"Анаграмматическое тело" в фотографической серии Ханса Беллмера "Кукла", 1934-1935

In this paper, Sakhno looks at the ‘Doll’ series of photographs (1934-1935) by the German photographer Hans Bellmer within the context of representing the artificial body. Bellmer’s articulated dolls were easy to take apart and ‘chop’ into pieces, representing objects which recreate new meanings of erotic content. The artist himself called them ‘articulated objects’ and anagrams, the visual translatability of which was marked with the aid of the instrument of deconstruction. For Bellmer, the Doll became something of an Alter ego, a part of a fetishist’s Universe, an ‘object that can be possessed’. Undermining the very foundations of aggressive masculinity, Hans Bellmer’s artificial girl is a product of his reaction to the Nazi regime (Rosalind Krauss). For Bellmer, the doll’s body is an erotic and narrative fetish that helps the artist to overcome childhood trauma, suppressed complexes and forbidden sexual desires. Through his obsessive interest in dolls, the photographer recreates a new associative text that is semantically ambiguous. In this, like a mathematician, he divides, subtracts and changes the order, presenting for the viewer’s appraisal an anagrammatic equation and a palindrome. In these photographic stagings, the body is balanced visually and linguistically with visual iconography and writing.