The Puppet Show

by Michael R. Taylor, Ingrid Schaffner (Editor), Carin Kuoni (Editor)

At first glance, The Puppet Show seems a flip title. Organized by Philadelphia ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni, this exhibition catalogue focuses--with both humor and gravity--on the surprisingly prodigious amount of puppet imagery in contemporary art. It takes as its historic point of departure one of the first episodes of avant-garde art Alfred Jarry's 1896 puppet play Ubu Roi , which the South African artist William Kentridge, in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company, has adapted into an allegory of apartheid. Other puppets are featured in works from more than 30 well-established, international artists, including Anne Chu, Terence Gower, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jankowski, Laurie Simmons, Kiki Smith and Kara Walker. This volume also looks at puppets in Modern art and popular culture--from Sophie Tauber Arp’s Dada marionettes to the Internet phenomenon of the “sockpuppet”--a well-known person’s fake online persona, created in order to boost public opinion.

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2008

About the author

Michael R. Taylor is chief curator and deputy director for art and education at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

Reviews

[H. Givens · Rating 1 out of 5]

The text is all unreadably pretentious, as is most of the art. A lot of it was also in video form, so the tiny stills give no sense of what the video was actually like. An exhibit DVD would've been a much more appropriate piece of merchandise for them to issue.

The "puppet storage" element of the exhibit actually seems like it might've been worth seeing. It contained pieces from a lot of major American puppeteers, displayed in kind of a simulation of a "backstage" with them ready to go out and perform. There are small notes about each puppet's origin, but entirely swamped by the sections of the book that were just textual masturbation over the brilliance of the exhibit and the Serious Art pieces.