At Invisible-Exports, Brigid Berlin Reads Her Own Lips

THE DAILY PIC (#1409): These two Polaroids by and of Brigid Berlin are from a rare solo show of her work, called “It’s All About Me,” curated by Anastasia Rygle for Invisible-Exports gallery in New York. Berlin was one of just a few people from the Warhol circle who had a real and freestanding talent, independent of what she did with/for/beside him. The show includes a selection of her famous audio cassettes, on which she recorded big chunks of her life as a Duchampian readymade, and also various artifacts from a solo show she had in 1970 at the Cologne gallery of the great Heiner Friedrich himself. (That exhibition presented something like 100 little albums of her photos, of which all but a few are untraceable.)

I’m particularly fond of how these two Polaroids, from the early 1970s, get at the place made-up lips have in the construction (sorry) of the feminine in our culture. Warhol touched on that in the silkscreens he made of Marilyn Monroe’s lips deprived of face or body, but there’s a special power and poignancy in seeing a live woman coming to grips with what her own lips are supposed to mean. (Courtesy of Brigid Berlin, Vincent Fremont Enterprises, Inc., and INVISIBLE-EXPORTS) 

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