Left For Dead Barbie Visits the Capitol

By Susan Arthur

Susan Arthur is a photographer, sculptor and writer, with an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She hides out in the very blue wilds of Massachusetts. Her work is shown nationally, and she’s a member of the artist co-op Brickbottom Artists Association, in Somerville, Massachusetts.

On art as a form of resistance

I think anything we do—art, science, business, everything—can be done in the spirit of resistance. For me, the primary purpose of art is that it can act as a mirror. If this election has done nothing else, we can see how difficult it is to unearth the truth. I had never thought of myself as an activist, but, since this election, as someone suffering from pathological idealism. By pathological I mean an unwillingness to adapt to what I see as an ugly turn the country has taken.

My work is never specifically political, but my personal statements intersect at times with politics. I have joined protests when the internal pressure is too great not to—in 1969 in the March on Washington, at the WTO protests in Seattle, against the Iraq war during the Bush Administration—all of these have been at critical moments. I don’t know if protesting helps directly. The Dakota Access Pipeline suggests it does. I do know it is essential to keep our voice heard.

There have been celebrations in the midst of all this, too. President Obama’s first inauguration, that bone-numbing, cold day out on the Mall in DC, was one of the collective happiest days ever.

On the Left for Dead Barbie series

Left For Dead Barbie was what I’d felt too often, what most of us feel at some moment in our lives. Lost. Abandoned. Deserted.

I changed her to dry-cleaner’s plastic, wrapping it around and around her body, a potentially lethal, diaphanous covering. I tried placing her in different positions: standing, running, prone. Left For Dead Barbie’s evolution went from horizontal and passive to vertical and active. She transformed gradually into the Terminator.  I took her out of the confines of my studio and into the world with me. I photographed her in front of the Capitol Building, the White House (where an armed guard made a point of reminding me to take her with me when I was done), St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. At St. Peter’s she waited to get in out of the storm like the rest of us, in a rain-soaked line that spun once around the block, timed entries like Disneyland. She’d become too thoroughly my surrogate. She was wet, she was annoyed, she was pickpocketed. OK, she wasn’t; I was, but Left For Dead Barbie acts as a surrogate for the viewer.

See more of Arthur’s work here.