The art of Hannah Wilke: ‘Feminist Narcissism’ and the reclamation of the erotic body.

December 31, 2010December 31, 2010 / Lady Lazarus / 18 Comments

I wrote the following essay on American visual artist Hannah Wilke for an art history class in graduate school. I include the full text and images, excluding citations. If you’re a student who discovers this via search engine, then I have every confidence in your research abilities to track down the scholarly sources. Wilke was a seminal Second Wave feminist artist whose work has received renewed interest from scholars since her death in 1993.

The politics of inclusion that shaped feminist discourse in the 1960s and 1970s spawned a legacy of body-based performance art, much of which was associated with women artists who used their own face as a subject of continual exploration. The self- imaging of women artists such as the provocative American artist Hannah Wilke was frequently attacked and dismissed by art critics as being indulgent exercises in narcissism that only served to reinforce the objectification of the female body. The charge of narcissism leveled on Wilke and her work may have been warranted, however, this should not be considered as a pejorative. Rather, the narcissism of Wilke can be viewed as a shrewd feminist tactic of self-objectification aimed at reclaiming the eroticized female body from the exclusive domain of male sexual desire. The ‘self-love’ of narcissism is a necessary component to this reclaiming of the body and the assertion of a female erotic will as being distinct from that of the male artist. Wilke wielded her narcissistic self-love as a powerful tool of critique, defiantly placing her own image into the hallowed halls of the male-dominated art institution.

The term “narcissism” derives from the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, a beautiful but arrogant youth who cruelly spurned the love of his admirers. For his cruelty, he was cursed by the goddess Nemesis and fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. The doomed Narcissus pined away for his unattainable lover – the image of his own self – and literally died as a result of his amorous longing.

Sigmund Freud bestowed the name of this mythic Greek youth upon his psychoanalytic theory of narcissism, a theory that describes normal personality development. According to Freud, the self-love of narcissism is a normal complement to the development of a healthy ego. Whereas a certain amount of narcissism is desirable, an excess of self-love is considered dysfunctional and indicative of pathology. This latter definition of narcissism, the one of pathological self-absorption, has cast our current understanding of narcissism in a negative light and reinforced the use of the term as a pejorative.

The psychoanalytic theories of Freud suggest that negative or pathological narcissism is a specifically female perversion. Art critic Amelia Jones writes that “[d]rawing loosely on Freud’s definitions – which connect narcissism to both a stage of development and to a form of homosexual neurosis – narcissism has come in everyday parlance to mean simply a kind of “self-love” epitomized through woman’s obsession with her own appearance.” Hence, the charges of narcissism leveled on Hannah Wilke were attempts by the critics to summarily dismiss her work as mere manifestations of a woman’s obsessive self-love and infer, according to Jones, that Wilke’s art was not “successfully feminist.”

Critics such as Amelia Jones and Joanna Frueh have championed Wilke and proposed, through their respective writings, a new and positive view of narcissism as a legitimately feminist, subversive tactic in the making of art. In her catalogue essay entitled “Intra-Venus and Hannah Wilke’s Feminist Narcissism”, Jones contextualized Wilke’s work within the framework of her “radical narcissism” and argued that the use of her own image throughout her art is far from the conventional or passively ‘feminine’ depiction of women as seen in advertising and other forms of mass media. Joanna Frueh, in her essay that accompanied the 1989 Wilke retrospective in Missouri, equated Wilke’s “positive narcissism” with a form of feminist self-exploration and an assertion of a female erotic will. Both Frueh and Jones cogently argue for a “positive narcissism” that expunges itself of the negative connotations of Freudian psychoanalytic theory and, in contrast, actively and unapologetically engages in self-love. Wilke enacts an aggressive form of narcissistic self-imaging that defiantly solicits the patriarchal gaze which she then, as Jones writes, “graft[s] onto and into her body/self, taking hold of it and reflecting it back to expose and exacerbate its reciprocity.”

Fig. #1. Hannah Wilke. "S.O.S. Starification Object Series: An Adult Game of Mastication". Mixed media (artist's multiple). 1974-75.

Wilke’s active solicitation of the “male gaze” as a method of feminist critique is best exemplified in her photographic series entitled S.O.S. Starification Object Series: An Adult Game of Mastication (figs. 1-2), a series which had been originally produced as a box-set artist’s multiple for the 1975 exhibition “Artists Make Toys” at the Clocktower in New York. Wilke commissioned a commercial photographer to capture her semi-nude self-portraits in which she adopts the exaggerated postures of the celebrity and fashion industries. In one such photograph, a sunglass-wearing Wilke clutches her Mickey Mouse toy tight to her partly naked torso as she gazes off-camera at an imaginary paparazzi. She assumed the role of the celebrity art “star” suggested by the witty wordplay of her title S.O.S. Starification Object Series. As with many of Wilke’s titles – for she was fond of linguistic games and frequently engaged in puns – there is a double meaning to be found in the titular pun “starification.” Wilke dotted her own skin with several tiny vaginal sculptures that she had shaped from chewing gum. These small sculptures decorated her body in a manner recalling the practice of ritual scarification employed by certain African cultures as a means of beautification. Given the presence of the vaginal “scars” in combination with the sexy, glamourous black and white photographs of Wilke, it is not difficult to locate the artist’s critical stance on the occasionally painful regimens Western women inflict upon themselves in their conformity to accepted conventions of beauty. Wilke willfully submitted her own body to this ritualized, albeit pretend, self-abuse in order to address this “tyranny of Venus” which, as Susan Brownmiller writes in Femininity, “…a woman feels whenever she criticizes her appearance for not conforming to prevailing erotic standards.” The fact that Wilke herself was, by these same erotic standards, a beautiful and sexually desirable woman does not confuse her aim of critique but rather serves to strengthen her commentary on women’s roles and gender stereotypes. Her overstated, sultry expressions and postures of sexual display invite scrutiny. Wilke was keenly aware of her status as a celebrity art-star as well as a beautiful, eroticized object of desire and she capitalized on both with the S.O.S. Starification Object Series. The original dissemination of this photographic series in a packaged box set, complete with sticks of chewing gum, preformed gum vaginas and phalluses, and the semi-nude artist self- portraits, simultaneously commented on both the artist-celebrity as a commodity as well as the erotic consumption of the female body. Cleverly, Wilke underscored the erotic self-objectification of her image in the extended title for this box set multiple: S.O.S. Starification Object Series: An Adult Game of Mastication. We are reminded that this is an adult game, and Wilke’s use of the word mastication in reference to chewing (gum) is likely a pun on masturbation, a suggestion that locates her eroticized self-portraits on the parameters of pornography.

Fig. #2. Hannah Wilke. "S.O.S. Starification Object Series: An Adult Game of Mastication". Detail. Mixed media (artist's multiple). 1974-75.

Assimilating the visual language of the objectified female body, Wilke employed her own eroticized body as a metaphorical mirror that she then held up to reflect back the sexual projections of male desire. This act of reflection enabled Wilke to sever her passive (and traditionally female) receptiveness of this male projection and assert her own erotic will. In her collection of essays entitled Erotic Faculties, Joanna Freuh used the phrase “autoerotic autonomy” in reference to Wilke’s images and suggested that her “…self-exhibition may demonstrate the positive narcissism – self- love – that masculinist eros has all but erased.” The empty vessel that is the celebrity or the fashion model – devoid of a personal will as she functions as a receptacle for our projected desires – has been adopted and systematically absorbed by Wilke’s exaggerated poses. For her part, Wilke then engaged her narcissistic self-love as a means to fill these empty vessels with her aggressive sexuality. The sites of female erotic pleasure, namely the mouth and the vagina, are conjured in her chewing gum sculptures while, at the same moment, they hint at the violent aggression of the folkloric vagina dentata.

The consciously sexualized self-objectification of Wilke and the use of her own body as a “professional currency” often elicited harsh criticism from the ranks of feminism, an ideology to which she actively subscribed. Lucy Lippard, the champion of 1970s feminist art, famously wrote that Wilke’s “confusion of her roles as beautiful woman and artist, as flirt and feminist, has resulted at times in politically ambiguous manifestations that have exposed her to criticism on a personal as well as on an artistic level.” Art critics Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman dismiss Wilke’s self-portraits: “In objectifying herself as she does, in assuming the conventions associated with a stripper, …Wilke…does not make her own position clear…It seems her work ends up by reinforcing what it intends to subvert…” The tense political climate and rapid social change of America during the decades of the 1960s and 70s fueled a radical activism amongst Second Wave feminists. The urgency felt by these activists to affect social change in relation to gender equality frequently generated a feminism that was fervent, even orthodox, in its ideology. This strict orthodoxy was shaped by anti- essentialism – a philosophical stance that rejected the representation of the female body as it was believed too imbued with a history of objectification by male artists – and therefore unable and unwilling to accommodate the sexualized body-based art of Hannah Wilke. The negative reception of Wilke by critics like Lippard, Barry and Flitterman may have been prompted by an adherence to this strict orthodoxy. The complex and ambiguous views of the body and female sexuality that Wilke presented, at times even contradictory to the aims of feminism, generated rancor in this inflexible climate of anti-essentialism.

In her 1978 interview “Artist Hannah Wilke Talks with Ernst” the artist unapologetically spoke of the “ethics of ambiguity” that characterized both her work and life. She addressed, in her honest and unmediated manner, the conflicted views of a woman who, though conscious of feminism, still felt concerned with her appearance and desirability to men. Rather than deny this impulse, Wilke embraced her feminine narcissism and brandished it as a weapon. Such a bold act of defiance and deliberate provocation against the anti-essentialist feminism that dominated the 1960s and 70s later established Wilke as the “…spiritual parent to postfeminist artists such as Tracey Emin…” and anticipated the self-imaging of Janine Antoni and Cindy Sherman.

