VIKTOR & ROLF Dolls at the Royal Ontario Museum

      Dolls are conceptual art objects of strange beauty and desire.
                                                                   (Exhibition Label Viktor&Rolf Dolls at the ROM)

Viktor & Rolf Dolls at the ROM, Photo I by Ingrid Mida 2013

Ever since I first laid eyes on the Viktor & Rolf dolls in 2008 at the Barbican Gallery in London, their fashionable presence has haunted me. I've studied the exhibition catalogue repeatedly, read and reread Freud's essay on the uncanny, undertaken research on fashion dolls and used them as inspiration for my own creative journeys into the essence of the uncanny as it relates to fashion. For these reasons, I've been counting the days to their arrival in Toronto as part of the Luminato Festival.

Viktor & Rolf Dolls at the ROM, Photo II by Ingrid Mida 2013

On Sunday, June 9, I visited the ROM, expecting line ups out the door.... I was utterly surprised to find the gallery almost devoid of visitors, and the few that wandered in seemed not to know what they were looking at. I overheard several people asking the gallery attendant for information on what was on display.... Quel horreur!

Creative Process Journal: My Double

My Double (Work in Progress) by Ingrid Mida 2012

This is the doll that I have decided is my double. I found her in Paris and she is normally dressed in a burgundy knee-length sheath dress with a matching coat and pill box hat. She is smaller than a Barbie, not as tall, not as busty nor as curvy. Her hips are narrow and she is petite, as I am. Her glasses are a match for my own.

My research -- into the uncanny, fashion dolls, wunderkammer, and the museum as a metaphor -- will be translated into designing two outfits for my double that will be placed inside a glass "coffin". The outfits will be constructed from scraps of material from my mother's dresses that I photographed in the series "My Mother/Myself".

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: Fashion Dolls

Jointed wooden doll, 17th-18th century

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fashion dolls were used by dressmakers as a way of illustrating the latest styles to their potential clients. Dolls dressed in the latest Parisian styles were on display in fashionable shops and also were sent regularly to London and to the courts of Europe. The dolls were considered precious and sometimes even had diplomatic immunity during times of war. Although the most fashionable dolls originated from Paris, dolls were also made up in England and sent to the American colonies, where England was the dominant cultural influence.

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 Uncanny

Viktor and Rolf L'Hiver de L'Amour 1994

This post marks the beginning of a new creative project - that I've tentatively titled The Uncanny. The spark of inspiration for this project comes from a passage I read in the book Adorned in Dreams where fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson considers the unsettling feelings created by the haunting spectre of costumed mannequins within a museum setting:

The living observer moves with a sense of mounting panic, through a world of the dead…We experience a sense of the uncanny when we gaze at garments that had an intimate relationship with human beings long since gone to their graves. For clothes are so much part of our living, moving selves that, frozen on display in the mausoleums of culture, they hint at something only half understood, sinister, threatening, the atrophy of the body, and the evanescent of life. (Wilson 1).

The element of the uncanny reminded me of the Viktor and Rolf retrospective exhibition at the at the Barbican Gallery in London in 2008 in which porcelain dolls of various sizes were used to present the designer duo’s fifteen years of work. The installation played with scale and was somewhat like a trip to Alice in Wonderland, which was exactly the intent of the exhibition designers (Evans 6).

Viktor and Rolf had used dolls in their collections before. Dolls were part of an early collection called “Launch” presented at the Torch Gallery in Amsterdam in October 1996 in which they presented their hopes and dreams for the future in the form of a miniature design studio, runway show, photographic shoot and boutique. Dolls reappeared in their subsequent collections as well and became the locus of their retrospective at the Barbican.

Over the weeks to come, I will explore the idea of the uncanny, dipping into Freud's essay of that name and as well as researching related topics like mannequins, dolls and the museum. The final outcome will be a visual response to this material. I hope you'll join me on my creative journey!

References:

Evans, Caroline and Frankel, Susannah. The House of Viktor and Rolf. London: Merrell, 2008.

Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: I.B. Tauris, 1985, reprinted 2011.

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