Lecture at the Bowes Museum by Cordula van Wyhe

Polychromed Christ Children made of wood, alabaster or wax were produced in
great numbers from the fourteenth century onwards across Europe. Their
shape and form varied in accordance to the ritual purposes they were made
for. In female monastic communities this could involve intensely personal
and emotive interactions such as bathing, swaddling and feeding them. The
experience of lactation – be it spiritual or biological –is one of the more
extreme psycho-physical reactions to wooden figures of baby Jesus. The
collection of polychromed, wooden statues of baby Jesus at the royal
convent of Franciscan nuns in Madrid, the Descalzas Reales, is unique in
its scope and variety.
 
This talk will rethink selected case studies from this collection by
establishing a dialogue between these seventeenth-century Spanish
polychromed statues of the Baby Jesus and modern fetishes of motherhood
such as reborn dolls (vinyl dolls crafted with a maximum degree of realism
including motor-controlled breathing and temperature) or digital babies
(offered online in so-called virtual online ‘adoption centers’).
Researchers have shown that modern reborn dolls help simulate the caretaker
experience and create genuine feelings of dependence. The fetish character,
understood here generally as objects inducing the intense desire or
reverence elicited by an absent body, is common to all these material and
digital “dolls” from past and present. How can a synchronised engagement
with seventeenth-century and contemporary “dolls” help us to understand the
elision of play and piety and the materiality of artificial companions as a
“viable other” (Sherry Turkle) in past and present societies.
 
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