Fig. #3. Film still from Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Fuses’, 1965.

Wilke was not the only woman artist of her generation to use her own body in a consciously sexualized manner, nor was she the only artist to engage with narcissism as a feminist tactic. Carolee Schneeman’s canonical 1965 Fuses (fig. 3), a film that included photographic footage of the artist having sex with her then-partner James Tenny, was greeted with outrage from the feminist audience who, as film theorist Shana MacDonald writes, “…[were] uncertain how to incorporate the sexualized, erotic and self-produced image provided by Schneemann” Similar to the harsh criticisms leveled on the photographs of Wilke, the erotic self-portraiture of Schneemann’s Fuses was frequently attacked as being “obscene and narcissistic.” According to MacDonald, it was her sexually graphic imagery – imagery that feminist theorists found indistinguishable from the objectified female image being resisted – that caused Schneemann to be misunderstood by her peers and ultimately marginalized.

As the coquettish semi-nudes of Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series made reference to imagery generated for pornographic use, so too does Schneemann’s Fuses address pornography in order to critique its traditional objectification of women. The repeated, non-linear narrative of Fuses interrupts the pornographic convention that the film necessarily terminate in the obligatory “cum shot” of male ejaculation. The sexuality communicated by Schneemann’s film is highly subjective and anchored in the banal reality of the everyday, including shots of the artist’s cat and the domestic surroundings of her home. The subjectivity of Fuses was further heightened by the literal mark of the artist, evidenced in Schneemann’s use of hand-processing techniques such as collage, painting and scratching directly onto the celluloid. Her infusion of a personal subjectivity performed as a feminist resistance against the sexual- objectification of the female body as seen in conventional pornography. By simultaneously inhabiting the roles of both the image and the image-maker, she positioned herself “not as sex object, but as willed and erotic subject, commanding her own image.” Schneemann’s urge to see her own sexualized image is a manifestation of self-love and the hypothesized “positive narcissism” of Jones and Freuh. As Narcissus romantically yearned for his own image, Schneemann desires to view her own erotic image, not reflected in a pool of water, but projected larger-than-life on the theatre screen. This act is a bold assertion of her narcissism and erotic will.

Fig. #4. Video still from Hannah Wilke’s ‘Gestures’, 1974.

At first glance Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series, much like Schneemann’s Fuses, appeared to reinforce the visual language of the objectified female body. The sultry eyes, seductively parted lips and naked breasts of Wilke read as cultural signifiers of female sexual invitation and availability. Lippard may have been correct in her observation that Wilke played both the “feminist and flirt” but her assessment that this polarity stemmed from her confusion over these two roles was essentially wrong. Wilke’s narcissistic self-imaging was not, as Elizabeth Hess charged, an impulse to “…wallow in cultural obsessions with the female body,” but a pointed feminist critique of these same obsessions. In contrast to fashion models and pin-up girls, who passively offer their flesh to be inscribed by male desire, Wilke interrupted this erotic exchange by the presence of her chewing gum “scar” sculptures. Recalling the artistic intervention of Schneemann’s hand-processing techniques in Fuses, Wilke’s sculptures mark the otherwise unblemished surface of her skin and disrupt the easy consumption of her body as an erotic object. She declared the canvas of her skin as the terrain of her own erotic expression, and marked it accordingly. Whereas the youth Narcissus failed to possess his own beloved self-image, Schneemann and Wilke are too shrewd in the deployment of their narcissism to suffer this same fate.
Women artists of the late 1960s and 1970s, such as Schneemann and Wilke, often engaged in the feminist project of reclaiming the female body from previous male privilege. Centuries of depiction by exclusively male artists had rendered the female nude a dehumanized, neutral object. Wilke and her feminist contemporaries sought to rectify this situation by seizing creative control over one’s own body. Performative works such as Wilke’s 1974 Gestures (fig. 4) – a video that featured the artist sculpting her flesh – enact this reclamation by proposing the artist’s own body as an artistic medium.

The thirty-minute black-and-white video Gestures showcases Wilke, her head and shoulders tightly framed, performing a series of repeated, often exaggerated gestures and facial expressions. These gestures are often absurd and comical in nature, while others verge on sexual seduction. A silent Wilke gently pulls and kneads her own face, manipulating her youthful, elastic skin much like the soft, putty-like material of her chewing gum sculptures. Saundra Goldman observed that Gestures “…signaled [Wilke’s] transition from sculpture to performance,” and there is a cyclical component to this transition: the soft, pliable chewing gum that Wilke employed to approximate flesh was now being mimicked by the artist’s own skin.

Fig. #5. Hannah Wilke. ‘I OBJECT: Memoirs of a Sugargiver, 1977-78.

The reclamation of the female body from the privileged control by male artists was the primary motivation behind Wilke’s photographic diptych entitled I OBJECT: Memoirs of a Sugargiver (fig. 5). Wilke’s strong objection was directly aimed at the father of the avant-garde, Marcel Duchamp. While the box set of S.O.S. Starification Object Series offered a critical view of consumerism, the fashion industry and pornography, and Gestures a declaration of control over one’s own body, the faux book jacket of I OBJECT was a direct response to Duchamp’s static rape victim of his infamous diorama Etant donnès (fig. 6). In her 1988 conversation with Joanna Freuh, Wilke stated: “I find Etant donnès repulsive, which is perhaps its message. She has a distorted vagina.” The pun contained in the title I OBJECT, with the play on the word “object” as both noun and verb, laid the foundation for the critical feminist dialogue Wilke embarked upon with this heavy-weight of art history.

Fig. #6. Marcel Duchamp. ‘Etant donnès’. View of installation (left) and detail (right). 1946-66.

The sculptural diorama Etant donnès confronts the viewer with a rustic wooden door, riddled with small holes. A light source shines through these holes, enticing the viewer to peek through and witness a scene hitherto concealed. A pastoral, natural landscape is suddenly revealed, in the foreground of which an alarmingly pale, naked female torso lies inert amongst a bramble of dried twigs and leaves. Her legs are splayed open to reveal her strangely misshapen vagina. The exposed nakedness of the woman, her corpse-like stillness and her derelict location amongst the bramble imply violation and victimhood. As if in a final gesture of violence, Duchamp has chosen to frame the woman’s image within the peepholes of the door in such a manner as to visually decapitate her. The mechanism of display – namely the peepholes through which the scene is revealed – forces the viewer to assume the role of voyeur, further compounding the violation of the woman.

Wilke’s I OBJECT functions as both homage and a critical response to Duchamp: she believed that “to honor Duchamp is to oppose him.” Taken while on a family vacation in Spain, the glossy colour photographs of Wilke show the artist, fully nude, lying atop some discarded clothing on a large, craggy rock. One of the photographs that comprise this diptych approximates the pose of Duchamp’s female torso, with Wilke’s body foreshortened in the camera lens so that her pubic region dominates the picture plane. In stark contrast to the deathly paleness of the woman in Etant donnès, Wilke appears whole-limbed, healthy and tanned. The clothing upon which she lies may have been voluntarily shed in a moment of spontaneous sexual activity, or simply in the act of sunbathing. A bottle of suntan lotion that lies nearby seems to support the latter. The second photograph of the diptych shows Wilke staring upwards at the camera, and directly at the viewer, her face partly concealed by a rocky outcropping. A small but satisfied smile adorns her face. The superimposed text reads “I OBJECT: Memoirs of a Sugargiver” across the upper left portion of the image and then “Hannah Wilke” on the lower left, in close juxtaposition to her smiling face. The presence of her written name paired with her direct, outward gaze reads like a radical declaration of personhood, as if to say I am Hannah Wilke, and here is my body. The feminist gesture of “positive narcissism” comes strongly into play in this particular context. Wilke’s feminist response to the faceless victim of Etant donnès is a bold affirmation of both her personhood and her female sexuality.

As previously mentioned, the close association of women to narcissism partly derives from a loose interpretation of Freudian theory that linked a “woman’s obsession with her own appearance” with a form of psychoanalytic pathology. This association is highly relevant in the critical reception of a work of art; a crucial factor to consider is the gender of the artist. Lucy Lippard, the same art critic who, ironically, dismissed Wilke for being a “feminist and flirt”, denounced the gender divide that existed between the reception of body-based performance work created by male artists against similar work produced by women. “She is a narcissist,” Lippard wrote of women artists, “and Vito Acconci with his less romantic image and pimply back, is an artist.” The crucial distinction between the narcissism of Vito Acconci and Hannah Wilke – for as Rosalind Krauss effectively argues in her essay “Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissism”, Acconci was most assuredly a narcissist – lies in the feminist agenda that fuelled the narcissism of Wilke.

Fig. #7. Video still from Vito Acconci's ‘Undertone’, 1972.

Vito Acconci’s performance-based work often contains ambiguous narratives that frequently wander into the territory of the absurd and contradictory. Much like his contemporary Hannah Wilke, Acconci primarily used his own body as an artistic medium. In his 1972 video entitled Undertone (fig. 7), Acconci is as conspicuously aware of performing as Wilke was of posing in her multitudinous self-images. Undertone begins with Acconci seating himself at a table, the opposite end of which extends in the direction of the camera. This arrangement immediately implicates the camera/viewer into the scene. Acconci closes his eyes, placing his hands on his thighs, and repeatedly mumbles an awkwardly confessional sexual fantasy involving an imagined woman who lurks beneath the table: I want to believe there’s a girl here under the table…who’s resting her hands on my knees…she’s resting her forearms on my thighs…slowly, slowly rubbing my thighs… After several repetitions of this fantasy, Acconci suddenly pauses, straightens his body and stares directly out at the camera/viewer. His hands, now resting on the table top, are clasped together in a pleading gesture while he repeatedly intones: I need you to be sitting there…facing me…because I have to have someone to talk to…so I know there’s someone there to address this to… Acconci proceeds to again close his eyes and place his hands beneath the table. Resuming his mumbled confession, he contradicts his original narrative by stating: I want to believe there’s no one under the table…I want to believe…it’s me that’s rubbing my thighs… The video concludes with a final plea to the viewer to witness the revelation of his fantasy.

