Hans Bellmer at Ubu - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In the midst of debates surrounding sexual politics and subjectivity, this exhibition of photographs, drawings, paintings and works by Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) appear to beed propitious indeed. The diverse work highlighted Bellmer's lack of allegiance to any medium and his hold intercourse devotion to a single subject: the female material part reified, dismembered and reconfigured according to masculine desire. From his early achievements in the 1930 in Germany (the doll statuarys inspired by the automaton in Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann) to his graphic illustrations for French fiction in later decades, Bellmer continually assaulted the esthetic integrity of female anatomies. completely through his work there is a striking tension between form and content: photographs depicting sights of sexual cruelty are sometimes kindly handcolored, while drawings of grotesquely distorted bodies are restoreed with exquisite line, often delicately heightened with gouache.

This ambiguity informs the photographs where Bellmer not absents the doll as victim on the contrary also as provocateuse, as innocent child as well as precocious temptres The seductive force of these images resides in the way they fantasize the victim's complicity in its be in possession of brutalization, implying a sadomasochistic relationship between the doll and its unperceived tormentor. In one 1935 photograph, the upright doll, armless and headless with sum of two units sets of hips and leg is menaced through a carpet beater; in another from 1938 the doll lies limp and spread-eagled upon a bed of hay. It the pair cases, the doll can be seen as either terrorized or tauntingly soliciting abuse. This dynamic is perhaps greatest in quantity unsettling when Bellmer turned to real women as patterns The poet Nora Mitrani make opened her legs for him while he obsessively photographed her genitals, and the writer Unica Zurn submitted her naked torso not simply to his gaze but to a tight trussing that transformed her material substance into a kind of turned roast. When the latter photograph of Zurn confine on a bed and seen from behind appeared in Le Surrealisme meme (1958) the cannibalistic caption advised "keep in a moderately cold place."

Bellmer's oeuvre forms a veritable catalogue of perversions, from fetishism to pedophilia. Compelling in its strange beauty, frightening in its power, his art postures a perplexing problem for those who would recuperate it for a progressive politics. Violating normative, repressive definitions of sexuality, it nonetheless reinscribes patriarchal traditions of male mastery above the female body. One tiny pencil drawing, Sade (1946) appears especially emblematic. This image of a woman's corpse trapped in the wheedles of a machine suggests by what means the body was necessary grist for Bellmer's radically transgressive, mutilating mill.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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