Jim Coverly: Selected Works

Overview

"I stick eyes back on/unstick ears/I cut off fingers/I tear off tJ breast/This is my law of exchanges/I carve up/I pull to pieces ... I give birth only to chimera."

Annette Messager

Personalities are interpreted in objects; what prevails is the inner purposefulness, or desire, imbricated in the process of objectifying one's self and others; (like Hans Bellmer) making dolls to make an equivocal similitude, a stereotyping in the genre of the doll, which is haunted by the call of the "possibl body", having origin both in the "little fetishism" that Benet describes as "inseparable from all human life." The 'Doll' is a vehicle for desire, a need to own and control, to look at an object, to invoke the spirit that threatens the return of the "look". The abstract dolls are disavowals from common culture, man-made, ideal for such fetish role-play. As consumable objects to play with, they perform the Ide~1 simulation. In the cuts and folds that comprise the fabrication of the doll, reside the stereotypical ambivalences of metaphoric/narcissistic, and metonymic/aggressive moments, finally manipulated into impossible objects. The discourse of the "Mannequin", of its latent narrative as "tableau vivant", is disclosed in the imaginary relations, (there is always the alienating other, or mirror, which crucially returns the subject's objectified self in a form of substitution and fetishism as the trace of loss and absence. As a counter-discourse, represented and reconstructed, of the opposition self/other, and as the chimera, of the fetish/genre.)

PL