Creative Process Journal: Links

When I discovered this beautiful ultramarine blue bodice in an unmarked bin in the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection on Friday afternoon, I wanted to clap my hands with glee. The brilliance of the colour captivated me. Although it shows signs of stress and the inevitable decay, the colour has not faded at all. In fact, it looks almost as brilliant as this JCrew Schoolboy blazer that I purchased a few weeks ago for my back to school wardrobe. How uncanny is that?

Judith Clark said that: "Curating, though its ruthless selection inevitably creates new patterns of chronology.... It also encourages us to read time backwards, to read it from where we are standing, always in the present, acknowledging that this is our perspective" (162). Could this the connection I'm looking for - the part that makes the project relevant, fresh and alive?

It also brings to mind Walter Benjamin's concept of "Tigersprung", fashion's leap into the past to be reborn anew. In his work on Passangenarbeit otherwise known as The Arcades Project, Benjamin wrote "Fashion has the scent of the modern whenever it stirs in the thicket of what has been. It is the tiger's leap into the past" (qtd. in Lehmann 241).

This happenstance discovery feels like a metaphysical leap that expresses the eternal within the transient. Benjamin would describe that feeling as "Chock" - the "sudden realization of materialization of the metaphysical element in the world" (qtd. in Lehmann 227).

References:

de la Haye, Amy and Judith Clark. "One Object: Multiple Interpretations". Fashion Theory 12.2 (2008):  137-170. Print.

Lehmann, Ulrich. "Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity". MIT Press: Cambridge, 2000. Print.

Creative Process Journal: Curation and Obsessions

From a curatorial perspective, finding a narrative from among the hundreds of dresses in the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection that come from different donors and span over a century of fashion history is a challenge. 

Garments represent important artifacts of material culture, giving evidence of the fashions and social history of a period. Museologist Susan Pearce describes the way objects can reflect our identity: "Objects hang before the eyes of the imagination, continuously representing ourselves to ourselves and telling the stories of our lives in ways which would be impossible otherwise" (qtd. in de la Haye 12). 

Clothing is material memory, carrying the marks and imprint of its wearer. Quentin Bell described clothing as being so much part of one’s identity that “it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul” (qtd. in Dant 85). The clothing that is kept beyond its fashionable life often has “symbolic qualities” and holds “personal memories” for the owner (de la Haye 14). In a poetic essay by Peter Stallybrass entitled “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things”, the author describes how the clothes of his late colleague Allon White triggered sensory memories. “He was there in the wrinkles of the elbows, wrinkles that in the technical jargon of sewing are called ‘memory’; he was there in the stains at the very bottom of the jacket; he was there in the smell of the armpits” (36). 

            If I draw on my obsessions as suggested by curator Maria Luisa Frisa, those centre on the traces of the former owners of these garment within the archive itself. Very few pieces have any associated photos or letters, making those that do have fragments of their history as evidence take on even greater importance, especially as some of them are extremely fragile. In my work, I've discovered: the wedding dress worn by Mary Suddon for her wedding in 1955 to Alan Suddon, an important collector of historical costume in Toronto, along with a box of bodices and gowns from the late nineteenth century donated to the collection by Alan Suddon; a set of three gowns designed in Paris and worn to the coronation of King George V; and, a Balmain gown labeled “Marie Antoinette” c.1957 donated by socialite Somer Rosenberg. 

There are also many historic pieces from the turn of the century that lack provenance but which bare traces of their former owners, in the faint stains of sweat under the arms, in the worn patches on the elbows, and in the shreds of silk that threaten to disintegrate into dust.  Yet there is a haunting beauty emanating from these pieces, an uncanny reminder of the former owners. 

Curator Judith Clark's reference to the "double loss of life" in terms of "the garment without its body, and the garment out of sight, embedded within an archive" (from The Concise Dictionary of Dress which has no page numbers) haunts me. In fashion exhibitions, the viewer almost never sees the archive. Garments are typically presented in a pristine state and evidence of the wearer, in terms of stains, rips or tears, would make a garment ineligible for display. 

It is this gap that excites me. The first time I went behind the scenes in a museum, at the musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris in Paris,  my heart literally pounded in my chest as treasures in storage were revealed to me. Only a small fraction of a museum's collection can be made visible to the public. And now when I examine an unmarked bin in the archives or can share a garment to a student related to their research as part of my job as Collection Co-ordinator, I get that same heady frisson of excitement. This is what I want to share in an exhibition.... 

