Contribution to Catalogue, Exhibition ISLANDS Waldemarsudde nov2020

Out of the Comfort Zone – Karl Dunér's Mechanical Dolls

by Meike Wagner

Karl Dunér´s mechanical dolls are challenging. We encounter them in an empty space of total openness – anything can happen, anything can be inscribed on them, and on us. I stand before them, waiting. There is an expectation that something is going to happen. Their automated electronic steering will produce some moving, sometime. My eyes wander slowly over their grey surface, their gestalt. Their white and eyeless faces do not give any indication of identity. They do not represent any women or men, any young or old, any weak or strong. Ageless, genderless, unaffected and unmoved. Their universal openness condemns me to waiting. I cannot but start thinking about them and also about myself who is standing in front of them, equally motionless, maybe equally unreadable for my environment. There is an aspect of mindful release in this waiting. My mind starts wandering, yet my senses enter a mode of increased awareness. Is this turning into a meditation?

This whole scenario is radically transformed at the moment when I perceive a tiny twist of the head, a slight moving of the breast. Slowly up and down, up and down. One of the dolls has started breathing, and soon the other ones also join in. Immediately I start perceiving them as something living. They leave their objecthood behind and turn into living beings. My animal instincts identify a kind of animated familiarity: These dolls are like me… And yet, a slight feeling of uneasiness emerges…

Animation is a central element of puppet theatre. The greatest skill of puppeteers lies in their ability to make an artificial object appear alive, to animate the puppet. Technical supporting devices, like a puppet stage hiding the puppeteer, expressive lighting or a humanlike puppet design, enhance the possibilities to transform the inert object into a living being in the mind of the beholder/spectator.

According to Aristotle’s treatise De Anima, the soul (anima) is a form of actualised life in a potential body, the process of becoming life, of acquiring a soul is animation. He identifies motion as one of the prime indicators for the animation of organic material. The object body appears here as a vessel potentially being filled by a soul, potentially being animated. This metaphysical concept has left a major imprint on the Christian tradition of emphasising the humanly divide between an ephemeral body and a divine soul. Both traditions, Aristotle’s metaphysics and Christian dogma, presuppose an unmoved mover, a divine principle behind the animation of organic matter.

Puppet theatre hence could be described in terms of this animation: the puppeteer as an unmoved mover, animates the dead object hence coming to life. Does the fascination for puppets and puppet performance stem from such mirror-like representation of metaphysical creation? Do we believe in the magic of animation because we draw parallels to ancient traditions we still bear in our bones and brains?

Karl Dunér’s mechanical dolls differ from theatre puppets, they do not make visible the unmoved mover behind their gracious little gestures and light breathing. The automated electronic steering is hidden beneath their floating grey cloaks. They also differ from traditional automatons that became popular in eighteenth and nineteenth century. These old mechanical dolls fascinated through their display of extraordinary skills, the artificial flute player, the mechanical writer almost outperformed ordinary human beings at the time. In comparison to Dunér’s dolls they were overachievers.

In his case, the dolls rather scale down their performance to some basic movements: a slow nodding or tiny twist of the head, a hardly noticeable bending of the trunk, a small gesture of the hands, and – the breathing. So, on one hand, Dunér’s dolls seem to be quite limited in their expressive means, on the other hand it is exactly this limitation that makes their performance so intense. The acute mindfulness of their movements has a powerful impact on my own bodily sensation. I am totally focused on their small twists, little slippages and tiny changes in posture – connecting, bonding, relating.

A certain intimacy emerges that is strangely mixed with an uncanny feeling of otherness. I perceive them as animated beings, but at the same time I know that they are automated mechanical dolls built from wood, wire, gauze and plaster. This ambiguous perception interrelates with my own phenomenological body scheme. ‘I am a body and I have a body’, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has formulated it. This means that I perceive myself in a double view – as a subject and an object at the same time. In order to consolidate my identity, I have to exert myself to fuse these two perceptions into one coherent idea of myself. But this coherence is fragile and too often prone to deconstruction, particularly in extreme physical situations. From Hellmuth Plessner we learn that human beings have an awareness of this precarious and ambiguous identity and are able to reflect on it as a prime existential problem due to their ‘eccentric positionality’. Dunér's subject/object dolls remind me on the precariousness of my identity. Hence, why, at the same time, I fully embrace and distance them from myself.

