Angel Egg New Dentelle by Marmite-Sue

Angel Egg (AE) dolls by Marmite-Sue have been vaguely known to me for some time.  I had seen a few pictures of head sculpts and knew the name Angel Egg.  However, it was not until July, when BJDCollectasy announced a giveway contest, that I took proper notice of Marmite-Sue's work.

Every so often, as an admirer of dolls, one encounters images or objects that arrest one's attention and refuse to let go.  They change one's notions about what is possible in the medium of doll-making, and they reverberate with some deep aesthetic chord in oneself as the viewer.  Far from evoking a simple possessive urge ("I want this doll"), they demand reflection.

Such was my immediate impression of Angel Egg New Dentelle the first time I saw her with the Carousel Total Look.  Her Rococo Blue and Pink Pearl iterations are also beautiful.  With New Dentelle, Marmite-Sue confronts me with a doll whose enchanting loveliness is tinged with the frightening.  She looks gentle, graceful-- her lips are slightly parted, as if she would speak, think, or breathe.  Her legs are threaded with ribbons, like fine stockings.  Her body is covered with frills and flowers, like lace.  She seems like the perfect antique automaton, wanting only a music box heart to animate her.

 In Rococo Blue, AE Dentelle is feather-light, as perfectly powdered as a confection by Boucher, and as elegant as a room as in the Hotel de Soubise.  In Pink Pearl, AE Dentelle is subtle and soft, her pearlescence reminding me of the pair of ceramic peacocks that my paternal grandmother has owned since the 1950s.  I remember them as sudden burst of florid femininity in a sea of mid-century neutral geometrics.  In Carousel, AE Dentelle is a marvel of pink, green, and gold.  Like the old-fashioned fair carousels from which Marmite-Suite takes inspiration, AE Dentelle is a spectacle of dizzying fantasy.  She is artifice harnessed to delight.

Yet, just as a very young child may be overwhelmed with the lights, music, and unstoppable motion of a carousel when she loses sight of her parents in the crowds, so does AE Dentelle suggest something a little dark behind her pretty colours, floral ornaments, and satin ribbons.

As Freud (of course) tells us, the uncanny appears when something from a repressed psychic state returns.  This doubled thing from the past reminds us of a time when dreams were nigh indistinguishable from reality, when the world was full of unaccountable powers, and death seemed porous.  A toy might come to life, or a corpse might stir of its own accord.  We thought we might stay young forever and marry a charming prince.  Yet the stripped bone of a skull, or the un-aging face of a doll reminds us both of our younger selves, frightened of monsters in the dark, and of our mundane, hopeless frailty. 

Beneath Marmite-Sue's magical painting and ribbons, New AE Dentelle is white like bone china.  Her flower-detailing looks like scarring, or the naturally adorned skeleton of the Crystal Maiden in the Actun Tunichil Muknal cave.  The holes for her ribbons gape like puncture wounds.  Her chest is a hollow, dark space.  Nor can we forget that, following the French Terror, a red ribbon around the neck became a sign of remembrance after the bloody excesses of the guillotine, which makes AE Dentelle's bruised, Rococo Blue version all the more ghostly.

At every point I consider, AE Dentelle's prettiness finds a correlation in violence.  To make the female body into a true spectacle of decorative fantasy, to make the function of ornament follow the form of a young lady, to leave no part untouched by artifice, is to do mortal damage.

And still, AE Dentelle is beautiful.  She is beautiful because artifice is also freedom from the confines of the natural.  Marmite-Sue has cast her in resin and strung her with elastic and silicon.  Having never lived, AE Dentelle will never die.  Instead, the imaginations of her beholders will give her exquisite presence a multitude of meanings and identities. 

* * *

Zemeno Dark Fairy Figurine Repaint

As anyone who might visit my tumblr at any given time will probably notice, I have a decided weakness for gothy, emotive camp.  