Dant, Tim. Material Culture in the Social World. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999. Print.

De La Haye, Amy. A Family of Fashion: The Messels: Six Generations of Dress. Eds. Lou Taylor and Eleanor Thompson. London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2005. Print.

Stallybrass, Peter. "Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things." The Yale Review 81.2 (1993): 35-50. Print.

Creative Process Journal: Weekly Reflection

This past week, I've been documenting some of my reading on curatorial process, teasing out the fragments of how curators come up with exhibition ideas. It might not seem like creative work, but it is part of my practice-led research project called Memories of a Dress. Using the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection, I am exploring the idea that a garment has a object biography and a memory of its former owner.  

Practice-led research focuses on the "the nature of practice and leads to new knowledge that has operational significance for that practice." From what I can tell, there seems to be a gap in knowledge about the process of how fashion curation takes place. The articles in scholarly journals only offer hints at how curators come up with their ideas and unless I've missed something altogether, this process seems to be largely private. In undertaking this work here, I am making my process transparent  and thereby adding to the advancement of knowledge about curatorial practice. 

If I could, I would mount Memories of a Dress in a space that is raw, with exposed brick and pipes.  This wounded setting would be fitting to convey the idea of decay and that a garment has an end-life, just as its owner does/did. Unfortunately, the School of Fashion does not have a dedicated exhibition gallery and so the end result will be largely conceptual, with the possibility of selected pieces and images being presented offsite. 

In handling the rare and fragile historic pieces within the collection, I am haunted by the traces of the owners - the faint sweat stains under the arms, the worn patches at the elbows, the shreds of weighted silk that have literally turned to dust. There is such poignancy in these pieces. They are still beautiful, but not to a pristine, museum-like standard. 

As I deal with past and present donors as part of my job as Collection Coordinator, I am also sensitive to the emotional nature of such transactions. There is great delicacy required when a donor offers pieces from his or her wardrobe. Giving up a garment that holds memories of a special time, event, or person requires a willingness to let go of that tangible connection. And because of that, the act of accepting or rejecting that item for a collection requires great tact and diplomacy. 

My own experiences with death, tragedy and grief gives me a heightened sensitivity to the symbolic nature of the embodiment of memory in clothing. In the back of my closet, I keep my father's Fedora, four of my mother's dresses, my brother Peter's tie. I have nothing from my husband's father, my sister-in-law Carrie, or my dear friends Brian, Joe, or Diana, but I wish I did. Although I have transcended my grief, I cannot part with these objects and I am only too keenly aware of the delicate dance I play with potential donors. I am acutely sensitive, with a radar to grief, since I have taken that journey far too many times relative to my age. 

Dealing with donor requests taxes curators who are already stretched by tight budgets. I happened to across a written reference to the emotional nature of this work in an article by N.J. Stevenson called "The Fashion Retrospective" from Fashion Theory. In analyzing curator Amy de la Haye's work she wrote:

Reflecting a moment in time has become one of the central precepts of de la Haye's work. She found that interviews with members of the public offering donations to the museum could mean dealing with profound emotion and grief that was precipitated by the associations that garments had for them (230). 

In sharing the nature of my curatorial obsessions, this project makes me feel vulnerable and exposed. And yet, I know that in mining the nature of my obsession and documenting my process for this practice-led research, the end result will be richer and deeper.

For Further Reading on the nature of Practice-led vs. Practice-based Research:
http://www.creativityandcognition.com/research/practice-based-research/differences-between-practice-based-and-practice-led-research/ 

References:
Stevenson, N.J., "The Fashion Retrospective". Fashion Theory 12.2 (2008) 219-236. 

Creative Process Journal: Curation and Judith Clark continued

Judith Clark's curatorial work is so rich and so vibrant that I want to read anything I can find about her process. Although the article One Object: Multiple Interpretations (co-written with Amy de la Haye) is about a mass produced women's coat/uniform worn by the British Women's Land Army during WWII, there are fragments of her general curatorial philosophy when she writes:  It is fitting singular objects into historical continuums and possible future stories that endlessly capture my imagination. Quite simply what stands next to what and where does it stand within an infinitely renewable curatorial grammer? (159).

Clark also points out that late Diana Vreeland "very astutely identified" that the exhibition viewer had to identify with the object in some way and make a connection between "finding something desirable and finding something interesting" (159). She goes on to ask: "is curating about the clarity of connections, and if so, how are these made visual or literal? How can objects be presented as a way into different stories?" (160).

