Devils and Dolls
Dolls are loaded objects. Thought to be the oldest toys, they’ve often had religious significance. And today they’re a kind of Rorschach test for point of view. Google “doll art” and you’ll find thousands of sites selling sweet, safe, socially acceptable miniature people to collectors. They can also be a vehicle for social subversion, however. In the 1930s German artist Hans Bellmer was celebrated in France for his use of dolls, often dismembered or deformed and posed sexually, as a response to the Nazis. Since then feminist artists have used dolls to question cultural expectations of women. Many of the works in Woman Made Gallery’s “Devils and Dolls,” a show of 45 artists, come across as fairly traditional dolls, falling somewhere between the poles of American Girl and Bellmer. I found myself drawn to these three-dimensional, tactile pieces rather than to the paintings and prints–usually because I coveted them. They were cute and I wanted to take them home, but where’s the provocation in that?
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Despite the show’s title, many of these works demonstrate that dolls provide comfort even to grown women. Li Raven’s small beaded Goddess of P.M.S. is a slightly bloated-looking woman in a gorgeous low-cut red dress who looks downright proud of her protruding belly. Karen Schuman’s folksy beaded figure, Banana Lady, is cuddly despite her plain wooden head and spiky arms. The objects I coveted most, however, were Bridgette Tritz’s Common Street Trash dolls. Brightly colored and tiny, they’re made of broken key rings and other, less identifiable junk she found and adorned with cloth heads: she puts a face with long red yarn braids, for example, atop a tiny Eiffel Tower souvenir.
Linda Brown’s Devil Worship adheres the most closely to the show’s theme: resembling a dressing table or altar, it’s adorned with dozens of objects, most of them red or black and shiny. That makes the flesh tones of the two dolls stand out all the more: one is a baby doll with a screw through her heart and the other a more grown-up figure in fetish boots with a nail in her head. At first I didn’t like the piece, finding it too obvious. But the more I looked the more I found in it an undercurrent of humor and acceptance that offset the sensationalism. I started to see the snake wrapped around a sconce as another doll, and the two sneering masks as dolls too. Ultimately Devil Worship puts satanism on a continuum with other forms of play. In fact it’s possible to see all figures in art as dolls, made with the intent to manipulate and control so we can conquer our fears and find comfort.
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