The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art: Marionettes, Models and Mannequins

by Adam Geczy

Overview

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formation of the self physically and psychologically, leading scholar Adam Geczy contends that the "natural" body has been replaced by a series of imaginary archetypes in our post-modern world, central to which is the figure of the doll.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 Artprovides 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472595959
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/03/2016
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Adam Geczy is an artist and writer, and teaches at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author and co-author of numerous books, the most recent being Fashion and Art (Berg, 2012) and Fashion's Double (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Clothes of Carnival: Personal Puppeteering and Role Play
2. A Soul in Control: The Art of the Automaton
3. Dark Doubles: Dolls and the Fallible Body
4. Between Torture and Transcendence: The Doll in Art
5. A Model Subject: The Window Dummy, the Fashion Doll, and the Double
6. Extreme Hellene: Sport, Superheroes and the Modern Übermensch
7. Genetically Baroque Beings: Cybergender, Transexuality and Natrificiality
8. Future Postscript: Shells and Ghosts, Bodies and Souls
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

A profoundly innovative study that presents surprising and far-reaching insights into the complex intersections between the phenomenology of dolls, masquerade and marionettes and post-modern subjectivities.
Mary Gluck, Professor of History and Comparative Literature, Brown University, USA

The mixture and range of cultural forces at play in this scintillating manuscript takes us on a cultural magical mystery tour that is as exciting as it is surprising, as provocative as it is erudite, as original as it is imaginative, and as thrilling as it is perverse.
Joy Sperling, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, Denison University, USA

Using several social science disciplines, Geczy undertakes a valuable overview of the changing significance of the doll in previous centuries and today. His analysis reveals important changes that are taking place in women's conceptions of the female body.
Diana Crane-Herve, University of Pennsylvania, USA

From the Publisher