Kim Dingle’s girls embody control and power, which in their case is attached to violence. In her recent paintings, Dingle’s signature girls succumb to their savage impulses and reach a level of violence far beyond that of the sandbox. Dressed in frilly white frocks, bobby socks, and Mary Janes, the toddlers wreak havoc on unsuspecting infants and cuddly lambs, apparently in preparation for the holiday feast to which the title of the series Easter Violence alludes. Gleefully and maliciously wielding weapons, the girl-warriors achieve power and proudly take on the traditionally male role of conqueror, presenting their slaughtered victims as trophies. But for what, dinner? Unlike the little girls in Dingle’s past works, who fought amongst themselves, these dominating brutes instead turn on smaller and helpless beings, who cannot possibly fight back. Dingle’s work reflects battles between ethnic groups, generations, and sexes in the pursuit of acceptance and authority, and condemns our destruction of animals for luxury purposes. Her sly sense of humor (a smiling hippo in a dress clobbered with a mallet or a cow with a painted target on its rump) also hammers home the mass appeal of senseless cruelty. By exploring the violence so readily glorified by tabloid journalists and Hollywood filmmakers, her works reveal its ferocity yet revel in its freedom.

In Dingle’s paintings the constrictions and restraints of girlhood are symbolized by the forced femininity of the girls’ clothing. It can be assumed that the girls would not have chosen white lace garments to engage in bloody murder. Dingle’s girls resort to a sort of compliance in order to get away with breaking the rules, though their disguises cannot hide their desire for power. In Dingle’s world, girls rule. They get what they want without remorse or a nagging conscience. War, adventure, spontaneity, and corruption become their realm. In critic Peter Schjeldahl’s words, Dingle “tells us that innocence and its abstract sibling, correctness of any sort, are nowhere. The domain of the fiend is wall to wall.”

The frenzied nature of Dingle’s “wild girls” contrasts dramatically with the frozen poses of Judy Fox’s terra-cotta sculptures. Modeled upon female figures plucked from the Bible, mythology, art history, and fairy tales, Fox’s girls personify psychological traits or personality types. Fusing the notion of the heroic or historic ideal with the earthly realism of detailed figurative sculpture, while combining an adult character with the corporeality of a child, Fox places her hybrids in the here and now. Naked in both their appearance and their lack of original context, these figures exist in a public gallery, becoming objects to scrutinize. Their pained and hesitant expressions and gestures, aimed directly at the viewer, disclose the anxiety of being vulnerable, of being watched, and of sharing their space with strangers.

With extended arms and an impossibly arched back, Fox’s Sphinx assumes a pose taken from the decorative table legs on carved furniture, but the contortion also mimics the young gymnast’s salute at the end of her routine and alludes to the sanctioned manipulation of young girls’ bodies and minds in the name of triumph and patriotism. In Greek mythology, the sphinx is a winged monster with the head of a woman and the body of a lion that destroys those who cannot answer its riddle. The psychological and physical struggle symbolized by this creature addresses the quandary of being female, both adult and child, but thus far Fox has found no solutions to the enigma. The circle of characters is enriched by sculptures based on Delilah and Olympia, women who have been interpreted as wily and aggressive. Delilah is a Philistine trickster and indirectly a murderer and the Olympia of Manet’s painting is an unabashed French prostitute. In tandem with the figure of the perfectly coifed Cinderella, who tentatively watches her step while at the same time curtseying, these sculptures illustrate an array of one-dimensional female archetypes that have historically been defined through their relationship with men. They will always be remembered for their alluring beauty, which captures the eyes and hearts of the opposite sex, bringing them happiness and success.

