Body Surrogates
Author(s): Francesco Spampinato
Source: PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art , 2016, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2016), pp. 1-20
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Performing Arts Journal, Inc
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© 2016 Performing Arts Journal, Inc.	 PAJ 113 (2016), pp. 1–20.	 	 1
	 doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00311
Body Surrogates
Mannequins, Life-Size Dolls, and Avatars
Francesco Spampinato
O
ne of the tropes of these early years of the twenty-first century is that
of the avatar, a virtual representation of a human being used for entertainment,
educational, technical, or scientific purposes. The avatar is
a product of digital culture, but its origins are coeval with those of the human
being and its evolution is affected by material conditions and the level of technology
currently achieved by a given society. The origin of the word “avatar” has
a spiritual connotation: It was associated with Hinduism and used to describe a
deity who took a terrestrial form. More generally, however, whether in terms of
religion or computing, we could define the avatar as a surrogate, a body—real
or virtual—that replaces another.
The origins of the avatar in Western societies date back to the modern era, which
was founded on mechanical technology and marked by the birth of urban culture.
At that time, between the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a typical
surrogate for the human body was the mannequin. Mannequins were displayed
in shopping windows, bearers of fashion trends and styles. They later became
a symbol of conformity that reached a peak under totalitarian governments,
embodying those values of efficiency that put the human body on the same level
as machines, both the machine of industrial production and the war machine.
As a substitute, the mannequin in society played a purely functional role, taking
the place of the human body in activities that the human being, out of dignity or
resistance, wouldn’t perform. These included mannequins used for commercial
purposes as well as those later used for testing in the automotive industry and
military engineering. Other mannequins, meanwhile, had a completely different
fate: They became the subject of photographs and paintings, employed as cultural
artifacts, fetishes or symbols of a mass culture that artists were either fascinated
by or wanted to criticize.
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2    PAJ 113
Two recent exhibitions have been devoted to the history of mannequins in art
history: Silent Partners: Artists & Mannequin from Function to Fetish at The Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge (October 2014–January 2015) and Mannequin d’Artiste,
Mannequin Fetiche at Musée Bourdelle, Paris (April–July 2015). While they focused
mainly on lay figures—those mannequins used by artists to study proportions
and composition—from the Renaissance to the modern era, with few incursions
into the contemporary, my focus explores a more articulated series of correspondences
between visual culture and the arts, organized around several main areas
of interest—metaphysical art, fashion, the fetish, surrealism, commodity culture,
postmodernism, abjection, post-humanism, and digital culture—spanning the
modern until today.
Substantial psychoanalytical thought is associated with mannequins and dolls,
particularly as framed by the lens of fetishism. The idea of the fetish, indeed,
represents a guiding thread through the survey here. “Puppets, mannequins,
waxworks, automatons, dolls, painted scenery, plaster casts, dummies, secret
clockworks, mimesis, and illusion: all form a part of the fetishist’s magic and
artful universe,” wrote French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. “Lying
between life and death, animated and mechanic, hybrid creatures and creatures
to which hubris gave birth, they all may be liked to fetishes. And, as fetishes,
they give us, for a while, the feeling that a world not ruled by our common laws
does exist, a marvelous and uncanny world.”1
While the general category defined by Chasseguet-Smirgel incorporates marionettes
and puppets, I am considering only on mannequins, life-size dolls,
and avatars—lifeless anthropometric surrogates of the human body. They are
unlike dolls, marionettes, and puppets—also lifeless, but smaller and roughly
controlled through wires or software. Mannequins, life-size dolls, and avatars
are uncanny doubles, meant for a function that human beings would or could
hardly perform, human bodies turned into objects or images, available to be
exposed, exploited, or abused.
The matter of scale was crucial in selecting the artworks, objects, and artifacts
to be discussed, as it was crucial for the artist Mike Kelley when he curated a
seminal exhibition that addressed similar issues: Uncanny (1993) at Gemeentemuseum
for Sonsbeek ’93 in Arnhem, the Netherlands, restaged in 2004 at Tate
Liverpool and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna. Writing in the
catalogue, Kelley explains:
It is important to me, first of all, that the objects displayed maintain
their physical presence, that they hold their own power in relation to the
viewer. I decided, therefore, to exclude miniatures—smaller than life-size
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SPAMPINATO / Body Surrogates    3
statues, dolls, toys, figurines, and the like—from the exhibition. Generally,
I believe that small figurative objects invite the viewer to project onto
them [. . .] On the other hand, I am interested in objects with which the
viewer emphasizes in a human way—though only as long as the viewer,
and the object viewed, maintain their sense of being there physically.2
THE MODERN MANNEQUIN
Since the Renaissance, lay figures have been employed by painters and sculptors
to study proportions and composition, but in the modern era the mannequin
becomes more and more the subject of artworks rather than a mere anthropometric
reference. Mannequins recur frequently in the art produced by historical
avant-garde movements such as Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and
Bauhaus. An interesting early case is that of Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka,
who in 1918 commissioned a doll maker to produce a life-size doll in the image
of his former lover Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler.