Even before I discovered the world of BJDs, a friend gave me a little Zemeno figurine for Christmas.  Although I had seen such fairy figurines before, I thought that their appeal for me had died sometime around my eighth birthday.  On the whole, this remains true.  However, this Zemeno Dark Fairy Figurine came opportunistically packed with a black and purple flier advertising a number of other fairy figurines.

I had never heard of Zemeno.  They had an underwhelming web presence at the time, so all I knew was that I had seen one of their dark fairies, and I knew where my friend had made the purchase.  This last point acquired additional interest because, amongst the fairies advertised on the purple flier, there was one who, as a tiny printed facsimile, reminded me of an illustration by Edmund Dulac of Scheherazade.  

I went to Millenium, gothic kitsch central, and inquired about the figurine shown in the flier.  Lo and behold, the lantern fairy with the headscarf was available (her company name is 'Eclipse' and you can see her at La Table Ronde's appropriately camp website).  I recall feeling utterly scandalous as I left the store with my lantern fairy; no decent young adult in Art School ever purchases such tacky things, I thought.  Then there was the price.  These were the days before BJDs, and I performed all manner of mental acrobatics to impress upon myself that spending $30-ish on the lantern fairy would not entirely condemn me to the ranks of the hopelessly dissipated and debauched. 

When I returned home and inspected my dissipated indulgence, I discovered that the mass-manufacturing process had not been very kind to my fairy.  Part of her face was globbed onto her headscarf in the manner of a pancake.  The paint around her eyes was not very precise either.  Not having any other suitable tools, since Art School was determined to make me a large-scale painter of Edifying Post Modern Art, I used a sakura fine-liner to fix the pancake face and badly painted eyes.  At least, from a distance, she looked respectable.  However, I was never completely happy with her face.

So, a number years later, I find myself in the heat of procrastination and academic despair.  I take the lantern fairy down from her post, am appalled by the company face-up, and feel a sort of pity for my inexperienced, fine-lining self.  It then occurs to me that I have since painted on somewhat similar objects that cost a great deal more.  I can hardly imagine making my poor fairy look any worse.  So I decided to try giving her a sweeter, more gothic pin-up inspired look. 

What I discovered in the process is that her forehead is strangely bumpy.  I also found an inverted bubble in her nose, which I was only partly successful at filling with acrylic paint.  She's about 10 inches tall, so this makes her my smallest face-up to date.  I used only arcylics, which is another reason why she is not quite as subtle as my BJD face-ups.  Maybe in several more years, I'll have improved sufficiently to do attempt another repaint.  For the time being, I think she looks tolerably better.

She has azo red on her lips, raw umber and mars black on her eyes and eyebrows, titan buff on her nose, and ultramarine blue in her irises. 

As always, thank-you very much for reading! 

* * *

Issue with the Enchanted Doll™ Resin Line

 This post is primarily a rant in response to this image that was being discussed on DoA, as well as discussions on the blog of Marina Bychkova.  If you are not interested in alarmingly expensive art EBJDs, please do carry on with your day.

* * *

In regard to the topicality of Enchanted Dolls™ on DoA, Marina Bychkova must be considered in a different light from the other dolls featured in the image linked above.

To begin at the beginning, Bychkova has been separated from the wider BJD industry-- previously because of her chosen medium of porcelain, but now also because the price of her new resin line is not in accordance with other producers of equivalently sized and styled dolls. Unlike the other dolls appearing in St. James's line-up image, Bychkova's resin Enchanted Dolls,™ despite their comparable aesthetic, are sold for about twice or thrice the price ($700 for a basic face-up and $1300 for a blank doll, for instance).

Bychkova's new resin Enchanted Dolls™ are different from the others because their high prices are not based on quality of craftsmanship or materials alone (the resin line is still just elastics, imported glass eyes, S-hooks, and resin, even though Bychkova once proclaimed that elastics Suck), and clearly (as St. James's shades-of-grey illustration shows) they are not based on any objective artistic superiority either.

