Art of the school and paper dolls

“What is art, Herr Schwitters”

“What isn’t?”

This was my opening quote in the art history exam in 1973. Kurt, neatly summing up the conceptualist ideology of 1970s art schools. For all of its egalitarian symbolism, Kurt’s quote was embedded in the curriculum still dominated theoretically by the old male, white, modernist patriarchs with a post Freudian hangover. I was one of many marginalised female art students dodging conception and conceptualism, sometimes on the same timetable. The female gaze wasn’t acknowledged or respected. We were not made aware of Hannah Hoch, Emmy Hennings and Claude Cahun. Dolls and costumes made to shock and challenge in their performances, the dolls saying the unspeakable. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven  and Mina Loy with their found objects, projecting alternative identities onto objects, unacknowledged. Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning painting their pain and horrors into surrealism.

And I don’t think my childhood dedicated reading  at breakfast would have been lauded in a 1970s art school. To me the Bunty comic back cover was art, a resource not acknowledged in the canon of art history, that subliminally influenced me. The day I saw my convent school uniform list, I knew an imposter identity was being foisted on me and in school hours I didn’t exist. Fashion gave me an identity and a means for self expression. On the back of the comic were cut out dolls. Each costume had little tags that folded over to hang from the doll.
Sometimes the doll’s clothes were twee and mumsy, other times they showed a Mary Quant or Biba influence. Little flat dolls projecting popular culture in their gendered stereotypical  norms but fulfilling my own fantasy of inventing new personas.

So I pay homage to Bunty

I love David Bowie, Elton John, Lou Reed, Mick Jagger, romantic poets and Harlequinade  so I nick their jackets and poses. I put them on the feisty, brave, female characters in my childhood books or characters made up on the canvas.

and I love the art of Kurt Schwitters’ so I nicked his suit