The Puppet Show, Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pa, from January 18 to March 30, 2008; traveling to the Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Frye Art Museum, Seattle.

Bianca Neve, Teatro del Carretto, LaMama E.T.C., NY, NY, January 10 - 27, 2008; Teatro Araldo, Torino, Italy, April 18-19 2008

Puppets look easy, child-like and direct. They are obviously about the body, about power, about imagination, about the self, about comedy and about mortality.

Any artist can drop in on this art form and give it a try. A puppet could be made from anything: your hands (Cindy Loehr gives us a video with talking fists/think "The In-Laws" with Alan Arkin); your genitals (Guy Ben-Ner's video gives a sometimes shy body part a star singing role); your whole body as you act like a puppet (Paul McCarthy, scary clown slopping paint around for us).

Puppets are about drawing and about sculpting too. Film, video, computer animation too. Robotics. I think the thing vacuuming my neighbor's home right now is a puppet. I'm pretty sure some of my children's pets are puppets, that "live and die"by various digital reenactments of nurturing. And this month I have my first sighting of a Baby Think It Over Doll at, where else, the mall! A teenage girl, right out of an after-school special, is dutifully carrying her puppet baby, waiting for its electronic wail, her cue to turn a key in its back. Her puppet baby is also a surveillance tool which will give a digital readout of her mothering skills, but looking at her a little more closely what I still want to know is: does she or doesn't she? Is she wearing a strap-on empathy belly?

Try http://www.enasco.com/product/SB43113G

And, where, America, can you get a brain to strap on?

Puppets pull the strings of our emotions: revulsion, fear, anxiety, lust, weirdness, disconnectedness. Being crude is a big part of "keeping it real." Natalie Djurberg's romps in a cardboard world are kinda sick, kinda cool. Bruce Nauman has done this for decades, here with a video about a dinner date gone yucky. Doug Skinner and Michael Smith contribute a conversation between two toilets. The body is funny.

Let me note quickly Argonautika at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, the story of Jason and the Argonauts, where a marionette puppet of a baby wiggles its arms and legs making eager clicking sounds on the stage floor. We laugh at the repetitive, silly motions, but laugh too soon because here the king's henchmen enter and cut the strings, and leave it dead, noiseless and still on the stage.

Paul McCarthy loves the gross-out stuff, and I suppose he does it so we don't have to -- something the Ancient Greeks called catharsis. Aristotle talked about men having either too much or too little emotion, too much violence, too much feeling and that the arts can bring this into balance, can clean and calm and regulate the emotions. What would you rather do, spend the afternoon reading Aristotle or run around and see a puppet show to get the point?

There were more puppets on my radar screen recently as I saw Teatro del Carretto's Bianca Neve (Snow White) at LaMaMa E.T.C. This was the old tradition of performance, feeling Medieval, magical, distilled, beautiful, sorrowful. Three actors/puppeteers and a velvet lined box which opened up in different ways to reveal shifts of scale, texture, light and varying degrees of humor and suffering...from the miniature 7 dwarves to the terrifying full-scale actress portraying the witch/queen with an unmoving mask.

I think that mask that does not move produces fear because we rely so deeply on our ability to move each other, to make each other laugh, to get a rise out of each other. When we can't get a reaction, either we are powerless, mute, cut off from the world, or perhaps the other person is cruel, or perhaps the other person is dead to us. The line has gone dead.

The "Art History Book" Tour: depARTures goes to Brooklyn and New York, February, 2008

Public versus private and vice versa. How does the inner stage of the artist's imagination play in the big world out there? How weird should an artist get? Or how normal? Is art supposed to be populist, or is it a more intimate, personal affair? Is the artist at play in the realm of childhood or adolescence or is it just plain time to grow up?

One day in February, 2008, a light curtain of snow ushers us into an art adventure that begins in the Brooklyn studio of Tom Otterness. He comes to the door in a good mood, his gray hair falling down casually, in a plaid flannel work shirt. He's a mellow guy who started small: selling cast plaster cartoonish figures outside museums. Now he's INSIDE museums: the guy with over 20 employees working on international projects, spanning bureaucratic eons, producing playful groupings of large and small bronze cartoon-like sculptures. His art gives a gentle poke at what might be Capitalism, or cronyism, or business-as-usual and his work is populist for sure. User-friendly, kid-friendly, climbable. Play and playfulness, a cast of characters with surprise in their eyes and an understated melancholy about their mouths. That's the open expression that lets anyone play with these game pieces.

Otterness is affable, and he lets you into his world generously. The literary and art history allusions are perennial favorites: Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver, and Edward Hicks' painting "The Peaceable Kingdom" from the 1830's. We get to poke around models in various media, clay, plastic, plaster. Photographs of finished pieces, one or two of the real thing before us. We get to step over a drawing on the floor, pencil still lying there; we get to edge past a small model of plump little animals with the scraped-off red clay still stuck on the tool; we look at a scale model of a plaza in Philadelphia: little cardboard elements that are being moved around at this stage like game pieces. We get a peek at the many steps, the research, the care and the wit that goes into bringing his world into ours.

Otterness directs us to coffee at Le Petit Cafe on Court Street (good call) and then we zoom off to visit Dennis Oppenheim. Today is turning out to be something like opening an art history book and tumbling inside.

Oppenheim is a presence, though relaxed and shoeless in his scruffy/stylish Tribeca space. "Should we take off our shoes?" I ask. "No, no," he looks down at his socks. "I'm just an informal kind of person."

