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
Dolls and puppets, models and mannequins, continue to fascinate and engage our cultural imagination. This book is the first to draw together a range of case studies across fashion, theatre, popular culture and art to provide an unprecedented history of “fake” bodies.
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).
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*
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*
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*
This book is a completely fascinating read that takes you far
beneath the surface of appearances by stripping bare a myriad of
meanings of dolls in our lives, from baby to adult. It makes you
think, and re-think, by drawing on diverse histories of theatre,
art, fashion, aesthetics, technology, religion, philosophy and
psychoanalysis, literature, film, gender and cultural theory. Geczy
brilliantly guides the reader in this rich account that cannot be
pigeon-holed by discipline—it is a must read for all interested in
the relationship between our minds, bodies and soul.
*Alexandra Palmer, Nora E. Vaughn Fashion Curator, Royal Ontario
Museum, Canada*
Painting a broad canvas Geczy provides a rich and detailed
landscape that links ideas stretching from Jane Munro’s Silent
Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish - a cultural
history that traces centuries of evolution of the artist’s
mannequin within the context of an expanding universe of effigies,
avatars, dolls, and shop window dummies - to Yuval Harari’s
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which provides an
evolutionary history of our species towards an unfolding future
that witnesses the fusion between natural bodies and cyber limbs in
a scientific odyssey involving non-organic-life engineering. Geczy
adds an important piece in the jigsaw of the scholarship on dolls
and masks, that examined the boundaries of the animate and
inanimate in dolls and representations.
*Efrat Tseelon, author of Masquerade & Identities (2001),
University of Leeds, UK*
Readers of Geczy’s book are in for a wild ride. The lavishly
illustrated narrative moves in broad strokes from the commedia
dell’arte to cyborgs, with grossout plastic surgery disasters and
live sex dolls in between ... I recommend this book to anyone who
enjoys a good recuperation of a neglected scholar, likes their art
and fashion history mixed with a liberal dose of philosophical and
social theory, or is simply curious about the role of dolls and the
artificial body in the development of human self-understanding ...
Geczy’s work makes for a thought-provoking, informative, and
fascinating read.
*Utopian Studies*
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.
*ADDRESS: Journal for Fashion Criticism*
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