Week 4- Possible 'Project:STRETCH' response

(The artwork of Hans Bellmer- all images above)

The body was a site for Surrealist experiment and a conduit for the transmission of ideas. It became the subject of intense scrutiny: dismembered, fragmented, desecrated, eroticized and eulogized in the pursuit of a range of psychological, sociological and sexual concerns. These processes were iterated in mind and physical act. For instance, Hans Bellmer pulled mannequins apart to create violent new forms. Fashion brought it into a direct relationship with commodities, and through the imagery of fashion and fashion photography it was manipulated, fetishized and irrecoverably changed.
For the surrealists, the mannequin embodied the dialectics of modern life. It confused the boundaries between animate and inanimate, human and machine, male and female, the sexualized and the sexless, and ultimately life and death. It was simultaneously a commodity, a simulacra, an erotic object, and the embodiment of the uncanny.
In the Freudian uncanny the mannequin also represented the return of a suppressed elementary or primal human emerging from the unconscious. It provoked a sense of ’the crossing of the human and the non human’
(‘The Surreal Body: Fetish and Fashion’, Ghislaine Wood)

These passages express an idea and point of view which I find very intriguing and wish to further explore as a possible concept for the final project. To develop the theoretical view of these surreal artists into the way I approach the possibilities of stretch wear for this project.