Alma and Kokoschka fell in love in 1912, but broke off after her abortion and
World War I. Upon returning from the war, he discovered she had married the
architect Walter Gropius.
From a correspondence between Kokoschka and Munich-based dollmaker Hermine
Moos, we know he gave specific measurements and instructions regarding
proportions and materials to be used. The resulting doll is not the erotic fetish
one would expect, but a creepy primitive-looking creature more in the style of
the Expressionistic figures he used to paint—yet apparently functional enough to
fulfill his desire: to get over her. “Finally, after I had drawn and painted it over
and over again, I decided to do away with it,” he confessed. “It had managed to
cure me completely of my passion. So I gave a big champagne party with chamber
music, during which my maid Hulda exhibited the doll in all its beautiful
clothes for the last time. When dawn broke—I was quite drunk, as everyone else—
I beheaded it out in the garden and broke a bottle of red wine over its head.”3
Between the late nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth,
mannequins were the subject of the photographs of Eugène Atget and Germaine
Krull; appeared in paintings by Giorgio De Chirico, Alberto Savinio, and Carlo
Carrà; and stood in as surrogates for actors in Fortunato Depero’s and Oskar
Schlemmer’s performances. A representative use of mannequins is the wellknown
assemblage by Raoul Hausmann, a key figure in Berlin Dada, entitled
Mechanical Head–Spirit of Our Age (1920): It is the decapitated head of a wooden
mannequin with various measuring devices attached to it, including a ruler and
the mechanisms of a pocket watch and a typewriter. The artwork is emblematic
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4    PAJ 113
of what mannequins stood for in society: symbols of precision, smoothness, and
functionality, to be taken as models by human beings.
A group of Italian artists including De Chirico, his brother Savinio, and Carrà
was particularly interested in mannequins. Expressionless and featureless wood
surrogates occupied a landmark position in the current labeled “metaphysical
art”—of which these three artists were the most representative members. They
used to represent mannequins within deserted public squares, usually marked
by the presence of bold areas of light and shadow. The space depicted is that of
Italian cities as if they were abandoned by human presence, as if their historic
beauty—characterized by the juxtaposition of ancient Greek and Roman ruins
and glorious Middle Age and Renaissance buildings and infrastructures—could
not accommodate modern life.
De Chirico used the term “men-statue-object” to describe a series of mannequins
he painted in the late 1920s combining human, mannequin, sculptural, and
architectural forms: not properly lifeless creatures, but monumental repositories
of ancient civilizations, men left mute and immobile in front of technological
progress. It is not a coincidence that metaphysical art is also symbolic of a larger
phase of European art between the two world wars, dubbed the “return to order.”
That phase reflected a step back from abstraction, which had to that point characterized
most of the European avant-gardes, in search of a utopian purification
from war and its connotations of death and destruction.
Unlike metaphysical art and other currents associated with the “return to order,”
the other avant-gardes celebrated industry and machines. Futurism and Bauhaus
both endorsed an idea of progress that encompassed a trans-disciplinary set of
activities including visual arts, theatre, architecture, publishing, and design.
Rather than mannequins, however, the humanoid figures that populate the
universes created by Futurist artist Depero and Bauhaus member Schlemmer
are more similar to robots or cyborgs, symbols of the new efficient bodies at the
service now of industrial production, now of some totalitarian ideology. Not
surprisingly, both artists anticipated the dystopian future soon to be brought by
Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany.
FASHIONABLE DUMMIES
The idea on which both Depero and Schlemmer speculate—the mannequin as a
symbol of efficiency, production, and perfection—is strictly linked to the role that
mannequins play in society, which in the 1910s and 20s was mainly associated
with retail. The main function of mannequins was to serve as body surrogates
in the store windows of the first modern Western cities like Paris, London, and
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SPAMPINATO / Body Surrogates    5
Nancy Grossman, T.O.K., 1969. © Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.
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6    PAJ 113
New York. As such, the mannequin also becomes the symbol of the new mass
culture, a tool to display commodities, and an instrument of standardization
of the body according to measurements and proportions set by the fashion and
advertising industries. Incidentally, a store mannequin is also called a “dummy,”
a word that in English also means “a stupid person.”
Paris was certainly the most representative as well as the most represented of
the modern cities. Artists moved there from the French countryside as well from
other countries, fascinated by the experimental lifestyle the city offered and by
an environment equally given over to work and to leisure. Culture, entertainment,
media, and commerce as they were known before had all been reinvented
in modern Paris. Since Baudelaire’s first usage of it in 1860, the word flâneur—
literally, someone who strolls through the city—has become synonymous with
leisure and urban life. As someone who knows the city but also likes to get lost,
the flâneur enjoys the entertainments the city offers: bars, cafes, cabarets, sports,
theatres, brothels, and malls.