Enchanted Dolls™ are sold at that price entirely because of an exclusivity that Bychkova cleverly builds into all her marketing of Enchanted Dolls™.  What is being sold is therefore not only a doll: it is an elitist mystique that perpetuates itself through unattainably.  Until she takes steps to make her resin line more like the other resin EBJDs that are being compared on DoA, I do believe they are different.

To conclude so far: the resin Enchanted Dolls™ are not drastically different in aesthetic or in quality, but they are different from the other dolls pictured by St. James due to the context in which they have been economically constructed.  A dead shark on the beach is very different than a dead shark positioned by Damien Hirst.  Additionally, as fans have already discussed on the aforementioned blog, Marina Bychkova's waiting-list system has tended to be somewhat less than ideal.  For this reason too, the economic context of the resin Enchanted Dolls™ is different; the difficulty and uncertainty of being able purchase one of her dolls is a compelling component in Bychkova's economy of value.

Although this inciting of fans through limited release and opportunity has been exploited by many other BJD manufacturers, Bychkova has never constrained her waiting lists to any temporal or physical commitment.  Whereas other companies have offered consumers limited quantities, or limited dates for release in order to encourage fans to act quickly, Bychkova has, at least once, completely abandoned her waiting list after pursuing it for an arbitrary amount of time, and reopened a different waiting list after a second and equally arbitrary amount of time.  This strategy is as much a part of her dolls' mystique as their price, for it lowers certain collectors into a kind of submission, where Bychkova's whim is value, where what is withheld is desired, and where value and unconsummated desire are conflated into an experience that is later remembered (or concurrently enjoyed) as pleasure.

And I do so like that DoA has thus far avoided such madness.  Until now, most of DoA's discussion of topicality has centered on the aesthetic qualities of various dolls, but I hope that Bychkova's dolls remain off-topic on DoA for reasons beyond their visual aesthetic.   This is because the economy of value that she creates around her dolls is much more exclusive than the usual BJDs seen on DoA, and because her relationship as an artist to her audience is vastly different from the usual relationships that most BJD studios have with their audiences on DoA.

* * *

Edit (11/12/12):  It looks like the Enchanted resin line is probably on-topic for the new WBJD subforum.  Even though I still think that Marina Bychkova's dolls are different from the majority of dolls on DoA because of their exclusivity, they are very pretty, and I hope that anyone posting about them on DoA will enjoying sharing their pictures, stories, and discussions. No hard feelings, kay?  :0)

Lady with a Parrot by Eugene Joors

(cross-posted from my very new & addicting tumblr).

I love this picture!

The more I look at this image, the more innuendo I seem to see. So suggestive, the way her dress almost flesh-toned, and the manner in which she’s stroking the parrot’s head… I’m guessing she’s a prostitute or someone’s kept woman.

The setting is mash-up of 19th century orientalism and japonisme, possibly (or probably) meant to evoke a sensual and luxurious atmosphere, ripe for the projection of European (sexual and colonial) fantasy.

The crane in the background (whose pose mirrors the parrot's position) reminds me of Manet’s Nana. There, it was supposed to signify female vanity. Here, the avian imagery in this painting is taken further, with the parrot and the feathered fan. By visually linking the lady to the parrot and the crane through the fan, Joors is casting her in the role of a decorative pet. Her fan looks like an evening fan, while her dress— her dress is odd. It has the high collar that one would expect on a day dress, but the sleeves are short enough that she can wear long gloves (causing that unexpected slash of flesh, right at the middle of the sleeve, so that the sensitive spot inside the elbow will be exposed if she unbends her arms). I suppose her clothing is as ambiguous and as erotisized as the lady’s social position.

Her face is turned away from the viewer, which both impedes our access to her as a subject, even as it allows our gaze to view her face more comfortably as an object. Her body, corseted and padded into fashionable curves, is turned directly to us- is almost offered to our gaze as a thing we can apprehend— and her meticulously painted pink ear is an open orifice, passively (yet alertly) awaiting someone’s command: come over here.

* * *