The plant-filled loft, edged with Americana, mock-cheerful kitsch, is also inhabited by 2 dogs, one a loping, cheerful yellow lab, the other a small silent poodle that needs carrying in the arms of an assistant. "The attack dog," Oppenheim says with a smile as it's ferried into the backroom.

From his work I'd have said Oppenheim would be crankier, but he's nice to us, and curious about us, asking who we are and what we do. (Of the two dogs he's definitely more like the yellow lab, only a ton smarter of course.) We're invited to gather around the computer to see a slideshow of dozens of public sculptures from the last 15 or so years. Is this a more highly evolved Oppenheim than the one I associate with a kind of brutal sculpture from the 80's? He talks about architecture and the "enlightened moment" of contemporary architecture and public projects in contrast to art "made in the studio, which can be an ego-driven temper tantrum."

He may be referencing his own work when he says, "fine art can be so perverse, so paradoxical," -- the anxious puppets and the flaming antlers and the explosions of an earlier time -- though he directs his skepticism to the guy who floats the shark in the formaldehyde. He's clearly in his public, international phase here, and some of the pieces are even beautiful, something I've never said about his work, ever (awkward, fascinating, yes, but never beautiful.)

"These are non-monolithic pieces. They relate to the theater in the sense that something can happen." A movie or stage set of a living room where a camera crew might film in Valladolid, Spain; a giant rocking structure that dips down to the edge of a lake, rocks back and fills its own pool: "Drinking Structure With Exposed Kidney" from Lithuania. A bus station in Ventura, California that turns, swoops and somehow erupts into a house. A crystalline series of forms in Madrid, stained glass become scientific, structural. Open-formed airplanes that cling to the Sacramento Airport building, filling up with vines and growth over time.

About all the shifts and about-faces in his manner of working, he says, "I think it's something psychological. When I get too far into something I have to stop and move onto something else. I admire the artists who can stay in one area and be productive in that area, but I just can't do it." Looking up from the computer I see the walls are lined with photographs from the 60's of earthworks, stripes on land, drawings in snow, all ideas that might be relevant again in the face of global warming and questions about sustainable art practice. When I ask him about whether this kind of work applies today, and how much he thinks about the environment, he shies away from the question saying art needs to follow its own needs, and shouldn't be loaded with this kind of content.

I go back to his iconic work from 1970 when he got a sunburn outlining the pale shape of a book on his chest, "Reading Position for Second Degree Burn". I ask him something I've wondered about for some years now: "What was the book?" "It's a book called Tactics, about military strategy. I still have it," he tells me. He used to talk about that piece in formal terms, that his body was acting like a painting. Now that I hear it was a military book it changes everything for me. The piece becomes a war protest but an unusually self-directed one, not a finger-pointing one....I have to wonder what other revelations await us if only we could unlock them.

We eat a late lunch at Planet Thailand -- see-thru kitchen, cool-looking bar, good cheap food-- and walk through chilled drizzle to the studio of Melissa Marks, her warm, light space filled with art about energy and color. The artist combines humor with clarity as she tells us the story of Volitia, a self-conscious drip of paint who launches into a journey of self-transformation that plays out in different rugged landscapes. Talk about fleshing an idea out, here the idea seems to be flesh, rendered in and around rock, ice, and vegetation, lit in acidic pink and orange.

The color pencil drawings relate to the page in scale, though we see larger work hanging on the wall, and images of enormous drawings done directly on the wall in black and white. Somehow, coming in from the cold to see this intense work spread out panel by panel in front of us is very satisfying, particularly after getting a sense of the machinations of public art pieces earlier on. Here's an individual, imaginative artist at work on forms that take time to unfold for us on a one-on-one level. The tension and manic energy present in these works is exciting for us; it's like watching a movie, and though the drawings are done, just sitting there, still they perform for us.

"Is Volitia always female?" Jeff Nathanson (director of The Arts Council) asks, getting right to the point it seems to me. "She can change. She can be all things. She can evolve," Marks answers with a smile, "though my son always asks me "When are you going to do the Adventures of Volitio?!"

We are racing now, because this is all verging on sensory overload, and because our day is almost done. We scoot back downtown to enter the magical zone of Meghan Boody. If you remember the theme song to the Addams' Family (their house is a muse'um, when people come to see'um...) you'll have an idea of what this is like, except add a dash of beauty. In the hall there are sensors turning on sound and light vitrines. There are rows of glass domes under which slightly twisted music box experiences await you. There are huge photographs of archetypal girls posed in front of windows, at orphanages, in stormy landscapes with lighthouses, buildings on fire, glowering skies. Palm trees are growing inside and live mice are crawling there in a low table, lit from within. Lying inside it a young female wax figure is caged on a ground of moss with the mice as her cagemates. Are they miked, or do I hear their breathing and squeaking so clearly? Darn that we are in a rush here, because I've had a million questions all day, but should have saved some up for this!

There is a pinball machine, that is so much more, made seemingly of nether world sights and bubbling laboratory ingredients. It seems darkly alive, and I don't know if it needs me to play it, or if it works by itself, flashing and revealing complex images. Boody explains, "It's a machine for playing and experimenting with dark impulses."

Boody is exploring the container as much as the contents within it. Her cases, caskets, bell jars, even her frames with eyes looking out at us give me the idea that there are many ways to file memories, and that these systems of containment change the memories, change the stories each time. It may be that we too are contained and caged in many ways, and in some ways put ourselves on display. I want to explore this idea further, but --

Time to go!!! Oh, what a day. We're sleeping on the ride back, and have enough new ideas for our dreams to last us quite a while.

home artwork bio text teaching press contact

© 2007-2009 eva mantell