Renowned French photographer Eugène Atget took over 10,000 photos of Paris
street life during the first three decades of the century. He shot bars and gypsies,
prostitutes and vehicles, circuses and gardens; but one of his favorite subjects
was definitely store displays. The mannequins populating the shopping windows
give us a pretty clear idea of the style, taste, and ideal of beauty possessed by
modern Parisians. Male but more often female busts and mannequins were
installed within dioramas that replicated an ideal society, where everyone smiled
and each body had perfect proportions and shape. The surrounding city usually
reflected on the glass, intensifying the clash between reality and representation.
The ethereal atmosphere rendered through these photographs made Atget a model
admired by an emerging group of artists living in Paris at that time who called
themselves Surrealists. For them, the mannequin as a surrogate of the human
being was a particularly powerful symbol to explore the liminal space between
reality and subconscious upon which Surrealism focused. Mannequins appear
in the photos of Man Ray as well as Germaine Krull—who, although not officially
a Surrealist, was close to some of the group’s founding members. Krull’s
Étalage: Les Mannequins (1928) shows the window of a store in Paris with seven
female mannequins without clothes on, exposing their artificial quasi-android
nature within the abstract environment of a store window decorated in typical
modernist style.
Man Ray’s Mannequin on Balcony (1930) increases the surrealistic nature of mannequins,
bringing one outside of a store’s display, dressing it with elegant clothes,
and portraying it on the balcony of a residential building. A similar fascination
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SPAMPINATO / Body Surrogates    7
with mannequins as repositories of an ideal as much as an uncanny form of
beauty will inform the production of several photographers to come. A few
examples from the following decades are Erwin Blumenfeld’s Mannequin (c. 1932),
Elliot Erwitt’s Wilmington: North Carolina [Mannequin Looking at a Woman] (1950),
and Ralph Gibson’s Untitled (Oaxaca) (1968) and Untitled (From “Deja-Vu”) (1972).
An extreme degree of fetishization of the female body is reached by renowned
fashion photographer Helmut Newton with a 2002 photo shoot commissioned
by the magazine Playboy, in which the female models are replaced by life-size sex
dolls photographed in domestic settings. Despite the longstanding collaboration
between Newton and Playboy, the magazine refused to publish the photos. Clearly,
Newton intended the photo shoot as a sort of metalinguistic operation, a way
to reveal the mechanism of voyeurism and objectification of the female body
enacted by photography—particularly fashion and erotic photography—through
its material replacement with a silicon and hyper-sexualized surrogate.
UNCANNY BODIES
In turning the female body into a fetish and literally objectifying it, fashion and
adult industries are as much responsible as advertising for imposing stereotyped
bodily features and lifestyles through which a male-dominated society maintains
control over women. However, as an art movement centered around an interest
in the subconscious, Surrealism played an important role in exploring how the
fetish is first of all a psychoanalytical rather than a social issue. The word “fetish”
comes from the Latin facticius (“artificial”) and was initially used to refer to manmade
objects believed to be carriers of supernatural powers.
In the modern era, “fetish” assumed a sexual connotation to refer to objects and
body parts that produced sexual stimulation. Writing in 1927, Sigmund Freud
famously interpreted this non-living object of desire as a substitute for the penis,
not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite
special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but
had later been lost. That is to say, it should normally have been given up,
but the fetish is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction. To put
it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s)
penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to
us—does not want to give up.4
Less than a decade before, Freud theorized another concept interestingly associated
with that of the fetish: the uncanny. In 1919 he wrote: “It may be true that
the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone
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8    PAJ 113
repression and then emerged from it.”5
Earlier mentioned by the philosophers
Schelling and Nietzsche, the concept of the uncanny was first explored in psychology
by Ernst Jentsch in the 1906 essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,”
in which he refers to German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann’s invention of the lifesize
doll Olympia in the short story “The Sandman” (1816). Mannequins and
life-size dolls have served since then as ideal cultural symbols of the uncanny,
being repositories of hidden emotions, complicated processes of split identity,
and repressed sexual desires.
Surrealism happened at the same time Freud interpreted the uncanny and fetishism,
and whether or not Surrealist artists and intellectuals understood or believed
in these concepts, their work certainly provided the perfect visual component
to the father of the theory of psychoanalysis. “The body was a site for Surrealist
experiment and a conduit for the transmission of ideas,” wrote Ghislaine Wood
in the catalogue of an exhibition on Surrealism and the body. “It became the
subject of intense scrutiny: dismembered, fragmented, desecrated, eroticized
and eulogized in the pursuit of a range of psychological, sociological and sexual
concerns.”6
The female body recurs in Surrealist artworks as does the mannequin as the
quintessential fetish of the female body. With a few exceptions like Herbert
Bayer’s Self Portrait (1932)—where he contemplates, amazed, his disjointed arm in
a ­mirror—most of the mannequins in Surrealist artworks are females. Representative
of the Surrealist objectification of the female body is the work of German
artist Hans Bellmer, consisting mainly in the construction and representation
of a series of female dolls, the first being made in 1933 in the image of an adolescent
girl, constructed of papier-mâché and plaster molded around a structure
made of wood and metal.
