Companion Spider: Essays

Spider Sibyls

Spider Sibyls From the late ipyos through the early 19805, Michel Nedjar created some of the most unique and unforgettable "things" of the latter halfof this century. These "things" are referred to as dolls, but since they are unlike any dolls I have ever seen, I prefer to approach them with the spirit in which Rainer Maria Rilke spoke of "things," as strange, mystical entities, in his second lecture on Rodin. Working essentially with detritus—dirty torn rags, abandoned trampled clothes—Nedjar first ties and stitches, then bathes in a vat of dye what when lifted to view are creatures that, on one hand, appear to beas old as humanity's oldest image making and, on the other, seem to be the enfleshed souls of those gassed and burned in the European Annihilation . In these works, Nedjar, in effect, fuses the earliest decorated rock shelters of Europe with Auschwitz—a Cro-Magnon gouging a vagina into a cave wall with a sharpened rock echoed in time by a concentration-camp victim scratching his or her name on a cell wall with a nail. While Nedjar's dolls are not directly beholden to any artist's work, they are not only the children of prehistory brought up against recent history but reflect an extreme point in permutations on the theme of the doll—a word, I should add,whose roots are obscured in etymological conjecture. Sensing that "fetish" and "idol" are bound into its global significance, I also spot the pun on i-dol, an I doll, realizing that Nedjar's creatures could more accurately, if somewhat obscurely, be called no-dols—or, pushing the pun perhaps beyond the breaking point, id-owls, creatures whose ids are inhuman. The admittance of the inhuman sets up another line of imaginal conThis essaywas written for a catalogue of the dolls and paintings of Michel Nedjar, les angles m Demi, produced by Galerie Susanne Zander,in Koln, Germany, 1996. Spider Sibyls 223 jecture: if the doll is a sentinel of mother nature, then revelations concerning its soul are bound to evoke creatures of nonhuman kingdoms. Before addressing this matter, I would like to briefly trace a few twentieth-century doll permutations. In 1914, Rilke wrote an essay called "Some Reflections on Dolls," based on the wax,Expressionist dolls of Lotte Pritzel. Commenting on Pritzel's work, Max von Boehn writes: "One hardly dares to use the word 'doll' for these creatures, since this word so easily leads one astray. These figures possess a psychological strength, in marked contrast to their butterfly forms. 'They come to life,' asH. Rupe says, 'like improvisations of the unconscious.' . . . The artist has baptized her fantasies with the names of Simonetta, Omphale, Ganymed, Bajadere, Chichette , the Unveiled, Hamlet, Adoration, and so forth." Such names may call up for readers of poetry the strange cast of figures in Gerard de NervaPs Chimeras. That aside, Rilke's essayitself does not appear to address Pritzel's dolls directly but uses them to reflect on those "things" that prepare us, as children, for our relationship with the world. The most precious of things, Rilke proposes, are the thinly painted, sawdust-filled dolls we play with, drag about, and finally abandon . As often with Rilke, a complex ambivalence moves through his evocations : "At a time when everyone was still intent on giving us a quick and reassuring answer," he writes, "the dolls were the first to inflict on us that tremendous silence (larger than life) which was later to come to us out of space,whenever we approached the frontiers of our existence at any point. It was facing the doll, asit stared at us, that we experienced for the first time that emptiness of feeling, that heart-pause, in which we should perish did not the whole, gently persisting Nature then lift us across abysses like some lifeless thing." A curious turn! For in becoming "some lifeless thing," do we not become doll-like—suggesting that the doll may be the first messenger of our own mortality. A decade after Rilke wrote his doll essay, Hans Bellmer also met Lotte Pritzel. He discovered in her dolls not a trip back to childhood but an erotic nest: Omphale as a blonde in black stockings and lace, also Chichette as a provocative adolescent in silks and satins wielding a riding whip. Pritzel's figures suggested to Bellmer the possibility of an 2 2 4...