Oh You Beautiful Doll
Douglas F. Maxwell
For children, dolls are an obvious and natural way to play creatively. Children relate doll activity to imaginary or actual human behavior, which allows a child to express a broad range of emotions and to begin mastering them–first in play, then in real life. The notion of adults playing with dolls is something different. "Oh You Beautiful Doll" addresses ways in which contemporary artists use symbolic, sometimes fetish aspects, of dolls to play on our fears, anxieties, arousals and shame in a way that makes palatable aspects of the human predicament.
Donna Bassin, in addition to being an artist, is a noted psychoanalyst. In her work, Listening to Laurie, Bassin’ positions her ‘Laurie doll’ lying on the couch and photographs the scene with a pinhole camera. The image is then exposed for approximately 45 minutes, the length of a psychoanalytic session. Bassin both acknowledges the legacy of Simmons and involves herself conceptually in her own professional dual role of listening to and creating from "Laurie’s" work.
Karin Yasinsky presents us with the potential Oedipal, incestuous triangle in her video, Who’s Your True Love? In the myth, it is Oedipus who pokes out his eyes as punishment for killing his father and marrying his mother. In the video, the young female figure is without eyes from the very beginning, perhaps blinded by the emotional aura from the charged relationship that surrounds her. She brings an implied relationship to the brink of real life scenarios, leaving us barely enough distance to sublimate our urge to identify with her provocative tableaux.
Elena Sisto explores aspects of familial relationships in her paintings. For years she has made work about the emotional, physical and psychological growth of her daughter, Clara. In her recent work, Sisto arranges the dolls that Clara used to play with but has outgrown to insinuate family dynamics and male/female power struggles. In Betty and Dudley Get Married on the Shadow of a Shadow, Sisto conjures a relationship between Dudley Dooright and Betty Boop and imagines the kind of offspring they would produce. Her scenario suspends us between childhood and adulthood, raising questions that are the stuff of adult conversation: how do couples who seem mismatched get together, and why on earth do certain couples have kids?
Stephen Roach’s muses are his wife and daughter. Included in his oeuvre are photographs of dolls that have seen better days. The dolls actually belonged to his grown daughters who have long since abandoned them. He has recovered them from the elements and photographed them at close range, causing a strange pathos–they appear to know that they have suffered neglect, and they transmit to the notion of aging humans who try hard to remain youthful-looking but who have been unable to overcome the ravages of time.
Sharon Switzer’s video Breath presents an image of the infant doll, which initially is the picture of innocence. How strange it is, though, that the doll is actually breathing. This work conjures ominous and sad references somewhere between science fiction and Rosemary’s Baby, and suggests unsettling experiences beyond fantasy, such as harsh realities extreme suffering from infertility or loss.
Julie Farstadt ’s paintings are of infant dolls free falling–helpless and ungrounded–in abstract space. In Kissy Kissy the big dolls act like real kids and play with little dolls in a topsy-turvy world. It is not such a rare occasion for a child therapist to use doll play to help a child to bring out the horrors of a trauma to which she has been exposed. For example, a little girl sits in a chair in a therapy room and begins to play with a male and female doll. Suddenly the child becomes agitated and she forces the male doll onto the female. But in Farstadt’s paintings, her keen sense of color and composition creates ambiguity and tension beyond the traumatic to leave the narrative open-ended.
Corinne May Botz’s obsession goes beyond dolls. Her discovery of small-scale replicas of crime scenes originally constructed in detail by the female criminologist Francis Glessner Lee (1878- 1962), which were used at the time to teach police how to observe the details of crime scenes, culminated in the series of photographs, "The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death." Not only do Botz’s photographs of toy-sized gruesome domestic scenes manage to reflect the dark side of life, but they also point to our pop fascination with violence and death reported in the news. We find ourselves in front of Botz’s images making imaginary evidentiary findings, solving, trying and closing cold cases.
Lydia Veneri’s disturbing images defy innocence and uncover the effects of sadomasochism. Her images of bound infant dolls amuse, but also alarm–hinting at dark, psychological truths. In Hibernation, Veneri alludes to a deep-seeded fantasy of adults somehow controlling, simplifying or perhaps taking a long hiatus from, the persistent obligations inherent in caring for young children. It is only natural to struggle with such issues. The problem arises with the misuses of power and control that often results in the abuse of the child and the development of pathology in the adult.
Davis and Davis have a keen sense of humor that borders on making us itch with discomfort as we smile wryly. In their diptych Kissers 1 & 2, they call a triangular relationship a triangular relationship with a cartoonish flavor. What makes their images so effective is that they have found dolls that could not be more perfect to resonate with situations in everyday life. The kissers look like little kids, but are truly versions of grown-ups. We see in them the seeds of human behavior that leads to complex, often uncomfortable and painful memories of failed love.
Elena Dorfman engages in the feminist critique originally opened by Cindy Sherman. In her images, Dorfman flips the idea of a baby-doll to doll-baby with hyper-realistic sex dolls with voluptuous bodies that arouse the imagination to succulent perversion and fetish, and opens the door to the ongoing debate over art and pornography. She dares us to either engage in her play or look away.
"Oh You Beautiful Doll" presents provocative and wide-ranging tableaux, which create allure, repulsion and perhaps bring out some of the Pygmalion in all of us by playing on the complex business of human relationships in a social world.