Comparable to the revealing titles of Wilke, the layered meanings behind Acconci’s title Undertone provides an important clue to its interpretation. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines the word undertone as an “underlying quality; undercurrent of feeling.” The underlying theme of Acconci’s video is not found in his repeated sexual fantasy of the imaginary woman under the table – a fiction that his monologue later negates – but rather in his urgent plea directed at the viewer. Acconci compels the viewer to witness his confessional fantasy and thus, by acting in this capacity, participate. A necessary reciprocity exists between Acconci’s performance and the viewer’s reception of this fictitious fantasy. A fruitful comparison can be drawn between Acconci’s Undertone and Wilke’s Gestures video. The performance of Acconci is validated by an exchange with the viewer in the same manner as the poses of Wilke require an onlooker. Equally, both artists achieve a form of sexual power through their performative actions. The crucial difference lies in gender. Even as the awkward disclosure of the fantasy ostensibly renders him vulnerable, Acconci nonetheless seizes sexual control. He punctuates the revelation of his fantasy by a vigorous and masturbatory rubbing of his own thighs, a gesture that creates an uncomfortable tension in the viewer who has been manoeuvred into the place of the voyeur. His repeated pleas to the viewer to witness recall the dynamic of the sexual exhibitionist who requires an onlooker to fulfill his perversion. Acconci enacts his narcissism by forcing his passive-aggressive sexuality upon the viewer.

In the video Gestures, Wilke systematically performs the postures of female display. She seductively rubs her finger across her upper lip. With the practiced smile of a fashion model, she repeatedly tosses her long hair in simulation of a shampoo commercial. Isolated from their usual context of seduction or advertising, these gestures appear absurd – which is entirely Wilke’s point. By repeatedly and methodically performing these gestures, she empties them of meaning. As a young, desirable woman Wilke understands that sexual display is the currency of her power. As a feminist, she acknowledges that these same gestures reduce her to a mere sex object. There is an implicit solicitation of the viewer to witness Wilke’s repetitive actions in much the same manner as Acconci’s Undertone requests participation with his narrative. Their respective sexual power – Wilke as the female sex object and Acconci as the male sexual exhibitionist – require the gaze of the viewer to activate this power exchange.

The deliberate self-objectification of Hannah Wilke seems, in the context of contemporary art practice, very prescient indeed. A consummate agitator and provocateur, her legacy of complex and eroticized body-based art anticipated the work of numerous future women artists whose creative point-of-departure was their own visage. While her work may have been devalued by feminist critics of her generation, a renewed interest from the ranks of feminist scholarship has emerged since her untimely death from lymphoma in 1993. Wilke and her feminist colleague Carolee Schneemann, who worked similarly with erotic self-portraiture, shrewdly engaged with the self-love of positive narcissism to reclaim the erotic female body from the objectification of the male gaze. Fully comfortable within her own skin and embracing all of her very human contradictions – as an artist, a feminist and a woman – she skillfully commanded her own image, both in front of and behind the camera.

Calamari Love: the curious tradition of Japanese ‘tentacle erotica.’

December 13, 2010July 6, 2015 / Lady Lazarus / 9 Comments

Katsushika Hokusai, "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife," 1814.

Tentacle…what? Yes, indeed. In the realm of sexual fantasy, any and all things that can be imagined are possible. Like, for instance, receiving cunnilingus from an obliging octopus, as depicted in the above image by renowned artist Katsushika Hokusai. Known in the West by the title The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, Hokusai’s print is one of the most celebrated examples of shunga (erotic art) from the Edo Period in Japan. According to a scholarly paper written by Danielle Talerico, the Edo audience would have clearly recognized Hokusai’s woman as a depiction of the female abalone diver Tamatori. In the legend, Tamatori steals a jewel from the Dragon King. However, during her egress, the Dragon King and his sea-life minions — including octopodes — pursue her. Evidently, once the minions successfully capture Tamatori, some sexy-time ensues.

The more contemporary version of Japanese ‘tentacle erotica’, known as shokushu goukan, is a darker, violent and sadistic cousin of the gentler, Edo-period erotica. In 1986, manga artist Toshio Maeda created his infamous series Demon Beast Invasion, which featured malevolent tentacled aliens who embark upon a cross-breeding campaign with human females in a bid to rule the Earth. Essentially, Maeda’s rather thin plot-device afforded him the excuse to stuff a large number of phallic ‘tentacles’ into a great many female orifices. The reason for the reliance on tentacles was simple. Until 1993, Japanese law prohibited straightforward depictions of penises and intercourse. So Maeda was obliged to come up with a substitute: tentacles.

So, there you have it. I bet you’ll never look at a plate of deep-fried calamari in quite the same way again.

Preface & Chapter One: A Sense of Nostalgia

November 11, 2010January 17, 2011 / Lady Lazarus / 4 Comments

For many years, I was satisfied by the simple act of drawing. While a number of my colleagues relied on computer software or other technologies to produce their art, I rejoiced in the analog. Aided by a pencil and a facility for drawing, I was limited only by my imagination when creating fantastical worlds between the borders of my paper. And then, one day, I wondered how my fantastical worlds would appear were they freed from their paper borders and delivered into our three-dimensional world.

Tatebanko is the Japanese art of creating dioramas and scenic perspectives from paper. It was popular and widely admired from the 17th century to the early 20th century.

The desire to see my drawings projected into space began, nearly two years ago, with a moment of pure serendipity. While checking my email, an advertisement for an ‘arts & crafts’ store landed in my inbox that offered Japanese paper dioramas for sale. These paper dioramas – known as tatebanko in their native land – are small boxes containing flat, printed paper elements that are folded and glued into miniature tableaux. I grew instantly curious. The shallow relief of the tatebanko provided the perfect stage upon which to mount my drawings and project them into space. As an artist who also works in print media, I could use printmaking techniques to generate multiples that could be cut out, folded and glued. I decided that the box diorama was an obvious next step in the evolution of my hitherto two-dimensional art practice, enabling me to consider space and volume with relative ease.

In the months that followed my virtual encounter with the tatebanko boxes, my project grew in both size and scope. My initial concept of a box diorama expanded into the much larger and more complex construction of a dollhouse, a toy fondly remembered from my childhood. Revisiting the dollhouse in adulthood, myself a parent, has proven a psychologically rich and poignant exercise. In stark contrast to the innocuous role-playing of childhood – when one could ‘play Mommy’ – as an actual parent, the actions I take have real life consequences. This simple fact can, at times, be the cause of anxiety. Additionally, while the household provides a peaceful refuge from the hectic pace of the outside world, the daily negotiations between career aspirations and familial responsibilities simultaneously render the house a site of friction and conflict. An exploration of the conflicts that arise from these competing interests was, in part, the impetus behind my dollhouse project.

Domestic conflict aside, the physical construction of the dollhouse presented the greatest degree of friction and conflict during its creation. Not being a sculptor or an individual with any discernible building skills, working with three-dimensional materials proved a challenging and, at times, frustrating process. However, rather than enlist the aid of someone more technically proficient, I was stubbornly determined to construct the dollhouse myself. Although this aspect of the project offered the steepest learning curve, it also proved surprisingly rewarding to begin to understand and address the special demands of my chosen building materials. Whereas at the start of this project, I viewed the dollhouse solely as a devise for the display of my drawings, by its conclusion, I gave equal consideration to the dollhouse as an object unto itself. This newly found appreciation for sculptural space was, for me, the most pivotal and profound moment of the creative process.

Yet another surprising discovery was the quality of play I found in working with the cut out lithographs. Having printed multiples of the same drawing meant that I was able to explore different arrangements of the same graphic elements. With my drawings freed from the static plane of the paper, I could experiment with composition, contextualizing and re-contextualizing with each new grouping of images. A folded paper wardrobe in one room, for instance, appears subtly altered when combined with different objects in another room. This quality of ‘play’ not only proved enjoyable, but also highly appropriate given the framework of a dollhouse.

Within the body of this paper, I reveal and discuss the various sources that have guided the aesthetics of my project. These sources – which include the Gothic novel, the horror film, and the art of the Surrealists – have shaped not only this project, but have greatly informed my artistic practice to date. It is to these sources that the Disobedient Dollhouse pays homage.

