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

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%