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Indepth Arts News:
"Dolls, Dummies, Automatons"
1999-07-24 until 1999-10-07
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
Dusseldorf, ,
DE Germany
The avant-garde artists of the first half of this century invented a whole
diversity of anthropomorphous, synthetic figures and often mirrored
themselves in technoid doppelgängers. Shopwindow and tailors
dummies, lay figures and marionettes, automatons and robots, false limbs
and anatomy models, wax busts and wig blocks populated their artistic
worlds of fantasy. They fascinated painters, sculptors and photographers
alike, for they existed in a kind of limbo between deceptive trueness to life
and extreme artificiality.
Whilst dolls, dummies and other
synthetic figures are purpose-built,
lifeless artefacts, they nonetheless
simulate live human beings and are
able, in a most uncanny way, to develop
a dynamic all their own. It is precisely
this ambiguity which has fired the
imagination of so many artists of our
century: destructively critical, mystical
and magical, sexual and erotic —
epithets that testify to the fetish
character of these artificial human
substitutes.
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