Chapter One: A Sense of Nostalgia

“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.”
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

The image that appears in my mind when I meditate on the word “house” is not a recreation of the family home of my childhood, nor is it a straightforward rendering of the house in which I currently dwell. Rather, it is an amalgamation of all the houses in which I’ve lived, blended together with the houses belonging to friends, and the houses I’ve vicariously experienced through films or books. This is the composite house of my dreams, a grand and expansive place with numerous corridors and hidden rooms. The space within my imagined house is infinite in scope. Doors from great hallways lead into small rooms, each presenting more doors which, in turn, lead to progressively smaller rooms, stacked into each other with the artful precision of a Russian matryoshka nesting doll. The endless replication of interiority in my imagined house, unlike that of the nesting doll, has no physical limits. Space as it is experienced through the psyche is boundless. Mine is an oneiric house – a house of dreams – similar in nature to the one conjured by philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his text Poetics of Space, built not from bricks-and-mortar but constructed from layers of memory and experience. According to Bachelard, my every experience with the phenomenon that is “house” is imbued with a deeply personal, psychological resonance derived from the memory of the very first house of my childhood. While I do support Bachelard’s claim that the childhood home is fundamental to the psychological mapping of the oneiric house, I would graft onto his argument the importance of the towers of fairytale castles and the cobwebbed elegance of aristocratic manors that so often provide the setting for Gothic narratives in film and literature. These majestic dwellings, while considerably more grandiose and romantic than the humble home of my childhood, are nonetheless formative to the house of which I dream. The mysterious interior of my oneiric house – the one of endless doors and dark, secret passageways – owe as great a debt to these traditions of literature and film as it does to my own personal, lived-in experience with a physical house. It is this house, this strange amalgam of the real and the fantastic, that I strive to conjure in my project entitled the Disobedient Dollhouse.
Granting form and substance to my house of dreams has proved a daunting task. The infinite space of the dreamscape, with its ever-shifting walls and limitless rooms and doors, defies reproduction in the static world of the real. At best, my aim to is achieve some sort of compromise with the infinite. Thus, I have sought to make this compromise concrete through the creation of a miniature toy house: a dollhouse.

My fascination with dollhouses began, predictably, in childhood. Though I was never fortunate enough to own a dollhouse, I did possess several pieces of plastic miniature furniture that I would fastidiously arrange into rooms. These rooms provided the setting for the domestic scenes myself and my playmates would enact with our dolls – scenes that mimicked the day-to-day household routines of our mothers. This form of play amongst young girls – where we would ‘play house’ and pretend to be ‘the Mommy’ – was not only an imitation of the maternal role as we observed it, but, presumably, constituted a type of practice for our future lives as women. Now, as an adult, artist and mother, I revisit the dollhouse. The idealized view of domesticity that informed my childhood dollhouse is reconfigured by my adult self as a place much more complex, even contradictory in nature. These darker, more nuanced shadings find expression in the ‘gothic’ elements of my dollhouse.

A dollhouse is a gendered space, one specifically codified as feminine. Literary critic Susan Stewart defines the dollhouse as a “discourse of the ‘petite feminine’” that yearns to see itself replicated in a tiny, precious model of perfect domesticity. Developed in the 17th century as an amusement solely intended for adults, it served as a trophy of the wealthy European woman. Given the rise in popularity of dollhouses in 18th century Europe, at a time in history when women’s roles were increasingly confined to the home, it is tempting to draw a correlation between this change in gender-based codes of conduct and the miniature toy house that reinforced a woman’s role as being solely defined by her place within the house. Her fantasy of a microcosm over which she held complete control – in a world in which she held little or no political control – played out through the choreography of furnishings in her miniature rooms. Unlike the traditional toy object, the staged interiors of the dollhouse were not meant to be manually played with but rather to be “consumed by the eye” as an object of display. As such, the dollhouse was modeled as a shrine to an idealized domesticity, forever unsoiled by the grimy reality of daily living.

A compulsion towards nostalgia often shapes the interior of a dollhouse. Contemporary dollhouses are decidedly not contemporary in their motifs, with the historic splendor of wealthy Victorian homes being the most frequently represented style amongst current dollhouse enthusiasts. As Stewart notes:

“…it is probably not accidental that it is the Victorian period which is presently so popular for reproduction in miniature […] because of that period’s obsession with detail and materiality is so analogous to the miniature’s general functions…”

Nostalgia is characterized by a sense of yearning, either for one’s own past or for an imaginary past located somewhere in history. Yearning constructs a view of the past that is sentimental in nature, and the dollhouse is a manifestation of this essentially romantic construction. There are no shoeless Dickensian street urchins haunting the perimeters of a Victorian-themed dollhouse; these are sumptuous interiors fuelled by fantasy and free of social critique.

A trace of nostalgia can be discerned in my Disobedient Dollhouse, evidenced by the Victorian-style decoration and furnishings, as well as in the clothing worn by some of its inhabitants. An old-fashioned cast iron cook-stove is represented in the kitchen. The parlor room prominently features an upright piano, an entertainment staple in many wealthy Victorian households. The era’s obsession with detail is fully on display in the intricately patterned wallpaper that adorns each room of my dollhouse.

Fig. #1. Odilon Redon. "The Crying Spider". 1881. Lithograph.

Not only do the furnishings and other contents express nostalgia, but the medium by which many of these contents were produced – namely the medium of stone lithography – is itself informed by nostalgia. The printmaking process of stone lithography enjoyed enormous popularity amongst visual artists in the 19th century, particularly during the later decades of that century. Hence, the formal characteristics of the medium carry a heightened association to print-based artwork produced during the Victorian era, particularly amongst fin-de-siècle artists such as Odilon Redon (fig. #1) and Edvard Munch. As a contemporary visual artist, producing a body of work using stone lithography is an especially purposeful act. Against the backdrop of the 21st century digital age, where images can be instantly produced and replicated with the click of a computer mouse, the physically arduous medium of stone lithography – which involves sanding and drawing onto a heavy slab of limestone – is comparatively anachronistic. At a time in history when images can be more easily obtained by photographic or digital means, the act of drawing and reproducing images with stone lithography carries with it a quality of nostalgia. By using this “nostalgic” print technology, my intention is to formally recall the style and design of Victorian art, and in particular the grotesque and macabre imagery of Victorian artists like Redon and Munch.

While a trace of nostalgia is detectible in the Disobedient Dollhouse, a tension also exists in the work that simultaneously disrupts the easy consumption of these same nostalgic images. The word “disobedient” contained in the title summons an image of a stubbornly defiant child who refuses to submit to a higher authority. Against which authoritative structure does my dollhouse rebel? In part, it is the force that drives the nostalgic impulse – the urge to construct a sentimentalized view of domesticity – that compels my dollhouse to revolt. A tactic of subversion has been employed as a means of rebellion. For instance, although the conventional Victorian domestic scene of a woman playing piano has been dutifully rendered, the woman depicted is a hybrid creature with the head of a bird. A chair located in the same room as the bird-headed woman mysteriously sprouts twisted floral vines that snake up the back wall. Gigantic insects infiltrate the room and swarm across the ornate damask wallpaper like a strange, inexplicable virus. These hybrid monsters, giant insects and fantastic vegetal growths disturb the inherent sentimentality of nostalgia and propose a dark, secret world that churns just beneath the veneer of domestic perfection.

[…this is an excerpt from my Master’s thesis on the Gothic aesthetic. For a continuation of this paper, please visit the earlier post “The Gothic House.”]

Surrealism, alter-egos and private mythologies; conclusion.

September 8, 2010February 25, 2024 / Lady Lazarus / 4 Comments

The concluding chapter of my essay on the Gothic aesthetic and my thesis project The Disobedient Dollhouse. These excerpts from my thesis began with The Gothic House and The Abject…, respectively.

“In 1930, after having furiously and methodically composed my
novel ‘La femme 100 têtes’ I was visited almost daily by Loplop,
Bird Superior, a private phantom very much attached and devoted to me.”
— Max Ernst

Fig. #8. Jennifer Linton. Detail from the “Disobedient Dollhouse”, 2009-10, lithograph.

Poised amongst the brood of bird-children sits the nanny, a character within my Disobedient Dollhouse that was modeled after myself. Downstairs in the kitchen, a second version of ‘myself’ cast as the household cook struggles with an absurdly large cooking utensil. These characters are the result of an amalgamation of Gothic heroines I have borrowed from sources such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and, most especially, Lewis Carroll’s Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Costumed in a fashion reminiscent of a Victorian girl, my ribbon bonnet, puffed sleeves and crinolined skirt (fig. #8) recall the famous wood engravings of Alice by British illustrator John Tenniel. By incorporating my own image into these characters, I have effectively embedded myself within this miniature world. This role-playing is one of the creative strategies I employ in order to generate a private mythology.

Throughout my visual art practice, I have used various legends and myths as cultural ready-mades into which I introduce my own personal symbolism and meanings. Over the years, these pre-existing myths have been absorbed into my artistic lexicon, contributing to a complex language of symbols by which I construct a private mythology. Myths supply an accessible and universal narrative to which I can attach my idiosyncratic story.

Fig. #9. Jennifer Linton. “The Bitter Seed”, 2000, coloured pencil and ink on Mylar.

Renowned scholar and mythologist Joseph Campbell describes one of the goals of myth as “…effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will.” Similarly, in his essay “The Expressive Fallacy” Hal Foster cites Nietzsche’s discussion of an artist’s use of myth to express an interior world: “The whole notion of an ‘inner experience’ enters our consciousness only after it has found a language that the individual understands – i.e., a translation of a situation into a familiar situation…” The “language” to which Nietzsche refers can be interpreted as “mythology” which provides a universal narrative to which all cultures, no matter how disparate, have access. The “inner experience” may be read as the personal, psychological or emotional world that the artist seeks to materialize through the use of myth. In short, myths connect us to each other by anchoring the idiosyncrasy of the individual to a universally shared point of reference.

