ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates some cases in which the artist approaches duality as a quest to know the self as other. From her early days at Black Mountain College, Ruth Asawa developed prolific explorations into the figure of the double to access a direct, empirical experience of art that breaks down the border between self and other. Sheila Pepe and Asawa were born 23 years apart and on opposite coasts of the United States. In The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, Otto Rank writes on a variety of figures directly applicable to “The Doll Project.” In Pepe’s performance, the doll becomes a “shadow” rather than a mirror image; that is, the doll shadows the actions of its human performer. Shadows and mirror images differ in fundamental ways. Real existence of the developing subject does not resemble the whole ideal one sees in the mirror.
