Can One Squander Their Purest Affections on Gruesome Foreign Bodies? Remarks on the Doll Motif in the Oeuvre of Marek Piasecki

Marta Smolińska

doi:10.25819/dedo/135

Authors

Marta Smolińska University of Arts Poznań

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25819/dedo/135

Keywords:

Marek Piasecki, doll, photographs, objects, abject

Abstract

The 1950s and 1960s series of black-and-white photographs by the Polish artist Marek Piasecki (1935-2011) entitled The Doll as well as the objects created in the same period in which the artist wove the motif of a doll are analysed in the context of the doll text by Rainer Maria Rilke and the work of Hans Bellmer, complemented by reflections by Anna Szyjkowska-Piotrowska, Georges Didi-Huberman and other contemporary authors.. Fragmentation of bodies in these works by Piasecki is not a device of eroticization or fetishization, as in Bellmer, but makes one aware of their defenceless fragility and mortality. As a typical abject Piasecki’s doll attract as much as they put one off; their presence verges on unbearable as it awakens the anxiety of death.

Author Biography

Marta Smolińska, University of Arts Poznań

Prof. Dr. heads the Department of Art History and Philosophy at the University of
of Arts Poznań (Poland). Curator and art critic, nomad and cross-border
border crosser. 2003 PhD in Poznań ("Młody Mehoffer" - "The Young Mehoffer").
2005-2006 and 2009 scholarship holder of the Foundation for Polish Science.
2012 DAAD scholarship holder at Humboldt University Berlin. 2013
Habilitation ("Otwieranie obrazu. De(kon)strukacja uniwersalnych mechanizmów
widzenia w nieprzedstawiającym malarstwie sztalugowym drugiej połowy
XX wieku" - "Opening the Image. The de(con)struction of the universal
mechanisms of seeing in non-representational painting in the second half of the
of the 20th century"). 2014 Fellow at the Graduate School of Eastern and
Southeastern European Studies at the LMU Munich. 2015 Fellow of the Arp Foundation in
Berlin. 2018 DAAD scholarship holder at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of
Munich and at the Central Institute for Art History in Munich. 2021 Scholarship holder
of the DAAD at the Freie Universität Berlin. Research and publications
on non-representational painting of the second half of the 20th century, Border
Art, transmediality and haptics.