ATTN: STEVE GRASSE SEEKS TO JOIN MATTHEW BARNEY AND DAMIEN HIRST AMONG THE RANKS OF THE WORLD’S FOREMOST CONCEPTUAL ARTISTS
To the uneducated viewer, Bikini Bandits might appear to be nothing more than eye-candy. However, the creator of the series, has much loftier ideas.
In fact, Gyro Worldwide CEO, Steve Grasse, sees Bikini Bandits as a post-feminist attack on the way women are portrayed in modern culture, especially by advertising.
According to the artist’s statement on The Arcadia Project (which he describes as “a sequence of five projects that together form a phenomenology of attentional economics and American pop culture at the beginning of the 21st century):
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.
It’s copy like that leaves me dumbfounded. I don’t know whether to stand up and cheer, or roll around on the floor in a fit of laughter.