I did not see this exhibition about WLA coats from WWII and it might sound rather droll, but Judith Clark finds patterns and connections that leap off the page.  Drawing on Freud's work The Interpretation of Dreams, Clark presents the idea of a uniform as a denial of difference and symbolic of a disguise. She also makes connections to Alexander McQueen's dress-coat from Autumn Winter 2001/2002 and stylistic references to Coco Chanel's design for a coat from 1917. There is a dialogue between the past and present, invoking a non-linear exploration of time. She says "Curating, though its ruthless selection inevitably creates new patterns of chronology.... It also encourages us to read time backwards, to read it from where we are standing, always in the present, acknowledging that this is our perspective" (162).

Clark's words give me much to think about. Whenever I enter the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection, I step back in time, feeling the presence of the women who wore the garments that are entrusted into my care. How do I give them a voice, when in so many cases their stories have not been captured, leaving only the marks, stains and signs of wear that suggest a living body? What is the connection that links them as objects of embodied memory? 

References:

de la Haye, Amy and Judith Clark. "One Object: Multiple Interpretations". Fashion Theory 12.2 (2008):  137-170. Print.

Creative Process Journal: Curation and Judith Clark

Pretentious from The Concise Dictionary of Dress
Photo by Julian Abrams 2010

Judith Clark is a curator of fashion exhibitions that are often unconventional and thought provoking, including The Concise Dictionary of Dress in 2010. In this exhibition, fashionable objects or works of art relating to the clothed body were juxtaposed alongside singular words addressing the psychology of the fashioned body, such as "armoured, conformist, fashionable, plain, pretentious, provocative, tight". The setting of this exhibition was within the confines of the storage facility of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which added a degree of theatrically and exclusivity. This was a show that required advance booking. If your name was not on the security list, you were left standing at the locked gate. All belongings had to be left behind before entry and small groups of visitors were accompanied through the exhibition by a guide. Talking was not permitted and signage was virtually non-existent. In absence of a history the object or explanation of what was being presented, the dialogue was internal, challenging the viewer to create connections and links between the words and the objects. This was a show that haunts me still.

Conformed from The Concise Dictionary of Dress
Photo by Julian Abrams 2010

In the exhibition catalogue, there is a section towards the end in which questions were posed to Judith by an anonymous panel. The fifteen questions include:

Does one need a body to bring a garment to life and why?

There seem to be two categories of embodiment implied by the commission. The ghost-like presence of clothing once inhabited and the absent body of the archivist. What sort of relationship between curator and curated do these shadows and voids suggest?

What is most interesting: finding, collection, drawing or making the exhibition?

What does the desirability of historic/vintage dress say about a particular period in time?

Her answers reveal a fierce intellect, one that is capable of bringing coherence to a divergent array of items of dress. She suggests that the absence of the living body is at the heart of curating dress, and she sees that the priority for her is not the re-enactment of history but to use dress to "talk about other things". In specific reference to The Concise Dictionary of Dress she says: "In this particular series of installations, there is a double loss of life, if you like: that of the garment without its body, and the garment out of sight, embedded within an archive. The archive is a very important ingredient here, as visitors do not expect garments to have been brought to life, but instead stored, classified and protected, and it is here that I am free to wonder: what are we storing when we are storing dress?"

For me, in storing a dress, the garment changes context when it is separated from its owner and placed in an archive for study purposes. It becomes an object with a number and is divorced from its former owner, except within the records. Yet the traces of the wearer might live on in the folds, embedded in the marks and stains of the living body. There is a story, whether it is known or not, whether it is recorded or not. When a garment is accepted into a collection, it signifies the end stage of the garment's biography because it will never again adorn a living body.

References:
Clark, Judith and Adam Phillips. The Concise Dictionary of Dress. London: Violette Limited, 2010. Print.

Mida, Ingrid. "Exhibition Review: The Concise Dictionary of Dress." June 7, 2010. Available online at http://fashionismymuse.blogspot.ca/2010/06/exhibition-review-concise-dictionary-of.html
Accessed September 9, 2012.

Mida, Ingrid. "Book Review: The Concise Dictionary of Dress." June 9, 2010. Available online at
http://fashionismymuse.blogspot.ca/2010/06/book-review-concise-dictionary-of-dress.html
Accessed September 9, 2012.

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".