Approximately 4.5 feet (1.40 meters) tall, with movable head and limbs that
could be assembled in different combinations, the doll became the subject of a
series of photographs, tableaux vivants characterized by a decadent and dreamy
atmosphere of mourning and nostalgia in which the doll is usually represented
naked, dismembered, or unnaturally contorted. In December 1934, eighteen of
these photographs were featured in a two-page spread of the surrealist journal
Minotaure, edited by André Breton, with the title “Poupée, variations sur le montage
d’une mineure articulée” (“Doll: Variations on the Montage of an Articulated
Minor”).7
Bellmer’s subsequent dolls were headless, had more articulated joints, and were
covered in glue and tissue paper painted to resemble human flesh. The artist kept
photographing them in interiors or natural settings and collected the photos
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SPAMPINATO / Body Surrogates    9
in artist’s books. Bellmer’s peculiar production is one of the highlights in the
relationships between art and the mannequin, despite the immoral connotations
that come from its standing between masochism, misogyny, and pedophilia, as
the artist confirms with his own words:
Fit one joint to the other, swivel the ball-joints full circle and test them
for childlike poses, gently trace the hollows, savour the pleasures of the
curves, stray into the opening of an ear, do pretty things while simultaneously
scattering the salt of deformation with a hint of vengeance.8
SURREALIST SURROGATES
From a social perspective, Bellmer’s mutilated and abused dolls have often been
read as allegories of the bodies martyred in World Wars I and II, considering
the peculiar moment when they were made (the years before and during World
War II) and the artist’s political inclinations, which set him radically against the
National Socialist Party in Germany. But the main interpretation remains that of
the fetish. What pushes Bellmer to build his own dolls, after all, is the same desire
that brought Kokoshka to commission a doll in the image of Alma: to possess
the objectified body of a woman in order to fantasize sexually or even interact
with it one moment, and beat, torture, and even dismember it a moment later.
With Surrealism, the mannequin becomes a proper surrogate, no longer a lifeless
anthropometric reference but a quasi-animate double of the human body, the
quintessential companion for the Surrealist artists’ alienated modern life. The
apotheosis was reached at the Exposition International du Surréalisme of 1938 at
the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris, which included the installation of sixteen female
mannequins, each customized by a different artist. The shopping mannequins
turned into quasi-living objects of desire by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, André
Masson, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalì, were installed in a corridor dubbed Rue
Surréaliste.
With the exception of Duchamp’s, which was cross-dressed as a male (a possible
extension of the artist’s self-portrait in drag as Rrose Sélavy), the mannequins
showcased female bodies turned into mythological figures or sexual fetishes
through the application of everyday objects, fabrics, and extreme fashion accessories.
Masson’s mannequin, for instance, had a bird cage around its head. Man
Ray, who photographed them, recalled:
In 1938 nude young women were kidnapped from the windows of the
Grands Magasins and subjected to the frenzy of the Surrealists who immediately
deemed it their duty to violate them, each in his own original
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10    PAJ 113
Top: Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014. © The artist and Cabinet, London.
Bottom: Allen Jones, Table, 1969. © Allen Jones. Photo: Deirdre Morrow. Courtesy the artist.
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SPAMPINATO / Body Surrogates    11
and inimitable manner but without any consideration whatsoever for the
feelings of the victims who nevertheless submitted with charming good
will to the homage and outrage that were inflicted on them.9
World War II spread soon after and images of bodies mutilated or dismembered
became a constant daily horror. The fascination for mannequins survived, though,
and it is still through Surrealist eyes that mannequins are represented in art
right after the war. A particularly interesting case is Fernand Léger’s contribution
to Hans Richter’s film Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947). Léger’s The Girl
with the Prefabricated Heart, one of the seven episodes, each commissioned to a
different artist, pairs the love story of a real couple with that of two male and
female shopping dummies immersed in a black dreamy space, whose mechanical
positions and movements echo the post-Cubist automata for which the French
painter is known.
Like many other European avant-garde artists, Léger had moved to New York
in exile during the war. The film not only bears his fascination with the more
spectacular forms of street folklore that New York offered as opposed to Paris,
but also with a new idea of woman, more emancipated, dangerous, and no longer
so easily available to submit to a man: “a femme fatale just as threatening to the
modern psyche as any flesh prostitute,”10
observes Alyce Mahon. The acknowledgment
of a new social phase toward the empowerment of women transpires
from a scene in which the male mannequin is decapitated while the woman
rides frenetically on a bicycle.
