A Tale of Two Puppets

Ben sent me this link to a They Might Be Giants video starring a few odd puppets, which reminded me of the popular puppet rendition of "Istanbul" some friends and I performed at various official high school functions, which opened up an entire catacomb cinema in my head.

So, let's talk about puppets.

Puppets are a bit like comic books in that the wide view of them is as a "kid's thing" although gifted alternative artists have managed to tap into the potential of their respective medium. Puppetry is at a very difficult point in its exploratory maturation, though. The reason is the Popular Puppet.

The Popular Puppet today is a sort of smarmy wink. Take that TMBG video, for instance... Aesthetically, the video is a throwback to the barbaric age of televised puppetry, with a converted-hand-down-stuffed-animal style of character and a type of puppetry performance that is intended to look like puppetry. Puppetry is an art of taking an inamitate object and - by guiding its motion - making it appear really alive. But the predominate form of puppetry in our culture is a weird meta-puppetry.

And there's nothing necessarily wrong with it. I think the TMBG video is cute; Being John Malkovich is an excellent meditation on the high philosophy of manipulation while poking fun at the puppeteer-as-artist; I saw Sock Puppet Showgirls and enjoyed it; as a puppeteer, I pulled out the metapuppet jokes - one-handed push-ups, "nothing on me actually works", etc - and got laughs...

The conundrum is that the satirical genre has overtaken the actual base. So, at some point, the parody is, in a way, cruel. The entire artform exists simply to destroy the artform.

This becomes particularly accented since the method and style of puppeteering are an intended regression. If we were winking at our audience while at the same time pushing the form, the effect could be completely opposite. This is something Jim Henson era Muppetry did well. (Although, I do think Henson largely avoided any kind of admission that his characters were simply puppets; he was very serious about the artform.) Even when not taking themselves totally seriously, the Muppet crew was pushing the barriers of where puppets could go and what puppets could do.

Is there actual puppetry being done? Yeah, but the continuing assault on it by the Popular Puppet drives it deeper and deeper underground. Here in Chicago, there was a brief period a few years ago where the city hosted an international festival of puppetry that exposed people to its more exploratory and art-minded forms. To my knowledge, the festival no longer exists. We do have Red Moon, but they have changed their focus to spectacle theater (a more appropriate name for what they primarily do), which implies masks and elaborate constructions - puppet-type things but not the life-breathing idea of puppetry proper. (Red Moon is a case where, I believe, the directors felt so derided by the kinder-connotation (a term I just made up, but hope to use more frequently) of "puppet" that they abandoned it. Very full of themselves based on my interactions and witness.) Generally, this is the type of thing you see under the moniker of artistic puppetry: artists interested in the medium but without the skill, training or patience to manipulate a puppet artistically.

So, we have a difficult rift to surmount. But, that's why every time I see a rag puppet, I cringe.