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Whose pleasure? Whose pain? What kind of pleasure? What kind of pain? How can we begin to discuss issues of spectatorial pleasure and pain when addressing artistic representation? To give you an idea of how complicated these questions can be, tiiink for a moment about some of the contradictory functions of pleasure. It may be apprehended as a source of conservative tendencies, reifying status quo ideology, psychic stagnancy and repression, reproducing familiar and comfortable forms of oppression. Feelings of pleasure may also be connected to more progressive, liberating circumstances, perhaps in the strange and anticipatory exhilaration produced by entering a psychic void, or new and changing social, physical or political situations. These two theoretical possibilities may operate either separately or dialectically. Since theories and experiences of pleasure, pain and perversion are historically and culturally conditioned, I want to take as my starting point a specific set of complex and disturbing images and locate them in their "original" context, while remaining aware that the way I attempt to reconstruct these beginnings will reveal much about my own hermeneutical context.
The year is 1933. We are in Germany. The Weimar Republic has collapsed, and Hider and die Nazis have risen to power. In a small apartment in Berlin Hans Bellmer, a modernist artist with leftist leanings, lives in semi-reclusion. Ardendy anti-Nazi, he refuses to produce any work that would support the functioning of die Nazi state. He has abandoned his advertising practice and is at work, with assistance from his brother and with financial aid from his mother, on the construction of his first doll.
As a modernist artist living in Germany during the 1930s, Bellmer had to hide his work from the government. Beginning in 1933, the National Socialists confiscated modern art from galleries and museums and forbade modern artists to paint. Bellmer's work, however, found an appreciative and supportive audience in the Surrealists, who saw Bellmer as a kindred spirit. They published his photographs of the doll in a double-page spread in the December 1934 issue of the Surrealist periodical Minotaure.
One of the series of 18 black-and-white photographs of the doll which appeared in Minotaure is a close-up of a partially disembodied, semi-nude adolescent girl/doll leaning her mask-like head against a wall. A long...