My Mother/Myself #3, by Ingrid Mida 2010

My Mother/Myself #1 by Ingrid Mida 2010

These dresses will be fit for my double and then laid inside the glass coffin with archival tissue, like in a museum.  The glass "coffin" is a metaphor for the museum and for my ultimate death. For we shall all die, and my greatest fear is that I will die like my mother, as a prisoner of my body.

Progress on the dresses has been slow. My double is petite and I was careless with the first version of her dress, shown in the top photo above. The fabric is silky and frays easily and I made some errors in handling it. It looks okay but it is not perfect and I am making it over. I will construct a muslin toile for the next attempt because I have very little fabric to play with. My drive for perfection permeates all that I do and my double deserves no less.

Creative Process Journal: The Dress in The Museum

Untitled by Valerie Belin, 1997

This dress, stuffed with archival tissue, is from a series of works by French photographer Valerie Belin that were exhibited at the Musee des Beaux-Arts in an exhibition called "State of Things, States of Places" in 1997. The work is described in the exhibition catalogue as follows: "These dresses are like bodily remains...still moulded in places to the shape of their former presence, giving the appearance of the body itself." (Muller 78)

Having been behind the scenes in many museums, and having surreptitiously taken a few photos of beautiful things inside museum storage facilities, I am drawn to this photo.... It evokes so many things for me including the duality of beauty and decay, life and death, as well as my affinity for museums and  the ephemeral nature of fashion.

If I could, I would create a series of photos taken behind the scenes in a museum like the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musee de la Mode in Paris... But baring that, I will have to find some other way of depicting this idea. It seems to bring me back full circle to the original source of inspiration for this creative project, which was a quote from Elizabeth Wilson's book Adorned in Dreams when she wrote:
"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).

References:

Muller, Florence. art and fashion. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000
Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams. London: Virago Press, 1985.

Creative Process Journal: Museum in a Box

Museum in a Box (My Mother/Myself Series) by Ingrid Mida 2012

Through my process work for this creative project, I took a journey of surreal wonder. I was inspired by the Viktor and Rolf exhibition and followed that spark into research about Freud's Uncanny, fashion dolls, and the museum as a metaphor.  Although I expected to create something related to fashion dolls, this process work has revealed a different path.

Museum in a Box 2 (My Mother/Myself Series) by Ingrid Mida 2012

These small glass boxes are like the glass vitrines of a museum. By curating a number of objects in my studio, I have created assemblages of memory. Each box contains objects that were either collected by my mother (tea spoons, watch parts, rose buds) or made by my mother (lace doilies). The doll hands are my own additions to reflect the graceful movement that is no more, since she can no longer make or hold such delicate things.

Museum in a Box 3 (My Mother/Myself Series) by Ingrid Mida 2012

Watching my mother suffer in the prison of her body with late stage Parkinson's disease is one of the most painful stories of my life. Much of what I do is haunted by that experience and I am acutely aware of the need to make the most of each day.

Museum in a Box 4 (My Mother/Myself Series) by Ingrid Mida 2012

Within these boxes, I have become a curator of my own museum. It is a museum of memory and love.

Museum in a Box 5 (My Mother/Myself Series) by Ingrid Mida 2012

Creative Process Journal: The Metaphor of the Museum

Joseph Beuys Felt Suit at the MOMA
Photo by Ingrid Mida

In contemporary art, context plays a role in defining what is considered art. One of the most well known examples of how this works are Marcel Duchamp's readymades, including the urinal, bottle-rack, bicycle wheel and snow shovels, which were presented as artworks. These mass-produced objects, displayed in the context of a gallery, challenged the notion of "aura" and prestige associated with objects of art. Since Duchamp there have been an array of artists who have used context to define their work such as Joseph Beuys did with the Felt Suit.  Others, like artists Sophie Calle,  Fred Wilson and Cornelia Parker,  have explored the metaphor of the museum as inspiration for their work.

The Birthday Ceremony by Sophie Calle 1991 

Sophie Calle played with the notion of the museum vitrine in her work The Birthday Ceremony 1991. In fifteen medical-style vitrines, Calle assembled an inventory of items received as birthday presents between 1980 and 1993. Each year on her birthday she had a birthday party, archiving her presents and exhibiting them in this display.

