No Strings Attached: Puppetry at SMMOA; Kori Newkirk at PMCA

Animation sparks magic in these bodies of art

Comments (0) By Holly Myers Wednesday, Jul 16 2008

The puppetry bug, when it hits, cuts deep. Recently, a friend, in a move that few who knew her would ever have expected, auditioned to participate in the opening festivities for the Noah’s Ark installation at the Skirball last year. She made it, played an ostrich, and has been fantasizing ever since about abandoning her career as a filmmaker and scholar for the impassioned, painstaking, none-too-lucrative life of a puppeteer.

Dennis Oppenheim, Theme for a Major Hit (1974)

Kori Newkirk,Void of Silence (2001)

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Dennis Oppenheim, Theme for a Major Hit (1974)

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Kori Newkirk,Void of Silence (2001)

It was in her company — which is to say, in the glow of her guileless and contagious enthusiasm — that I found myself having a puppet epiphany of my own; it came while attending a production called Who's Hungry? in a West Hollywood community center several weeks ago. Created by Dan Froot and Dan Hurlin, the program consisted of three short “toy theater” pieces based on the oral histories of homeless Angelenos. The epiphany hit me during the second piece, “Eight Days Without a Dog,” prompted by a pair of binoculars. This small, cheap plastic object became, when topped with a mop of curling ribbon and passed through the hands of four very talented young puppeteers, a woman who spends her days cycling between soup kitchens and welfare offices, who’s known her share of struggle but is determined to maintain an upbeat attitude, her spirits buoyed daily by the companionship of a beloved dog (actually nothing more than a mesh sponge). But when, in a grievous turn of events, this dog goes missing, she spends eight days pounding the pavement, proliferating “Missing” signs, asking everyone she sees for clues, and drifting ever closer to the abyss as she is forced to contemplate a life stripped not only of material comforts but of its most basic emotional foundation as well: the capacity to love and feel connected to another living being. All this, mind you, without a word of dialogue.

The magical quality of this transformation, so fundamental to the enchantment of puppetry — there’s the epiphany — is strangely absent from the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s “The Puppet Show,” a well-intentioned but largely unaffecting exploration through the lens of contemporary art. Organized by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art, it is an ambitious undertaking, with roughly 40 works — video and sculpture primarily — by 27 international artists, as well as a side room dubbed “Puppet Storage” devoted to a crowded collection of actual puppets and related ephemera. There are a number of obvious but nonetheless appropriate inclusions — Dennis Oppenheim’s 1974 installation of self-portrait marionettes, Theme for a Major Hit; a pair of Kara Walker’s grotesquely beautiful shadow puppet videos — as well as several more clever additions: footage of the Survival Research Laboratory’s 2004 performance at the former Post gallery downtown, in which massive robotic machines were maneuvered by remote to destroy one another; Matt Mullican’s Live Under Hypnosis, a 2002 video of a performance undertaken while under the sway of a hypnotist; and Paul McCarthy’s simultaneously hilarious and horrifying 1995 video Painter, in which the artist, looking like a puppet himself in layers of costume, prosthetics and other goo, stumbles through an exceedingly (and characteristically) messy pantomime of the creative process.

A show about puppetry, which is composed primarily of static objects, however, puts itself at an immediate disadvantage: If the magic is in the transformation — the shift from inanimate to animate — then the objects themselves are only half the equation. Those binoculars, had they been sitting on a pedestal, would have merely been binoculars, done up with a little ribbon, and though most of these pieces were intended as artworks in their own right, the effect in this context — when held up against the framework of theatrical production — is much the same. Even otherwise fine pieces, like Kiki Smith’s Nuit, a 1992 installation of human limbs, cast in plaster and hanging from the ceiling, feel stilted and inert. The videos add an element of animation; fixed as they are, however, in boxy, plywood partitions, they have a curiously sculptural presence as well, and seem a dismaying step removed from the real thing.

There are two notable exceptions — works that don’t merely echo or mimic this quality of transformation but fundamentally embody it. One is What Will Come, a 2007 video installation by the South African William Kentridge, an artist with much experience in the realm of experimental theater, and whose particular fusion of invention and sensitivity is emblematic of the best contemporary puppetry. This particular piece involves animated video footage that is projected downward onto a table and reflected in the metallic surface of a cylinder that occupies the center of the table, such that the marks and smudges of the projection cohere into imagery (stars, faces, airplanes, a merry-go-round) only in the curve of the reflection — a magical effect. The other is Mike Kelley’s 1992 Gussied Up, a sculptural installation in which various pieces of furniture — a bed frame, a straight-back chair, a coffee table — have been neatly but awkwardly fitted with doll clothes. Simultaneously banal and illogical, this one takes a minute to sink in, but assumes, when it does, an almost terrible poignancy, evoking a panoply of associations surrounding childhood, fear, need, comfort and imagination.