The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art

Marionettes, Models and Mannequins

Adam Geczy

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781472595980
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Design
• Categoría: Fashion Design

Artificial bodies constructed in human likeness, from uncanny automatons to mechanical dolls, have long played a complex and subtle role in human identity and culture. This book takes a range of these bodies, from antiquity to the present day, to explore how we seek out echoes, caricatures and replications of ourselves in order to make sense of the complex world in which we live. Packed with case studies, from the commedia del'arte to Hans Bellmer and the 1980s supermodel, this volume explores the divide between the "real" and the constructed. Arguing that the body "other" plays a crucial role in the formation of the self physically and psychologically, leading scholar Adam Geczy contends that the "natural" body has been replaced by a series of imaginary archetypes in our post-modern world, central to which is the figure of the doll. The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art provides a much-needed synthesis of constructed bodies across time and place, drawing on fashion theory, theatre studies and material culture, to explore what the body means in the realms of identity, gender, performance and art.

1

CLOTHES OF CARNIVAL: PERSONAL PUPPETEERING AND ROLE PLAY

Ah! ah! ah! ah! How I have made them scared! Here we have some fools who fear me, me who fears others. I’faith! It is only about playing face in this world. Had I not played the lord, and had not played the hero, they wouldn’t have bothered nabbing me. Ah! ah! ah! ah!

—POLICHINELLE, IN MOLIÈRE, THE IMAGINARY INVALID¹

In accounting for major changes in human awareness and activity, the logical place to turn is historical circumstance: the climate of knowledge and need. Social changes that transpire from a particular leader, or upheavals such as war or natural disaster are easy to accept as part of the vicissitudes of change. However, the causes of changes in consciousness and knowledge are harder to position. The alterations of worldview instigated by Kepler and Galileo are to a great extent precipitated by growing sophistication in lenses and the burgeoning of world travel. And the major landmark that followed from their example was the introduction of the Cartesian cogito, in which the mind is deemed independent from the body, and in which the only worldly certainty is that we think and know we are alive. Descartes spent his entire professional life careful to duck accusations of apostasy, but his system, widely agreed to be the beginning of modern philosophy, is central to the schism between rationality and religion that would only continue to widen. In this light, we can begin to speculate more deeply on the phenomenon of the commedia dell’arte and its historical complement of the masque as it grew out of the sixteenth century. People had always dressed up, even to the point of knowing that their own enactment in social and personal settings are equivalent, yet never before had there been such a stylization by which theater was organized.

The commedia began with a relatively prescriptive framework of costumes and character types that were the armature for improvisation. The term commedia dell’arte was coined toward the end of the seventeenth century,² and was preceded by “commedia a braccio,” “commedia all’improviso” (or improvisa), “commedia di gratiani,” “commedia a soetto,” “commedia d’ostrioni,” “commedia italiana” and “commedia di zanni.”³ By this time, it was embraced throughout Europe and persists to some degree to this day (if only as an historical echo) as a theatrical institution. Many commentaries about the commedia and improvisation tend to emphasize the role of language,⁴ while underplaying the extent to which improvisation steers the actor toward the body, toward the physical and embodied aspect, inherent but subordinate to spoken language. In his analysis of the influence of the commedia on Molière’s Don Juan, Franco Tonelli remarks that

The specificity of the Commedia dell’Arte resided in the shifting of the theatre’s center of gravity from words to mimic and action. The spoken word became but one element among all others, often improvised, created, readapted, at any rate conditioned by a theatrical mode more akin to the “happenings.” Thus, the specificity of the Commedia signals that the matrix of their entertainment was a blatant transgression of the dominant theatre’s norms; for here it is not the text that becomes action, rather it is action that becomes text. As forms of entertainment, their performance privileged movement over linear narrative, space over temporal development.⁵

Or to use the words of Gustave Attinger, the commedia dell’arte is “a plastic conception of cinema,” plastic here understood in the sculptural sense of clear tangibility.⁶ As traveling actors, placing action before language also made them more universally accessible.⁷ This would later prove congenial to presound cinema. After all, the most famous modern inheritor of the commedia’s stylized movements, and in masking and dressing up to support improvisation, was Charlie Chaplin. But either way, improvisation opens up a zone of uncertainty for the actor. Well before film, the fragility of the theatrical machinery was part of the thrill.⁸ Occurring at the same time as the entry of women into live public theater,⁹ improvisation also sounded a thoroughly modern tune since it reflected the equivocal nature of existence itself—think of Hamlet vacillating between his perception of himself as isolated individual or as a plaything of forces beyond his ken.¹⁰

