Mannequins in Fashion and Art Reference 1

There were a lot more references involving mannequins than I had expected when looking into mannequins, art and photography. I also found a really helpful online article – https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mannequins-in-art_b_483333 – which gave me a lot of the references that I have looked at in my sketchbook.

Cindy Sherman’s Sex Pictures

Intended by the artist to shock the unsuspecting viewer, the Sex Pictures series features anatomical dolls arranged in compromising positions. Set clearly apart from actual pornography, the photograph cruelly comments on the greater dehumanization of women in life, as well as in art since time immemorial. Her space is claustrophobic, the body little more than a tool of raw desire, while the accoutrements of “beauty,” such as hairbrush, skimpy panties, and the like, are strewn haphazardly around her. Once again, Sherman extracts certain conventions from their usual contexts, where they are often obscured by a host of attendant desires, and baldly reframes them as objects of intense, analytical attention. The effect is something that neither a medical investigation nor a political speech could convey with such vivid precision. Sherman suddenly “makes strange” the everyday, or the familiar, in ways that suggest we often trod through our lives while sleepwalking.

Joe Duggan

Duggan takes family snapshots as his subject in Family Man, a series of staged photographic tableaux. These family snapshots on a large scale feature a number of stock subjects: a picnic, playing in the garden and even posing for a photograph. But there is something strange about them. It doesn’t take long to figure out what. All the participants, mother, children and pets, are mannequins. Only the figure of the father is a real person – presumably Duggan himself.

There is an uncanny air to the images because of this. They just seem wrong, in an unsettling way. In an accompanying essay, Colin Graham notes the disturbing effect but argues that the work is, all the same, positive in tone. The photographs “seem to make the paternal role a lonely and almost nihilistically pointless one”, but “they actually return on themselves to confirm an underlying capacity and wish for fatherly and family care, against all the odds”.

Peter Livingston

“Mannequins are everywhere and often ignored with our attention paid to the garments they are showcasing. I hope to cast them in a different light through this series and challenge the viewer that it isn’t a person they are seeing.”