Artists who use dolls

Before I start filming, I want to consolidate my ideas by exploring artists who have used dolls in their work,
here are a few of my favourites:

Hans Bellmer

According to good old Wikipedia, Bellmer 'was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s'. He recreated the doll girl in a variety of contorted forms, all of which I find extremely scary. The fear they provoke is owed to their resemblance to a real body, combined with their Surrealist abstraction from it; they are both human and not-human. Like the dolls I have been using to depict the horrors of the pageant world, Bellmers 'poupees' give a sense of something not quite right. This is not surprising when we consider his inspiration was unrequited lust for a young girl. Like me, Bellmer manipulated his 3D object to create photographs, but he built it himself rather than using found objects.
' In acknowledging his objectification of the nubile form Bellmer seems to have stumbled across something much deeper, the tragedy of being that nubile form. Young women, though beautiful, often seek validation in a variety of ways. Society pushes such an archetype to be complacent and accepting of any affection given to them, even forcing them to play the role of the victim.'
- Interesting words from an extensive article found at http://volatilestructure.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/the-object-of-desire-la-poupee/


Jake and Dinos Chapman

From Six Feet Under (1997)

It would be hard not to choose these brothers, as I used to see them in the pub opposite my work! Long before this, I had found images of their strange mutant doll sculptures in books and been shocked by them from a young age. They manipulate life-sized plastic dolls to shock audiences, like I hope to. Though I'm not using life-size mannequins or mutating the body shape, I want a similar sense of obvious artificiality (hard, shiny plastic) which is unsettling in its imitation of human characteristics. I can see a lot of Bellmer's influence in their work with dolls.

Tracey Moffat

Doll Birth 1972

I had not come across this photographer before researching this project. I was taken aback by this image of two boys playing, from her 'Scarred for Life' series. Though it looks like a simple snapshot, this image uses the doll as a prop to show the tragic and the comic; in Moffat's words 'there is a thin line between both.'

Gabriel Orozco

Instead of working in the lab on Wednesday we visited the Tate Modern to see the Gabriel Orozco exhibition.

If you don't feel like reading all those scribbles, here's a summary:

• Orozco reinvents everyday objects, taking them out of context or manipulating them slightly, to make them seem more unusual (I plan to do this!) examples: abstracted washing lines/laundry in 'Lintels', collected and laid out pieces of tyres, spat-out toothpaste turned into patterns...
• In his famous piece 'Black Kites' (from the exhibition poster)  he has pain-stakingly drawn squares onto a human skull.*
• In paintings like 'The Eye of Go' the artist uses black circles to create a sense of the scientific, as well as emulating the strange bubbles in 'First was the Spitting' (paintings which use toothpaste/spit as a starting point)

*this could be relevant to what I am doing with painting on doll's faces with black ink.

Some comments on the everyday and makeup

"I don't believe in dressing up reality. I don't believe in using makeup to make things look smoother."
Lou Reed

Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

Philip Larkin

“I don't like standard beauty - there is no beauty without strangeness.”
Karl Lagerfeld

Kynodontas

I watched this Greek film (the title translates as Dogtooth) during GIS week,

which made me think about how 'the everyday' doesn't have to be mundane;

for some people every day is unimaginably bizzarre.

Though this film is obviously not animated, actually focusing very strongly on traditional filming, I want to use these ideas to make my animation unsettling and unusual.