Mannequins


Ever since the advent of humanism, man has been at the center of the universe. This position of priviledge prevailed through the Enlightenment’s emphasis on man as a rational being, Romanticism’s attempts to redeem the emotional aspect of man, and each successive school of thought from nihilism to existentialism, right up to the end of the millenium. Man has been the basic unit of our thought systems, one of the few consistent reference points that we have always been able to count on. But today, in the age of cybernetics and bioengineering, our society—which Guy Debord rightly dubbed "the spectacle society"—increasingly suffers from a sense of alienation and depersonalization (the dramatic implications of which are not lost on contemporary artists). We live in a system governed both politically and economically by the forces of serial duplication; large numbers determine the choices of the entire system, and anything that does not involve a large mass of individuals is not taken seriously.

It is in the light of the situation outlined above that the work of artists who use mannequins must be examined. Beyond the various interpretations and symbolism that they might suggest, manniquins are a way of replicating, on a grand scale, a single "individual" to create innumerable identical, unthinking individuals, whose lack of any definite identity insures their inoffensiveness…




Simona Vendrame
Translation by Jacqueline Smith