I don't know if this is weirdest piece of artwork in human history; but I can legitimately claim that it's the weirdest I've ever encountered in my lifetime.
Here's the story.
It's morning of October 29, 1966. In a few days, I would be turning 10 years old.
One of the things I loved to do was draw and paint. So my ears perked up when the local TV news on every channel carried stories about a giant painting of a woman that had mysteriously appeared literally overnight above the southern entrance to the tunnel on Malibu Canyon Road.
Most of the news channels only showed the head and shoulders of the painting, which was 60 feet tall from the bottoms of her bare pink feet to the top of the brunette hair on her head. This was 1966, and nudity was very much a taboo on TV.
Most of the news stories presented the painting as an obscene act of vandalism, obviously created by some dirty-minded man or men. It was lewd. It was obscene. It wasn't art, it was vandalism!
And it needed to be covered.
Through the next few days, the news reported on attempts to sandblast or wash away the pink lady, efforts that failed because the artist(s)/vandal(s) had done an absolutely flawless job of cleaning the rock surface before applying the paint, and had used heavy-duty house paint.
So when efforts at removal failed, the people in charge of the removal effort announced they were going to paint over the pink lady with brown paint.
This proved to be too much for the person who created the pink lady to stand. The dirty-minded sex-crazed vandal came forward.
….And the shock in the news media was palpable when the perpetrator of this obscenity proved to be a woman, and a mother of small children to boot!
Lynne Seemayer was a 31-year-old paralegal with small children, who had plotted and planned the pink lady for months. Here are a couple of sites where you can learn more about her.
Pink Lady of Malibu Canyon: 50 years ago
For me, the fascinating thing was to observe the way the news coverage of the pink lady changed once it became known the artist was a woman. All the prior coverage had treated the painting as something referenced from a male point-of-view: it was a naked woman, after all; that's the sort of thing men can paint, and do paint. But women? A woman painting a nude woman?
Even at just turned 10-years-old, it was apparent to me that there was a difference in the way the news media treated the story when they knew a woman was the creator. They were perplexed; they didn't know what to say or how to deal with her as the perpetrator of this painting.
That was the first time I can remember having it made crystal clear and apparent that men and women were regarded in different ways, with different expectations for the ways they were expected to behave.
And I felt that this was intrinsically unfair, in a way that I didn't yet have the words to describe. Why shouldn't/couldn't a woman paint the pink lady of Malibu Canyon? Why did everyone treat this as something that was wrong in a way that made the woman artist seem like someone weird and unnatural?
That, for me, was the weirdest thing about the pink lady.
But as I got older, and learned more about the history of women as artists and in the art establishment, I understood: the narrative of women was being told by men, controlled by men, and represented what they thought, judged and felt. And that was, and still is, the weirdest part.
