A question of form

A key aspect of my work concerns the destruction of illusion. I propose that it is not the “willing suspension of disbelief” (Samuel T. Coleridge) that brings about an immersive film experience, as it is widely claimed, but rather the opposite: the full awareness of the artificiality of the storytelling facilitates an uncompromised reception of a film’s subject. I don’t want to entertain an audience that sits back and passively consumes a picture show. Manipulating an audience’s emotions, for example with wall-to-wall music, just deceives them into believing they are witnessing something moving or meaningful. Exposing the fictionality of film, in turn, stimulates the intellect. The focus turns to meaning. The audience make their own discoveries. They become active participants.

About the puppets

Pierre Albert-Birot, a poet and playwright with Dadaist leanings, writes in a Parisian magazine in 1924: “The actor from flesh and blood has a heart and admirable joints. That is all too marvellous, walks all by itself. I want an actor from cardboard, who doesn’t have feelings and walks awkwardly. I want an actor who isn’t human. Only he will be wonderfully human, only he will not play a role. He will be the character.”

“The artificial body, the puppet (also marionette, manikin, waxwork, robot) as an opponent or double of modern man merges the highest fascination with the deepest horror.” (Uta Brandes in her preface to Tom Bieling’s Gender Puppets, 2008)

From Fritz Lang’s robot in Metropolis to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner we find countless versions of artificial humans in film history. Shop-window mannequins have played almost no part so far. But on closer inspection their function as an image of man is compelling.

Shop-window mannequins conform to a socially and economically determined ideal in respect of looks, body shape and clothing with the intention to prompt the onlooker to aspire to this ideal (by buying the merchandise on display). At the same time, this constructed ideal must not be too far removed from the real world of potential customers so that they are able to identify with the idealised effigy. Therefore, decorators and marketing managers prefer to rely on gender politics in shop windows that are either conservative or, at least, clichéd. Mannequins have to be both aspirational (the ideal) and recognisable (the stereotype). It is this dual role that forms the basis for the relationship between onlooker and manikin, in which both parties influence each other.

In the 1950s film stars like Anna Magnani, Silvana Mangano and Gina Lollobrigida were used as templates for the production of mannequins. Today facial casts of models are used while the bodies assume a set of recognizable postures, each representing a particular attitude.

I believe that we all assume a personal stance early on, a default position that we adhere to for much, if not all, of our lives. Yes, we can move our limbs. Yet we can hardly change our position.

My mannequins are, like Albert-Birot’s cardboard figures, the perfect actors and actresses as their inanimate surfaces serve as blank canvasses, on which to project the images. They do not play roles. They are what they are – and what we see in them.