Go, Figure

There’s a shiver that happens. The shiver
is inhuman; the whole body shakes equally at once. The puppeteer
holding the strings doesn’t intend the shiver, and you couldn’t say the shiver is coming from within the puppet,
dressed and dignified in his three-button suit and bow tie, though that
might be the closest thing to the truth. The shiver happens in between
the puppet’s actions, when he’s finished doing something and is on his
way to being still. It is a surplus affect, the dangling remainder
after you account for what the puppeteer intends and what the puppet is
made to do: walk around, sit down, invent buildings—for it is a
puppet of the architect Le Corbusier—and die. But not shiver.
Would the towering figure of Le Corbusier himself ever shiver? And yet
this shiver is what makes the puppet alive. This shiver is the
puppet.

There is a show now at the Frye Art Museum called The Puppet
Show. It is not for children, even though it includes a video of a
puppet conference moderated by a panel of puppets including Fozzie
Bear, Lamb Chop, Grover, and an elderly turtle wearing a hat and
monocle and going by the name of Mr. Shelby (evidently he is from a
television nature program), all of whose appearance will certainly
thrill children but whose discussion centers on metaphysics. “What is a
puppet?” Grover asks innocently. He has never heard the word before.
Fozzie Bear, meanwhile, not only knows what a puppet is but knows how
best to market a puppet (funny hat).

The Puppet Show, a contemporary art exhibition that has
traveled to the Frye from the Institute of Contemporary Art at the
University of Pennsylvania, is one of those shows you can disappear
down into, and at every level down you go, you will get something more.
Because a puppet moves, on a stage, in a setting, the exhibition is
designed as a series of stages putting you, the audience, in a series
of positions with respect to these stages. You start, for instance,
backstage, in a closetlike place where puppets stand, sit (sagging),
and lie down on shelves, protected from interfering hands by chicken
wire. The curators call this the exhibition’s unconscious. When I
previewed the show, the breakdown of a nearby installation (a puppet’s
head came off!) somehow caused the lights to go down in this closet,
which turned it into a crypt-toy-box. Traditional Indonesian puppets
(e.g., a god, blue and curly) and historical puppets (Pinocchio, nose
long) are in there, along with new puppets from the videos in the rest
of the exhibition and myriad other puppet-relics.

When you emerge from backstage, you are thrust in front of a group
of little motor-driven marionettes cast to look like the artist Dennis
Oppenheim, dressed in miniature black suits with crisp white shirts
(pictured). Suddenly they begin a dance, but it’s loud (are their feet
bronze?) and spastic and intimidating, like a military event gone
haywire. Next to it are photographs from Laurie Simmons’s story of a
girl puppet come to life, starring Meryl Streep (the actual). Welcome
to The Puppet Show.

The Puppet Show uses internationally important
artists—Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Kara Walker, Pierre Huyghe,
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Bruce Nauman, Maurizio Cattelan, Nayland Blake,
Nathalie Djurberg, Christian Jankowski, William Kentridge, Guy
Ben-Ner—very, very well. This is not an excuse to round up big
names; it’s a fascinating new way of drawing them together. It follows
up on strands of art history going back to midcentury modernism so
easily—as cocurator Ingrid Schaffner writes in the really good
catalog, “Speed up Hans Namuth’s film of Pollock painting if you want
to see a puppet show”—that it’s hard to believe nobody’s done it
before. What better way to further the questions of pop and minimalism
(and the entire political situation of the 20th century) than puppetry?
It’s the oldest question—which parts of us do we control and
which parts belong to systems that pull our strings?—asked
another way. And what if we know about the strings? What then?

Pretend these questions are being asked by puppets, and you get an
idea of what this show is like: McCarthy, in a video, stomps around
wearing a bulbous nose and making a mess with paint while chanting,
“Yooo-hooo, de Koooooning“; two hands wearing rhinestone eyes
have a relationship talk (Cindy Loehr, Señor
Wences–style); Ben-Ner’s penis, wearing googly eyes, performs
karaoke to Connie Francis’s “Lipstick on Your Collar”; puppets of
famous artists (Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno) that can be hired out for
events sit on a bench watching themselves be (badly) ventriloquized on
a video projection while you sit on another bench behind them, watching
and watching the watching; Matt Mullican makes a painting in a gallery
while under a hypnotist’s spell not to obey the hypnotist; a “Negress
Burdened by Good Intentions” reverses slavery—black women are in
charge—but still gets ejaculated all over in the end (Walker); a
vise wears a tiny pink sweater, and a bed and chair are linked,
incestuously, by their legs having been inserted into a single pair of
children’s shorts (Kelley); a war is fought by carousel horses on
sticks and men whose bodies explode then are reconstituted in order to
be exploded again (Kentridge); and Le Corbusier’s shiver looks you in
the eye (Huyghe).

The puppet, mostly dead, makes everything possible. Go see this
show.