Puppetry is Dead...

Although I have had plenty of art-crushes in my life, I have had far fewer philosophy crushes. Generally, old  philosophers, like Plato or Nietzsche, have managed to express ideas that inspired me alongside the sort of gender politics that would make Jim Davidson blush. Fortunately, I haven't managed to delve into the biography of John Bell too far, and I think he is my current "philosophy of puppetry" crush.

Apart from having an obvious love of puppetry that comes through even in his most academic texts, Bell is unafraid of offering  big answers. Death and Performing Objects, which is where I first fell for his mind, looks at the history of puppetry and concludes that it is fundamentally a spiritual process. Once a member of Bread and Puppet Theatre, and currently holding a post named after a Jesuit, Bell chases after the essence of puppetry, concluding that it has been used within ritual thanks to the specific qualities of the materials used in its creation.

Death and Performing Objects has the bold energy of popular criticism rather than the precise detail of the academic essay: kicking off by establishing the dualism between the living and the inert (and noticing how life itself comes from non-living matter), he sees inspiration for the arts coming from performers' willingness to look towards death. 

Citing both Heinrich von Kleist's 1810 On the Marionette Theater and Edward Gordon Craig's 1906 The Actor and the Ubermarionnete, Bell separates object manipulation from both scripted and physical theatre by emphasising how the object can replace the human presence (he quotes Craig's sardonic "the body of man is by nature utterly useless as a material for an art"). He then promotes an alternative: the 'elevated prop' can work together with the actor to offer a more comprehensive representation of reality, one where the profound question of live against death is implicit in the very fabric of the performance.


Like McLuhan's declaration that the medium is the message, object manipulation draws attention to the function of art by its format. Vox Motus' Slick has human heads atop puppet bodies, mirroring the slapstick humour of the script in the actor's (suddenly diminished) presence. Paper Cut surrounds Yael Rasooly with fragments of the magazines that maintain her character's rich fantasy life. And Cloud Eye Control explore the contemporary interface between human and technology on a stage set by projections and software. 


Bell insists that there is a difference between actors' theatre which "can talk about death and show death with living bodies pretending to be dead" and object theatre: "When puppeteers, maskers, object performers, political demonstrators, machine operators, web site designers, film directors, multi-media producers, and advertising agencies work, they constantly create and modify relationships between living human beings and dead matter: wood, stone, metal, plastic, leather, bone. This makes for a profound reckoning with death on a constant subconscious or symbolic level."

The drama of Bell's essay is that he presents an essentialist vision of object theatre, before linking the idea back to its history. He's good on the global history too - Mongolian rituals bash heads with more contemporary experiments, and there is a generosity in his inclusive analysis. That uncanny moment of recognition, the magic of the puppet, is given a grounding in its very material. And even better, he offers a possible appreciation of the purpose of art that can be seen as consistent across time and place.



  

Thoughts on Dead Matter

John Bell, in Death and Performing Objects, suggests that "What makes performance with puppets.. and other objects different than the actor's work is a concentration, both in the creation and execution... on the materials of the inanimate world, the dead world of inert matter." Considering a range of performances, from a 1511 Florentine Carnival through to the plays of Polish icon Kantor, Bell argues that this consideration makes object manipulation a fundamentally spiritual practice.

The fashion for art that considers the afterlife has been the victim of the twenty-first century's movement towards the secular - the journey of Derren Brown, from youthful Christian to a determined materialist reflects something of the cultural shift away from religion towards science as the dominant influence on society. 

For all the justified complaints of atheists that religion still holds an undue respect, the combination of technological advances and popular science writing has encouraged artists to ponder scientific theory over theological intention. For example, after the war, choreographer Robert Helpmann updated the Christ story to a Glasgow of tenement and slum when he wanted to extend the range of ballet's contents. In contrast, Wayne MacGregor, when not making idiosyncratic videos for Radiohead, is inspired by his research fellowship in neuroscience. And Janis Claxton's study of primates has translated into a series of choreographies that take cues from the great ape's social organisation and behaviour.

Bell's argument follows a selective history of puppetry to identify a specific concern with the relationship between the human and the inanimate. Noting that many traditions feature puppets literally made from the dead, like the Indian tolubommalata that even specifies that the puppets must be made from the hide of an animal which died a natural death and was not killed for purpose, he evokes the words of Kleist and Edward Craig who appeared to want to replace the actor with the puppet. Connecting this to certain rituals - notably the Aztec priest wearing a suit of flayed skin - he presents a case for the puppet as a representation of death.

Although Bell conflates very diverse artists into a single narrative, his claims about the puppet as a reminder of the relationship between inanimate and living material is persuasive, and perhaps accounts for the uncanny impact of works like Schicklgruber, where Nigel Tranter operates life-size versions of Hitler and friends. As puppetry becomes less concerned with "hiding the strings" and the puppeteer is clearly visible,  the relationship between puppeteer and puppet echoes the broader relationship between man and matter.

Throughout Bell's essay, there is an unwillingness to address the spiritual concerns that the rituals considered - the Florentine Carnival was undoubtedly Christian - even if it has a few pagan elements, and the Aztec priest was not playing dress up in flesh for an exclusively secular end and the spirituality he considers is oddly materialist (the puppet becomes a reminder of mortality and the way of all flesh): Klein was interested in the marionette as a cypher for the human in tune with divine grace, even ironically, and Kantor wasn't shy about referencing either the seance or the mass. While he doesn't convince that a preoccupation with death is implicitly spiritual, he effectively offers a resonance to the puppet's presence.

Perhaps this resonance is what encouraged Egyptian priests or medieval churches to incorporate automata into their liturgies - certainly, it's an aspect of the puppet's aura and adds fire to Tranter's depiction of Hitler. His conclusion, which points to modern political demonstrations as part of this tradition, integrates both the otherworldly atmosphere of the puppet show with the contemporary enthusiasm for theatre as a potent, radical activism.