Dries Van Noten invites UK-based artist Julian Kalinowski to exhibit at their Los Angeles event space. The exhibition includes a constellation of Kalinowski’s work, including 12 dolls dressed exclusively for the exhibition, three poster-sized prints of the dolls, and original polaroids from his Tattoo club photo collection.

Kalinowski takes inspiration from the fifties, hand-painting the dolls and making their outfits from scratch. On the themes of his creations, the artist cites cultural references from old Hollywood and European art cinema. We caught up with Kalinowski about staying true to period, the lives of his dolls, and the obsession with the macabre of Hollywood.

There are very specific “miniature communities” online where people share the process of creating dolls, miniature furniture, and cook tiny meals. What do you think of people’s fascination with scaling real life down?

Jean Luc Godard had a great quote: ‘’Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.” I think that artificial life in miniature can be more fulfilling than the tedium of ‘real life’. Dolls are a tool for the imagination. People can create dream like living environments and live a fabulous fantasy world, even in a tiny apartment. They can buy the stuff or make stuff as projects - it’s very fulfilling and kills time. Their dolls are their friends. You know many dolls have stronger personalities than ‘real’ people. Ask any doll collector this. It’s a whole new ‘ideal for living’. It’s modern. It’s a ‘camp’ idea, and as Susan Sontag wrote ‘the camp eye has the power to transform experience’.

Of course the dolls you create visually harken back to a certain period, but your process also does. Where does this commitment to the period come from?

It’s a love of craft and that human touch. In the past dolls made in factories were hand painted and hand finished. Hand finishing gives ‘soul’ to even the most banal objects. I base my process in the way the Bild Lilli dolls were made in Germany - that was the doll Barbie was a copy of. Lilli was made of a sort of obsolete material called Tortolon. I use hard plastic. I design the dolls as a sort of ‘collage’ of existing dolls that I melange together. The mouth of Nancy by Bella , the nose of Bild Lilli , the eyes of Schwabinchen and the legs of Caprice. Everything is very specifically referenced. Of course when the dolls are made up these references are not important as the finished dolls become a thing on their own.It’s not where you take it from, it’s where you take it to. The plastic is spray painted as a base for the airbrushing and paint. The hair is set in under a screwed down pate on the back of the head and set by hand. Or I have little wigs made.

Dressing them up and adorning them is a kind of ‘bricolage’. Some things are made by very talented ladies I work with -some things are found. I love accidents and I’m an anti-perfectionist. If they look too ‘right’ I throw in something ‘off’ or it’s too boring. In the past I used to love ‘dressing up’, as all sorts of things - I called these looks my ‘disguises’. Often I dressed as a ‘woman‘ although I didn’t really think of it in that way - it was me wearing garments denoted to women. I never understood how a garment could really have gender, logically. Although I understood, of course, that everyone else seemed to. Women are always on view. Gay men are always on view too. They are both under the scrutiny of the male gaze. But the distinction between that view is very different… It’s an object lesson for a man to know how it feels to be SEEN as a woman. And I don’t mean as a woman on her ‘pedestal’. This was an idea I played with in the past. My dolls are often odd self portraits that show my inner world.

Why do you think there is such a fascination with the macabre and the dismal of Hollywood? Why does our culture like to see stars fall?

Kenneth Anger tuned into this idea, of what the Germans call ‘Schadenfreude’, in his book ‘Hollywood Babylon’—the pleasure to be derived from the misfortune of others. We all love to hear about ‘falls from grace’. These ‘archetypes’ and ‘stars’ are our ’Saints‘ and we want them to suffer for our sins, and especially for their own. When people choose to become ‘stars’ they become ‘sacrificial lambs’ and it’s inevitable that they get led to the slaughter. There are exceptions; Garbo escaped with grace. Someone like Madonna is running straight into the eye of the storm.

Your dolls are quite expressive. Do you imagine the lives they may have lived as you create them?

Thank you! Yes I do. I base them on characters from books and movies. Characters like Sasha in Jean Rhys’s book ‘Good Morning Midnight’, a woman past a certain age living in exile in Paris between the wars. Jean Rhys’s famous quote was ‘if all respectable people had one face I’d spit in it’. I’m obsessed with the writer Anna Kavan. Her looks, her reinvention, her writing and her life story. She is a big touch stone for me. I also like the heroines of Fassbinders German melodramas, bored bourgeois housewives, women on the edge of breakdown. Valium casualties. Of course these archetypes speak of the lives of many gay men too. From a time when they still had to hide and could only see representations of themselves through the cliches of portrayals of fractured women in cinema. The fear of aging is a theme in my work. This can be a terrible fear for many women and a fatal one for many gay men. My doll ‘Sylvain’ is my most ambiguous doll. She is clearly older, ‘Jolie Laide’ and not necessarily born of the female sex ( but I don’t talk about things like that, as there is dignity in privacy). But most of all my dolls are about myself. Many of them are sketches of my inner world at that precise time that I’m painting them.

What makes presenting this exhibition at the Dries Van Noten LA event space special?

I’m a doll maker and an artist. I use the medium of dolls to speak about my life. The doll is many things - a painting, an idol a sculpture. But dolls are really all about their clothes. Dries Van Noten speaks of finding inspiration everywhere and in everything. He also says that for him restrictions are not always negative. I like this very much as I think that what can be achieved working within restrictions and limitations is often far more exciting than being given free reign. Dries also says ‘Clothes is just something you put on to cover yourself... fashion is a way to communicate.’ Fashion dolls are my mode of communication. By giving me this show Dries is seeing that fashion also lies outside the big picture.

The installation is open until February 12, 2022, at 451 N. La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90048.