Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 64 Impassively true to life
Claudia Peppel
Abstract: Dolls are key figures of the uncanny, or the no-longer- familiar, because of their functional ambivalence. In her historical overview, Peppel focuses on the complex relations between dolls and humans in religion, art, psychotherapy and economy. As part of stagings, dolls transgress the limits between life and artificial. They refer to, represent and remain artificial body, thing, model and human body at the same time.
Résumé : Les poupées sont des figures-clés de l’étrange, de la perte du familier, en raison de leur ambivalence fonctionnelle. Dans cet aperçu historique, Peppel se concentre sur les relations complexes entre poupées et humains dans la religion, l’art, la psychothérapie et l’économie. En tant qu’éléments de mises en scène, les poupées transgressent les limites entre vie et artifice. Elles renvoient à, représentent et demeurent corps artificiel, chose, modèle et corps humain dans le même temps.
Keywords: "dolls", "death vs.life"," ritual" , "Zeitgeist"
The words uneasy and uncanny seem to surround dolls as part of their aura or our idea of them, evoking what Ernst Jentsch described as a “dark feeling of uncertainty” (Jentsch 1906: 11). Sigmund Freud also referred to dolls and their capacity to evoke the uncanny (Freud 1919: 233), a sensation which occurs when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced and a lifeless object becomes too much like an animate one (Freud 1919: 226). The nature of dolls -- or rather the nature of their existence as unknown, undefined, ambivalent, and yet everyday symbolic objects -- is a recurring theme in theories of the uncanny. Their mimetic replication of humans, or human-like beings, along with their representation in artistic and literary contexts, is closely bound up with the history of the model, the ‘double’ and the duplicate.
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 65 Fig. 1: Window display with mannequin head, Martine Kane for Helena Rubinstein, in Robert
Leydenfrost, Window Display, New York 1950, p. 112.
Many types of doll have been given special names, such as wooden doll, voodoo doll, real doll, fashion doll, mechanical puppet, marionette, lay figure, jointed figure, life-size mannequin, dressmaker’s dummy or religious effigy, to make differentiation between them possible. But what is a doll, a puppet, a dummy? And furthermore, when is a doll a doll, and when would we rather refer to a figure, a model or a prototype? By definition, a doll is a replica of a human or human-like figure, and is deeply intertwined with the history of models and copies, replicas or facsimiles. Their size can vary greatly, from that of an actual person to that of dolls for dolls’ houses, for example. Dolls are among the oldest toys and religious commodities: their often ritualised use extends into the bounds of the “idol with a magical function” (Lode 2008: 1). In general, a doll is understood as an object relating to either religion or play - without any more precise explanation or consideration of what this means.
Thus it has been claimed that “replicas of human figures in sculpture (statues or busts) that were produced for artistic, representative or decorative purposes with no relation to play or religion” are not understood as dolls, and yet such classifications are not always easy to make (Meyers Lexikon online). For example, on what basis can the label “doll” be applied to (or denied) mannequins in shop windows? And what of fifteenth-century Christian lay piety in monasteries around Florence, in Nuremberg in southern Germany, and in Flanders, where wooden or waxen figures of the Christ Child were worshipped, often together with a statue of
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 66 the Virgin Mary? From the seventeenth century onwards, figures appeared as reclining and immobile baby dolls, whereas older models stood upright and had rather youthful or androgynous figures with very grown-up faces and limbs. They were crafted by the monastery workshops and permanently dressed and re-dressed. Again, it is not clear whether these were figures or dolls, but in any case, for our purposes they succeed in illustrating how important the act of clothing was as part of the ritual (Basta 1997: 96, 128, and 130).
Right from the start of their history, which stretches back over several centuries and spans numerous different cultures, dolls have performed representational tasks (Belting 2001, 150-152). In their manufacture, handling and use, and within an “imaginary field of meaning”, dolls always presuppose a relationship with human beings. A doll is, like an actor, a functional element or part of a performance “bound to reality” (Berger 1987: 265-266).
Fig. 2: Homburg medical simulation mannequin, © Iris Maurer, Courtesy of Universität des Saarlandes (2010).
Dolls inhabit a gap, an interstitial realm, by evoking distance while allowing us to forget it, resulting in a performative presence that gives rise to the believable conveyance of life (Belting 2001: 94). As an “inanimate representative of the animate”(Altner 2005: 167), dolls are at once objects of fantasy and models to be used, illusions of and allusions to reality.
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 67 Fig. 3: Stockholm shop window decoration, Young Widows (late 1940s), in
Nicole Parrot (Ed.), Mannequins (Figures), Bern 1982, p. 165.
Is it then possible to view virtual objects such as avatars or Sims, whose worlds resemble dolls’ houses, as dolls, provided they fulfill our definition? Or do substance and haptics play the deciding role in the representative process? Which is most important: the application, the context, the atmosphere or the materials?
The photographer and artist Jean-Pierre Khazem has created a special form of the uncanny intersection of the “doll-like” and the “human” in his works Volume and Diesel.