Another French surrealist émigré in New York was Duchamp, who in the same
years begins working at his last legendary artwork, Étant Donnés (1946–1966),
permanently installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It consists in a voyeuristic
apparatus, a diorama that could be seen only through holes in a wood
door, behind which a naked female dummy sprawls in the foreground, with
open legs and shaved vulva. In The Erotic Doll, Marquard Smith offers several
interpretations of it:
[I]t is a fetishistic and perverse peepshow, stereoscopic porn, an “obscene
diorama” and a crime scene presenting a body, even a “sacrificial dummy.”
This body is, according to the extensive and paradoxical literature on
the work, either anticipating the act of love-making or in satiated postcoital
bliss, or—diametrically opposed to this—has been raped, soiled,
mutilated and abandoned.11
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12    PAJ 113
COMMODIFIED FETISHES
After the horror and the economic collapse brought by World War II, the 1950s
saw a new celebratory phase of industry and technological progress in Europe
and the United States, embraced in the name of economic growth. But we also
immediately start seeing the first negative results of this rebirth, namely an
increase in working hours and a mechanization of life in general. Many Surrealist
preoccupations became the basis of a new international movement that
flourished in Paris after the war: Situationism. Even more than Surrealists, Situationists
positioned themselves as radically against work, progress, capitalism,
entertainment, and mass culture—or what their founder Guy Debord famously
named “the society of the spectacle.”
The sixth issue of Internationale Situationniste, the magazine published by the
group, features an article on urban planning written by Raoul Vaneigem and
introduced by an illustration showing the maximum and normal extension
of the human arms on a horizontal surface. The image visualizes a series of
calculations of the proportions and correspondences between the human body
and the surrounding work area, exploring the maximum amount of labor that
a human being can perform in a given space and time. The illustration is used
here as the symptom of a larger process of mechanization of the city and the
life of its inhabitants.
Shopping mannequins take back their position in window displays after the war,
but somehow they have lost their fetishistic power. They are merely functional
tools, featureless as never before, made of inferior material—initially it was papier
maché, then wax, and then plastic—easily substituted and usually assembled into
armies of dummies that populate windows and corridors of bigger and bigger
stores and malls. In the modern era, shopping mannequins were fabricated by
professional craftsmen, one by one, each with distinctive features. Since the 1950s,
mannequins have been made industrially without any intent of customization,
applying a series of mathematical proportions.
The memories of World War II are still vivid, and there is always an enemy,
imagined or real, against whom it is better to be prepared. In 1953 J. C. Penney,
one of United States’ largest department stores, lent dozens of mannequins to the
nuclear test Operation Doorstep, conducted in Nevada on March 17, where blast
and thermal effects were tested on mannequins, automobiles, and fully furnished
wooden houses. A series of photos pre- and post-blast documents an uncanny
imaginary village with families of J. C. Penney-clothed dummies installed as if
they were performing daily activities. Obviously, despite being dismembered and
burned after the blast, they kept the same plastic smile they had before.
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SPAMPINATO / Body Surrogates    13
Other dummies, meanwhile, entered the public domain and fantasies: the crash
test dummies. While cadavers, animals, and peculiarly motivated human beings
had submitted themselves to this kind of test in previous decades, the automotive
and military industries eventually developed more and more advanced anthropometric
dummies to test the effects of acceleration and the results of impacts,
to evaluate the percentages and also the conditions of survival of the subject
after extreme situations. The first anthropometric device to be tested in mobile
vehicles crashes was Sierra Sam, created in 1949 and commissioned by the United
States Air Force, followed over the decades by Sierra Stan, General Motors’ Hybrid
series and THOR, and Toyota’s THUMS, today the most advanced in the market.
Two interesting sets of artistic dummies in the years of economic growth, the
1960s and 1970s, are those of Allen Jones and Nancy Grossman. Jones was part of
a young generation of British pop artists that, following the Independent Group,
had celebrated technology, progress, and mass culture. His contribution to the
history we’re tracing here is a controversial 1969 series of fiberglass sculptures
representing life-size female figures in leather lingerie, two of which are bent in
order to assume the shape of a table and a chair. Similar references to bondage
and fetishism inform Grossman’s carved wood heads wearing leather masks.
Although the former was accused of misogyny and the latter adopted a feminist
perspective, the references to BDSM allow us to read both these artworks as surrogates
of bodies now definitely domesticated through processes of maso­chistic
domination, and somehow interchangeable with the furniture pieces that surround
them.
ABJECT MANNEQUINS
Since the late 1960s, European and American artists, intellectuals and activists,
and later a more general public, have become more and more aware of the fact
that the political, economic, and media power systems have practiced a slow but
effective process of brainwashing since modernization. What has been called
postmodernism, indeed, was a new era characterized by the critique of latecapitalist
power systems and the adoption of a revisionist approach to history.
Mass media, in particular, have been pointed to as the main culprit behind the
transformation of reality into fiction through the bombardment of images of
desire and fantasies impossible to achieve.
