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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathDoll-Bodies
 
Sex Pictures (Sherman, Cindy), 1992Untitled (Freisager, Katrin), 2002Living Dolls (Freisager, Katrin), 2000
 
 
 

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repeated in the «Culture Wars» in puritanical America. [17] For the Surrealists, who under National Socialism fell into the category of degenerate art, whose German protagonists first had to emigrate to Paris and ultimately to the United States, the doll was the scene of an intense inspection of fantasies that thematicized a fragile subject position with its projections and disassociations and which was interspersed with traditional gender images within the context of fears of dismemberment. These were produced against the background of projective phantasms of modernity [18] and set against—in an almost anticipatory way—the Nazis' aesthetics of thebody. [19]

The hybrid doll constructions and photographic series of dolls by Hans Bellmer, who is considered to be one of the German Surrealists, are e.g. a point of reference for the American artist Cindy Sherman, who cites the Bellmer doll elements in her photographs while at the same time forcing open conventional gender constructions. In contrast to Bellmer, in her photoseries with spare body parts, she mixes ‹female› and ‹male› parts of the body in such a way that the fears of dismemberment cannot be disassociated from

 

one's own body (‹gender›) and assigned to the «other» (gender). This is a continuation of her work on the deconstruction of images of femininity and masculinity in the mass media of film and photography and in art history tradition, which she has pursued since 1975 from her photographic series of Film Stills and Centerfolds, fairytale masquerades, History Portraits, to her Disgust Photos and the «Sex Pictures» from 1992. [20] Bellmer's influence can be found on the level of the representation of the construction of body images—in the exposure of the material, the observer's eye—as well as on the level of the reflection on the mediality of photography.

These aspects have also been brought out by the Swiss artist and photographer Katrin Freisager, who is based in Zurich. She accurately traced the constituting elements of photography, pornography, view and body construction above all in her ten-part photoseries «Untitled» (2002). The seven-part photoseries «Living Dolls,» which she produced a few years prior to this, could be associated with a further aspect of the Bellmer doll photographs, viz. with his concept of the body (image) as language and parts of

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