The Glass Character: art dolls

Showing posts with label art dolls. Show all posts

Sunday, February 24, 2013

WARNING: graphic violence, may offend some viewers

(I was going to write dialogue for these repeating vignettes - some sort of art doll Kibuki theatre - but I just couldn't do it. These dolls got their mojo workin' and are full of such palpable juju that I don't think I could touch one of them. Yesterday I snapped a Barbie's knees - they cracked audibly, like knuckles - and that was freaky enough.)

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

There is always one more. . . doll

I don't know what gets into me, I really don't. I can't leave it alone, and I never could.

A few posts ago I was talking about fan art, which I've never done before, mainly because I have no artistic sensibilities whatsoever and can't draw or paint to save my life. Once during a manic phase, I did a lot of abstract painting and was convinced it was REALLY GOOD and went around scanning it and sending it to everyone. Unfortunately, it was shit. I had no idea why everyone seemed so embarrassed.

I don't know how artists do it, except through true talent and determination.

I can't leave it alone. These dolls, these alabaster time-travellers created by the mysterious genius Marina Bychkova (a Vancouver girl, I'm happy to say) pull something out of me, something equally strange.

I want to unjoint them and take them apart and see how they work, or at least dress and undress them. Why? What's the matter with me? I hated dolls as a little girl.

I didn't even have any, except an execrable Debbie doll with a big head and permed black hair like my mother's, and an even worse one called Miss Debutante. Does the average eight-year-old know or care what a "debutante" is? It's a strange term at the best of times, and like "chatelaine" it has no male equivalent. I used to call her "Miss De-BUT-ton-ty", when I called her anything at all.

I did mummify my Barbie, and got some strange looks for it, even from my schizophrenic brother Arthur who seemed to be from some other planet. What can I say, I loved mummies and hated Barbie and it seemed like a good solution.

I can't play with dolls even now, I can't afford one as good as these, and feel a bit silly prowling around doll shows where people just hoard them. So this is my only way of playing.

I have to reveal a secret: while I played with images today, I worried about a medical test I'm having in a week. I don't feel well and I haven't for some time, though as usual nobody has a clue about it because "you seem fine to me". When you've hidden depression and other kinds of wretched imbalance for nearly 60 years, you get awfully good at it.

This seems to be "physical", meaning "not my fault" and "not something I'm just making up to get attention that I could snap out of any time I wanted to, except I don't want to". It's weird, because part of me hopes there's something wrong, or at least something they can locate, so it won't be one of those vague situations where you KNOW there is something wrong but no one in the medical community will acknowledge it.

It seems a bit idiotic to say, "Gee, I sure hope they find something wrong."

But I do.

I have another secret, and now I will reveal it. I wanted to use one of those hideous birds by Hieronymus Bosch in my "fan art", but discovered it really wasn't do-able, any more than my equally bright idea to make my own Russian nesting dolls. But I did find this, some sort of hawk making that screaming noise they do. What struck me is that its mouth was a perfect mother-of-pearl-looking heart, so I used that as a basis for my fan art, or desecrations, or whatever they are.

It just worked so perfectly.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Embalmed Beauty, Part 2: fan art

Quite a while ago I went through a doll phase - all right, an obsessive doll phase - all right, a completely obsessive doll phase that took me down some very dark corridors in my mind.

I think the first significant genre I found was on a web site called Enchanted Doll (http://www.enchanteddoll.com/) which features a collection of exquisite and disturbing dolls by Russian-Canadian artist Marina Bychkova. Barely 30 years old (and living in my hometown of Vancouver), she has been creating these shockingly original alabaster dream-figures since her early 20s. It has certainly paid off: one of her dolls commanded the headspinning price of $27,000.00 on eBay, and the waiting list for purchase is now several years long.

What exactly is happening here? How to analyze this strange and spooky magic? You can't, and I won't try or I'll be here all morning. Most of Bychkova's dolls are in a category called BJD (and it doesn't mean what you think it does, so shut up or I'll smack your filthy mouth). It means ball-jointed dolls, whose arms and legs have the capability of moving in practically any direction. (Please don't count those Monster High monstrosities, whose arms, legs and hands have an alarming habit of falling off.)

The bodies seem identical, slim and virginal, sometimes elaborately tattooed, with realistic genitalia that freak a lot of people out. Some even have pubic hair and a visible clitoris, which is strange because the average woman's clitoris isn't visible. The slender figures and spookily lifelike skin of these dolls contrasts startlingly with their blatantly visible, marionette-like joints. The nudes pose innocently or provocatively, faces sad and sometimes frightened, eyes brimming with tears. Costumes can be incredibly intricate, and there is even some furniture, velvet sofas and the like. But this is hardly Barbie's House of Dreams (from which the name of this blog is derived, by the way. Some people don't get the satire at all and just think I'm stupid.)

There are recurring themes in the world of the Enchanted Doll. One seems to be subjugation and even a kind of captivity. Many of the dolls wear costumes that would feel something like a suit of armor, with enormous headgear (one even has a cathedral on top of her head!). Even the Scheherezade-like figures look like creatures kept under glass (which, during the many exhibits that draw wildly enthusiastic crowds, they actually are).

I had a Bychkova fit a year or so ago - or was it two? - then decided I had had enough and had better leave it alone before I crossed some sort of disturbing threshhold. Enchanted doesn't mean what people think it does. It means living under a powerful and often unbreakable spell, a spell cast through words or even song (the "chant" part). Abricadabra, bibbidy-bobbidy-boo, and you're captivated (captured?) for life.

But when I got triggered off again recently, God knows how, I found a trove of a couple hundred images I had previously hoarded (most of which I ruthlessly weeded down to just 66 or so - not 666! - figuring the rest of them are already accessible on the internet, and will be for the forseeable future). I found only a few that were really new to me, including the heartbreaking one at the start of this post. If you really want to freak yourself out, pretend you can hear what this doll is saying. And there is the really disturbing one, the battered doll, which seems to cross the line even for a dollmaker who likes to push the envelope.

So do these dolls "make a statement" about female subjugation? I doubt if it's done consciously. If they do, it's in the sense of holding up a mirror, both to society and to ourselves. We prize the waxen beauty of girls kept under glass, and even find them sexually irresistable.

SOOOOOOOOO. . . we come to my Daily Special. Those few years back when I first became obsessed, I produced a bit of fan art. There is fan art on Bychkova's Enchanted Doll site, but it's done by actual amateur artists, not people like me who can't paint or draw. I play with my Enchanted Doll images like Colorforms, that primitive form of magnetic paper dolls from the '60s, which I was startled to see my granddaughters playing with the other day.

This is photoshop art, placing the dolls in settings that worked for me, stolen from the internet. The backgrounds are meant to be standard wallpaper, but there is nothing standard about these dolls. They call up disturbing feelings in people, from "Ewwwwwwww! Cree-py!", to "Who made these?" to "Where can I get one?"

In case you think these dolls represent harmless social satire, just look on Bychkova's site and watch some of her videos. They feature "playing with" the various nude dolls, placing them in postures that often seem frankly lesbian. In one, a doll has died and is being buried.

It all makes the mummified Barbie in the shoebox sarcophagus of my childhood seem much less strange.

CODA. I kept getting a funny feeling when I looked at this one:

It was perhaps the simplest one to compose, with only one figure in the extreme foreground. But it looked funny, kept changing somehow.

It was like one of those "can you see two faces in this picture?" things that I can never figure out.

With a few magical photoshop changes, I was seeing a giant goose or duck or some other strange bird, a malevolent-looking one that seemed to be dominating the entire picture. It's what fairy tale enchantment can do to you.

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.)