In Fred Wilson's The Museum: Mixed Metaphors (1993), the artist placed a man's suit amongst a group of traditional African robes and sculptures inside the Seattle Art Museum. This installation included a cheeky parody of the museum labelling system which read "Certain elements of dress were used to designate one's rank in Afica's status conscious capitals. A grey suit with conservatively patterned tie denotes a businessman or member of government. Costumes such as this are designed and tailored in Africa and worn throughout the continent." (Putnam 135)

In 1995, Cornelia Parker and Tilda Swinton presented a performance piece called The Mayse at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In this work, Tilda Swinton lay asleep in a glass display case during gallery hours. In the surrounding gallery space, Parker presented a collection of borrowed items from various museums that were related to people from history, such as the brain of Charles Babbage (1760-1871).

I am fascinated by the concept of the museum as a metaphor and as a place of artistic intervention. If I could, I would mount my own intervention into the museums in Toronto. Their staid, conservative programming needs some shaking up in my view and I believe they would benefit from seeing outside the box so to speak. But that is unlikely to happen in time for the unfolding of this particular project. I suppose a girl can dream....


References:
Putnam, James. Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009.
Tate Gallery Web link  http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=26293

Creative Process Journal: Doll Houses and Wunderkammer

The Doll's House of Peronella Oortman c. 1686-1710
Inspiration for Viktor and Rolf's doll house

Another interesting aspect of the Viktor and Rolf 2008 retrospective at the Barbican Gallery was a 6-metre high doll's house which could be viewed from three different levels of the gallery. The giant Viktor and Rolf doll house references the seventeenth century cabinet houses or doll's houses from the collection of  the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where Viktor and Rolf live and work. Designed by Siebe Tettero, the Viktor and Rolf dollhouse, was three storeys, with each room containing one or more dolls dressed in a Viktor and Rolf creation.

The concept of Viktor and Rolf's doll house reminds me of a cabinet of curiosities, or what was once known as the Wunderkammer.

Wunderkammer of Ferrante Imperato, Naples 1599

As a predecessor to the contemporary museum, the Wunderkammer differed widely from the clinical, purist aesthetic common in museums today. Celebrating curiosity and wonder, the Wunderkammer was popular during the 16th to 18th centuries.  Based on the idea that "an entire cosmos could be controlled within the confines of a room", an individual would present their collection of rare and unusual objects therein. The intent was to invoke a sense of wonder and stimulate creative thought. Objects were arranged to highlight aesthetic pleasure and sometimes optical illusions were created through mirrors and special lenses as a way of further distorting reality. The notion of the bizarre, the rare and the precious was celebrated with a sense of capricious lack of rational classification.

The Cabinet of Curiosities played with the same concept but on a smaller scale, generally confined to a cabinet which revealed the collection as drawers and panels were opened. According to Walter Benjamin, the notion of collecting is a form of memory in that "Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories." (from Das Passagen-Werk, Volume 1 quoted in Putnam 12).

Museum by Joseph Cornell c1944-48

Many artists have also been inspired by the idea of Wunderkammer, using assemblage and bricolage to create collections of objects that provoke or inspire through their dialectical juxtaposition. In 1944-48, Joseph Cornell created an assemblage of objects called Museum which was presented in a red velvet lined box which emphasized the delicate contents of the glass specimen bottles contained therein.  More recently, artists like Andy Warhol (Raid the Icebox 1970), Jeffrey Vallance (The Travelling Nixon Museum 1991) Damien Hirst (Dead Ends Died Out, Explored, 1993), Fred Wilson (The Museum Mixed Metaphors, 1993), Sophie Calle (The Wedding Dress, 1999), and others have explored the concept of the museum as a medium of artistic expression.

Raid the Icebox by Andy Warhol, Museum of Art, Rode Island School of Design, 1970

I want to play with the concept of the curiosity cabinet or the more contemporary version of a museum in a box fascinating and use this form in some way as part of my creative project. How that will come together at this point, I'm not sure, but the concept  of containing memory in a box fills me with wonder.

References:

Evans, Caroline. The House of Viktor & Rolf. Ed. Susannah Frankel, et al. New York: Merrell, 2008.

Putnam, James.  Art and Artifact, The Museum as Medium. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009.

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.

Various authors have suggested two sources of inspiration for Bellmer's work. In 1931, Bellmer attended Max Reinhardt's production of The Tales of Hoffman in which there is a mechanical girl/doll named Olympia who seduces a living man (Freud also mentioned this literary work in his essay The Uncanny). As well, Bellmer's mother apparently sent him a box of childhood toys which included broken dolls (Sulick 14). Whatever the inspiration, Bellmer was not the only artist using dolls or mannequins at the time. Man Ray, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Masson and others all incorporated dolls into their artistic practice around this time.

