LUCIAJURIKOVA
THE USAGE OF THE CONCEPT OF A HOUSE AND A HOME IN DOLLHOUSES BY MIRIAM SHAPIRO AND KIM JONES
by luciajurikova 2020
The 1970s on the West Coast in America were full of social and political turbulent events. The world social and political conditions were captured through creating new art movements, experimenting with new art media and various concepts that were responding to the tumultuous happenings in the 1960s and 1970s. The Women’s movement, the Vietnam war, the subsequent anti-war politics, civil right activism, queer movement – all these instances of political and social activism led towards a new articulation of artworks and their meanings. Although these campaigns did not originate in the art world, they were translated into the artists’ lives and art practice from the 1970s onwards combining art and politics into new instruments of expression. The first artists this essay is going to focus on is Miriam Shapiro. As a significant figure of the feminist art movement of 1970s West Coast, Shapiro individually and in collaboration with other women artists have focused on a fight against the discrepancies in the treatment and gallery representations of male and female artists and normalisation and conventional assumptions of gender roles. Not only the feminist but the anti-war movement, too, had an impact on the development of the 1970s art scene on the West Coast. The criticism of the Vietnam war, violence and governmental war propaganda was expressed in the art world through creating or re-establishing new ways of art forms – performance art, mural art, collaborations, and installation. The second West Coast artist this essay is going to focus on is Kim Jones. This Vietnam War veteran and artist played an essential role in interpreting the anti-war politics and post-war trauma in his artworks. Jones, like Shapiro, reacted to the current situation by examining new ways of artistic interpretation. Shapiro and Jones used a concept of a dollhouse to form new meanings of home and house in connection to the feminism and anti-war activism in the 1970s.
I want to argue that the new and reconstructed meanings and readings of the Kim Jones’ and Miriam Shapiro’s dollhouses were created through their subjective understanding of the contemporary societal issues and the impact they had on the artists. Through examining Miriam Shapiro’s Dollhouse (1972) (Fig.1) and Kim Jones’ Dollhouse (1974) (Fig. 2), this paper suggests that the concept and utilisation of a dollhouse in Jones’ and Shapiro’s artworks play a significant role in addressing societal themes and issues of a home and a house in the 1970s. I argue that the concepts of home and a house used in their art practice were applied to criticise the patriarchal views of women’s duties at home, the traumatic impacts of the war on the American society, homes and war veterans in 1970s. I argue that both of the artworks comment on gender normalisation using a dollhouse which they transformed from the female and male perspectives into the image of society or certain societal groups.
Firstly, I am going to visually and contextually analyse Shapiro’s Dollhouse to expose the meanings of a home in her artwork and the critical way she used to identify the patriarchal society of the 1970s with a house as a women’s place. I am going to examine the way how Shapiro challenges and undermines cultural connotations of a house with the notions of domesticity and femininity using the concept of a dollhouse and different identities of the rooms within it. Secondly, I am going to focus on Kim Jones’ expressed the themes of a man’s military service, war trauma and abandonment using a doll’s house. Suggesting that the concept of home in his Dollhouse criticises the state of the post-war society, I am going to explore the war drawings as a tool for gender normalisation. Thirdly, I will recognise the importance of
the unfurnished and furnished interiors of both Dollhouses and the metaphorical use of a battle in Shapiro’s and Jones’ Dollhouses. Lastly, I will focus on the particular groups of the society that the artists comment on.
A dollhouse is a small-scale replica of a house often filled with miniature furniture. The fittings in the small rooms with different purposes, kitchen utensils, small pillows or cabinets, windows, façade – all of these features in a dollhouse signify an imagined family life in microcosm.1 For this reason, small-scaled houses have been mostly associated with little girls and reinforcing gender roles of women.2 Primarily used as toys for little girls or eighteen-century upper-class women conversation pieces, the dollhouses imply that they functioned mainly as tools for normalisation of gender roles through establishing concepts of a house and home, respectively.3 Similarly, Miriam Shapiro’s Dollhouse is a furnished mini-replica of a place that simulates home and acculturates connotations of domesticity. However, she uses the mini house to criticise the cultural geographies of gender roles and parodies some of the features of a home created and lived in by a woman artist in 1970s.