The construction of a private mythology is a procedure that allows an artist to explore deeply personal and intimate subject matter while simultaneously maintaining a level of psychological distance. In my own work, I employ the strategy of role-playing as a means to address autobiographical content. In an earlier body of work entitled The Bitter Seed (fig. #9), I combined images of myself as a child with the character of Persephone, a heroine borrowed from Greco-Roman mythology. By adopting the role of Persephone, I universalized the idiosyncratic – depersonalizing the personal content. This process provides a psychological distance while simultaneously rendering the work more readily accessible to the viewer.
The mythological character Persephone has supplied my artwork with its most recurrent of symbols: the pomegranate. My series The Bitter Seed took its name from the pomegranate seed that Persephone was forced to eat, thus sealing her fate as the goddess whose annual death and rebirth would usher in the changing seasons:

“Persephone was the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of agriculture. Hades, the lord of the Underworld, surprised Persephone one day while she was picking flowers and carried her off to be his bride. Demeter, the distraught mother, threatens to destroy all mortal men by causing an endless drought unless her daughter is returned. Zeus, who is the king of the gods at Olympus, commands Hermes to fetch Persephone from the realm of Hades. The wise Hades chooses to obey the command of Zeus; however, before Persephone is returned, he tricks her into eating a seed from a pomegranate. This deception is later revealed when Demeter asks her daughter ‘…have you eaten any food while you were below? If you have not, even though you have been in the company of loathsome Hades, you will live with me and your father…but if you have…you will return again beneath the depths of the earth and live there a third of the year; the other two-thirds of the time you will spend with me…’”

To the ancient Greeks, the myth of Demeter and Persephone served to explain the death and regeneration of plant life each year. Persephone personified the cycle of the seasons through her annual sacrifice.

Fig. #10. Jennifer Linton. Detail from the “Disobedient Dollhouse”, 2009-10, lithograph and digital image.

A pomegranate motif appears repeatedly throughout my Dollhouse. A highly stylized version of this fruit is featured in all of the stained-glass windows, and pomegranates adorn the wallpaper of the bedroom and the head and footboard of the bed. Two of the framed, miniature pictures that hang on the bedroom wall also contain the pomegranate. One of these framed pictures features a self-portrait, in which the curly locks of my hair transform into undulating, snake-like vines (fig. #10). These vines terminate in a single pomegranate, delicately suspended above my open palm. This self-portrait, however, makes only a vague reference to the pomegranate from the Persephone myth. Within the narrative of my current project, I no longer inhabit the role of this Greco-Roman goddess. The pomegranate serves not as a symbol of sexual subjugation – as it does within the Persephone myth – but rather as a symbol of female empowerment. The partially opened vulviform shape evident on the pomegranates throughout the Dollhouse make the linkage to female sexuality quite explicit.

Whenever an artist includes self-portraiture, the temptation for the viewer is to read autobiographical content into the work. Such is the case in my work, although this content is largely mediated through my use of symbolism and mythology. The grotesque and dreamlike imagery of the Disobedient Dollhouse obscures any straightforward reading of autobiography, softening the distinction between ‘the invented’ and ‘the real’ elements. The dark, psychologically tumultuous material that the Gothic would seek to conceal, and the Freudian psychoanalytic model to repress, my Dollhouse opts to place on display, albeit cloaked in myth and symbolism.

Blurring the boundaries between ‘the invented’ and ‘the real’ through the creation of a private mythology was a strategy often employed by artists who subscribed to the idiom of Surrealism. The fantastic and frequently grotesque imagery of Surrealist art closely relate to my Dollhouse’s otherworldly and Gothic-inspired content. In fact, the aims of Surrealism – to question rationality and uncover sublimated fears and desires – seem to echo the urge of Gothic novelists like Brontë to expose the concealed darkness of the human psyche. “Surrealism and the Gothic share a decisively anti-Modernist stance,” wrote curator Christoph Grunenberg, “rejecting Modernism’s emphasis on order, rationality, and purity.” One of the most ‘gothic’ practitioners of Surrealism – and an artist whose work was dedicated to the manufacture of a private mythology – was the visual artist Max Ernst.

The collage-based books and graphic work created by Ernst possess an especially heightened quality of the Gothic. To a large extent, this quality derives from the source material Ernst used to construct his collages, which included wood-engraved illustrations taken from 19th century French popular fiction. The subject matter of these ‘pulp’ fiction books and periodicals generally involved:

“…torrid love, torture, crimes passionels and the subsequent incarcerations and executions (by guillotine), hatreds and jealousies among the very wealthy and the very indigent…”

These are the same dramatic, sinister and darkly romantic themes that typify Gothic fiction. Ernst’s disjointed juxtapositions only served to amplify the already emotionally charged content of his source material.

Fig. #11. Max Ernst. Illustration from the novel “Une Semaine de Bonté”, 1933, engraving based on collage.

One of Ernst’s most famous collage novels is Une Semaine de Bonté (fig. #11), in which the days of the week are represented by seven seemingly arbitrary “deadly elements” such as the “Lion of Belfort,” bats, serpents and dragons, and the mythological character of Oedipus. It is in the latter chapter concerned with Oedipus that the bird-headed creature named ‘Loplop’ first makes his entrance into Ernst’s novel. The hybrid bird-man Loplop was a creation with which Ernst closely identified. His identification to the bird-headed man prompted many of his contemporaries to view Loplop as the artist’s alter-ego, an association that Ernst strengthened through his writing in Notes pour une biographie. Ernst frequently mixed actual autobiography with his Surrealist art, making it impossible to distinguish between the artist’s life and his wildly inventive stories. In one such account, Ernst forges a strong link between his early life and his artistic creation Loplop:

“1906. Head Bird Hornebom. A friend by the name of Hornebom, an intelligent, piebald, faithful bird dies during the night; the same night a baby, number six, enters life. Confusion in the brain of this otherwise quite healthy boy – a kind of interpretation mania, as if newborn innocence, sister Loni, had in her lust for life taken possession of the vital fluids of his favorite bird. The crisis is soon overcome. Yet in the boy’s mind there remains a voluntary if irrational confounding of the images of human beings with birds and other creatures; and this is reflected in the emblems of his art.”

Ernst’s motivation behind this conflation of his art and autobiography remains unclear. While writers such as Werner Spies describe Loplop as an “autobiographically tinged bird-creature”, there remains a degree of mystery surrounding Ernst’s personal attachment to his alter-ego. His complex vocabulary of recurrent symbols and characters, including the omnipresent Loplop, may have been more the result of a Surrealist intellectual game than a deeply personal expression of psychological catharsis. Driven by a fascination with psychoanalysis, Surrealist artists like Ernst frequently engaged in game-playing as a means to access the random machinations of the unconscious mind. The technique of collage was particularly well-suited to this end. Thus, Ernst’s juxtaposition of disparate images, such as a male figure topped with a bird’s head, could well be the result of his Surrealist investigations into randomness. Regardless, inspired by the psychoanalytic writings of Freud, his private myth-making created a forum in which he unearthed and explored the repressed material of the human psyche.

The bird-headed women that populate my Disobedient Dollhouse can be viewed as the great-granddaughters of Loplop. Female counterparts to Ernst’s invariably male creation, they inhabit a similarly enigmatic role. While it is enticing to read these bird-women as extensions of myself, this close association remains ambiguous. My own image is represented in the appearance of the ‘nanny’ and ‘cook’ characters. Cast in these roles, my social status within this world appears subservient to the two bird-headed women, one of whom leisurely plays at the piano. Has my character/s been enslaved by these menacing creatures and forced to care for their offspring while they lounge? Given my real-life status as artist, wife, and mother, one could easily attach this autobiographical reading. Caution should be exercised, however, to interpret these images too literally. Similar to the private myth-making of Max Ernst, my work contains as much theatrical artifice as it does legitimate psychological exploration. Steeped in dramatic excess, my Dollhouse is self-consciously prone to hyperbole.

The genesis of my bird-women has little to do with Surrealist explorations of the unconscious mind, but instead, are visual evidence of my recent interest in dioramas. In fact, the figure of the bird-woman holding the skeletal rodent was not only the very first image I created for this project, but she derived entirely from a taxidermy diorama I viewed online at the A Case of Curiosities web site. Anthropomorphic taxidermy dioramas were a strange passion of the Victorians. Walter Potter, one of that era’s most celebrated practitioners of this macabre art form, was renowned for his complex and large scale tableaux such as his Kittens’ Tea & Croquet Party (fig. #12). The ghoulish spectacle of Potter’s taxidermy dioramas neatly encapsulates the type of grotesque art to which I am drawn as an artist, and therefore, it is not the least bit surprising that these provided the creative ‘jumping-off point’ for my dollhouse project.

The hybrid bird-women and host of other grotesques that populate my Disobedient Dollhouse represent the wild, unruly and random elements of the psyche that stubbornly resist the process of repression. The nostalgic impulse that seeks to construct a too-perfect version of the past – one that suppresses the ‘dark family secret’ or other psychologically troubling material – is thwarted by these defiant monsters. The idyllic view of domesticity generated by nostalgia rejects the ugly, soiled, imperfect and dissonant. This romanticized construction is illusory and cannot be maintained. Shaken to its very foundations by the uncanny creatures that swarm its interiors, it will inevitably falter and collapse like the ill-fated House of Usher.

Epilogue: A Perverse Thrill

“Who has not a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”
— Edgar Allan Poe

The music builds to a crescendo that ends in a sudden, resounding crash, followed by silence. “She’s dead”, pronounces Dr. Markway after he grasps the arm that dangles limply from the open car window. This is the dramatic finale of Robert Wise’s 1963 film The Haunting, in which the character of Nell meets her end in a fatal car accident on the grounds of Hill House, remaining forever as the caretaker of the vindictive ghost who haunts the nursery in this classically Gothic house. “It was what [Nell] wanted, to stay here…” explains the clairvoyant Theo, “…she had no place else to go. The house belongs to her now, too…maybe she’s happier.”

