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: 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: 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.

19th Century Fashion Doll by Simonne Paris c.1877-78

Although fashion dolls were largely supplanted by journals as a tool of disseminating fashion information, they have not disappeared. In 1945, a travelling exhibition of Parisian fashion dolls was conceived and presented called Theatre de la Mode in an effort to restore the haute couture industry after WWII. With outfits designed by Dior, Lucien Lelong, Piguet, Carven, Nina Ricci, Jean Patou, Schiaparelli, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture showcased the best of French fashion - in miniature. Milliners, shoemakers, glovemakers, and jewelers all contributed to the project to help fulfill the designer's vision.

Theatre de la Mode doll by Lucien Lelong photographed by David Seidner c.1990 

With blank faces, wire bodies and real hair, these small scale mannequins (27.5 inches in height) were clothed in miniature versions of the designer's clothing and accessories. Everything was replicated with precision: pockets opened, buttons could be unbuttoned and handbags unclasped. The effect was surreal and the audience, who had "been starved for beauty, for glamour, for amusement after four years of occupation" streamed in (Braun-Munk et al 46). An estimated 100,000 visitors saw the exhibition in Paris before it travelled to cities like London, Barcelona and New York. The dolls were packed away in a basement in San Francisco for several years before being sent to the Maryhill Museum of Fine Art in Washington. They have been redisplayed on occasion including an exhibition at the Musee des Arts Decoratif in Paris in 1990 and at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1991.

Theatre de la Mode doll heads, Photograph by David Seidner c.1990

The photographs by David Seidner for the book Théâtre De La Mode seem to embody the essence of Freud's uncanny. Juxtaposed in contemporary contexts, with blurred backgrounds evoking decay, these photos of the dolls present them as objects posited on the boundary between animate and inanimate, life and death. This is fuel for the creative process....

References:

Fox, Carl. Doll. Ed. Herman Landshoff. New York: Abrams, 1972.

Mac Neil, Sylvia. The Paris Collection. Grantsville, Md.: Hobby House Press, 1992.

Théâtre De La Mode. Ed. Eugene Clarence Braun-Munk, Edmonde Charles-Roux, and Susan Train. New York: Rizzoli in cooperation with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991.

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". 

Twin dolls c. 1840

In the 2008 Viktor and Rolf retrospective at the Barican Gallery, the use of dolls as mannequins was a curatorial choice designed to invoke a sense of the uncanny. The curator Caroline Evans mentions this in her essay from the exhibition catalogue and asks "If the dolls in the Barbican came to life, what might they not do? With career ambitions to match those of their makes, they may even now be planning their future in the powerhouse of Viktor and Rolf" (Evans 20). 


Image credits: H. Landshoff from The Doll (1972)


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

Fox, Carl. The Doll. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc, 1972.

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.