Such a doll!: man-made dolls in German modern culture and their afterlife in postmodern visual culture

My dissertation “Man-Made Dolls in Modern German Culture and their Afterlife in Postmodern Visual Culture” seeks to move the discussion of doll-like artifacts beyond the psychoanalytical discourse, and offers to read these man-made dolls as a new modality of perceiving and desiring an anthropomorphous body. My study addresses the doll’s dialectical relationship to the human body and her endless shape shifting ability. The doll’s to-be-played-with-ness and her to-be-looked-at-ness strike a raw nerve among the doll makers I investigate in each of the chapters of the present study. Chapter one examines E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story Der Sandmann under the lens of performance. I argue that Hoffmann, a composer and a music critic, ultimately raises the issue of the performing body and explores its possibilities and limitations through the presence of a musical automaton in the figure of Olimpia. Chapter two examines the doll the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka made in collaboration with the German Avant-garde doll maker Hermine Moos. I claim that Kokoschka, striving to create a three-dimensional image of his beloved around 1920, was exploring new ways of seeing to cope with the loss of his mistress. Chapter three focuses on Bellmer’s dolls featured in his photography books, Die Puppe (1934) and Les Jeux de la poupée (1935). In his photographs, he probes the female body, explores its insides, refashions and redesigns it. By turning the surface of the female body inside out and upside down, he reveals its reversibility and permutability. Chapter four investigates fashion design with the late British fashion designer Alexander McQueen. In 1996, McQueen presented a Spring/Summer collection entitled Bellmer La Poupée – an overt reference to Bellmer’s doll. The fashion show featured models wearing wigs and dresses cut in a way that emphasizes the fragmentation and deformity of the female body. My conclusion focuses on a female photographer, contemporary American photographer Laurie Simmons and her series of photographs, entitled The Love Doll. Far from sexualizing the doll or deconstructing her as a mere product of male sexual fantasy, Simmons pursues with her beautiful doll photographs the exploration of the sensory apparatus initiated by Kokoschka and BellmerPh.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Christophe André Kon