Inanimate Abjections Configuring Identity in the Work of Hans Bellmer, Cindy Sherman, and Mike Kelley

Date of Award

2003

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Hassold, Cris

Keywords

Bellmer, Hans, Sherman, Cindy, Kelley, Mike

Area of Concentration

Art History

Abstract

Images of articulated dolls and mannequins in twentieth-century art raise critical questions about identity formation and comment on social, political and economic affairs. Looking at the work of three artists, I examine the ways in which modem and postmodem dolls can be interpreted by various psychoanalytic and critical theories. The pedophilic quality of Hans Bellmer's photographs satiate male fetishistic viewing and the dehumanization of the female subject. The angry, abject work of Cindy Sherman challenges the viewer with grotesque, non-gendered depictions that cannot be categorized in their resistances to the existing phallocentric Symbolic order. Mike Kelley's revival of the found stuffed animal in his installation art comments on the social economy of relationships that children have with their toys and the return of the repressed uncanny in an adult encounter with abjected objects. With a combination of aesthetic theory and criticism, as well as several theoretical accounts of identity formation from psychoanalysis, I address the advantages and disadvantages of an engagement of theory in Bellmer, Sherman, and Kelley's art. I also illustrate the ways that these works attract or repulse the viewer's gaze, and how conceptions of beauty and subjectivity have been radically altered in late-capitalist culture. My focus on theories of the abject demonstrates how ambiguity and expulsion resist the Symbolic order and how the deconstruction of the subject in art exposes rejected, uncategorized identities that challenge dualistic and oppressive subjectivism.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS