As a young
puppeteer—particularly one who had come to puppetry from an acting and mime
background-- I found myself frustrated by the lack of appreciation for what I
was doing as the mover, and maker of character, and images “behind the scenes.”
Often when reviewers spoke of a production I was in, they would invariably speak
glowingly of the production. They would write about the creator or director of the
piece—but they never acknowledged that their responses to the live work they had witnessed had anything
to do with my performance—albeit a performance that I had projected through the puppet. Indeed, within the field there are those who
have shared Gordon Craig’s notion of the ubermarionette as the perfect actor. I
have had one director say, with complete ignorance, that he “loved working with
puppets because they didn’t have any ego,” while I stood silently wondering how
he could forget that certainly I, and the other puppeteers, did have egos, and
that he was working with us—not the puppets—we
were working with the puppets. When one is able to witness a competent performance
with puppets, one can begin to understand the relationship of skill to the performance
with objects. When one is able to witness a brilliant performance with puppets,
one can begin to understand the nature of the artistry of the puppeteer. But, are we in denial? Why are we—those of us who have come to the field of puppetry,
working with puppets or objects? I suggest that we have migrated to a field in
which we are consciously or unconsciously tapping into the way objects –created
or found—act upon us and our viewers. These things when used in our
hands-moving, living, acting, interacting—either as a mimesis and reflective of
our world experience or of our inner imaginative one—have their own very significant
ways of moving us that is unique to the medium and therefore is co-dependent
upon the medium for its impact. It is not merely “dead matter” made to look
alive-and therefore uncanny; it is a great range of things and though for some
perhaps that latter quite enough—for others this is a limiting perspective.
There are
innumerable ways to tell a story: live actor, dance, music, written word,
cinema, animation,rap, poetry, visual art, performance art, puppetry… Do we not seem to be
attracted to the particular field we land in, by the medium through which we
will tell our stories? Before I go on, I would be in error were I not to say
that I use the term “story “broadly. It might be linear or non linear, it might
literally feature a plot or it might be a story that must be constructed by the
viewer either through the bits and pieces of image and text they receive, or
through empathy. Since the post dramatic movement, with artists such as Heiner
Müller, Robert Wilson, and the Wooster Group, some theater has truly left the
bounds of the Aristotelian model, and audiences are often asked to participate in
ways that are unlike the traditional viewer to performance relationship. Nevertheless,
to return to the question at hand, are we, who work with objects, not in some
way compelled to share our perceptions with audiences through the medium of the
object and puppetry? If so, why now is there such a tremendous backlash against
the medium through which we “speak.” A sentiment which appears to be building
imagines that a puppet, without the puppeteer present, is “just a doll.” I
agree that without the creative intent for the object to be performable, an
object may be thought of as sculpture. However, an object created and intended
for performance carries additional facets of meanings to the viewer. A puppet
designer and maker may have spent innumerable hours thinking through how the visual
impact of the object will also reveal important
information to the viewer, yet now the relevance of these objects appears
to be under attack. In one instance a puppeteer and scholar has noted that he
has no interest in curating a museum of puppets, yet, when I pass through such a
museum in which these performable objects have been collected I experience a
multitude of responses—intellectual, and emotional. In this instance, my responses
to the static objects are stacked upon one base realization: that the objects were
constructed by someone who intended to perform with them, or intended that they be performed by someone else.
Both Art History
and Anthropology have an arm of studies referred to as Material Culture which
explores the material remains of cultures to understand them. From the website for the University of
Wisconsin –Madison read:
The
Material Culture Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison examines forms,
uses, and meanings of objects, images, and environments in everyday life. We
want to take a fresh look at old categories of study in order to discover
untold stories. (my emphasis) (http://www.materialculture.wisc.edu/)
And from the Department
of Anthropology at UCL:
Material
and visual culture is concerned with how people make, exchange and consume the
material world, but equally with how material forms and visual images are
central to the socialization of human beings into culture. We are in vanguard
of theoretical discussion in exploring perspectives such as phenomenology and
objectification. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/material-culture
Here is where puppetry intersects
with a field of study that we have yet to enter into—but which is entirely relevant
to what we do. (There are others that we should begin cross pollinating with as well.) Isn't it important to consider that the object constructed or selected
for performance is itself a conveyor of meaning and is perhaps itself capable
of eliciting empathy? While others may wish to debate whether puppets are art,
I will simply state that in many instances, I believe it to be true, and in other
instances when the object is perhaps not art—yet it too reveals something about
us, and is reflective about something in our culture at the moment in time in
which it was constructed. In Art and Agency, Alfred Gell postulates
that
A purely cultural, aesthetic, 'appreciative'
approach to art objects is an anthropological dead end. Instead, the question
which interests me is the possibility of formulating a 'theory of art' which
fits naturally into the context of anthropology, given the premise that
anthropological theories are 'recognizable' initially, as theories about
social relationships, and not anything else. The simplest way to imagine this
is to suppose that there could be a species of anthropological theory in which persons
or `social agents' are, in certain contexts, substituted for by art
objects…. I have avoided the
use of the notion of 'symbolic meaning' throughout this work. This refusal to
discuss art in terms of symbols and meanings may occasion some surprise, since
the domain of 'art' and the symbolic are held by many to be more or less
coextensive. In place of symbolic communication, I place all the emphasis on agency,
intention, causation, result, and transformation. I view art
as a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic
propositions about it. The 'action'-centred approach to art is inherently more
anthropological than the alternative semiotic approach because it is preoccupied
with the practical mediatory role of art objects in the social process, rather
than with the interpretation of objects `as if' they were texts…..The kinds of
'index' with which the anthropological theory of art has to deal are usually
(but not always) artefacts, These artefacts have the capacity to index their
'origins' in an act of manufacture. Any artefact, by virtue of
being a manufactured thing, motivates an abduction which specifies the
identity of the agent who made or originated it. Manufactured objects are
'caused' by their makers, just as smoke is caused by fire; hence manufactured
objects are indexes of their makers. ….Just as any art object indexes its
origins in the activity of the artist, it also indexes its reception by a
public, primarily the public it was made ‘for.’ (5-23)
When
Caroline Eck commented on Gell’s work in her essay Gell's theory of
art as agency and living presence response, she wrote:
Most reactions to
Gell’s work try to assess the significance of his work to anthropology and/or
art history in general; here the merits of applying a Gellian analysis to one
particular, but very widespread, variety of art acting on the viewer are
considered: living presence response, in which viewers react to works of
art as if they are living beings or even persons that act upon the viewer,
enter into a personal relationship with them, and elicit love, hate, desire or
fear. Art and Agency offers a new departure to study
such responses because it singles out precisely that aspect of the interaction
between works of art and their viewers that makes them similar to living
beings: their agency, the power to influence their viewers, to make them act as
if they are engaging not with dead matter, but with living persons….Art and
Agency maps the ways in which indexes make viewers do things (in the
widest sense of the word), and this mapping depends heavily on the cognitive
psychology of Pascal Boyer. But it does not engage in much detail with the
actual experience of the patients of the index. Yet it is precisely the
experience of a work of art turning out to be alive, of the creeping awareness
or sudden appearance of the inanimate as an animated, living being that defines
living presence response, makes it resistant to any form of scientific
explanation, and at the same time profoundly unsettling.
Clearly, people outside
the field or puppetry are busy looking into the resonances of objects and their actions upon us. It is troubling to note that we are quickly backpedaling
away from the significance of objects in the work that we do, and the question
arises; what is the unspoken commentary in this stance?
|
