mannqeuin by Andre Masson
photo by Man Ray
I went to see the Surreal Things exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario (extended until Sept 19th) yesterday. It brought me back into an old obsession in a totally new way. I’ve been captivated by the beauty of mannequins since I was about five years old. I wanted to share a section of the curatorial text below by Ghislaine Wood (also author of The Surreal Body: Fashion and Fetish) because I found it as fascinating as the art.
The Mannequin
For the Surrealists, the mannequin embodied the contradictions of modern life. It confused the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, human and machine, male and female, sexualized and sexless, and ultimately life and death. It was simultaneously a commodity, a simulacrum, an erotic object and the embodiment of the uncanny.
For Freud, the uncanniest objects were ‘waxwork figures, artifical dolls and automatons.’ In the Freudian uncanny, the mannequin also represented the suppressed primal human being emerging from the unconscious. Andre Breton saw the mannequin as the ultimate representative of what he termed ‘convulsive beauty.’