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 68 Fig. 4: Jean-Pierre Khazem, No Sex_1 for the fashion brand Diesel (2001), ©
Courtesy of Jean-Pierre Khazem (2010).
Khazem plays with the categories “animated” and “inanimate” by putting doll faces in mask form on his human models. At first glance these creations appear to be large dolls, although the masks do not appear mask-like nor the human models particularly human-like. Even at second glance it is difficult to differentiate between a subject that is human and one that is a doll. The face of any particular model seems to distance itself peculiarly from its corresponding body, and yet the body and face build a single entity in which both parts are strongly accentuated. A mask of modern facelessness and meaninglessness? Do we feel less observed when we look at such pieces? “The genuine face is not the one concealed behind the mask, but the one fabricated by the mask, if one is to understand the true social intention” (Belting 2001: 36, and Macho 1996: 25-29).
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 69 Fig. 5: Jean-Pierre Khazem, Volume_1 (2000), © Courtesy of Jean-Pierre Khazem
(2010).
The categories that define dolls, in other words, do not become evident when dolls are considered in terms of their ontological essence, but instead are constructed in processes of interaction with them: through their garments, through play and ritual, and so forth (Huber 1989: 140).
The artificial, surrogate human bodies of dolls in the past were often made out of short-lived materials and were rich in detail in their design. The accentuation with hair and clothes was regarded as important and was at least hinted at in paint, though many dolls were and are furnished with specially produced clothes and real human hair.
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 70 Fig. 6: Louis-François Roubiliac, Mannequin of the sculptor
with accoutrements (1740), in Jane Turner (Ed.), The Dictionary of Art, London 1996, XVIII, p. 898.
The earliest probable instances of dolls are the so-called symbolic bodies found in Jordan: plastered skulls that were modelled after the deceased and mounted onto considerably smaller figurines, dating back to around 7200 BC. What is particularly remarkable about these skulls is that the original form and the replicated form are one and the same. In preserving the look of a face or in evoking the memory of something that was once alive, reference and representation coincide. Plaster-coated reed busts with fake eyes have been found in the same region and date back to the same time period. Named after their location in Ain Ghazal, these figures bear the signs of the living body, and it has been shown that they were originally painted in skin tones. They point towards “all subsequent attempts to create man-made surrogate bodies for the dead” (Gerchow 2002: 189-191). In this context, Didi-Huberman has referred to a “genealogical ritualisation of similarity” (1999: 32) This means that what is no longer living, and thus absent, is given a form in order to create a connection to the ancestors and a path into the present.
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 71 Fig. 7: Plaster bust from Ain Ghazal (ca. 7000 BC), in Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft, Munich 2001, p. 152.
Dolls as human representations have always been closely connected with death and transition, occupying a liminal space and thereby evoking, by means of their perishable material in particular, a fleeting material state.
A certain kind of reality is thus transmitted by dolls - a reality which no longer exists as it once was, and which is now present only in the imagination. Dolls make something which is absent visible, they function as a representation of that which is human, especially of previously living people: “The doll is the vestige of death in life, even in childhood; in it the finite and irreversible transition of humans into things is anticipated” (Goebel 2004: 292). The imitation is attractive, and yet at the same time unwanted and abhorrent.
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 72 The creation of or the demand for such human substitutes is perhaps always caused by short- or longer-term absence. Dolls thus appear to be, both in the literal and metaphorical sense of the word, transitional objects that mark an empty space which, however, they simultaneously fill. These phenomena are mentioned here in order to show that the human endeavour to create representative substitutes in the form of objects of art that appear human, or to make something dead appear alive again, has deep roots and that, in ritual practice, this material and incarnate presence was clearly more important than the use of icons (Belting 2001: 169). Martin Schulz points to the importance of the materialisation of a haptic physicality, one that can be experienced and touched: it is a question “not just of a mimetic reference, however it may appear, but also of the trace of a once physical presence that is represented” (Schulz see Belting 2002: 18). This trace of physical presence is created by or evoked through the greatest possible similarity with the original and, as mentioned earlier, through authentic attributes such as hair.
“The secret of successful imitation is a double illusion. […] Dolls, imitations of the body, are not only artefacts purporting to be living beings - they are also signs purporting not to be. They apparently stand for themselves alone: for the body that they embody” (Gerchow 2002: 14).
Dolls can be said to exist, both in imaginary fields of meaning and in their concrete use, as part of a tension-filled relationship: they can both refer to something and represent it at the same time. They cross the boundaries between things alive and artificial, between the human and the mechanical, between object and body. The doll is a model based on the human figure and serves both as an artistic object as well as a representative medium for simulating the human presence and absence i.e. the animation of thingness as well as embodying the reification of the animate (Altner 2005: 167). This “confusion between animate and inanimate processes”, which is intensified by their indeterminate character with regard to gender and physiology, makes dolls key figures of the strange and the uncanny (Simms 1996: 668).
“Among all the psychical uncertainties that can become a cause for the uncanny feeling to arise, there is one in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 73 – and more precisely, when this doubt only makes itself felt obscurely in one’s consciousness” (Jentsch 1906: 8).