The Dollhouse by Miriam Shapiro was a part of the installation called Womanhouse, which encompassed an entire house in residential Hollywood.4 Led by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, the house was renovated and re-used for artistic practices by twenty-one women and artists from Feminist Art Program at California Institute for the Arts in 1972.5 The group of women hosted many installations focusing on the neglected women and feminine issues as well as the themes of home and domesticity.6 Chicago and Shapiro in Womanhouse (Fig.3) used the concept of a house and home to challenge and undermine some of its cultural connotations through examining gender roles differences and women’s traditional roles at home. One of the installations critiquing and imitating the conflicting duties of women is Miriam Shapiro’s Dollhouse created with the assistance of Sherry Brody in 1972.
The Dollhouse is an installation mixed media sculpture assembled from a wooden liquor box consisting of six rooms.7 The three floors of the miniature house are formed by a parlour and a kitchen on the ground floor, a Hollywood star’s dressing room and a ‘Harem’ themed room on the floor above and a nursery neighbouring the artist’s studio on the top floor.8 Each of the rooms addresses gender roles and stereotypes through carefully installed furniture serving to define the identity and purpose of the rooms. The artist’s studio contains a naked figure - a miniaturised occupant of a man standing on an elevated pedestal. Temma Balducci emphasises the importance of the man’s model in the artist’s studio and identifies two meanings of its presence. Being posed with the tray of bananas, the figure is a direct reference to the sexist association of women models posing with the baskets of apples as symbols of breasts.9 As well, she recognises the male figure as ‘[an] exaggerated stereotype of the potent artist whose creativity derives from his male sexuality’10. The view of Kremlin from the artist’s studio symbolises the Russian ideology of male artists supremacy. She directly compares oppressed female artists of the Soviet Union with the American female artists of 1970s. Only in this room, Shapiro discusses and parodies the topic of representation of women using the aroused male model and the Kremlin view to address the fetishised and oppressive societal thinking about women artist’s place within the society and their representation in the art world.11
The dressing room and the bedroom are positioned on the middle floor. Balducci describes both of the places as a ‘woman’s private spaces devoted to the wife’s ongoing concern with beauty and the effects of ageing to satisfy her husband in the adjacent bedroom’.12 This quote identifies Shapiro’s intentions to underline the problematics of gender roles directly connected to the forced societal establishment of women’s identity, intensified by the photography of a Hollywood movie star framed on the wall in the dressing room recognising the ‘impossible beauty ideal’.13 Together with the dressing room and bedroom on the middle floor, Shapiro posed and furnished the kitchen and the parlour in the way that they represented a housewife’s daily devotion and care towards a home for a husband and child. The rooms on the ground floor identify other primary duties of women constructed by the patriarchal society of the 1970s – cooking in the kitchen and family gatherings in the living room - both performed and facilitated by women.
Through identifying the purpose of each of the room, Shapiro critiques the gender roles established by the patriarchal society using the concept of a home and a house as a symbol of a middle-class, white woman. The Dollhouse is filled with items evoking home, domesticity and the purview of femininity. However, it openly criticises the normalisation of gender roles and points out the discrepancy of genders in the art world and society as a whole. The individual rooms have an exclusive connection to Shapiro’s and women artist’s lives set by gender duties assumptions and expectations. Her floor plan of the house serves to express her view of the female artists’ complicated position in society and the art world. Using the three floors of a house, she identifies the main conflicts in roles of women and women artists in society – a woman as a mother and a woman as an artist. Through positioning the kitchen and living room to the bottom floor, the dressing room and the bedroom to the middle floor and the artist’s studio with the nursery to the top floor, she creates a scale rating the importance of duties for a woman artist in 1970s from the first floor as the least important to the top floor as the most important. (Fig.4)
On the contrary, unfurnished Kim Jones’ Dollhouse undermines the traditional connection of a dollhouse with normalisation of gender roles of women through opening up other interpretation possibilities.14 In the book Playing at Home, Gill Perry suggests that ‘as new relationships are formed with and within the scaled-down worlds, new meanings and readings of that world can be created and manipulated’15. Kim Jones uses a dollhouse to bring the concept of home and a house into a new discussion through using the war-battle drawings in the interior of his Dollhouse. Focused on the post-war theme, he explores the trauma of a war veteran expressed at home and in the society of 1970s as a whole.