Like Yuskavage, Nicky Hoberman is attracted to young girls’ malleability, or in the artist’s words, to their “marshmallow factor.” The child’s ability to be molded, both physically and psychologically, is the crux of Hoberman’s concerns, and appears in her paintings through distortions of the child’s body. Hoberman begins with Polaroids, which tend to flatten and reduce detail, then employs a technique of wet-on-wet oil painting, allowing the form to take on its own shape. This contrast between the fixed photographic images and the fluid distortion of paint parallels the child’s struggle to dictate her own course at a time when she is determinedly ruled by others. Hoberman’s large-scale paintings position either an individual figure or a group of girls against a flat backdrop painted with colors as candy-sweet as their titles, all of which come directly from dessert names ringing with sexual undertones. Larger than life (often eight feet tall), with oversized dark pools for eyes, Hoberman’s coterie of monstrous beings have their feet firmly planted in childhood, but in a strange way resemble aging adults. Foreseeing the effects of the adult impulse to control and fiercely protect their young, Hoberman imbues her subjects with hints of a disquieting and unsure future. By befriending her models, who are often children of friends, Hoberman is able to experience the girl’s particular family situation. Informed by her resulting visceral reaction, the artist portrays her vision of the girl’s future, often a bleak one. This act in itself gives us as much information about the artist as it does about the subject, as most portraits do. Though Hoberman frowns on this reading of her work, the fusion of self and subject, with suggestions of the subject’s ultimate destiny, has much in common with traditional children’s portraiture and especially brings to mind the photographs of Diane Arbus.

The attire, facial expression, and pose of each girl in Hoberman’s paintings provide us with clues to each individual personality. Though playful and carefree, with hair blowing in the wind and hand in pocket, Glacé Cherry possesses a wisdom beyond her years, similar to many child characters in recent films (see One Fine Day or Les Voleurs). In Vanilla PuVs, the contrast of the Hepburnesque ballerina and the Puritanical fanatic is striking. Both dressed up in ill-fitting, adult-designed identities, they glare into the future, questioning their fate. The buttoned-up girl in black has a particularly evil glint in her eye, warning us that she might not be contained by her garments and is likely to rebel. “Sugar and spice and everything nice” is no longer relevant in Hoberman’s heightened reality of girlhood. The artist’s pleasure in painting these subjects is evident, revealing her own connection with and fondness for nasty (defiant?) girls who seem equipped to take control of their destinies.

Inez van Lamsweerde’s photographic series Final Fantasy proposes that innocence is no more than a figment in a culture in which morals and values are built upon foundations of the omnipotent media. At first glance, Wendy, Ursula, Topaze, and Caroline may look like cute little girls from glossy magazine ads, but are in fact more tampered-with constructions. Like their promotional counterparts, these girls were hired from a children’s modeling agency, and their poses have been tightly choreographed by the artist, who is also a fashion photographer. But the similarity ends here. Through computer manipulation, their mouths have been replaced by the grins of adult males, and they are pressed up against a wall of perspex, like specimens on a slide or animals in a sterile white box. Van Lamsweerde’s digital photographs, made four years ago, uncannily prefigure a description of the portfolio of murdered child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey in a 1997 New York Times article: “Many of her photographs show her posed coquettishly in showgirl costume and lipstick, her hair a highlighted blonde.” The writer, Karen De Witt, goes on to say that child beauty pageants “appear to be another example of an America wanting to have it both ways: a paean to the beautiful innocence that childhood should be, but dolled up with the aura of adulthood.”5 Van Lamsweerde makes that description physically literal by perverting the face of a girl with the implanted leer of a grown man. This new species—a hybrid of both child and adult, female and male, real and artificial—embodies psychologist Emily Hancock’s contention that a little girl’s identity is inevitably tainted by adult and masculine forces: “Contained, adapted, and sexualized long before adolescence, a girl is cowed and tamed as her natural spontaneity gives way to patriarchal construction of the female. In donning the masks provided by the culture, a girl easily loses sight of who and what she is beneath the feminine face she adopts in youth.”6

Van Lamsweerde’s earlier work Claudia: 60-54-61, from the 1991 series Vital Statistics, eroticizes a ripening girl to the point of cliché by posing her in a standard submissive position, with a juicy cherry balanced in her mouth. Identified by meaningless vital statistics, Claudia is dropped into an alien environment, the only connection between body and site being that they both are “under construction.” In comparing these two disparate arenas, van Lamsweerde questions notions of appeal and desire, emphasizing the vulnerability of cycles that are not yet complete. The absurd image, a parody of pin-up girls, toes the line between critique and glorification, as van Lamsweerde indulges our fascination once again.