I find Bellmer's photographs disturbing, but also strangely fascinating. The bizarre range of contortions and dismembered limbs are haunting, but as abstract forms, the images are striking in their virtuosity of composition.

References:

Sulick, Amber Rae. Hans Bellmer's "Les Jeux De La Poupee". Ed. Hans Bellmer and Joint Graduate Program in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management, 2008.

Wood, Ghislaine. Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design. London: V&A Publications, 2007.

P.S. The Canadian Opera Company is performing The Tales of Hoffman in their spring production lineup (April 10 - May 14, 2012). I plan on attending. For more information, visit the COC website here.

Creative Process Journal: Barbie

Barbie

In 1959, when the Barbie doll was first introduced onto the market by Ruth Handler, more than 350,000 units were sold and since then an estimated that over 1 billion dolls have been sold. She has survived a range of assaults, including the firing of Ruth Handler from the company in 1971 and backlash from feminists and women's rights advocates. Robin Swicord, an author and screenwriter, said "In countries where they don’t even sell makeup or have anything like our dating rituals, they play with Barbie. Barbie embodies not a cultural view of femininity, but the essence of woman” (qtd. in Lord 80). 


Barbie was a respectable version of the Lilli doll in Germany. Lilli was "a German doxie - an ice-blond, pixie-nosed specimen of an Aryan ideal" that was popular among German men who often placed her on the dashboards of their car or gave the doll as a gift to their girlfriends (Lord 8). Handler recast Lilli as a wholesome all-American girl and marketed the doll to young girls. The rest is the stuff of marketing legend.


Barbie has been characterized as "a space-age fertility symbol: a narrow-hipped mother goddess for the epoch of casarean sections" (Lord 75) and a scaling up of her hour glass proportions suggest that she would be unnaturally slender. According to Professor Janet Treasure, an expert on body size and image at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, "Barbie's body shape and proportions are among the many things that play up to this 'thin ideal' which is ubiquitous these days. The promotion of dolls with such a body shape, and other things like size zero, have wider public health implications, like an increased risk of eating disorders." (Qtd. in BBC News On-line Magazine 2009)

Barbie by Jocelyn Grivauld

Nevertheless, the "mythic resonance of her form" and her longevity has made Barbie into an icon of popular culture (Lord 6). She has served as inspiration for a wide variety of artists including painters like Andy Warhol and Grace Hartigan, mixed media artists like Maggie Robbins (who hammers hundreds of nails into Barbies) and photographers like Barry Sturgill, Susan Evans Grove, Felicia Rosshandler, Dean Brown,  David Levinthal and Jocelyn Grivauld (who has "appropriated" the style of Dean Brown in depicting Barbie in iconic art references).


There is something about Barbie that I can relate to. Perhaps her embodiment of "perfection" is at the root of it, because those who know me well, know that I am haunted by the unattainable standard of  perfection. I can also relate to her German roots as well as the hostility that her petite frame engenders. In seeking out a doll double for my creative project, I would have to say that Barbie might be the one, although I'd definitely need to dress her in a more geeky, academic type of look.


References:
Lord, M. G. Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. 1st ed. New York: Avon Books, 1994.

Skariachan, Dhanya. Mattel profit tops estimates, sales miss. Reuters in Globe and Mail. On-line Published Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2012, Accessed February 29, 2012 Link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/mattel-profit-tops-estimates-sales-miss/article2320652/ 

Van der Broek, Anna. Barbie Inspired Art. Forbes Magazine Published March 5, 2009. Accessed February 29, 2012. 

Link: http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/05/barbie-boll-art-business_art.html

Winterman, Denise. What would a real life Barbie look like? BBC News Magazine. Tuesday, March 9, 2009. On-line. Accessed February 29, 2012. Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7920962.stm

Creative Process Journal: The Doll in my Studio

Her Face, Photo by Ingrid Mida 2012

I have a doll in my studio -- a Santos Cage Doll that I purchased a number of years ago in a vintage furniture shop. I didn't even know what kind of doll she was when I acquired her, and only learned later that these types of dolls were used as a form of altar for homes in Spain and Mexico. She has sat unadorned, until now. All this research into dolls has led me to want to do something with her, so I've begun to make her a skirt out of mesh. In the photo you can see the basque for the skirt around her hips. This isn't intended to be the final product of my research, but just one path in my creative exploration.

Santos Cage Doll in Studio, Photo by Ingrid Mida 2012