Margot Cox in an old issue of Ambit:
Schiele's exacting anatomical structures:
Drawings on many loose sheets of hands and bodies and things:
With a gallant and exquisite return to the magical doll/fetish theme of yester-post, shrunken heads! I believe on QI they once mentioned them briefly, and said you knew when you had a fake head because the stitching was too neat, too perfect, and the real thing was hewn together by mad head hunting tribe people - mad in that they stole the skin of some poor murdered persons face and made it into a trinket. (Weirdly, though I'm rather squeamish and necrophobic, oddities like shrunken heads don't actually bother me that much. They're such an abstraction on death and the culture I live in I feel more curious than disturbed. More like a normal person....) ANYHOW, I digress as always. This has to do with the construction of magical items and dolls and humanoid ephemera. A poppet / voodoo doll looks all the more insidious if it is dirty and roughly sewn, crude and primitive instead of looking polished and factory produced - things tend not to look magical with 'made in china' printed on the reverse.Following this, I made a crude little ragdoll to look at ways of sewing and stuffing - hand sewing areas and stuffing them without reversing the piece first, reversing and stuffing, machine sewing and balling together fabric instead of cutting it to approximate size to make the shape required. (I balled the fabric of the head and tried to give it a vaguely forehead-and-chin kind of shape.) Let me find the picture...
I showed this to my tutor and she agreed it was too childish and cheery looking to be appropriately witch-y. Actually, it occurred to me after making it, it seems very much to resemble an actual dolly witch instead of a WITCH DOLL - like the TY beanie witch 'scary' who i have had sitting on my self since I was about ten:
Not a great start, then. But a start none the less!
I started to look at idols/dolls from antiquity - things that were once endowed with sympathetic godly magic when things we made still looked... irrevocably mysterious. I made salt dough models (above) looking at how to put together the pieces, the difference between the heavily moulded and minimally moulded bodies, the difference between poking eyes and no eyes, pressing basic features into the dough etc.
I thought a lot on the altering of perception based on context - the way in which we receive the object, but also, most importantly, on its PRODUCTION.
On Elisabeth Frink:
On Michel Nedjar:
Thoughts on illustrative materials to build context / narrative, texture, emotion, response... the use of fabric and filling to create potent primitive-like magic feel; the combined and cohesive use of material and method to create a separate entity / piece.
I thought about the use of these things - in the literal, real, not-metaphysical world. The wrapping of John Claude and Christo that, strangely, reminded me of a story I read about a Vietnamese guy called Le Van who encased his deceased wife's remains in plaster (or similar) and slept with her and kept her as though she were still alive but paralysed. Like Egyptian mummies (too dead to want to google, eugh) the binding, wrapping and encasing of things (like my shells from before) the presentation of the dead - Le Van's dolly wife. She's not bone in plaster, she's his dolly wife. It's a kind of funny but poignant, tragic comedy, of human transience and the need to keep things, section them off as eternal and forever. Because we feel so strongly, because we see those things how we see them, surely it must be so! How far will you believe your own illusions? Ah- 'til we reach the very summit...
I love the funny ways we see things. The animate becomes inanimate, vice versa. I love all of those special little things that are so special to people, that other people really couldn't give a fuck about. And I don't mean it in a patronising way, and I don't think I'm being pretentious. I mean it! Like when a little kid has a toy and it's more than just plastic to him - it's alive! It is not his play-thing but a friend. Magic :)
Michel Nedjar's holocaust dollies are made of waste and scrap, stained with dirt and lashed together with much seeming violence! I see his point (I think), the little human object. (YOU ARE NOT INSIDE YOUR BODY, YOU *ARE* YOUR BODY!!!!!) But they make me feel so sad and motherly, whereas people I've shown them to feel repulsed - but then I have a collection of plastic dolls and things that I couldn't bare to leave in situ in charity shops. They break my big schmaltzy heart. Come here, sad little plastic children, I will make you okay <3
What in the hell was I talking about?
Following on from Nedjar and little children's primitivism, I looked into using cloth more suited to the emergent theme.
Below: I used a dolly kind of fabric, some bandage type thing and a stocking and stuffed them with leaves, dirt and rocks to see what they were like. Bandages and dirt definitely produce the more melancholic feeling, something I can submit myself to at a reach to become more childlike and illusioned.
Below: my whole cloth dolly. I stitched it by hand and didn't reverse it before stuffing it with part-wadding-part-dirt-but-mostly-dirt. Given the simplicity of everything herewith that has gone into it, I find it satisfactory :) Little cloth boy, you are a keeper.
Below: some looser bandage bound with coarse string. I tried to tie it in a fashion that would leave the fabric open to slight manipulation to produce a face in profile, but tried not to make my placement too deliberate to spoil the overall effect.
Dolls embody the strange plasticity and lucidity of the idealisation and objectification of humans. Hans Bellmer, now, I think is a good reference to mention. To quote from the book I have that concerns Nedjar: 'There is indeed something deathlike about the mute, immobile, human-featured doll. Rilke contrasted it with the noble minded rocking horse 'which rocks little boys hearts and brightens up the playroom', regarding the doll as a bumpkin Danae whose limbs move woodenly in response to the golden shower of imagination. He considered dolls indifferent to human tenderness and confessed that he subconsciously hated them; he preferred the rudimentary kind, stuffed with sawdust, which could be treated like an 'object' to be played with, carted around anywhere and finally tossed away. What was Nedjar's relationship to this 'object'? It seems to have been identical to Rilke's, in any case quite unlike that of Bellmer whose famous DOLL - with a body and limbs which can be taken apart and reassembled at will - is a pure object of desire. The doll's soul - or 'flesh of the soul' as Nedjar later described it... is all the more fascinating for its elusiveness...'
And what of the dolls themselves?
[ http://www.enjoy-your-style.com/babydoll-dress.html
http://www.enjoy-your-style.com/kinderwhore.html
http://kinderwhoresluts.blogspot.com/2011/07/kinderwhore.html ]
Related to the 90s kinderwhore style of dress (childish babydoll dresses, ribbons, I'm in heaven) is the idea of reclaiming one's childhood from an abusive past. This is the complete antithesis to the Bellmer Doll with manipulatable body and limbs and seemingly perverse intent. It seems a strange irony (though not at all surprising) that girls would return to that lowly state whereby their youth was ruined to take control and remedy the pain. It's okay, because I can do that - and I can make it right...
I was thinking about trash again. And sticks and leaves and stuff. Thinking about primitivism and Nedjar, I made this doll:
the intended body of the leaf-stuffed head I showed above. But it looks too impromptu and thoughtless - and truly, not a lot of care went into it. I was just binding wadding and cloth very quickly thinking 'does this look enough like a body?' Very bad idea. So I took up my sketches from life drawing and picked out the ones that best displayed the front and back of a woman's body. My camera's about dead, but I managed to photograph two said pictures.
Front:
Back:
I started with a sheet of cardboard this time and cut it to a very approximate human shape (a little square on a little triangle) and tried to pad-out the flat shape to look like a lady. Unfortunately, it occurred to me that AGAIN this was sheer lack of forethought because padding an entirely flat surface to look like a full 3D woman is absurd. Next time, next time I'm starting with 3D model shapes like in GCSE maths or whatever. I'll start with a cube... Anyway, here's the end result:
Front
Back
Since then, I've thought about Lolita and it's use in advertising, the binding and framing of things, Courtney Love (never far from my mind. Derp.) autonomy and what that means and I've read some quantity on Existentialist philosophy. But I have done no work since Thursday. Goodbye blog, we're now up to speed. I'll be back soon, I promise.
X
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