Suddenly I was pitched back in time. It was a vid that did it, about the Popovy sisters. They are Russian identical sisters who make jointed porcelain dolls. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH5exTEFVhw
Some would say the dolls were pornographic, particularly since our culture is so captured by girls on the verge of adolescence who cannot be too thin, too made up, too costumed. A bit like Lolita, but not trashy, more as though ballet dancers. The dolls combine porn, elegance, objects of control, and the fascination of the miniature.
For me two things were precursors. One was the collection of miniature fashion mannequins “Theatre de la mode” at the Maryhill Museum on the Collumbia River which my family used to visit on Sunday afternoons. https://www.maryhillmuseum.org/inside/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/theatre-de-la-mode
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The other was an endless stream of paperdolls that I drew and its SnowWhite/RoseRed fairytale theme, though I didn’t consciously know it. I made clothes and devised ways to add hairpieces and earrings. They were intensely felt and they were about coming into sexuality, with round breasts I copied from the cartoon strip called Winnie Winkle. People knew about the dolls but not about what they meant emotionally, what they FELT like to me.
Bob Scriver and other Western artists were doing something like the same thing with their tabletop bronzes of riders and warriors. In fact, David Powell said that when he embarked on a series of doll-like pieces about Piegan Indians, they sometimes sold faster than his paintings and for better money.
Boys used to buy bags of little stamped-out plastic cowboys and Indians with repetitious horses they could clamp onto. Another version was battalions of soldiers. They all did ritualistic things that involved making gun noises. We had a sandbox and built forts or trenches.
Humans have the capacity to create selves that are not themselves. It is an art form, but also a form of play. It is a kind of control, but also a release from imprisonment in one identity. Romantically attenuated and fabulously silk-wigged Lolita porcelain dolls with articulated joints are only one kind. They have a kind of bittersweet quality, halfway between being an unconscious child and an enchanted being, possibly not human. “Pleasure accompanied by suffering or regret.” Movie stars try to hit that sweet spot.
Another kind of doll with much emotional weight is intensified baby dolls, utterly realistic, quite unlike mass-produced dollies for children. These grip the gut with the urge to shelter, to soothe, to engage. They trigger something intense in some people and maybe perverse in hopefully fewer people.
That begins to come close to what these figures evoke: more than empathy, more like fusion or inhabitation, becoming the figure at the same time as interacting with it in an inchoate and unfocused way full of magic — even holiness. Not everyone feels it.
Bob’s wildlife dioramas were made “inch-to-a-foot” and included no humans at all, but still drew people in. You could see it on their faces. Sometimes they forgot they couldn’t reach through the glass and stubbed their fingers. When the Big Flood hit and there was no tourist business all summer, Bob had just dissected a saddle to copy in heroic scale, “one-and-a-half feet to a foot” for the big Bill Linderman statue in Oklahoma City. There was a bit of free time and he used it to make tiny replica saddles out of leather lady’s gloves his mom gave him. I made the cinches from carpet thread. Someone stole the saddles out of the display cases. Miniaturization makes people yearn for the small world.
When I was still working in Portland and walking the shops at lunch time, I used to visit a place that carried miniature figures. Most remarkable was a glass case of tiny Japanese erotic figures. They were often nude, gleeful, and startling, like an old man bent over, semi-squatting, while two children made his balls swing. I bought Bob one carved from a hard kind of nut, almost like ivory. It depicted an ape clasping a naked woman, small enough to fit in a teaspoon. He loved it and immediately pocketed it. I always wondered what happened to it when he died. What happened to the collection after I looked at it closely was that it was moved out of the main store and one had to ask to see it.
Most art dolls are Fimo, polymer clay, and there are magazines filled with them. The Popovy sisters use cast porcelain parts which are surprisingly durable when they are small. The women prepare the parts and assemble them in the same way up to a point, but then create unique faces and hair, clothing and accessories. I wonder if the sisters talk to the dolls. Once the Portland Bureau of Buildings had a Christmas project of making dollhouses for homeless kids. I made a family of pink Fimo pigs to live in mine and when the fire department came to pick up the houses for delivery, I saw that two big tough guys were making my pigs walk around and talk to each other.
I’ve never had the dexterity or control to make dolls as striking as these, but there have been times when I’ve made cloth dolls and used them for marionettes. I put lead fishing weights in their feet. Or I made papier mache puppets with taxidermy eyes. They say that even a paper plate with two dot eyes and a curved mouth will get the attention of an infant as though it were a human face. We see little persons everywhere.
Here is a vid of those fabulous Popovy dolls again.
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