Kim Jones’ Dollhouse was created in 1974 as a functional, three-floored dollhouse and its façade and interior were later painted over with his war-drawings.16 While the top floor contains two larger rooms, the rooms on the middle and first floor are smaller and connected with a hallway. The Dollhouse’s façade was painted with dark grey colour evoking a camouflage effect. (Fig.5) Kim Jones painted the interior walls with his war-drawings, where each room represents a different battle. (Fig.6) The artwork’s connection to the war is presented in several aspects: the camouflaged effect of the house as a reference to a soldier’s camouflage in a war battle, the war drawings on the walls, the lack of furniture or the overall sense of destruction and abandonment. He connects these interpretations to society and individuals through a Dollhouse.
As a Vietnam war veteran, Kim Jones enlisted into the U.S. Marines in 1966.17 He described his involvement in the war as something he had to do to please his father. He states: ‘After four years in college and art school, I had slightly bushy hair and didn’t look like his idea of a real man. I was in the Marines from 1966-69 and did a tour of duty in Vietnam.’18 After returning from the war, he started expressing this experience in various forms of art, focusing mainly on sculpture, drawing and performance art. The sculpture pieces, later worn during the art performance such as Mudman and the Ratpiece (1976), or the war drawings game, all drew on his experience in Vietnam commenting on the war, the post-war societal situation and the societal response to violence and killing.19 Since he was a child, Jones has been playing his own game of war battles where he manipulates tanks and canons in a fictional world through erasing and re-drawing their positions.20 In these battlements, he articulates war battles in their ever-changing continuity. He points out the caprices and unpredictability of the war.21 Jones’ perspective on society is expressed through the unfinishedness or ‘open-endedness’ of the war drawings.22 The constant recall of trauma or enactment of a ritual remembrance is captured in the rules of the war drawings game, where only constant erasing and re-creating of tanks and missiles allows progression in the game. Applying the game rules on the concept of a house and the idea of trauma recalling, he comments on an unstable and capricious mind of a Vietnam war veteran, the post-war societal trauma reflected in households and homes of the survivors and their families. Moreover, through the war drawings, he comments on constructions of gender role from a male perspective. For a child Kim Jones, these war drawings formed his relationship towards war, which was later exposed in him enlisting into the US Marines voluntarily. The childhood war games were supposed to teach boys to love war before they experience it.23 Thus, the war drawing is an equivalent towards dollhouses for little girls, which were supposed to teach them how to fulfil female roles within the society.
The drawings appear on the walls inside the Dollhouse and are protected by the camouflaged grey colour shielded outer layer of the house on one side but opened for spectators on the other side. Shapiro’s and Jones’ Dollhouses, both are open to a voyeuristic experience, where the spectator becomes a part of the game that a dollhouse intends to evoke.24 However, Jones’ Dollhouse never used furniture to evoke domesticity. The lack of material possessions and fittings in the house directs the spectator to other meanings of a house and home in the artwork. Jones combined a two-dimensional quality of a war drawing and a three-dimensional sculpture of Dollhouse to comment on the male position within the American society. The missing furniture evokes evacuation - abandonment of a soldier in the war, the immediate war action and the duty of an American man to enlist into the war – as it was expected by the government and the society. Moreover, the empty rooms decorated with war drawings only suggest the loss of lives during the Vietnam war. While the furnished interiors of dollhouses imply that their function is to be played with, Gill Perry suggests that the empty homes refer to ‘the possibility of catastrophe that comes with sudden desertion’.25 Elaborating on this argument, Kim Jones’ empty Dollhouse metaphorically represents the idea of the war in society. The house, in this case, was used to accommodate his trauma from the war. In this artwork, he brought the unfurnished house into a relationship with home pointing at the abandoned American soldier fighting in Vietnam and the catastrophe that this emptiness evokes.
