| Summary: | Generally produced within a five-year period in the early 1970s, Dorothea Tanning's soft sculptures evoke a sensual, emotive, and sometimes humorous character. In this paper, I examine Tanning's <italic>Pincushion to Serve as Fetish</italic>, 1979, in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art. Despite its title, <italic>Pincushion</italic> is less identifiable than most of Tanning's sculptures, making it even more open to interpretation. More than her other sculptures, <italic>Pincushion</italic> encourages the viewer's mind to wander imaginatively in search of meaning.
To understand this piece, I explore the context within which Tanning worked. The Surrealist movement greatly influenced Tanning and remains the primary impetus behind her art and imagery. Her employment of the fetish conjures up Surrealism's interest in the sacred traditions of "primitive" societies and the strong influence of Sigmund Freud's theory of sexual displacement. Although eager to join Surrealism at the beginning of her career, Tanning gradually shifted away from the movement and refused any association. Yet she continued to engage with Surrealist imagery and practices. Considering this contradiction, I view Tanning's <italic>Pincushion to Serve as Fetish</italic> as the artist's exploitation and subversion of Surrealism.
The association of human characteristics is a common quality found in soft sculpture, as examined in the works of other artists, such as Claes Oldenburg and Yayoi Kusama. Likewise, <italic>Pincushion</italic>'s material and method of construction, as well as the title's allusion to a domestic object, a pincushion, elicits a discussion of feminist art practices emerging around the production period of Tanning's soft sculpture. Through my investigation of all of these elements, I illuminate how Tanning appropriates the idea of the body from the evocation of the fetish and the inherent nature of soft sculpture to produce an object that functions both as a self-portrait and as an object open to projected portraits of the viewers clad in the language of enigma.
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