Bikini Bandits
Advertising is the economy of human attention. If you have something to sell, there's no cheaper, faster, easier or less imaginative way to get maximum attention on a minimum budget than positioning your product next to a naked or almost-naked female body. But not just any body. Industry has refined the profit-maximizing feminine form to an unattainable ideal. This body is hairless, and tanned to a deep copper color. It is shaped like the number 8, with impossibly huge breasts that are both pert and pendulous, positioned above a narrow waist and wide, fertile hips.
Staring down at us from billboards and out from magazine pages, the number-8 body works as advertising because it inspires the ideal consumer response to a product. It is the embodiment of unattainable desire. Men want to (and can't ever quite) find it and fuck it. Women want (and can't ever quite) deform themselves into it.
Advertising usually presents women as passive objects who are acted upon. And the consumption that advertising promotes--though it may be dressed up as an act of rebellion--is equally passive. Before the retail environment swallowed the natural world, satisfaction was wrested by violent force from the land. Today satisfaction is not longer a visceral atavistic exchange but a hollow, symbolic one, obtained by calmly waiting in line and exchanging symbols of credit for symbols of desire.
With the Bikini Bandits, I restored the old sense of blood-and-guts dominion to the act of consumption and the feminine form. Possessing perfect number-8 bodies shown to their best advantage by skimpy bikinis, I armed the Bikini Bandits with automatic assault rifles and a vicious frontier ethic of take everything, subjugate everyone, and pay for nothing. I juxtaposed the life-giving symbols of feminine submission with the life-taking accoutrements of masculine sovereignty. I wanted to elevate the possible role of women in the global marketplace, from disposable ornaments to predatory robber barons. And, after being personally subjected to three decades of sexless, emasculating, politically-correct feminism, I wanted to demonstrate that physical beauty and liberation are not incompatible.
I found my number-8 bodies sliding up and down the poles of Delilah's Den, the premiere Philadelphia-area "gentleman's club." Working with strippers struck me as an especially appropriate medium for this exercise. The strip club, after all, is where cash is exchanged directly for a few minutes of proximity to the feminine ideal. By giving these women guns and filming them overthrowing the masculine establishment, I would reveal their true relation to their beauty-addled customer base. Strippers, in this way, are like advertising agencies. They may appear to be slaves to the public taste but in fact they hold the power.
In the first Bikini Bandits feature, I challenged the fundamentalist Christian establishment by sending the bandits to "hell," where they converse with Satan who orders them to desecrate the Virgin Mary. I cast Dee Dee Ramone as the Pope, suggesting how quickly the American economy of dissent enshrines rebels as icons of the establishment.
In the second Bikini Bandits feature, I pitted the Bandits against "Steve Grasse," CEO of the evil "G-Mart Corporation." The film included footage of the bandits breaking out of prison and shooting up the meeting of the corporate board. Here I sought to identify feminine beauty as a powerful force with the potential to violently disrupt the prevailing order. The bandits interpret the ornamental ethic of "use what you got to get what you need," to their own purposes, as justification for gunplay and larceny. To my dismay, the statement: "Left unchecked the world will be overrun by an army of assholes," proved to be prophetic. The film ends, however, on a hopeful note, with the Golden Rod--a vibrator--liberating our heroes from the stone-walled prison of masculine entrapment through a transcendentally earth-shaking orgasm.
The Bikini Bandits project did more than create a culturally significant film. I paid strippers to help me make my art, and this allowed them to see themselves as something more than playthings for men. By enlisting them as full collaborators in a creative endeavor, I gave them a platform to showcase the tremendous attention-drawing power and added value that quality tits and ass bring on the open market.