In contrast, Shapiro concentrates on the presence of individual room fittings as symbols of women in society. Shapiro’s Dollhouse refers to the topic of gender roles, pointing at the expectations of a woman in the society which expects her to fulfil the established duties. Through re-creating the unchanging and relentless women’s environment on the 1970s, her Dollhouse uses the fittings and different identities of the rooms to criticise the persistent patriarchal society.
Both houses examine the notion of a battle as an ongoing struggle in society. Jones’ house directly implies these connotations through the war battle drawings. In the interview with the Indianapolis Museum of Art, he compares the battles in society to those in his drawings.26 He states that the battles in the game are never-ending, the tanks will always fight each other and that there will be no peace established in the battlements, nor society.27 Roberta Smith argues that Jones’ war drawings present a bird-view of a world that has wholly given up to the war.28 Each floor of his Dollhouse accommodates a separate battle. Admittedly, the idea of a house as a battlefield can be applied to the war trauma translated into homes of the Vietnam war veterans and the traumatic memories that Jones’ and others suffered from.
Similarly, Shapiro’s Dollhouse preserves different conflicts on each level of the house. Labelling the rooms and the floors with different identities, she directly refers to the specific disputes rooted in the patriarchal society and affecting women artists in 1970s. Gill Perry suggests that the established cultural geographies of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, class or social status overlap and interact within our ideas of a home and its material correlate – a house.29 With this in mind, both of the artists addressed the issues of certain societal groups in their Dollhouses. Temma Balducci reiterates that Miriam Shapiro represented only a specific type of the societal group. She identifies this group as ‘white, heterosexual, and middle-class women in mid- twentieth-century America’30 and claims that Shapiros’ Dollhouse, as well as Womenhouse, are products of that positioning.31 Through the Dollhouse, Shapiro seeks to address women’s life and female gender in general, commenting on the normalisation of gender roles. However, in the house, she represents and identifies only a particular type of women – American, middle-class, white, married. Within this group, Shapiro recognises the struggles of women artists specifically. Not only Shapiro, but Kim Jones also focuses on a specific group of society – the men being drafted to and serving in the Vietnam war. His Dollhouse suggests that the duty these men were bound to, was developed through the war games played at home - shaping their relationship towards war.
The evidence concludes that Miriam Shapiro and Kim Jones represented different cultural geographies and societal discrepancies in their artworks. This essay has addressed the understanding and utilisation of a house and home in both Dollhouses. It discusses the different meanings of home in society through Shapiro’s use of domestic items at home, addressing the constructed women identity and Jones’ use of the empty house as a symbol of abandonment and -post-war destruction of the society in the 1970s society. Shapiro creates a different meaning of a dollhouse, which was often used to reiterate or enhance the importance of women duties in society. She used Dollhouse to comment on and parody the gender normalisation by imitating the conflicting duties of women using different identities of the rooms. She focuses on the middle-class, heterosexual, white, American women artists. Jones used a dollhouse to re-create a post-war image of home addressing male responsibilities toward the war. The analysis suggests that Jones identified the never-ending battle within society and the construction of male duties through the attribute of a game in war-drawings. This essay has shown that the main factors which influenced the meanings and readings of their Dollhouses are the particular societal groups they belong to, the political situation in the 1970s West Coast, the gender constructions and their subjective experience. They translate these issues in the Dollhouse artworks using the concepts of a furnished and unfurnished home and a house, the battles within the society and in the war and the images of voyeuristic and a child’s play experience. Through different view-points and addressing various societal issues, they used the concept of a dollhouse to open a discussion about gender normalisation and post-war trauma.