Moviegoers have flocked, myself included, to horror films like The Haunting in order to vicariously experience the eerie and macabre. What is it about these frightening experiences that we find so intriguing? Much like the malevolent spirit of Hill House that beckoned to Nell, we feel urged by an inexplicable force to seek out the locked doors, hidden rooms and dark, mysterious corners of the Gothic house. The more we have been instructed by the rationality of science to reject the nonsensical, the superstitious, the absurd and otherworldly, the more we seem compelled to seek these out. The shadowy interiors of these cinematic and literary haunted houses have significantly shaped the construction of my oneiric house, the one that I dream with the endless doors and secret passageways. They also inform the grotesquery of my Disobedient Dollhouse. Rather than reject the absurd and uncanny, my Dollhouse celebrates it.

Preface & Chapter One: A Sense of Nostalgia (jenniferlintonart.wordpress.com)

The Abject, the Grotesque and the Uncanny; an excerpt

September 2, 2010January 17, 2011 / Lady Lazarus / 3 Comments

A continuation from my previous post, The Gothic House.

“This was all so strange and uncanny that a dreadful fear came upon me.”
— The character of Jonathan Harker from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula.

Any analysis of the term ‘gothic’ will inevitably conjure its related terminologies: the ‘abject’, the ‘grotesque’, and the ‘uncanny’. By its very nature, the Gothic contains elements of each of these terms, although it maintains a separate and very distinct character. All three of these terms find a varying degree of expression within my Disobedient Dollhouse. The first term ‘the abject’ was coined by the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in her seminal essay entitled Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Abjection is primarily concerned with societal taboos surrounding the materiality of the body, and the horror that arises from exposure to bodily excretions such as blood, pus and feces. For example, the horror associated with blood is a central theme to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the classic Victorian Gothic novel in which the legend of the vampire is powerfully invoked. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva classifies the corpse as representing the utmost in abjection: “[The corpse] is death infecting life. […] Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.” When confronted with a corpse, we are forced to address our own mortality and the inevitable corruption of our own bodies.

Fig. #5 - Lithograph from "The Disobedient Dollhouse", Jennifer Linton, mixed media installation, 2009-10.

The abject is clearly present within my Disobedient Dollhouse. A group of dead mice hang by their tails inside a kitchen cabinet, presumably providing a food source for the other inhabitants of the Dollhouse. A sinister bird-headed woman stands before the cabinet, clutching the tiny, skeletal remains of a rodent-like creature (fig. #5) While this scene does not contain any signs of blood or viscera, these small rodent corpses offer the presence of violent death, thus contributing to an atmosphere of abject horror within this Victorian-style dollhouse kitchen. Although animal and not human, these tiny corpses nevertheless serve as potent reminders of our own eventual demise.

While elements of abjection are undeniable within my Dollhouse, the second terminology related to the Gothic – the term ‘grotesque’ – has played a significantly greater role in the development of my imagery for this project. The term ‘grotesque’ originated in the ancient Roman period and relates to fanciful, decorative flourishes in art and architecture. Grotesque art involves the fantastic, ugly and bizarre, and its subjects are frequently mythological creatures and other strange, physically malformed monsters. The bizarre, anthropomorphic creatures that populate Lewis Carroll’s children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are a primary example of ‘the grotesque’ in literature. Carroll’s novel has also proved a valuable source of inspiration for the fantastic hybrid creatures that inhabit my Disobedient Dollhouse. In fact, the only human figure that appears in my Dollhouse is a character loosely based on Carroll’s Alice. This character – ostensibly a self-portrait as I served as the model – appears twice, once as the beleaguered ‘nanny’ in the nursery, and again as the ‘cook’ in the kitchen. The ‘nanny’, gazing down with quiet stoicism at the squawking bird-infant cradled in her arms, was based upon a

Fig. #6. John Tenniel. Illustration for Lewis Carroll’s "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland", 1865, wood engraving.

19th century illustration for Carroll’s novel by John Tenniel depicting Alice holding a bonneted baby pig (fig. #6). The monstrous brood housed inside my nursery – heads tilted up with beaks wide open, their arms thrust outwards in a gesture of relentless, constant need – represent every parent’s nightmare of unending responsibility. The parental anxiety symbolized by this scene has been tempered, however, by an element of the absurd. Much like the ridiculously grotesque image of the bonneted pig held by Alice, my bird-headed children are designed to elicit equal measures of pathos, humour and horror. My nursery most assuredly conveys parental anxiety, but it does so with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Grotesque art revels in the absurd, championing a fantasy world of the irrational over the rigid strictures of realism. One tactic employed by Lewis Carroll to create the ‘grotesque’ in Alice was his effective play with scale, a scheme that underscored the absurdity of his Wonderland. Alice experiences a succession of physical transformations when, enticed by the label on a mysterious bottle that reads ‘DRINK ME’, she consumes its contents only to magically shrink in size:

“It was all very well to say ‘Drink me,’ but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. ‘No, I’ll look first,’ she said, ‘and see whether it’s marked “poison” or not’… […] However, this bottle was not marked ‘poison,’ so Alice ventured to taste it, and […] she very soon finished it off. ‘What a curious feeling!’ said Alice; ‘I must be shutting up like a telescope.’ And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden.”

After her initial transformation, Alice consumes a cake labeled ‘EAT ME’ and shoots upwards in the opposite direction, growing large so suddenly that she becomes trapped within the house.

As the sudden alteration of a person’s size is impossible without the intervention of magic, this change in scale is both fantastic and absurd in nature. Alice’s transformation from miniature to gigantic in Carroll’s novel provides clear evidence of the absurd, even comical, possibilities of this play with scale. This does not, however, necessarily apply to an object. The miniature furniture contained within a dollhouse, for instance, does not appear absurd or grotesque due to its strict adherence to a standard scale. In fact, the adherence to scale is one of the most fundamental principles of any dollhouse. Any object within this miniature world that deviates from the standard scale appears strangely incongruous in relation to its surroundings. Susan Stewart, in her analysis of the dollhouse, quotes the author Arthur Benson from his introduction to The Book of the Queen’s Dolls’ House:

“The scale of one inch to one foot being precisely maintained throughout…thus there is nothing of the grotesque absurdity of a scene that does not resemble life and has only the interest of caricature.”

The accuracy of scale within a dollhouse creates a sense of realism. Hence, when a deviation from scale occurs, the illusion of reality is severely comprised.
Similar to Carroll, I have adopted elements of ‘the grotesque’ in my Disobedient Dollhouse by playing with the scale of objects. In fact, several deviations in scale exist. In the kitchen, in the guise of the household cook, I attempt to wield a gigantic eggbeater that stands as tall as my miniature self (fig. #7). The exaggerated difference in size – plus the fact that, undaunted, I continue to struggle with the giant kitchen utensil – heightens the grotesque absurdity of this scene.

Fig. #7 - Lithograph from "The Disobedient Dollhouse", Jennifer Linton, mixed media installation, 2009-10.

One creature that appears repeatedly throughout my Dollhouse is the insect. Changing the size of the insect, as well as the context in which the insect is received, is a simple gesture that invokes ‘the grotesque’. Initially, I drew these insects to actual scale from specimens found in a local museum. When placed on the walls of my Dollhouse, however, these same insects suddenly appear gigantic in relation to the miniature scale therein. This change of context – from a normal sized insect in our world to a gigantic one in the miniature world – alters the perception of these creatures from ordinary to grotesque. When these same insects are scaled up, appearing as giants that loom over the viewer within the gallery space, this encounter with the grotesque is further intensified. As the contents of the Disobedient Dollhouse emerge into the surrounding exhibition space, the viewer becomes immersed in its fantastic world – no longer a mere observer but a full participant in its alternate reality.

The repetition of the insects and change of their scale harkens back to my earlier analogy of the Russian matryoshka nesting doll – a doll within a doll, each one a slightly smaller version of the larger doll that contains it – an analogy suggestive of an almost endless replication. By playing with scale, I allude to the infinity of repeated space, an infinity that is only truly attainable in my ‘house of dreams.’

An encounter with giant insects on a gallery wall – insects made strange by the fact of their surprising scale – can be classified as an encounter with ‘the uncanny’, the third and final of the terminologies related to ‘the Gothic.’ Our present day understanding of the term ‘the uncanny’ has been largely shaped by the psychoanalytic viewpoint of Sigmund Freud’s 1919 seminal essay entitled “The Uncanny”. In his essay, Freud defines the uncanny experience as: “that class of the frightening which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” To experience something as ‘foreign, and yet familiar’ may result in feelings of discomfort and alienation. In this regard, the concept of ‘the uncanny’ is closely related to Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection – in which the human corpse can be simultaneously experienced as alien (the abject) but also felt to be strangely familiar (an individual, now deceased). Freud situated ‘the uncanny’ in the realm of the repressed: “[The uncanny] is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old – established in the mind and become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” According to the Freudian psychoanalytic model, the process of repression involves the rejection and subsequent suppression of troubling impulses and desires. The concept of repression closely relates to the suppressed ‘family secret’ frequently found within the Gothic narrative. Whereas the Gothic ‘family secret’ manifests in the guise of a vengeful ghost, repressed desire assumes the form of the uncanny person or object.

In his essay “The Uncanny,” Freud analyzes the etymology of ‘unheimlich,’ the German word for ‘uncanny.’ His analysis proposes a strong linkage of ‘the uncanny’ to the domestic setting of the home. The German term das Heimlich signifies that which feels homely, comfortable and familiar. The inversion of this term, das Unheimlich, negates this feeling of comfort and suggests an estrangement or feeling ‘not at home,’ literally ‘unhomely.’ Through the process of repression, the safe haven of the home becomes ‘self-haunted’ by ghosts of the unconscious, a phenomenon that transforms the otherwise comfortable and familiar setting into a place that feels inexorably strange.

