Can One Squander Their Purest Affections on Gruesome Foreign Bodies?

Remarks on the Doll Motif in the Oeuvre of Marek Piasecki

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.