1 G. Perry, Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), p.77
2 Perry, Playing at Home, p.76
3 T. Balducci, ‘Revisiting "Womanhouse": Welcome to the (Deconstructed) "Dollhouse"’, Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 27, No. 2, 2006, p. 20
4 Balducci, ‘Revisiting ‘’Womenhouse’’ ‘, p. 17
5 Balducci, ‘Revisiting ‘’Womenhouse’’ ‘, p. 17
6 Perry, Playing at Home, p.18
7 P. Selz and S. Landauer, Art of Engagement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) p.199
8 Perry, Playing at Home, p.78
9 Balducci, ‘Revisiting ‘’Womenhouse’’ ‘, p. 20
10 Ibid, p. 20
11 L. J. Hoptman, and T. Pospiszyl. Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), p. 10
12 Balducci, ‘Revisiting ‘’Womenhouse’’ ‘, p. 21
13 Ibid, p. 21
14 Perry, Playing at Home, p.83
15 Perry, Playing at Home, p.75
16 Wsimag, ‘Kim Jones. Mountain Girl Door 2014’, Wsimag.com, 29 April, 2014, (last updated 2014),
https://wsimag.com/art/8789-kim-jones-mountain-girl-door [accessed 25 November 2020]
17Artviewer, ‘Kim Jones at Zeno X Gallery’. Artviewer.Org, December 3, 2015, (last updated 2015, https://artviewer.org/kim-jones-at-zeno-x-gallery [accessed 25 November 2020]
18 Artviewer, ‘Kim Jones at Zeno X Gallery’.
19 P. Phelan, ‘VIOLENCE AND RUPTURE: Misfires of the Ephemeral’, Live Art in LA, (Routledge, 2012). p. 24
20 R. Smith, ‘The Vietnam War Reluctantly Ricochets into the Galleries’, New York Times, 21 January, 1990, Section 2, p. 31
21 K. Harmon, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), p. 18
22 Smith, ‘The Vietnam War’, p. 31
23 Smith, ‘The Vietnam War’, p. 31
24 Perry, Playing at Home, p.77
25 Perry, Playing at Home, p.84
26 ‘Artist Kim Jones: War Drawings’, Youtube, uploaded by Newfields, 2 January 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItdEFUB1geQ, 2:17
27 ‘Artist Kim Jones: War Drawings’, 2:21
28 Smith, ‘The Vietnam War’, p. 31
29 Smith, ‘The Vietnam War’, p. 10
30 Balducci, ‘Revisiting ‘’Womenhouse’’ ‘, p. 22
31 Ibid, p.22
Fig.1 Miriam Schapiro and Sherry Brody, The Dollhouse (1972), wood and mixed media, 79 3/4 x 82 x 8 1/2 inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Gene Davis Memorial Fund.
Fig.2 Peter Cox, Kim Jones, Doll House, 1974-2013, Acrylic and graphite on wood, Approximately 35 x 28 x 33 inches, Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
Fig.3 Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, The front page of the exhibition catalog for "Womanhouse”, 1972.
Fig. 4 Miriam Schapiro and Sherry Brody, The Dollhouse (1972), wood and mixed media, 79 3/4 x 82 x 8 1/2 inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Gene Davis Memorial Fund (Detail, interior view)
Fig. 5 Peter Cox, Kim Jones, Doll House (Exterior), 1974-2013, Acrylic and graphite on wood, Approximately 35 x 28 x 33 inches, Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
Fig. 6 Peter Cox, Kim Jones, Doll House (Interior), 1974-2013, Acrylic and graphite on wood, Approximately 35 x 28 x 33 inches, Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balducci, Temma, ‘Revisiting "Womanhouse": Welcome to the (Deconstructed) "Dollhouse"’, Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 27, No. 2, 2006, pp. 17-23
Artviewer, ‘Kim Jones at Zeno X Gallery’. Artviewer.Org 2020, December 3, 2015, (last updated 2015), https://artviewer.org/kim-jones-at-zeno-x-gallery [accessed 25
November 2020].
Harmon, Katherine, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010).
Hoptman, Laura J, and Tomáš Pospiszyl. Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002).
Perry, Gill, Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2013).
Phelan, Peggy. ‘VIOLENCE AND RUPTURE: Misfires of the Ephemeral,’ in Live Art in LA, (Routledge, 2012).
Selz, Peter, and Landauer, Susan, Art of Engagement (Berkerley: University of California Press, 2006).
Smith, Roberta, ‘The Vietnam War Reluctantly Ricochets into the Galleries’, New York Times, 21 January, 1990, Section 2, page 31.
Wsimag, ‘Kim Jones. Mountain Girl Door 2014’, Wsimag.com 2020, 29 April, 2014, (last updated 2014), https://wsimag.com/art/8789-kim-jones-mountain-girl-door
[accessed 25 November 2020].
