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Paul Klee puppets

 

 

Robert Anton 2019 – edge exhibition – small stick puppets papier-mache heads small and intricate.

 https://www.edgearts.org/whats-on/events/exhibition-preview-the-theatre-of-robert-anton/

 

Jordan Wolfson Tate Modern

 

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/may/03/jordan-wolfson-puppet-violence-colored-sculpture-tate-modern

 

Alvaro Guevara Puppets

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guevara-puppets-t07488

‘A sense of anxiety and threat hangs over Guevara`s painting, perhaps reflecting the atmosphere of Europe on the brink of war. Puppets substitute for people, their features exaggerated into caricature. The metaphor suggests both the collapse of contemporary politics into farcical play-acting, and the helplessness of individuals tugged by the strings of history. Originally from Chile, Guevara had been a fashionable portraitist in London before moving to France in 1930. As he struggled for recognition there, the ease of his earlier work was replaced by a melancholic mood.’

 

Pierre Huyghe ‘This is not a time for dreaming’ 2004

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpPEprPYK04

Puppet controlling puppets

Lighting important for mood

Animated moving objects e.g. architecture/ paper

 

 Pierre Huyghe’s strength lies in his understanding of the fact that an image always comes with baggage. This is probably what makes his work so important today, at a time when commercial signals are proliferating in place of works, closed-loop communication is coming to replace culture, images have become masks for universal media ventriloquism and it’s always power that does the talking. https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-7-summer-2006/reversibility-real

 

Huyghe has asserted the work of art as a zone of activity, a form filled with human interactions and economic, political and social phenomena.

 

The idea that everything is fundamentally a process – not objects

 

Tony Oursler

Projection onto head of ‘puppet’ under the sofa

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/oursler-the-most-beautiful-thing-ive-never-seen-t06989

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/oursler-autochthonous-aaaahhhh-t07056

https://hirshhorn.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Tony-Oursler-Directions-Brochure.pdf

https://tonyoursler.com/

https://tonyoursler.com/interviews

 

These projections are subverting the idea that the puppet/mask is a barrier or a way of distancing from the audience. Links to surveillance and face recognition – where does the current mass use of face masks leave this?

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