Creative Process Journal: Les Jeux de la Poupee (The Doll's Games)

Les jeux de la poupee by Hans Bellmer 1949  

Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) was a German artist, who used self-crafted life sized dolls assembled from a range of materials in photographs which explored erotic themes. He hand-coloured the images and published ten of them in a book in 1934. Bellmer made a second doll in 1935 using the head and hands from the first doll and also incorporating a number of ball and socket joints which allowed the doll to be manipulated into a variety of contortions. The doll had interchangeable limbs and other parts, as well as an extensive wardrobe. He photographed this work in 1935 but it was not published until 1949, in part because his work was considered 'Degenerate' by the Nazis (Wood 316). Bellmer's is associated with the Surrealist movement, and after moving to Paris in 1938, he spent some time in an interment camp in the south of France alongside Max Ernst.

Creative Process Journal: Freud and The Uncanny

In 1919, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay called The Uncanny in which he described the intense feeling of strangeness that can occur when encountering something that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, causing doubt as to whether or not the object is, in fact, alive. The essay begins with a semantic analysis of the origins of the German word for uncanny, which is unheimlich and its opposite, heimlich which means homely. He ties the notion of uncanny to something that is familiar but strangely unsettling, such as dolls, doubles and waxwork figures. 

Wax-head doll. English c.1882

Freud also analyzed the idea of the double in his essay, drawing on the writings of Otto Rank who linked the double to “mirror-images, shadows, guardian spirits, the doctrine of the soul and the fear of death”. Doubles were used in ancient civilizations, where artists formed images of the dead as “assurance of immortality” and an “energetic denial of the power of death”.  Freud suggested that the double “having once been an assurance of immortality”, could also be an “uncanny harbinger of death.” (Freud 142). He also describes the fantasy of being mistakenly buried alive as "the most uncanny thing of all". 

Creative Process Journal: The Viktor & Rolf Dolls

Viktor & Rolf doll for 2008 retrospective

The dolls used in the Viktor and Rolf retrospective at the Barbican Gallery in 2008 were based on a nineteenth-century bebe type doll intended as a plaything and produced by the Maison Jurneau in Paris. A Belgian doll maker used real human hair, bisque porcelain faces and paper-mache bodies for the Viktor and Rolf dolls.

Bedtime Story Autumn/Winter 2005-6 Viktor & Rolf

There were two sizes of dolls used in the exhibition at the Barbican: 70 cm tall dolls dressed in miniature versions of the designer's collections and life-size dolls dressed in the actual garments. The shift in scale created an Alice in Wonderland illusion and it was somewhat surreal.

Cover of the exhibition catalogue

The cold perfection and the haunting gaze of the Viktor and Rolf dolls at the Barbicon – both large and small – depicted what Freud has defined as uncanny (and which will be the subject of an upcoming post). Caroline Evans referenced Freud’s essay in the exhibition catalogue and she also pointed out that “the double poses a challenge to the idea of individuality and the doll straddles an uncomfortable boundary between the living and the dead.” (Evans 19).

References:

Evans, Caroline and Frankel, Susannah. The House of Viktor and Rolf. London: Merrell. 2008.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. London: Penguin Books, 2005

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All text and images on this blog are the copyright of Ingrid Mida, unless otherwise noted. The copying of posts, images and/or text without proper attribution is violation of copyright and legal action will be pursued.

The Philosophical Link between Beauty and Death

Dance with the Angel of Death, Pen and Ink Drawing (8x10) by Ingrid Mida 2010

In preparations for my upcoming show at Loop Gallery, I've been doing research into the philosophical link between beauty and death. Contemporary French philosopher Julia Kristeva asked the question of "whether beauty and death are facets of the same experience or perennial opposites" in her book Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (translated by Leon S. Roudiez and published by Columbia University Press, New York, 1989).

Using Sigmund Freud's essay about the links between grief, transience and beauty as her starting point, Kristeva writes:

"Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destruction and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death?" 

Kristeva concludes that "beauty represents an artificial, imaginary conquering of death that allows life to continue." 

For me, beauty and death are on the same continuum. When I create something beautiful, I feel as if I've cheated death. But in the world of contemporary art, beauty is not enough. For my upcoming show, I've layered in meaning with references to death in the form of roses (a metaphor for the bloom and decay of human life), clocks (a metaphor for the finite quality of life), and veils (a marker of life's significant passages including weddings and funerals).