hans bellmer (the dolls)

[frail_and_bedazzled]

Perhaps a more authentic anguish adheres to forbidden photography. Why not do it? But finally this new zeal is accompanied by certain annoyances, and it suffices to state that in precisely this manner little girls entered my mind. To tell the truth, certain objects from their domain had always aroused my lust, even if these were as fragile as the black eggs of Easter and their pink sugar pigeons and biscuits, which were promising but luckily to no advantage. They were hollow. Their seduction confessed deception in advance. It was sufficient in itself, assumed the lovely suspicious odor of the superfluous.
Of course white pigeons, roses, and clasped hands denied nothing to the maternal souvenir album. But if one made an abstraction of confectionary baroque, a single multicolored glass marble could expand such ideas in an obviously more disturbing direction. Although less confidential, it offered itself entirely to the eye, allowing the spirals of its intimacy to be seen in frozen ecstasy.

It was captivating. The thoughts aroused by its tension lent the marble a supernatural force, until it soared, vitreous, in space. Attracted by this prodigy, a band of lace encompassed the marble, the lost leg of a little doll curved lightly over it, a fragment of a cigar box reared up in a menacing vertical and, toward the top, its "flor fina" disappeared under a caress of corkscrew curls. In the midst of it all, a breast rose against a brittle fan, and a bow of ribbon pierced the pink or green aureole of the ring that kept the whole thing together.

The dream was destroyed, erased by the banal crumpling of a paper, and it vanished into thin air like a mist, like flies, across the heart carved in the bathroom door.

The marble remained in my fingers as suspicious as a girl's giggle behind the hedges. In a word, I was no longer able to find the mysterious ways of these little darlings insignificant. What transpired by the staircase or the cracks in doors when they were playing doctor up there in the loft, what oozed from those juicy enemas, if I dare say it--the sour juice of strawberries, in short, all that could easily be taken for seduction, even stimulate desire.

It must be recognized how reluctantly I was brought to this, that I restrained the too painful memory of all that could not be learned about them. And like me, no one would have lost all mistrust of such brats. When their legs stayed there, doing nothing but dawdling, one could hardly ask any more of their splay-looted allure, especially around the knees, than a resemblance to playful goats. Seen from the front or from the side, their profile already provided much less to laugh about; the frail curve of the calf was encouraged by the padding of the knee, venturing to a curious convexity. But the crowning confusion was when they stiffened unexpectedly, comparing their pretentious function to the course of a hoop in flight, only to end by hanging naked outside open-work laces and rumpled pleats, enjoying each other in the aftertaste of their game. Nothing in all this sustained the comparison to the little tarts with the pleated collars in the pastry shop. On the contrary, those little girls' legs were surrounded by an intangibility with which my great magician's Me collided, rebounding like their balls.

There were no spoils to be expected from this side; at most one could, in passing, underhandedly obtain the unaccustomed sound of a name that remained available like the epitome of the inexpressible. For my language had borrowed a raucous sound from streams of the firey water of the imaginary, so that the art of oaths spat from a rattling throat and hoarseness would have stifled in a cloud of ridicule had it tried to appropriate so precious a medley.

Unquestionably these little girls were not reassuring. At little expense, with a fortuitous flutter of pink pleats, they changed one into an ordinary sort of boy in dark pants and dull shoes, whose proportions were obtrusively exaggerated in the light of one's disenchanting contemplation of oneself. Nor was bitterness lacking when one of these finicky jointed females deigned to lower herself to the level of our world, when in the dark mazes of a dwelling made of chairs, crates, ironing boards covered with sheets, the heart was caught beating.

Indeed, it was implied that one was not the first to have certain fugitive contacts, without this good fortune relating to a strange and personal participation: the favor of chance did not dispel proper worth. But the memory of these contacts left too many desires, which, with a corrosive perseverance, began to turn on a more definite end. Let us anticipate: her popularized initials on board fences and walls were too dry for me. They lacked, above all, the convincing and meritorious precision of careful workmanship, and, like the rough draft of a clear vein of brass or of my phantoms knocking on the walls, could claim no great value. Probably collective usage had made them sterile, and before the eyes of too many passers-by, this sign had lost its ability to endow curiosity with anything but very timid sensations.

If the promise was not there, it had instead to be sought inside like the panoramas in my mirror boxes. But little girls (we came back to the same idea) were neither boxes, nor alarm clocks, and offered not the least trick that would allow me to turn the intentions attached to their charms into destructible or creative activities.

Believe me: the Mississippi no longer flowed into the stream under my window: the jumble of my old drawer and the spots on the wall paper were no longer anything but ironic souvenirs of past fertility, when inactivity was accomplished by the vague fear that in the end this pink realm would totally escape me.
Certainly in the years that followed, I sometimes underhandedly obtained a flimsy fragment of the dream in a careless drawing, or in a woman's play. But very little of all that subsisted. Nothing in comparison with the wealth of that enchanted garden whose distant odor had so rapidly depreciated my magician's faculties. I should not suppose that the fabulous distance the dolls retained was an essential element of this extreme fragrance that wasted away proportionately as their inaccessibility decreased? Would it not be in the doll's very reality that the imagination would find the joy, ecstasy and fear it sought? Would it not be the final triumph over those adolescents with wide eyes turning away if, beneath the conscious stare that plunders their charms, aggressive fingers were to assail their plastic form and slowly construct, limb by limb, all that had been appropriated by the senses and the brain?

Adjust their joints one to the other, skim off the images of infantile poses through balls and their radius of rotation, follow very gently the contour of small valleys, taste the pleasure of curves, make pretty things, and, not without some slight resentment, spill the salt of deformation. finally, to refrain from staving motionless before the interior mechanism, defoliate the thoughts retained of little girls, and expose the core of those thoughts preferably by the navel: panorama in the belly's depth revealed by multicolored electric illumination. Would this not be the solution?

[frail_and_bedazzled]

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[frail_and_bedazzled]

http://www.btinternet.com/~sev/REGRO...es/poupee3.jpg

[severin]

interesting..i kinda like that kind of art

[frail_and_bedazzled]

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ok. i guess i'll stop. um. i don't want to bother you with my opinions or feelings about the work. i just want you to experience it. the text is by the artist as well.