No Strings Attached: Puppetry at SMMOA; Kori Newkirk at PMCA
Animation sparks magic in these bodies of art
On the whole, “The Puppet Show”has the air of a project conceived primarily on paper, its connections hinging on idea rather than experience or instinct, and its highlights largely incidental. In mulling over the concept, for instance, “why puppets matter now,” the show’s brochure waxes abstract: “Puppets embody questions of control and the freedom to act,” it reads. “The loss of individual and collective agency to corporate interests; the erosion of civil rights, government by outside forces: the imagery of puppets points to certain social and political conditions that loom large today.” It’s true, perhaps — even interesting, in a grad-school seminar sort of way — but nothing compared to the thrill of seeing a life emerge from a pair of binoculars.
Whatever its role as an influence on contemporary art (significant but piecemeal is the suggestion at SMMOA), puppetry is a thriving field in itself, especially in Los Angeles, thanks to the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts at CalArts, the Manual Archives, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Velaslavasay Panorama and other sympathetic institutions. The best you could take from this exhibition is the inspiration to venture closer to the source. Fortunately, the museum offers several opportunities in coming weeks, with a screening, on July 19, of Sandow Birk and Sean Meredith’s gorgeously vernacular puppet film version of Dante’s Inferno, and two evenings of original performances on July 26 and August 2, featuring works by Susan Simpson, Janie Geiser, Laura Heit and others.
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One of the more memorable photographs in Kori Newkirk’s midcareer survey at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem) depicts the L.A.-based artist in a crisp white shirt and tie, lying on a patch of grass with his arm slung across his face. It is a deliciously mysterious image, seductive and intimate, even tender, but also closed, private and inscrutable. Asked by curator Thelma Golden in an interview in the catalog what he’s “talking about” when he uses his body in his work, he replies: “My place in the world — whatever that means and wherever that is. My place in society as a black man. I tend not to want to be identified as an individual in the photographic self-portraits. I feel there are larger issues than me being addressed, even if I was not able to identify them. ... It speaks to much larger archetypes.” It is the body employed, one might say, as a sort of marionette, an object on par with other objects, all in Newkirk’s case conscientiously refined and ideologically loaded: a beaded braid, a basketball, a white shark, a snowflake.
With some 30 works in all — photographs, sculptures, a wall painting of a Cadillac fashioned in pomade, and a selection of the handsome beaded curtain landscapes for which he’s best known — the show gives a coherent picture of Newkirk’s taut, highly focused oeuvre thus far. The most beguiling, to my mind, are these works involving the body, and particularly the two recent videos: Bixel (2005), in which we see Newkirk cavorting through a grassy, pastoral landscape, nude but for a shimmering jockstrap — it is a fluid, magnificent composition in green (grass), blue (sky), black (skin) and silver (glitter of various sorts) — and Titan (2007), in which Newkirk is shuffling down a dark city street wound in a tangle of illuminated plastic tubing and rattling IV carts. Sharp as the earlier work is, conceptually and politically, these videos point to the promise of the ongoing generational shift, the continued integration and interrogation of the identity politics movement of the ’80s and ’90s, of which Newkirk is a pivotal figure: a shift from the plainly symbolic to the elliptically suggestive and strange.
THE PUPPET SHOW | Santa Monica Museum of Art | 2525 Michigan Ave., G1, Santa Monica | (310) 586-6488 | www.smmoa.org | Through Aug. 9
KORI NEWKIRK: 1997-2007 | Pasadena Museum of California Art | 490 East Union St., Pasadena | (626) 568-3665 | www.pmcaonline.org | Through Sept. 14
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