Notes on staging the Puppet Show

(Excerpt from catalogue)

Terence Gower

The Puppet Show

For me, the most fascinating aspect of puppetry is its distortion of scale. I am interested in how miniaturizing or grotesque enlargement can engender a sense of the uncanny in the viewer. Puppets are often miniature scale reproductions of human beings, and when they are animated by the puppeteer, they take on living human characteristics. I believe this triggers a slightly uncomfortable, Gulliveresque consciousness in the viewer.

I push scale in two directions in my exhibition design. I use enormous graphics and shadows on the walls to reduce the perceived scale of the viewer; and I display smaller puppets on a massive out-of-scale platform, isolating them in a sea of whiteness. I put videos into small booths scattered around the exhibition like an invasion of itinerant puppet theatres, each displaying the works with a scaled-down intimacy.

The uncanny is also to be found in the space of non-animation, where the puppet is at rest. This is the backstage of the puppet theatre, where the puppets hang from their hooks as if they are asleep. This world of sleep is the world of “Puppet Storage,” the first exhibit the viewer encounters in The Puppet Show. The “sleeping” puppets lining the ceiling and walls of Puppet Storage evoke the world of dreams and the unconscious. For artists, the unconscious is the place where sensations, experiences and ideas are processed on their way to forming artworks. Puppet Storage represents this phase of the artistic process by displaying some of the sources and imagery behind the works in the exhibition.

Tyranny of the Copy

As an artist in the show, my approach to puppets is predicated on the invitation extended by the curators to design the installation for “The Puppet Show.” Thus, I have come to relate the imagery of puppets to those forms of “scale reproduction” that I use throughout my work as meditations on the relationship between model and copy. The architectural scale reproductions I build are miniature copies of real buildings, an inversion of the traditional relationship between model and finished building.
Several artists in “The Puppet Show” have created puppets based on real people. Nayland Blake has made copies of other artists; Rirkrit Tiravanija and Pierre Huyghe have made copies of themselves. The puppets are scale reproductions, similar to my scale architectural reproductions. Similarly, they turn their subjects into models. But unlike a building, a puppet is performed, and when it comes to life it seems to replace its model, to somehow become more “real” and present than the original. From this relationship of copy to model is borne the uncanny voice and authority of the puppet.

This tyranny of the copy brings to mind the final images of Federico Fellini’s film City of Women, in which Snàporaz (Marcello Mastroianni) finds himself in the gondola of a hot-air balloon. Looking up he realizes the balloon is a copy of the beautiful young woman he has been pursuing throughout the film. She looms over him like a vast marionette, yet it is he who is caught in the strings. This scene nicely illustrates the play of scale and control peculiar to puppets. I hope to trigger a similarly Gulliveresque consciousness in the viewer as he or she participates in my staging of “The Puppet Show.”