Cindy Sherman, one of the key postmodernist artists, has developed her entire
production around issues like fantasies and the fetish, focusing on women as
objects of desire. Her first official artwork, Doll Clothes (1975), realized when she
was still a student, is a stop-motion animation in which a two-dimensional dolllike
self-portrait of the artist makes its way out of a book and starts ­browsing its
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14    PAJ 113
pages to select the cutout clothes archived therein. Her following and more popular
series, Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), also explores the issue of objectification
of women, in this case through the re-enactment of movie stills in which she
performs female characters that are object of an external and invisible male gaze.
Neither of these artworks employs mannequins, but it is not difficult to interpret
the figures represented as victims of someone else’s will and trace a parallel with
artists’ mannequins and dolls like Bellmer’s. Not surprisingly, Sherman uses dummies
in a later series of works, Sex Pictures (1993), which consists in assemblages
of body parts of medical mannequins, with a focus on genitals and sexual acts
in reference to pornography and death. Like Jones and Grossman, Bellmer and
Sherman are seen from opposed perspectives, one accused of misogyny and the
other accepted as taking a feminist approach, but the ambivalence around their
intended meaning is what makes their mannequins operate, as Rosalind Krauss
suggests, “in a way that allows them to slide along the signifying chain.”12
The ambiguous meaning of Sherman’s preoccupations with horror and the mannequin
is what brings them a step ahead from postmodernist feminist critique
and toward that early 1990s phase of art that has been interpreted through the
lens of another psychoanalytical theory: abjection. Indeed, in 1993 Sherman’s
Sex Pictures were featured, together with other artists’ mannequins and life-size
dolls, in both of the group exhibitions that defined this artistic phase: Abject Art
at the Whitney Museum in New York, curated by the students of the museum’s
independent study program, and Uncanny, curated by Mike Kelley at Gemeentemuseum
in Arnhem, the Netherlands, earlier in this essay.
The main idea retroactively associated with abject art was developed by Julia
Kristeva in the book Powers of Horror (1980), in which the Bulgarian-French
philosopher and psychoanalyst defines the abject as a repulsive reaction to a
collapse of the distinction between subject and object. “Abjection is above all
ambiguity,” she asserts. “Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically
cut off the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledged
it to be in perpetual danger.”13
The concept is based on Freud’s idea of
the uncanny. Indeed, within the abject we can still recognize fragments of the
original subject, that “hidden, familiar thing that,” has Freud sustained, “has
undergone repression and then emerged from it.”14
In 1992 Kelley and Paul McCarthy made Heidi, a collaborative film project based
on Johanna Spyri’s novel, in which the two artists confront American media
entertainment with the pastoral Swiss lifestyle of the original novel through the
enactment of a situation of perversion and sexual abuse performed by rubber
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SPAMPINATO / Body Surrogates    15
figures. Most of the material Kelley exhibited in Uncanny, besides other artists’
works, had been collected in preparation for the Heidi project and consisted
“primarily of figurative sculptures, ranging from ancient to contemporary, which
had an ‘uncanny’ aura about them, but also included nonart objects that had
a similar quality, such as medical models, taxidermy, preserved human parts,
dolls, life masks, and film special-effects props.”15
Uncanny was restaged in 2004 featuring a slightly different list of artists. Besides
Kelley and Sherman, the American artists McCarthy, Robert Gober, Charles Ray,
and John Miller, and the British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman and Sarah
Lucas, present in the original show or its restaging, are worth mentioning among
those who make sculptural mannequins and life-size dolls. For Gober and Lucas,
the mannequin is a lens through which they self-portray a fragmented identity.
McCarthy and the Chapman brothers suggest uncanny connections between
social reality, sexual perversions, and horror tales. Ray and Miller’s mannequins,
instead, are more similar to those of any American mall, taller than the average
human being in the case of Ray, or anonymous and dressed with generic casual
clothes in the case of Miller.
POST-HUMAN DOLLS
Along with abjection, another cultural theory that dominated the 1990s was that
of post-humanism. The post-human in art was addressed in the eponymous exhibition
curated in 1992 by Jeffrey Deitch at Deste Foundation, Athens, and Castello
di Rivoli, Turin. Representative abject artists like Sherman, Kelley, McCarthy,
Ray, and Gober were featured in this exhibition as well. The post-human body
had many things in common with the abject, one of them being the exposure
of a body mutated under the influx of external physical or psychological factors.
However, while the concept of abjection was developed through a psychoanalytical
approach to the body, the post-human took into account mainly the social
and cultural changes brought by technology, science, and mass media.
