise is a symbol of what is rising beneath her insipid exterior.

But such images have been revived so many times, there is no news in Shields's photos. The news is his short film, in which Morris dances a jerky-elegant strip-ballet in a concrete room, then leaps on a pole made of tensile steel and drilled with gaps. It is a traffic sign, and the fusion here, between sex and the horrible ideas of forcible confinement and human trafficking, is mesmerizing.

What did Cameron say? We are all getting so sensitive. It is true that sometimes we charge, seeing red, when pausing might serve us better.

Morris's beautiful dance is in danger of being lost because of our bullish charge on the very Barbie we claim to want to protect.

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