In his catalogue essay for the exhibition Gothic mounted at the ICA Boston in 1997, curator Christoph Grunenberg reflects on the nature of the uncanny:

“The invasion of the private and secure sphere of the home by some unknown evil force exemplifies the conflict between interior and exterior world, between individual and society, and between the intra- and intersubjective. Ultimately, the uncanny describes the return of repressed events, memories, and fantasies – the encounter with one’s own most intimate fears…”

The “private and secure sphere” of the home becomes the site of internal conflict, where the repressed are stowed away in hidden rooms, behind locked doors, in attics, closets and cupboards. Ultimately resisting suppression, the repressed reemerge as the ‘uncanny’ and transform the home into a strange and frightening place.

The ‘uncanny’ appears throughout my Disobedient Dollhouse in the strange and otherworldly transformations. The bed – that most psychologically potent of symbols – literally boils over with desire and sprouts flowers from the elongated bedposts. Snakes emanate from the tousled bed sheet and slither across the floor, penetrating the wooden floorboards and sinking into the room beneath. These uncanny transformations hint at a secret world of sublimated desire, resistant to the forces of repression that are compelled to hide them away. Like the ‘madwoman in the attic’ of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, they periodically escape imprisonment, only to wreck havoc in the realm of the conscious.

Preface & Chapter One: A Sense of Nostalgia (jenniferlintonart.wordpress.com)

The Gothic House; an excerpt

August 20, 2010February 25, 2024 / Lady Lazarus / 2 Comments

The following text is an excerpt from my Master’s thesis written, in part, on the topic of the Gothic aesthetic. I felt that this chapter of the paper might be of particular interest to those that read this blog. The “Disobedient Dollhouse” project to which I make reference was the visual art component of my MFA thesis. To view images from this project, click on the Gallery page located above the header of this blog. Enjoy.

“It was an evil house from the beginning – a house that was born bad.”
— The character of Dr. John Markway from Robert Wise’s 1963 film The Haunting

I confess to being an avid fan of gothic horror films and ghost stories, a confession that may not seem overly surprising given the content of my work both past and present. The castles and aristocratic manors that I mentioned earlier as being critical to the formation of my ‘house of dreams’ arise from these sources (fig. #2). The heightened theatricality of a medieval cathedral, castle or historic manor has been incorporated into my oneiric house and translated into its endless doors and dark, secret passageways. The term ‘gothic’ that I use to specify a certain subgenre of horror fiction refers not to the tribes of ancient Germanic people from whom the name originally derived, nor is it related to the medieval art that also bears this name. Instead, the term derives from a chiefly British literary genre of the 18th and 19th centuries, originating with Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel entitled, appropriately enough, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Gothic literature combined elements of both horror and romanticism and its themes typically involve death, ghosts, the supernatural, transgression, patriarchy and the female heroine. Much like the staged interior of a dollhouse, the Gothic novel reflected a similar tendency towards the staged and theatrical. Gilda Williams, editor of the contemporary art anthology The Gothic, described ‘Gothic’ as “a studied, adopted stance,” that is “cultured, sensual and affected”, a description that concisely captures the Gothic’s propensity for dramatic hyperbole.

Fig. #2. Film still from Robert Wise’s 1963 The Haunting.

A central motif to the Gothic narrative is the house, especially one haunted by ghosts – both literal and metaphoric – and the disturbing family secret that has been shut away in an underground crypt, a dark attic, or behind hidden doors. Beginning with Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the genre has maintained a continual fascination with architecture. Perched on a hilltop overlooking a grey and perpetually soggy landscape, the dilapidated old aristocratic manor provided the Gothic narrative with its characteristic atmosphere of gloom and foreboding. Not merely a setting for the narrative to unfold, the Gothic house was frequently cast as a character itself, imbued with an uncanny – and often malevolent – sentience. This notion of a sentient house that is, by virtue of some inexplicable phenomenon arising from its very construction, a conscious being, is best exemplified by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher in which the titular house claims the lives of the family that dwell within it. In Poe’s short story, the character of Roderick Usher believes that his family home is sentient through some mysterious combination of masonry and vegetation, and that the illness which plague both he and his sister Madeline have been caused by this house. Poe’s use of adjectives such as “eye-like” to describe the windows belonging to the House of Usher bestow an anthropomorphic quality to the structure, a quality which further underscores the notion of a sentient house:

“I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down – but with a shudder even more thrilling than before – upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.”

In the dramatic conclusion, the moral and spiritual decay of the Usher family physically manifests in the destruction of the house itself – the building literally splits in two and sinks into the surrounding landscape.

Fig. #3. Jennifer Linton. Detail from the Disobedient Dollhouse, 2009-10, mixed media.

The structural features belonging to my Disobedient Dollhouse, while not as malevolent as those of the House of Usher, share some of the qualities of anthropomorphism and otherworldliness with its literary antecedent. Reminiscent of the “eye-like” windows of Poe’s creation, the windows featured on all of my exterior-facing walls are comprised of a stylized stained-glass pomegranate design that closely resembles the slit-shaped eye of a cat. These “cat’s eye” windows – all of them grouped in pairs – are most clearly evident from the brick exterior of the dollhouse, where they stare out, unblinking, at the viewer. Additionally, a repeating pattern of disembodied eyes gaze outward from the wallpaper of the kitchen (fig. #3), suggesting that the house itself bears witness to the strange events that are unfolding within. Upstairs on the wallpaper in the nursery, a legion of tiny, open mouths appear to silently scream in a gesture that mimics the endless squawking of the bird-children that inhabit this room. Much like the sentient house of Poe’s story, these anthropomorphic elements propose a house possessed of consciousness – one that not only contains supernatural events, but may also be the generator of them. The desired effect I aim to achieve is a disquieting exchange between the Dollhouse and the viewer, as the walls of the dollhouse uncannily return their gaze.

The crowning glory of any Gothic house is, of course, the attic. Similar to its close relative the cellar, the attic is a mysterious and seldom-used room where items – both material and psychological – are stowed away. The attic located within Bachelard’s oneiric house is a place of light and rationality, whereas he characterizes his cellar as the “dark entity of the house” that “partakes of subterranean forces” of the irrational, unconscious mind. In an inversion of Bachelard’s house, the attic that tops my Dollhouse is a shadowy place that offers a single window through which the dark interior may be viewed. Following the convention of most contemporary dollhouses, a cellar room is not represented in my Dollhouse, although the small cupboard door beneath the stairs – through which vine-like tentacles emerge from darkness – seem to hint at the “subterranean forces” present in Bachelard’s cellar. Peering through the attic window, the viewer encounters a snake-tentacled monster with a single, gigantic eye returning their gaze (fig. #4). This strange Cyclops is positioned slightly off-centre and is thus partially obscured by the outer wall, the bars of window frame, and the darkness within. The very purposeful positioning of this creature follows the time-tested horror film adage that “a monster you can’t see is scarier than one you can”, granting the viewer only enough information to understand that something sinister lurks within this space.

Fig. #4. Jennifer Linton. Detail from the Disobedient Dollhouse, 2009-10, mixed media.

The attic is the only enclosed room within my Dollhouse, allowing a very limited access to its interior. As such, it is the most private and mysterious of all the rooms. If I imagine myself descending from the attic onto the second story of my Dollhouse, where the nursery and the bedroom are located, the level of privacy compared to the attic decreases. While a bedroom is generally considered a very private and intimate space, the contents of my bedroom are fully on display, thus negating privacy. One of the crucial features of a dollhouse is the lack of complete enclosure of the miniature, thereby admitting access to its interior. This access facilitates play in a children’s dollhouse, and allows for display in the dollhouse designed for adults. Whereas the ground floor and second story of my Dollhouse adopt this convention of display, the enclosed attic rejects it. Whatever monsters and dark, troubling secrets hide within its shadowy corners, the attic will not reveal too readily. In this regard, the attic is the most “disobedient” of all the rooms.

The dusty and cobwebbed attic, dark and infrequently visited, provides the optimal place in which to discard the disused, unwanted, and the surplus. It can supply storage space for the cherished items of the past, no longer in use, as well as a hiding place for family secrets and other psychologically troubling material. The attic is a quintessentially ‘gothic’ space, where suppressed secrets threaten to rise up like a vengeful ghost. Given that my Disobedient Dollhouse is a Victorian-themed dollhouse, it is not difficult to imagine all of the wild, violent passions forbidden by that era’s strict social codes might be banished into the hidden corners of this room.

Concealed family secrets that slowly reveal themselves, threatening to unravel the apparent order of the household and causing a “…forced reckoning with a long buried piece of family history” is a classically Gothic trope. Like the ‘sentient house’, whose malevolence has assumed solid form within the structure of the house itself, the Gothic ‘family secret’ often physically manifests as an individual, or a ghost. In Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, the ghost of Madeline Usher rises from the family crypt – after having been interred there whilst still alive – and claims her deadly vengeance upon her brother Roderick. In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, the violently insane Bertha Mason has been imprisoned in the attic of Thornfield Hall, literally bound by chains and guarded. Described as a “beast”, a “wild animal”, a “monster”, and likened to “the foul German spectre – the vampire”, the insane first wife of Edward Rochester represents the darkest and most dangerous of family secrets.