“A new construction of the self will take hold as ever more powerful body-altering
techniques become commonplace. The new construction of the self is conceptual
rather than natural,” wrote Deitch. “The decentered television reality that
we experience, with its fragmentation, multiplicity, and simultaneity, is helping
to deepen the sense that there is no absolutely ‘correct’ or ‘true’ model of the
self.”16
Images of artworks in the exhibition catalogue were paired with media
images such as the last plastic surgery Michael Jackson or Ivana Trump underwent,
advertisements for the newest cellular phone on the market, and images
of bodies at the gym, during cosmetic treatments, or in sci-fi movies.
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16    PAJ 113
Above: Jennifer Rubell, Lysa III, 2011.
© Jennifer Rubell. Courtesy the artist.
Left: “Stacy,” Real Doll. © RealDoll.com and
Stacy Leigh Photography.
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SPAMPINATO / Body Surrogates    17
The main idea behind the Post Human exhibition was that certain artists acknowledged
and exposed the increasing possibilities science and technology offered us
to modify ourselves, pursuing an idealized image that is more and more similar
to the models proposed by fashion and media industries. Abjection, from this
perspective, could be seen as a result, or rather a reaction to, these models. The
hyper-sexualized mannequins and dolls of Sherman and Kelley featured in
Uncanny, then, could be interpreted as the result of a process of assimilation to
the standards imposed by media fantasies, a process of assimilation obviously
gone wrong.
Most of these media fantasies feature women, either because they are addressed
to them or because they stereotype them. While in the 1980s and 1990s fashion
pursued more and more androgynous standards, advertising and pornography
insisted on prosperous models, hyper-sexualized through plastic surgery or
more and more advanced digital effects. A symbolic doll of visual culture in the
post human era is the hyperrealistic sex doll put on the market in 1996 by the
California-based company RealDoll. Unlike any previous sex doll, a RealDoll has
a “poseable” PVC skeleton with steel joints and silicone flesh and is designed to
recreate the appearance, texture, and weight of a human body. Due to its uncanny
resemblance to a real human being, the RealDoll immediately entered the public
imaginary, appearing in movies, music videos, and documentaries.
For the 2002 Playboy photo shoot mentioned above, Helmut Newton replaced
models with RealDoll products. A more critical approach was that of Laurie
Simmons. The artist, part of the same Pictures Generation to which Sherman
belongs, always worked with dolls. She started with small dolls photographed in
domestic toy settings, but recently she has turned real women into dolls through
masks or heavy cosmetic treatments. For the series The Love Doll (2009–2011),
Simmons photographed Japanese sex dolls—detailed like the RealDoll products
but with Asian traits—in daily settings, walking on the snow, resting on a bed,
or posing as a bride for a wedding photo.
In a recent conversation with Sherman and other artists regarding the use of
dolls and toys in art, Simmons asserted:
I thought if you assigned an expression to a doll, it could be more powerful
than a human expression. The doll becomes hyper-real. I wasn’t
making a conscious critique of a woman trapped in a kitchen or a
bathroom. I had decent memories of my own early childhood and my
mother’s role in it. Things didn’t get weird for me until adolescence. I
was kind of obsessed with the white-washed perfection of the ads that
I saw about homemaking and post World War II life. I love the clarity.17
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18    PAJ 113
ALIENS, ANIMATRONICS, AND AVATARS
Simmons’ feeling of “perfection” in the domestic setting corresponds to a model
imposed by media that is impossible or rather unnatural to achieve. And the
same could be said for the human beings inhabiting these settings, mostly the
women who have traditionally been associated with values of domesticity. However,
more sexualized models and new forms of emancipation have set women
at odds with the domestic settings to which they supposedly belong. Although
many women have not really changed their status, they have definitely changed
their shape in the attempt to adhere to the ideal perfection proposed by the
cosmetic and fashion industries.
The transformation of the social role of the housewife could be examined through
the evolution of the TV shows that have it as the protagonist, from soap operas
to recent reality shows like Real Housewives. What emerges from the past few
decades is that we have apparently more and more emancipated housewives, but
still embedded within a mechanism of control and submission to the will of men
or to greater power systems. And emancipation, if that is really what it is, often
simply amounts to greater attention to the care of the self, which includes plastic
surgery and cosmetics. The idea of housewives turned into sex dolls features
in artworks such as Alex Bag’s video His Girlfriend is a Robot (1996), perfect for
cleaning and for sex, and Jennifer Rubell’s Lysa III (2014), a large-breasted naked
female mannequin, in horizontal position, whose crotch works as a nutcracker.
Often women’s bodies have been paired with those of automata or alien figures,
aliens and robots being another symbolic repository for desire that generates
fear. Although the relation between art and robots deserves a dedicated study, it
is sufficient here to mention Japanese artist Mariko Mori’s early works from the
mid-1990s, costumed performances in which she presents herself in an urban
setting as a sexualized cyborg, mixing elements of Eastern philosophies and sci-fi
culture. A recent artists’ cyborg, instead, is Jordan Wolfson’s (Female Figure) 2014
(2014), a platinum blonde life-size animatronic wearing a provocative white dress
coordinated with latex boots, with a witch mask and evident burns on its smooth
skin, who performs mechanical movements in front of a mirror to which it is
attached, accompanied by a music and spoken-word soundtrack.
