La vitrine la plus triste de Montréal

There's no easier way to get a gratuitous dose of uncanniness than by throwing together some mannequins. As every hack art student has noticed, there is something inherently troubling about them: they're like people, except that they're not; in this respect, they are like the beings that populate the majority of my nightmares.

The word 'mannequin' is just a diminituvization of 'man' ('manny-kin'), and so is really nothing other than the English version of the Latin homunculus. The dream of creating a little man in a workshop, by means of art and science, is of course one of the staples of the alchemical tradition and of its sundry representations in arts and literature.

But Frankenstein and the Golem are one thing; the dusty, faded lay figures sometimes spotted propping up clothing in low-end stores quite another. One wonders what the owners could be thinking, how they could imagine that associating the clothing with these fake bodies makes it any more attractive than, say, simply fastening it to the wall.

Uncanniness can be reduced, somewhat, by ensuring that all the parts are attached, and in the right places. But the shop owners in this case seem not even to be aware of the ordinary composition of the human body. It is true, for example, that they are selling clothing and not rings, and so strictly speaking their mannequins do not need all of their fingers. But who could imagine themselves in clothing first seen modeled by a fingerless homunculus? 

Comments

[The Worst of Perth]

Then there's this approach.
http://theworstofperth.com/2010/02/19/show-us-your-bargains/

[Cameron Brown]

Tonight I saw the Otto Dix exposition at the Musee des Beaux Arts. There is a mini-montage from Walter Ruttmann's 1927 'Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt' showing several vitrines populated by human automata. Of varying degrees of uncanniness - the rule seems to be that the more movement they're capable of, the less proportionate their bodies need be -, these are the happy counterpoint to the maimed and mechanized Kriegskrüppel of Dix in the early 20's.

(This is the best I could find: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA9CzYn_fa4&feature=related. The automata pop up around 1:30-1:55, 3:55-4:30.)

Taking early modern automata as part of the tradition of natural magic - as achieving miraculous effects through natural rather than supernatural means -, it could be interesting to follow their adaptation to the purely commercial use displayed here. (I'm assuming they once served non-commercial interests: the spectacle Leibniz saw in Paris, for example, or at least the one he envisioned in his Une drôle de pensée.) But maybe it's just cynical to think these vitrines weren't also offering genuine entertainment to passersby at the same time they performed their commercial role?