Literary critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their study of women writers entitled Madwoman in the Attic, draw a provocative parallel between the characters of Jane and Bertha in Brontë’s classic novel. They suggest that Bertha represents the “truest and darkest double” of Jane, embodying all of the wild, destructive passions that the genteel Jane consciously rejects. She can be likened to the wild, tangled vines that grow spontaneously from the chairs and bedposts in my Dollhouse, or the snakes that magically slither out from the folds of the bed sheet. Forced to dwell in the shadows of the attic for years, she reemerges into the light with an unchecked fury. The wild randomness of her actions, much like my snakes and vines, disrupt the social niceties occurring elsewhere in the house, serving as a forceful reminder that hidden secrets will inevitably “see the light of day”, and that the repressed will always return.

Preface & Chapter One: A Sense of Nostalgia (jenniferlintonart.wordpress.com)

A Disquieting Beauty: the photography of Loretta Lux

August 10, 2010September 21, 2011 / Lady Lazarus / Leave a comment

Study of a Boy 1, Loretta Lux, 2002.

It’s a given: babies and small children are cute. If ever there was a photographic image that possessed universal appeal, it is that of the child. Too young to have developed any sense of self-consciousness, they seem assured and wholly natural before the camera lens. That being said, there is no greater threat to the credibility of a fine art photographer than the use of the child as a subject. Photographs of cherubic babes are acceptable on your home mantle, but are they serious enough fodder for the lofty halls of the gallery or museum?

The meteoric rise and critical acclaim of photo-artist Loretta Lux answers my rhetorical question with a resounding “yes.” The German-born Lux combines painting with photography to create her quirky, signature portraits of children. She employs a subtle form of digital manipulation that seamlessly fuses her painted backdrops with the photographic foreground, resulting in images that appear just slightly “off” from straightforward portraiture. Her soft, diffuse light and muted colour palette give her children an otherworldly appearance, as if they were ghosts haunting long-abandoned houses. The nostalgic costumes in which her subjects are clothed serve to heighten this uncanny, ghost-like quality.

It is this tension between the beauty of the child and the strangeness of their environments that elevate Lux’s portraits above the Walmart-variety kitsch of, say, an Anne Geddes eggplant-baby, and offer up a compelling and unsentimental view of children and childhood.

The Green Room, Loretta Lux, 2005.

The Haunted Dollhouse.

July 19, 2010January 29, 2014 / Lady Lazarus / 2 Comments

Sarah Anne Johnson, “Upstairs Hallway”, 2009, Chromogenic Print from “House on Fire” series

There’s something inherently unnerving about a dollhouse. While we can easily admire and delight in its minuscule detail, this admiration is frequently accompanied by a sense of unease. This simultaneous intermingling of delight-with-unease is a manifestation of the uncanny — a sensation of anxiety experienced when one encounters “something familiar, yet foreign.” The dollhouse, with its miniaturized approximation of reality, recalls the familiar domestic setting of the home. At the same time, it falls short of appearing truly real. It’s the tension that exists within this disconnect — the miniature’s approximation of scaled-down reality with its inevitable failure — that contributes to our experience of the uncanny.

It is perhaps due to the uncanny nature of dollhouses that a curious subgenre has arisen — the haunted dollhouse. These are so popular that many web sites for dollhouse enthusiasts are now featuring “haunted dollhouse kits” for purchase. These range from kitschy, Halloween-variety spookiness to gloriously Gothic miniatures. Artists have, of course, also delved into this spooky realm. The chromogenic prints of Winnipeg-based visual artist Sarah Anne Johnson astutely edit out the campy cobwebs and, through her effective use of lighting and cropping, get straight at the mysterious elements of her miniature interiors. While it’s uncertain if Johnson would classify her dollhouse in the House on Fire series as haunted, it does strongly evoke some of the unnerving elements of the uncanny. I’m an immense fan of this series.

Sarah Anne Johnson, “Laundry Room,” 2009, Chromogenic Print, “House on Fire” series

Making art out of dead things, part II: The dioramas of Frederick Ruysch

July 14, 2010July 15, 2010 / Lady Lazarus / 2 Comments

In one of my earlier posts Making art out of dead things, I ruminated on the curious tradition of constructing art objects out of dead stuff. This ‘dead stuff’ ranged from taxidermic kittens and artfully-arranged insects to formaldehyde-preserved sharks and the bones of Italian monks. To this macabre list, I would now like to add the dioramas of the 18th-century Dutch anatomist Frederick Ruysch.

An engraving by Cornelius Huyberts of one of Frederick Ruysch's anatomical dioramas.

I first learned of Ruysch’s dioramas while conducting research for my Master’s thesis last year. One of my advisers, a professor of Anthropology at York University who shares my fascination with the unusual and bizarre, sent me a link to the Zymoglyphic Museum, a web site that contains a wealth of information on the curious intersection of art with science. According to this site, Frederick Ruysch (1638-1731) was a pioneer in preservation techniques for organs and tissue. In addition to his scientific achievements, he created a ‘museum of curosities’ that featured his anatomical dioramas of human fetal skeletons and other such bodily materials. Playing off the tradition of the memento mori, these melodramatic arrangements included skeletons weeping into ‘handkerchiefs’ made from papery-thin slices of brain tissue.

Here’s an excellent description of Ruysch’s strange assemblages from author Stephen Gould:

“Ruysch made about a dozen tableaux, constructed of human fetal skeletons with backgrounds of other body parts, on allegorical themes of death and the transiency of life…Ruysch built the ‘geological’ landscapes of these tableaux from gallstones and kidneystones, and ‘botanical’ backgrounds from injected and hardened major veins and arteries for “trees,” and more ramified tissue of lungs and smaller vessels for ‘bushes’ and ‘grass.’ The fetal skeletons, several per tableau, were ornamented with symbols of death and short life – hands may hold mayflies (which live but a day in their adult state); skulls bemoan their fate by weeping into ‘handkerchiefs’ made of elegantly injected mesentery or brain meninges; ‘snakes’ and ‘worms,’ symbols of corruption made of intestine, wind around pelvis and rib cage. Quotations and moral exhortations, emphasizing the brevity of life and the vanity of earthly riches, festooned the compositions. One fetal skeleton holding a string of pearls in its hand proclaims, ‘Why should I long for the things of this world?’ Another, playing a violin with a bow made of a dried artery, sings, ‘Ah fate, ah bitter fate.'”– Stephen Jay Gould in Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors

To view more of Ruysch’s dioramas, as well as other curiosities, visit the Zymoglyphic Museum.

The macabre eroticism of the ‘Anatomical Angel’

July 8, 2010June 7, 2011 / Lady Lazarus / 4 Comments

Sex and Death. An alluring, if frequently controversial, coupling. The symbolically potent pairing of eroticism with the macabre has a long, well-established tradition across many different cultures. The artists of the Northern Renaissance in Europe gave us the now familiar Death and the Maiden motif with its inherently erotic subtext. In 1920-30s Japan, there was the emergence of ero guro — a literary and visual art form that combined eroticism with elements of the grotesque. The focus of this blog post, however, shall be on the curious convergence of the erotic with the grotesque/macabre in anatomical art produced during the Age of Enlightenment.

L'ange Anatomique by Jacques-Fabien Gautier d'Agoty, coloured mezzotint, 1746.

One of the best known of the 18th-century anatomical artists was Jacques Fabian Gautier D’Agoty. Renowned as a printmaker of exceptional technical skill, his image of a flayed woman entitled Anatomical Angel was viewed as highly controversial even during his lifetime. D’Agoty dubbed his image Anatomical Angel due to the flaps of skin pulled away from the cadaver’s back in a manner that suggests angel wings. Great attention has been devoted to the elegantly coiffed hair on her half-turned head. Her rosy cheek appears flush with life. D’Agoty’s aptly-titled Angel exists on a plane somewhere outside of death, rendering her an otherworldly creature.

Personally, I find D’Agoty’s Angel less erotic than she is aesthetic. One cannot, however, quickly dismiss the artist’s decision to depict a young, conventionally beautiful and, yes, sexually attractive woman. Of course, D’Agoty knew his audience: scientists and people in the medical field, all of whom would’ve been men.

Wax model with human hair and pearls in rosewood and Venetian glass case; Probably modeled by Clemente Susini (around 1790)

Let’s leave the Angel of D’Agoty and examine a comparable Italian wax anatomical sculpture entitled Anatomical Venus, dating from the last decade of the 18th-century. This exquisitely detailed sculpture, attributed to Clemente Susini, extracts the erotic elements that were merely a subtext in D’Agoty’s Angel and places them in the forefront. The languorous expression on the face of Susini’s Venus seems to evoke the petite mort of orgasm more than the morbidity of actual death. Similar to the aestheticism of D’Agoty, Susini styles his Venus with elaborately braided hair and an elegant pearl necklace. (Even in death, a girl must accessorize).

Anatomical Venus, wax model; probably modeled by Clemente Susini (around 1790)

For more views of Susini’s Anatomical Venus, as well as other examples of anatomical sculptures, visit Anatomical Theatre. Highly recommended, if predictably macabre.

Lady Lazarus

art & animation by Jennifer Linton

Visual Art

The art of Hannah Wilke: ‘Feminist Narcissism’ and the reclamation of the erotic body.

Calamari Love: the curious tradition of Japanese ‘tentacle erotica.’

Preface & Chapter One: A Sense of Nostalgia

Chapter One: A Sense of Nostalgia

Surrealism, alter-egos and private mythologies; conclusion.

Epilogue: A Perverse Thrill

The Abject, the Grotesque and the Uncanny; an excerpt

The Gothic House; an excerpt

A Disquieting Beauty: the photography of Loretta Lux

The Haunted Dollhouse.

Making art out of dead things, part II: The dioramas of Frederick Ruysch

The macabre eroticism of the ‘Anatomical Angel’

Chapter One: A Sense of Nostalgia

Epilogue: A Perverse Thrill

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