Interview between Lori Waxman and Amber Hawk Swanson

LW-The first question that I want to ask is about how your relationship with Amber Doll has changed since you first acquired her.

AHS-I probably wouldn’t even have been talking about it as performance at one time; I imagined her as real. During the nine months of waiting for Amber Doll, I was buying things for the project—but as if I was buying gifts for her—and preparing my house. Every minute of my time was consumed with waiting for this doll. I had so many expectations for what she would fulfill for me.

LW-So if those were the initial expectations, that she was going to be this new, real person in your life, how has she turned into something else over time?

AHS-Now I’m thinking more about the fact that she’s this sexually available silicone replica. So she’s no longer filling emotional needs for me. By putting her in all of these ritualized spaces, I’m looking at her less as a partner and more of an extension of self.

LW-So more than a replica of you, she becomes a proxy for you in certain kinds of situations. But what are these situations where you need this Amber Doll proxy?

AHS-It stared out with the wedding reception, way back when I was feeling connected to Amber Doll. I wanted it to be a celebration of our six-month wedding anniversary and joint birthdays. There were a lot of people who knew me personally [at the event], so it surprised me to see them molest my doll, and it made me wonder if those were things that occurred to them to do to me or to women in general.  Someone took her tongue out, and her skirt was lifted up, and there was a real interest in her vagina and her mouth—and of course she’s penetrable in three orifices, which is exciting to everyone.
Watching these interactions blew my mind, and I realized afterward that that’s really where the project lies. Since we had already started using this hyper-ritualized setting, I wanted to find others, so I went back to my early research on cinematic rape scenes. There was always a partnership scene that preceded the rape scenes in these films. Roller-skating rinks came up all the time, especially in the movies with queer content—so that was the next ritualized space we hit.

All the spaces we pursued had something to do with dating. They also had this kind of innocence, but it’s this innocence that feels like it could turn at anytime. It‘s interesting how the social codes of innocence are broken by Amber Doll’s availability. In all of the settings, I was the most surprised by how a leader of violation as well as a protector would emerge.

LW-So even in a situation like the tailgate, a protector emerges?

AHS-Yes.

LW-In the pictures I’ve seen from that setting, this wasn’t apparent to me. And that makes me think that maybe you’re leaving out the photos that have a kind of redemptive content.

AHS-I may have edited out the redemptive images but the video tells a really different story. In it there’s no way to get away from the fact that a protector emerges in each scenario, whether it’s overt like in the wedding footage, where someone says, “Be careful!” or, “She’s a lesbian, you can’t touch her like that.” It happens in the tailgate, too, but more subtly. Someone walks by and says, “Hey man, look out, we’re on the street.” And just that little mention, in the midst of this free for all, was enough to make me think that somebody might stop this. In another instance, the doll interrupted a group of men and women who were tailgating together, and one of the women grabbed Amber Doll’s hand and made this waving motion, trying to bat away the people who were investigating her.

LW-In the earlier photographs, it becomes very clear that Amber Doll is both a live performance prop and also a studio prop. How do these two very different artistic situations play out?

AHS-The studio shots are the partnership of Amber and Amber Doll, our interaction and the love I once felt for her. Those pictures are important in a larger group, because they stand in the way of the viewer’s potential position of voyeur. The relationship between me and my doll I think complicates that whole idea, or I hope it does.

LW-What strikes me as being very different between studio-prop Amber Doll and live-performance Amber Doll is that in the latter nothing’s a setup. Real curiosities and desires are being acted out on this doll and real protection is coming into play. Whereas in the earlier photos, I feel I’m not seeing a relationship, but rather the faking of one.

AHS-Well, outwardly it may come off as staged, but what I was trying to get at was the partnership between Amber and Amber Doll. It’s also part of this violent fantasy fulfillment, the embodying of victim and victimizer, that is more developed when I’m using Amber Doll as a prop and trying to understand what she does in these spaces and how she interrupts things or not. I’m putting her in these positions and I am not personally protecting her.

LW-In all of these situations though, she’s still a prop. Whether she’s a live prop or a staged prop, props are something that we use. Is Amber Doll just a thing to be used in the end? Or is she something else?

