The surrealist toy, or the adventures of the bilboquet. (2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hopkins, David
• Is Part Of: Sculpture journal. Volume 28:Number 2(2019)
• Page Start: 175
• Page End: 192
• Publication Date: 2019
• Subjects: Sculpture -- Periodicals; 730.9005
• DOI: 10.3828/sj.2019.28.2.3
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1366-2724

Abstract

Abstract : The role of the toy, as a source for visual surrealism, has hardly been considered before now and even within avant-garde studies the toy is only just beginning to be looked at as an exemplar for modernist/avant-garde art. A growing literature on play has begun to register the importance of the ludic in Dadaist practice. Yet the surrealist toy has remained under-examined. Toys as (predominantly) three-dimensional objects lend themselves particularly well to sculpture. This essay therefore brings the specificities of the toy, surrealism and sculpture together in a new alignment through study of the bilboquet, an eroticized toy popular in France during the early twentieth century. This toy was the subject of a bawdy joke between Marcel Duchamp and a friend and might have been Duchamp's first readymade.