Wolfson’s animatronic echoes several contemporary issues related with digital
culture, like the advancement in robotics applied to both entertainment and production,
and the identity split induced by a more and more active interaction with
social networks and the Internet. Doing so, it brings us to a more contemporary
form of mannequins: avatars. Like mannequins, avatars were born for functional
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SPAMPINATO / Body Surrogates    19
reasons, employed in virtual simulations for technical or scientific purposes. And
like mannequins, avatars became fetishes, projections of sexual desires, from
videogames to virtual sex. Besides their material existence, the only thing that
apparently differentiates mannequins from avatars is the scale. However, since
they are conceived for a virtual world that is supposed to replicate the real one,
we tend to identify with avatars and their environment on a human scale.
An emerging generation of artists is using avatars in the present decade to explore
uncanny sides of their identity, projecting fetish values onto them or assigning
them duties they wouldn’t be able to perform in real life. In French artist Cécile B.
Evans’s video Hyperlinks or it Didn’t Happen (2014), a digitally rendered likeness
of late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman introduces himself saying: “I’m not magic,
and please don’t call me uncanny. I’m just a bad copy made too perfectly, too
soon.” In American artist Jacolby Satterwhite’s series Reifying Video Desire (2014),
the artist’s avatar wanders through a floating sci-fi universe where the exploration
of a fantastical world equals a new form of gender liberation through dance.
The most uncanny artists’ avatars are definitely British artist Ed Atkins’s hyperreal
self-portraits, which perform streams of consciousness, imprisoned in a limbo
between memory, melancholy, and death. Atkins realizes them through software
like Faceshift that maps specific features of the user, in this case himself, onto
standard virtual figures. The resulting avatar is an uncanny surrogate of the artist,
who in speaking regresses to the past, disclosing feelings and emotions that
social reality tends to hide. Hence the recurring talk of loneliness and illness,
presented in alienated settings that function more as virtual replicas of states of
mind than real places, with a soundtrack composed of fragments of pop music,
body sounds, and ambient noises.
Contemporary artists’ avatars prove that the cultural value that transpires from
the body surrogates we have taken into consideration doesn’t consist in their
material essence but in the invisible relationships that connect them to their
creator, owner, or whoever identifies or interacts with them. While mannequins,
life-like dolls, and avatars have a function in real life, their use in art has to be
intended as purely psychological: Their function, if there is one, is to expose the
tendency of human nature to conceal, repress, and hide feelings and pulsations.
Following the psychoanalytical path, we should then conclude that these uncanny
doubles are complex machines of introspection. We fetishize them in order to
escape a confrontation with our real selves; we project ourselves or our fantasies
onto them in order to bypass natural and social limits or real life.
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20    PAJ 113
NOTES
1. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion (New York: Norton, 1984), 88.
2. Mike Kelley, “Playing With Dead Things: On the Uncanny,” in John C. Welchman,
ed., Mike Kelley. Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 75.
3. http://www.alma-mahler.at/engl/almas_life/puppet.html
4. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in J. Strachey, trans., The Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1927), 6.
5. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Joan Rivière, trans. and ed., Sigmund Freud: Collected
Papers, vol. 4 (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 399.
6. G. Wood, The Surreal Body: Fetish and Fashion (London: Victoria & Albert Museum,
2007).
7. Hans Bellmer, “Poupée, variations sur le montage d’une mineure articulée,” Minotaure
6 (Winter, 1934–35), 30–31.
8. Hans Bellmer, The Doll, in Michael Semiff and Anthony Spira, eds., Hans Bellmer
(Paris: Centre Pompidou, Musée National D’Art Moderne, 2006).
9. Man Ray, quoted in N. Parrot, Mannequins (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983).
10. Alyce Mahon, “The Assembly Line Goddess: Modern Art and the Mannequin,” in
Jane Munro, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish (Cambridge: The
Fitzwilliam Museum, 2015).
11. Marquard Smith, The Erotic Doll: A Modern Fetish (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2014), 260.
12. Rosalind Krauss, Cindy Sherman (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 208.
13. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), 9.
14. Freud (1927), 5.
15. Kelley, 2.
16. Jeffrey Deitch, Post Human (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1992), 29.
17. Eric Fishl, David Salle, Laurie Simmons, and Cindy Sherman, Conversation, moderated
by Glenn Fuhrman—August 12, 2014, in Eric Fishl, ed., Disturbing Innocence (New
York: The FLAG Art Foundation, 2014), 92.
FRANCESCO SPAMPINATO is an art historian and professor at Rhode
Island School of Design, a Ph.D. candidate in Arts et Média at Sorbonne
Nouvelle, and author of Come Together: The Rise of Cooperative Art and
Design.
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