Sunday, January 22, 2012

Embalmed beauty: the dolls of Marina Bychkova




Oh great, now I have a new obsession! These dolls really are fetish objects and are very, very strange. Beautiful, but disturbing.

They are created by a young Russian-Canadian artist who lives right here in Vancouver, Marina Bychkova. Her eerily-beautiful Enchanted Dolls are celebrated and avidly collected all over the world.














Dolls are supposed to be the province of little girls, playthings that are somehow expected to imbue them with the desire for conventional social roles (wife, mother, virgin-whore). If Bychkova's dolls are playthings, then Barbie is a stick of dynamite.

Loaded.




These dolls have some highly unusual features. I doubt if I can name them all.

(a) they all have childlike, barely-pubescent bodies and look both virginal and somehow spoiled or besmirched; 

(b) many have tears swimming in their eyes, melancholy expressions and pouty lips;

(c) most, if not all, express a theme of captivity, i.e. heavily-costumed royal figures, concubines and erotic slaves, some even displayed under glass bell jars (and at least one has bound feet, which I have written about in a couple of other posts);



(d) many are meant to be displayed nude, and all the joints show, very creepily, as if they are mechanical (which they are!), contrasting with their “lifelike” faces;






(e) in spite of their waxy-looking marionette-like bodies, the poses are eerily natural due to the extreme flexibility of the ball-jointed limbs;

(f) they all have visible genitalia, which you just don’t expect on an adolescent-girl doll (and which has led to some ludicrous examples of censorship, such as pulling the dolls from store window displays);

(g) the fingernails look bitten-down or broken-off, as if the doll has been scratching and clawing to get away from something;



(h) many of the costumes/contexts are from darker versions of ancient stories and Grimm’s fairy tales;

(i) paradoxically, there’s something modern, stylish and haute-couture about them which contrasts with their ancient roots;

(j) the dolls remind me very strongly of the Victorian post-mortem photography I explored in a previous post;

















(k) the dolls call forth a welter of responses, as in: awe; admiration; disgust; horror; feeling creeped-out; curiosity; obsession; sexual fixation; maternal response (i.e. wanting to take care of wounded little girls); anger (i.e. these dolls all seem to have been sexually trespassed); confusion (not knowing why you feel all these things, not being able to find a context for them); feeling disoriented, as if lost in the woods (no other way to describe it); suffocation; astonishment (when realizing the artist is only in her 20s, and that the dolls can sell for $40,000.00); and on and on it goes.  So looking at these things (and they are, after all, “things”), you really don’t know how to feel.



That kind of response usually means we're in the presence of real art, whose purpose is not to please us so much as to throw us off-balance. They seem to “make a statement”, and that can seem tedious after you’ve seen the fiftieth face with pouty lips and brimming eyes. Then you see some of the costumes and you want to fall over.

It seems impossible. NO one could have created anything this sumptuous and elaborate. It seems like a throwback to some past century, when women spent the entire day embroidering and sewing on minuscule glass beads.

This dollmaker whose creations seem to exude so much subversive feminism seems to spend the majority of her time doing traditional women's work. The paradoxes never end.

My own response to the dolls has been confusing. Whatever she is trying to accomplish, she must be doing it if she can command prices like that, where she would only need to sell a few per year to keep going. Also, how can she have produced so many? Seems like it must be in the hundreds. All different, but somehow, creepily, all the same, with identical bodies unless customized with elaborate tattoos (or pubic hair, or even "bites and wounds": no, I'm not making this up, it's on her web site,  http://www.enchanteddoll.com/index.html



Also, if these "things" are made of porcelain, how can their faces be intricately molded like that? I don’t know. I thought porcelain was like china. They are “fired”, according to an article I found. There is almost nothing on her web site, and that too adds to the mystique: just how does she produce these things?


There is a book coming out, but it’s limited edition and $75.00, so I won’t be getting one any time soon. Meantime, I think of this as a rather unhealthy obsession (but maybe useful in getting me away from Harold. Oh my God, what if I had a Harold Lloyd doll?! I would be busy all day. Come to think of it, his Glass Character, with its white face and stylized clothing, is doll-like in many ways.)



Strangely enough, I had quite a few pictures of Bychkova's dolls filed away in my Favorites section, maybe for a year or two, and didn’t feel much curiosity about them until now. So I’m opening a treasure-trove, or unleashing a floodgate, or however you want to express it. And one that has been there all the time. What a bizarre phenomenon, such a strange art! It reminds me, for some reason, of people who used to paint beautiful faces on corpses so they would look "lifelike" during the funeral. Embalmed beauty. (p.s. do I have a favorite? Yes, I do. Imperial Concubine. Not sure why; she is both tearful and regal, and her costume is to die for.)






 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look


Thursday, January 19, 2012

The unknown Harold Lloyd



The sad, sweet romantic: was ever a comedian more melancholy, more aware of the fragile depths of the human heart?




Intensity, asceticism, fierceness: do not mess with this Harold Lloyd.




The Barrymore profile, a reminder of his first ambition: to be a stage actor. And he never stopped looking like a leading man.




So much for the chaste peck we see at the end of most silent screen comedies. This kiss (with Jobyna Ralson, Why Worry?) sets the screen on fire!




Oh, mighty-my. Movie stars, on the town.




This man did nothing by halves.  Harold didn't just have "a dog". He had a kennel full of Great Danes the size of small horses. 




There is just something about the way he sits in mud. Has a style all its own.




Oh, Bebe! The energy of these two leaps across time.
(And note the gaze: he has what they used to call "bedroom eyes").



Would you trust this man with your girl friend?




Is he sitting in mid-air, on a magic carpet, or in a giant high chair? Even in a Brooks Brothers suit, he's Peter Pan.




Even Cary Grant never wore a tux this well. As they say in Nebraska: he cleaned up real nice.




The emotional climax of The Freshman: some idiot critic once said of Lloyd that he "lacked tenderness". It was one of those wildly inaccurate remarks that sticks like a burr. Whoever he was, I don't think he ever saw a single Harold Lloyd movie, and most definitely not this one.




Harold is never funnier than when committing suicide. Here he's taking poison in one of my personal favorites, Never Weaken; in Haunted Spooks he tries to shoot himself with a water pistol.

(By the way, did anyone ever stop to ask how Harold managed to extract humor out of such a dark subject? It's yet another example of his genius, so quicksilvery that if you blink you might miss it.  I do not think his mind was operating at the same velocity as the rest of us.)



Without the white makeup and glasses, Harold was almost unrecognizable. He could go about incognito, and unlike most stars who want to be recognized, he believed it was a benefit to him and afforded him privacy.

I love this picture with Hal Roach: both of them look like youngsters. And that devastating flashbulb grin. But what's that weird halo doing above his head?






This, this, THIS is why women love Harold Lloyd, even now! In spite of all his good intentions he is always getting bruised and battered and humiliated. You want to take him home with you. In fact. . . you do.




No one courted with more delicacy.




Movie stars aren't like the rest of us. That's why they're movie stars.