Seeing Life of a ‘Doll’ at Work and Play in Africa

‘Tis the holiday season when grown-ups want to act like kids. Anyone inclined to regress while maintaining a veneer of dignified adulthood will find a perfect opportunity at UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

“Isn’t S/He a Doll: Play and Ritual in African Sculpture” offers the option of being taken simply as a fun exhibition or plumbed for serious subtextual questions raised by the timeless playthings. About 200 of the little rascals are on view. They come from 24 African nations plus a few comparative examples from the United States.

It’s a two-tiered affair. Differing labels for kids and adults are set at appropriate eye-levels. Basically, both ponder the same conundrums. What is a doll, anyway? That is, why is a doll different from, say, a puppet? The short answer is that, generally speaking, puppets are more animated. But the question actually functions to ignite a larger inquiry lurking within the whole show: Why are dolls so powerful?

“Oh, but they’re not,” you might say. “How can anybody call such a harmless toy powerful?”

Because they are and everybody knows it. Dolls themselves have no heft; they derive their eerie attraction from the fact that the human perceptual mechanism is so gullible it can’t resist mistaking anything shaped vaguely like the human body for the real thing and reacting accordingly.

Basically we understand this. For centuries religions have frowned on “graven images.” Islam virtually forbids them, so the Moslem Koto people of Chad took to making severely abstracted dolls from wax. It’s apparent that humans find fashioning objects in their own image on a par of irresistibility with making babies.

The comparison has to be apt. Otherwise we in the West wouldn’t go to such lengths to make dolls cute, humorous and more or less sexually neutered. We wouldn’t erect silly taboos against boys playing with girl dolls while allowing them to dally with so-called “action figures” like the monstrously muscled Freight from G.I. Joe’s Extreme Series on view.

African art has a long and admirable artistic tradition of accepting the elemental forces that operate on all of us. A large percentage of these dolls have frankly phallic and fetishistic characteristics. Instead of going into denial about our drives, African cultures build useful mythologies around their dolls.

Among the Asante people of Ghana, for instance, it’s believed that once upon a time a woman named Akua had trouble conceiving a child. A priest divined that she should commission a carving of an infant. She was to treat it exactly like a live baby. Although her neighbors made fun of her at first, she eventually bore a beautiful real infant.

Thus arose a tradition of Akua figures with big, round, disc-like heads, tubular bodies and small breasts. One of these, made by Osei Bonsu around 1935, provides one of the exhibition’s aesthetic masterpieces.

Truth to tell, numerous of the dolls on view fall considerably short of the most expressive African art. At the same time the wit and ingenuity of these craftsmen can overcome trite materials. In Kinshasa, Zaire, for example, they take tiny mass-produced plastic dolls and tart them up with fur and beads. Sold as souvenirs, they’re made to look like a tourist’s idea of an African warrior, and they’re charming.

Less so is a Western-style plastic doll that, sadly, is coming to replace the native product. It’s pure kitsch but does retain a hint of the old fertility fetish. The little girl depicted holds a bunny. The thing is also colored with a brightness that would never sell over here. Yet it has a gummy, ectoplasmic surface that’s spooky.

The Baule of the Ivory Coast have more serious business in mind with their tradition of dolls for adults. Ranging all the way from familiar nudes to engaging modern genre types, these figures depict men and women and are used by each when they feel dispirited, lonely or generally out of sorts. Their troubles are often diagnosed as being sent by an “Otherworld Lover” who feels neglected. A figure is commissioned to act as a kind of sexual surrogate, wined and dined, given gifts, paid compliments, taken on dates and accorded quality time. The practice recalls the Viennese Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka who for a time acted similarly with a life-sized mannequin.

Which proves, I guess, a human inclination to treat some dolls like people and suggests a predisposition to treat some people like dolls.

The show was organized by visiting curator Elisabeth L. Cameron. She also wrote the informative catalog, which includes an essay by Fowler director Doran H. Ross.

* “Isn’t S/He a Doll: Play and Ritual in African Sculpture,” UCLA, Fowler Museum of Cultural History, through Aug. 24, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (310) 825-4361.