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Recently, in the press, there has been some talk about the 'new feminism'. Briefly, 'lipstick feminism', as an articulation or recuperation of the feminine in the feminist, claims that women really do enjoy the beauty regime. Further it claims that anyone who would seek to discredit women's attachment to and identification with plucking and preening as a form of oppression is espousing an anachronistic doctrine which censures particular choices individual women make about their own identities.
Certain assumptions made in this debate seem to resonate in Susan F. Gray's work, Liquid Assets, part of the Beauty Fluid series in which she addresses advertising as a cultural institution. Liquid Assets featured three site-specific installations: a bus shelter advertisement, a light show at the Institute of Modern Art and a peep show at the 49 James Street gallery. Through these works Gray explores the relationship between advertising and audience. Beauty Fluid questions how the feminine is both constructed and commodified, via beauty/cosmetics advertising, as spectacle. Her parodic works tease out some of the complexities that women might experience in relation to a phallologocentric and commodified notion of feminine beauty in which nature and culture clash. Gray leaves her questions open-ended and they operate as a crack in an otherwise smooth foundation, leaving spaces through which alternate representations can seep into the public realm.
Of course, it seems absurd to assert that the 'beauty myth', as Naomi Wolf has argued, enslaves women and is a tyrannical and seductive trap in which women are imprisoned and in which they imprison themselves.[1] As the Beauty Liquid project seems to convey, it seems absurd to assert that women have so little power. Instead, there