With this form of theater, instead of the hand occupying the puppet, or controlling the strings of the marionette,or tweaking the arms of the doll, it was the body that entered the sheaf of costume, and the container of a character type. Commenting on a later exponent of the commedia, the Catalan dramatist Joan Brossa, David George notes that “Commedia characters are non-human, and as such play an important role in Brossa’s idea of theatre, which is unsentimental and denies psychological realism. They are easily identifiable types, able to be quickly portrayed.”¹¹ The respective actors don clothing encoded, or associated, with particular actors who are expected to respond in particular ways according to prescribed character traits. In this way, the body enters into prefabricated mechanism in order to animate it, as a hand enters into a puppet. The commedia is conceived as a decisive turning point in notions of dramatic character and a challenge to theatrical convention.¹² But this was evidently also a symptom of new material and psychological conditions. Just as, traditionally, dolls were both the material and the symbolic other for self-reflection and self-growth, they were also the reminder that the world had an order independent but inclusive of the individual. With the commedia, the actor effectively renounces his or her particularity, to participate in a generic order, functioning as a doll for the audience. But there was more to this, since the inherently improvisatory nature of the commedia also meant that the “doll” also had its own inner power. This was pure theatrical artifice laid bare because one knew from the very beginning that the character was not real, but a stereotype. For all accounts the notion of clear order of humans within a definable universe was scuttled. The commedia dell’arte, it would seem, was the cultural manifestations of Cartesian doubt, and the comedic embodiment of uncertainty in the modern world.

Originating in mid-sixteenth century Italy, the commedia dell’arte evolved out of Mannerist drama. Here, Mannerism has more than one definition, but it is broadly understood in art the jettisoning of stylistic harmonies associated with Renaissance humanism in favor of a more jarring aesthetic that was reflected the uncertainty of the individual in the face of church and state. One of the most cited watersheds in the way art reflected the change of values was in the Sack of Rome in 1527 due to troops out of control following the sudden death of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Pope Clement VII was driven from the Vatican and thousands of priests murdered, churches and monasteries sacked and pillaged. This was taken as a sign of the permeability of the Church and that of faith itself. With Luther already in 1521 having incited Charles and the former Pope, Leo X, by refusing to retract his Ninety-Five Theses, the sack was widely seen as inaugurating a new direction. The loss of an absolute figurehead also left a spiritual vacuum. Yet, the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis between Henri II of France and Philip II of Spain in 1559 marked a period of relative peace, which it has been argued, also opened a way for forms of enjoyment exemplified by new and revived comedic forms that would coalesce into the commedia dell’arte.¹³

Figure 1.1 Jacques Callot, Scapino and Zerbino, masks from the commedia dell’arte (early 1600s) engraving. Image: National Gallery of Art.

The art of this period, understood as the cusp of the modern world, varied from the Renaissance in numerous and quite marked ways, mainly through recourse to discordant relationships, and a growing emphasis on conceits and fancies. This could be seen not only in the birth of the commedia,¹⁴ but also in the painting and music of the period. While composers like Carlo Gesualdo relied on musical dissonances that would anticipate the music of the twentieth century and its distrust of melody, painters such as Pontormo would place their figures in unfathomable settings worthy of the Surrealists, while Parimigianino rejoiced in jettisoning natural bodily proportion, stretching figures to give them an alluringly serpentine but out-of-this world elegance. The statuesque portraits of artists such as Bronzino and Allori were characterized by a striking inscrutability, and their faces have an opaque, sculpted quality as if the sitter were wearing mask. A common property to painting as well as sculpture (Giambologna) was a tenseness and torsion to poses and gestures. While Renaissance artists such as Piero della Francesca placed his figures with a strong, harmonious architectonic order, or imbued them with a lyrical naturalism (Leonardo), the figure of Mannerist art was undeniably one that was out of sorts with its surroundings, uncomfortable in the world, hence improvising a role rather than participating in a harmonic, closed circle of divine immanence.

The masks used in the commedia helped in the stylization of character by obscuring facial attitudinizing, hence minimizing psychological import. Other signs of Mannerism, as Paul Castagno observes, included “typification of form (lack of individuality, conventionality), focus on surface treatment (costume, excessive ornamentation), lack of dimensionality or depth, exaggeration and distortion, and emphasis on parts versus the unity of the entire design.”¹⁵ He correctly states that the commedia lays the ground for modernist art, especially in the slackening of links between form and representation.¹⁶ While modernist visual art is a (heroic) struggle with different forms of abstraction, drama experimented with various abstractions of affect. As Arnold Hauser remarks in his huge...