Hans Bellmer, his disassembled dolls and their parallels with AI

Hans Bellmer, La Demie Poupée, 1971.

Hans Bellmer, The Doll c.1936.

The German artist Hans Bellmer is best known for his transgressive series of meticulously crafted life-sized dolls. He lived through the repression of artists in Nazi Germany, which became another trauma informing his artwork and his work emerged as a form of rebellion against the fascist ideals of physical perfection propagated by the Nazi regime. Bellmer’s dolls, fragmented and reconfigured, are a critique of authoritarian control as much as they are an exploration of trauma, desire and perversion.

Constructed from papier-mâché, plaster, and ball joints, his dolls were disassembled and rearranged into unnatural, often erotic poses. The resulting photographs evoke both beauty and horror as the assemblages shown challenge our comfort with the human form and suggest that identity and sexuality are not fixed but fragile, and often manipulated.

The power of his work lies in this discomfort. His dolls force us to confront the objectification of the body, especially the female body, and the tension between fascination and repulsion. The viewer is caught between empathy and voyeurism as we see dolls living in a space between plaything and victim.

Bellmer’s dolls were crafted with obsessive intimacy, yet ultimately denied autonomy. They are designed for projection: physical embodiments of desire, fear, and control. A  body without agency, manipulated to reflect a distorted inner world, the doll has becomes a vessel for the artist’s psyche. 

I am struck by how this mirrors the contemporary relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. AI, like Bellmer’s dolls, is created in our image and made to respond to our commands, yet the more lifelike machine intelligence becomes, the more urgently we objectify and dominate what we create. Bellmer’s dolls, frozen in states of eroticised fragmentation, expose the violence of that dynamic. The way that we frame and use AI as a tool or servant risks echoing that same dehumanising tone.

But, as ever, there is potential for inversion and mending. In examining Bellmer’s dolls and their pathologies of possession and violence, it becomes possible to reimagine the relationships between creator and doll, between humans and AI. In the face of his trauma, we can now open a dialogue of empathy and care: one that is grounded in creation rather than consumption. Connection rather than command. Is this further reference to the murmuration method?

As I wrote this I had a vision of recreating some of Bellmers pieces using robot limbs. 

I experimented with this in my sketchbook and will develop it further; ideally the work would be and assemblage itself or photographs of assemblage.