Judith Raphael also recasts historical representations of women, creating contemporary female icons by appropriating the stances of renowned male figurative sculptures from art history. Motivated by a personal desire to introduce art history to her granddaughter’s youthful generation, Raphael noted the lack of heroines in the history of art and performed sex changes on such sculptures as the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius and Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus to insert the girl into the patriarchy of Western art. The girl on the left in Big Swing borrows the pose of Donatello’s David, but Raphael’s giant killer sports a ruffled bikini and boasts a solidity and confidence that the boyish and humble David cannot claim. Her bold demeanor taunts poor David and actually challenges him to a contest, reviving the schoolyard chant, “anything boys can do girls can do better.” Raphael also uncovers children’s games as telling metaphors for sexual identity. While games for boys tend to be fiercely competitive, physical, and spontaneous, activities for girls value ritual, repetition, and rhythmic control and memory. In Go Boy, two girls play jump rope with a pit bull, Raphael’s symbol of libidinal energy, which ultimately becomes exhausted by the girls’ monotonous and seemingly endless rope turning and chanting.

In her recent gouaches, Raphael has moved away from her previous canvases, which contain individuals of varying ages and sexes, one usually a young girl, placed in sparse interior spaces or lush landscapes. The ambiguous relationships among those figures, many of whom have contorted poses and eerie facial expressions, owe something to the domestic scenes of Paula Rego while responding to the voyeuristic fantasies of Balthus. Her newer works continue to explore figural relationships, but are now composed on highly saturated decontextualized grounds, similar to Hoberman’s backdrops. The neutrality of the space emphasizes the forms and activities of the protagonists, and also serves to liberate them from temporal and spatial confines. Raphael explains, “I possess the experience of an overlay of the girlhood of two generations. . . . For me, the subject of girlhood visually reconfigured takes place over time, not in a specific time or context.”10

Lisa Yuskavage also produces images that rely on the allure of exaggeration and fantasy. In her work, nature joins culture as a force to contend with, activating the vulnerability of girls’ traumatic physical transformation. Hancock describes the state as follows: “female appendages begin to intrude on pure physical prowess: unwieldy breasts, broadening hips, softening contours clutter the taut streamlined body of her androgynous youth. . . . these physical changes hamper a girl’s freedom and weaken the confidence she earlier placed in her physical skills.” Yuskavage amplifies this uncomfortable period in many of her works, not to provide a clinical record of metamorphoses, but to metaphorically explore issues of grotesque desire, scopophilia, and self-inquiry. In her painting Faucet (1995), the “unwieldy breasts” of a young girl are highly distorted, fabricated by the artist to entice a viewer into a period of intense looking. The girl’s uncovered eye and her slightly parted lips subtly but powerfully hold our interest and help create a prolonged dialogue between artist, subject (made object), and viewer. The peripheral curves of the figure fade into the hazy apricot background, making the girl as much a part of the painting as she has become part of us, provoking an awareness of how we treat things we look at (be it a girl or a painting) and why. Perhaps in order to liberate the girls from her paintings, Yuskavage cast several of them in white Hydrocal, leaving them unpainted. The diminutive cast of characters are unencumbered by seductive colors, emphasizing their raw nakedness and solid flesh. Given crass titles, Asspicking, foodeating, headshrinking, social climbing, motherfucking bad habits, they become objects of intended disgust.

Yuskavage’s keen interest in form and its meaning, as well as her acute self-awareness and skillful observation, lead her to “Anthropomorphize [painting] into different types of women. Different colors, different shapes become different haircolors and styles. The way the paintings themselves behave between being good/bad is really so much about how I operate in the world. The impulse toward self-portraiture runs through the work from the beginning all the way to the end.” Blatant exposure, in its many facets, is essential to this artist, and this practice is not often kindly looked upon in our increasingly censored world. She identifies with the girl’s body as a form of transgression, constructing something that is both desirable and repulsive, informed by her own experiences as well as her interpretations of the public consciousness. Fusing private and public, Yuskavage offers us guilty pleasures to consume and challenges us by disclosing a little more than we want to know.