Each of these dolls individually represents this ambiguous identity. But I am not in a one-to-one situation with them. They appear in groups of two or three in the vast exhibition room. This opens the possibility for a theatrical narrative. The nodding of the right doll towards the left seems to initiate a response from the other one – a slight bending of the head away from the first. Is this the beginning of a drama? Does the left doll express its discomfort over the decent approach of the right one? Has someone been hurt before? Is this rejection going to have effects on any of these communication partners? Because this is how I perceive them – as two living beings communicating with each other. Or do they rather communicate with me? Staging a drama just for me to observe, to judge, to imagine? The chance generator of the motion steering rudely counters the assumed intention of their actions, but in the theatrical moment, in the drama, I forget about the technological devices behind their moving and create a meaningful narrative. This assumed responsiveness of the dolls increases the overall impression of life.

It can happen that at some point one of the dolls falls over, or gets blocked. Then the museum guardians hurry to help. They lift them up again and bring them back in position. One might think that in this moment of blockage, of failure, the doll falls back on its object status. The autonomy of movement and action revealed to be an illusion. Yes – and no. Again, the dolls offer an ambiguous conclusion. They could be either seen as failed objects, in need of mechanical repair, or the guardian could be considered as a carer for a strange yet living being in difficulties. It will depend on the attitude of the person who approaches the doll – either a mechanical or a caring one.

Karl Dunér offers us a performative scenario through his artworks. His dolls open a wide horizon of imaginary readings and existential challenges. They are positioned in the ‘in-between’ that stimulates my creative thinking. Their ‘natural’ movements provide them with the status of a living being, their visibly artificial design though – the lack of individual faces, the neutral costume, the sometimes clumsy motion – emphasises their object quality. Here, they meet with my own phenomenological body scheme that negotiates intimate familiarity with radical otherness.

Their assumed interactivity with their neighbour doll gives them a potential to spark imaginary dramatic narratives. Their seemingly intentional interaction embraces not only the museum guardians but also the visitors and gives them, voluntarily or not, a part in the performance. Therefore, all present in the exhibition space have the opportunity to respond to them with curiosity, attention, rejection, and maybe even love and caring to provide them performatively with a subject character.

Through these ambivalences, the claims to interaction and the stimulation of the imaginary, the dolls have on me a long-lasting impression. They pull me out of my comfort zone – and this is what I am striving for when looking for art.

Meike Wagner

1. As opposed to the English words „doll“ and „puppet“, both, the Swedish and German languages do not differentiate between toy dolls, mechanical dolls and theatre puppets. All these objects are called „dockor“ in Swedish and „Puppen“ in German. In regard to Durén’s objects, I would rather like to position them between „dolls“ and „puppets“ due to their inherent theatricality, so a Swedish or German translation would make a description much easier.

2. Aristotle states that the soul is the origin of and determined by capacities of nutrition, sensation, thought and by motion. See Aristotle, De Anima, transl. and ed. by R. D. Hicks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907, 55.

3. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII, ed. by W.D. Ross, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1924, 1072a. In the Bible Genesis, ch. 1 depicts the divine principle behind creation animating the inanimate organic matter.

4. E.g. Jacques de Vaucanson’s flute player from 1737.

5. E.g. Jaquet-Droz’s writer, built between 1768 and 1774.

6. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phénoménologie de la Perception, Paris: Gallimard, 1945.

7. Helmuth Plessner developed the idea of an eccentric positionality (»exzentrische Positionalität«) of human beings in his book Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1928.