As Jentsch puts it: “The horror which a dead body (especially a human one) […], and similar things cause can also be explained to a great extent by the fact that thoughts of a latent animate state always lie so close to these things” (Jentsch 1906: 15).
Dolls can only be animated by make-up or decoration. This genuine emptiness - in the sense of a body which has to be given form, but also in the sense of an absence of liveliness, personality, soul - both inspires and calls for the projection of aesthetic and societal concerns or other fantasies and wishes (Kavrakova-Lorenz 1989: 237). The special characteristics of mannequins that Jan Gerchow stresses, namely “the possibility of dressing and undressing them”, as well as their changing “scenic” usage for the public (2002: 249), apply to dolls in general, as they are all changeable in terms of clothing and roles. This property is exploited in burial rites, processions, theatrical performances, window displays and psychoanalytic play therapy, in which dolls permit or carry out the projection of unconscious processes that a child cannot articulate, but can act out on and with the doll.
According to Freud, children in the first stages of playing cannot generally differentiate between the living and the lifeless, or reality and fantasy, and especially enjoy treating their dolls as if they were living beings (Freud 1919: 233). It has also been argued that a crucial step in cognitive development is the ability to preserve lost objects by replacing them with inner imagined pictures (Casdan 1990: 61). In general, children from the age of two-and-a-half to three are assumed to have acquired this ability; before that age, transitional objects serve as substitutes for people. The most common such objects are dolls and stuffed animals (i.e. doll-like replicas of animals), or pieces of clothing. They give comfort to the child and enable it to “hold” the person to whom it is closely attached in some kind of haptic form (Casdan 1990: 62). “The object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated” (Winnicott 1971: 5). By means of such objects, a child not only learns to bear the absence of its mother (or father), but also to adopt its own stance or mindset, “to distinguish between the ego and the world” (Simms 1996: 671). This ability to occupy both spheres, to designate the transitory as such, is especially challenged by the symbolic peculiarity of the doll and its genuine emptiness, listlessness and unresponsiveness, which can precipitate the fiercest feelings of love and hate (Simms 1996: 664-666). And the phenomenon is intensified
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 74 by the neutral or indeterminate gender of the doll, its arguably ungendered or pre-gendered quality. The doll is special in its ability to be neutral, particularly in terms of its undefined gender characteristics or facial features.
The attribution of a spectrum of feelings to dolls can already be found in poetic texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which a “fateful dependence” and an “insentient numbness” are described as a prototypical aura of experience (Drux 1990: 155). “The doll exists on the threshold of ego-identity, where subject and object are undifferentiated and merge in an erotic fusion” (Simms 1996: 671). The doll is a “deficient figure that yearns for something” repeatedly, without ever giving anything back (Altner 2005: 165). The blend of numbness and vitality that marks the doll arises from its function as a double. The doll is a reminder of a living human being, but, as an object, it must always and forever be re-animated by the human power of imagination.
An especially clear example is the shop-window mannequin, which, in the most cramped of spaces - the display window - gives scope for the possibility of dressing and undressing and changing scenes before the eyes of the public. As an artistic object and a visual medium, it also serves to simulate human presence and absence, embodying both the vitalisation of the material and the materialisation of vitality. As a “culture-bearer in the most generally binding way”, the success of a mannequin depends upon its embodiment of the Zeitgeist (Brock 1994: 11). Retrospectively examined, mannequins like fashion dolls, display the temporal and cultural ties of personality types and allow insights into changing bodily ideals and fashion trends. As an aside, I would briefly like to touch upon Barbie, who has turned fifty and perfectly exemplifies how bodily ideals and fashion have changed. Barbie has had to undergo more than 500 aesthetic surgeries to constantly remain attractive, timeless and up-to-date: in this and other senses she is “a fascinating index of cultural change” (Peers 2004: 29). For the United States Bicentennial, a Barbie doll, an American flag, a bottle of Coca-Cola and a Mickey Mouse doll were shot into outer space in a time capsule as cultural assets worthy of preservation (Cagli 2001: 78). This act is nearly as strange and uncanny as the doll itself.
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 75 I am grateful to Rose Knudsen for her translation of the original conference paper and to Craig Williams and Catherine Smale for subtle comments and helpful suggestions concerning the final version.
Claudia Peppel is the Academic Coordinator at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Her field is Romance languages and literature with a primary focus on cultural and literary studies as well as art history. She has taught as a Guest Lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts and was a Research Fellow within the German Research Foundation (DFG) PhD programme "Technology and Society” at the Technical University of Darmstadt where she obtained her doctorate in Philosophy. Her dissertation The Mannequin: From Lay Figure to Technological Cult Object. Imagining Bodies in the Works of Giorgio de Chirico, Weimar: VDG, 2008, is about the so-called Metaphysical Group and their representation of the body.
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Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 79 Claudia Peppel is a specialist in Romance languages and works since 2008 as scientific coordinator at the ICI Kulturlabor in Berlin. Her research interests are: historical avant-garde, artistic figures and bodily imaginations, cultural history of shop window decoration as well as the fake in the context of art, artistry and illusion.