AHS-Just when I think I’ve snapped back into reality, someone says something like that: Like a prop! [laughs]. You’re calling Amber Doll a prop? It hurts a little bit, so I’m clearly still assigning meaning to her. Perhaps in a lesser amount than I was, but I still don’t think of her as something to be used. I feel like she holds the answers to something and that’s probably the personal side to this whole project. But she’s not a prop to me. She’s an Amber Doll. Whatever that is.

LW-That’s a good corrective because if I’m thinking about something performative, it’s with participants. There are people, but people are not props. In Vanessa Beecroft’s performances, I think people are props and that’s a huge issue one can take with her performances and it’s also a huge part of their affective tension. So it’s very interesting for you to insist that Amber Doll, who is in fact an object, doesn’t get reduced down to being just a prop.

AHS-I think some people think of her that way but I think an equal amount of people think of her as real as I do. Otherwise, I don’t think those protectors would emerge. There’s something about the one person assigning meaning to this doll or protecting this doll for whatever reason that gets more people to understand her as real. I’ve watched that happen in many settings.

LW-Now for a totally different question: Why does it all come down to sex, and sexual violation? Why are these the situations in which we keep finding Amber Doll?

AHS-The wedding is a great example of a place where I really didn’t expect those kinds of things to happen. But because it happened there, it made me think, this is going to happen no matter where Amber goes. And that might have something to do with the way that Real Dolls have been presented in mainstream media. People understand what they are, that they are sex dolls as opposed to mannequins, which are not penetrable.
There is also something related to the way children explore dolls. I remember Jeanne Dunning talking about this years ago, when she was doing her work with dolls and the way that children assign sexuality to them or not. Exploration and dolls go together and often in a sexual way.

With Amber Doll it’s also so overt. She’s a sex doll: no matter what shirt you put on her, her nipples peek through. There’s enough signifiers that she’s a sexual object that it gives most people permission to go there with her—especially at the wedding reception, where you just wouldn’t normally accept that. I’m trying to think of what other scenarios exist where that would not be permissible, and I think that might be a funeral. The very first Real Doll article I read was about necrophilia, and the author was comparing the relationship between owner and doll to necrophilia. I’ve come to understand the relationship in a really different way through my interactions, but there is something to that. I do wonder what will happen when she’s laid out and acting in these funerary rituals, if people will still feel that permission.

LW-That brings us to the last question, which is how and when will the relationship between you and Amber Doll end, and if in fact it must end, and why?

AHS-Part of me feels like it will never end, but not in a way that I would feel trapped. Mostly this project has had a really big impact on my personal life. As far as the project goes, you know, she’ll be laid out in a casket. I’m interested in drawing upon the ceremonial aspects of a gallery setting to invite viewers to grieve with me for Amber Doll, on her untimely death.

People have asked for my backstory. Real Doll owners often have extensive backstories, about where their doll was before, or when their doll entered their lives. I don’t have a backstory. I saw her birth, so before she came to me, she kind of didn’t exist. And I actually don’t have a backstory for how she might die. But she is going to be laid out. She might be acting, we don’t know yet. She might be revived. I also have fantasies of burying her and then exhuming her.

LW-You called her death “untimely.” And I’m wondering if, in fact, it’s timely, for you and for her and for the project as a whole.

AHS-In the Sex TV piece there’s an emphasis on the way that my relationship with my doll has waned since I met my current girlfriend, and certainly that’s the case. That’s one place where this performance gets muddy, and the whole art practice and personal life come together. I also do feel ready to be done taking her to places. But I’m still curious about how people might interact with her when they perceive her to be dead. I’m trying to think of how else it may be timely other than I feel a little bit exhausted by it all, it’s been a really intense project.

LW-Rest in Peace.

Lori Waxman is a Chicago-based critic and art historian. She publishes in Artforum, Modern Painters, and on Artforum.com, co-hosts a monthly review show on the podcast Bad at Sports, and has written for various exhibition catalogues. She teaches art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois, Chicago.