THE SACRIFICAL LAMB
Dieter Roelstraete Ponders the Work of Jos De Gruyter & Harald Thys

On Kuklaphobia in Modern and Contemporary Art

[a fragment]

Without a shadow of a doubt and plenty of strings attached: the puppet has a rather tarnished reputation in both contemporary art and the culture at large. Whether paraded around as a spokesman for the gullible inner child and accompanying infantilist drive in all of us, or as a soft-spoken stand-in for the ghoulish platoon of living dead who habitually people our nightmares (zombies, werewolves, vampires, twins, robots, golems, frankensteins, clones, in short: doubles), the puppet-most widely known politically as a lowly prefix denoting anything ignobly dependent on a 'higher' power, as in "puppet government"-surely has had its share of bad press in modern times, and the contemporary art regime has proven to be one of the foremost (and most trustworthy!) platforms from which this consistently vicious attack has been launched.

This inordinately harsh persecution of puppets of all kinds and sorts-automata, dolls, dummies, idols, mannequins, pawns, pet toys and stuffed animals, teddy bears, wax figures-can be traced back to a teeming rhizome of reasons and root causes, foremost among them, of course, a tradition of deep-seated hostility (typical of modern art to the point that this hostility in part defines art's very modernity) towards what one might call the 'literalist impulse' or, less literary perhaps, the 'realist enterprise' in the visual arts. Taking its historical cue from the Mosaic taboo on the manufacturing of 'graven images' that could-"God forbid!"-be mistaken for Jehova 'in person', modern and contemporary art's programmatic suspicion and outright denunciation of the production and consumption of anything that looks, sounds, smells, tastes or feels too uncomfortably 'close' to the 'real thing'-the real 'thing' always being, rather ironically, the least thing-like of beings, namely the human figure-is based on the simple yet compelling assumption that the more one draws near towards representing what is 'alive' (as in: the living human being), the less 'life-like' its representation becomes, and, alternately, the more one seems to find oneself in the 'presence' of death. The harder we try to depict 'life' as such, the more poignantly we experience its eloping, escaping and evading our every insisting grasp. The more ostentatiously a certain graven image or idol may start to sport god-like facial features, the more we become convinced and, finally, acutely aware of its being nothing more but a sad old raggedy doll.

Indeed, the age-old desire towards life-like representation and depiction of the human figure paradoxically uncovers the very abyss-or, put slightly more abstruse, the abysmal double bind of absence-as-presence-of that which is quintessentially unrepresentable, namely the Real as such. In the daunting face of the unrepresentability of the Real as that which most emphatically cries out for representation, modern art has chosen to throw in the towel and lower its arms in a symbolic gesture of almost religious resignation, joining the growing choir of nay-sayers in the process: literalness has become the arch-enemy of a 'serious' (i.e. 'modern') art intent on weeding out the mimetic drive, and the puppet (in all its differring guises) has been among the very first casualties of this unbalanced war on 'semblance', 'realism' and 'representation'. The art establishment's zealous campaign against puppets, dummies, dolls and the like, is no war of extermination. To be sure, the puppet is a massive presence in modern and contemporary art; it is so, however, in an almost uniquely one-directional and ultimately one-dimensional fashion-as the token emblem of radical Evil.

There is a true army of puppets doing the rounds in today's art world, but-as if in punishment for their 'becoming-man'-they seem to be allowed only one role, primarily acting as the messengers of malice and woe. Both the puppet motif as such and the puppetry trope more specifically are almost exclusively affiliated with feelings of absence, denial and negativity, with meanings of death, destruction and ruin; what little images there exist of puppets in contemporary painting, photography, film and/or video-based work and, most notably, sculpture, they well-nigh always connote feelings of fear, disgust, embarassment, revulsion, sadness, shame and, finally and perhaps most importantly, unheimlichkeit - the feeling of 'uncanniness' Sigmund Freud so famously theorized around the frightful figure of the 'double' in his seminal essay Das Unheimliche from 1919 (Freud's argument is partially based on his reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann's novel "Der Sandmann", featuring a 'living doll' by the name of Olympia among others). No small wonder, then, that the prime puppet master of contemporary art, Mike Kelley-who, perhaps more than any other artist, might be held responsible for the harsh and systematic defilement of the puppet in art today-decided to name both an exhibition (in 1993) and an artist book (in 2004) in honour of Freud's groundbreaking work on the 'uncanny'.

Flipping through the book that documents Kelley's long-standing interest in puppets and automatons as exemplary carriers of "that class of the terrifying which leads us back to something long known to us, once very familiar" or alternately instill in us "doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact inanimate," one is indeed struck by the terribly bleak portrait picture Kelley has painted of the puppet: a veritable pageant of dummy monstrosities, The Uncanny brings together a ghastly host of dolls and idols from both modern and contemporary art, popular and fringe culture, science and antiquity, all of which seemingly serve to underscore the Gleichschaltung, so typical of modern art's enmity towards figurations of the overly literal and excessively realistic, of the puppet with notions of the macabre and the moribund. We are of course well aware of the unenviable status dolls, puppets and stuffed animals of all kinds and provenances don in the American artist's own visual practice: in works such as Craft Morphology Flow Chart, More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, Innards and Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood, they are the mongrel harbingers of childhood trauma rearing its ugly head-the so-called 'return of the real' qua 'repressed'-to haunt us in our tormented adult lives. Kelley's puppets are smeared with shit, grinningly engage in unholy orgies of infantile sexuality, and teeter on the brink of violence and deathlike silence; in short, they are the very conduits of transgression.

In the work of Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeois, the doll is transformed into a minefield of polymorphous-perverse sexual energies, highlighting the overtly fetishistic nature of the art of puppet-making and puppetry. In the work of Robert Gober, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith, the foremost practicioners of what, in the late eighties and early nineties, came to be known as 'abject art', this dimension of transgressive sexuality-an eros all too distressingly close to the antipodal realm of thanatos-is of course played out in all its glaring urgency, resulting in a disturbing motley of grossly deformed dolls, dummies and mannequins. In the work of Dinos and Jake Chapman, Edward Kienholz, Bruce Nauman and Paul Thek, an artist greatly admired by Kelley, the life-sized dolls, dummy heads or lifeless limbs are much less eroticized and more straightforwardly evocative of themes closely associated with death, terror and torture (i.e. the political deployment and 'industrialization' of death), whereas in the hyperrealist sculptural work of such artists as John De Andrea, Keith Edmier, Duane Hanson and Ron Mueck, we are again reminded of the utter folly of the realist enterprise as such-the inevitable fate of abysmal lifelessness that awaits all attempts at representing life at its most unrepresentable. In the work of the Chapman brothers, Edmier and Tony Oursler more specifically, the triadic motif of eros, thanatos and mimesis is also closely entwined with the phenomenology of the gothic, a literary and pictorial trope best defined by its most enduring icon, the monster of Frankenstein-the very paradigm of the foundational evil that is implied in puppetry and puppet-making.

Finally, if the extravagant photographic tableaux of Vancouver artist Jeff Wall could indeed be said to be 'spooky', 'eerie' or faintly reminiscent of 'gothic' genre-painting-and I would like to claim here, by way of aside, that feelings of uncanniness, horror, disturbance and desolation are indeed a dominant presence in Wall's work-it is precisely because of the puppet-like nature of so many of the 'figurants' peopling his sprawling, narrative tableaux, and because of the viewer's sense he is indeed witnessing a magisterially orchestrated feat of puppetry. Wall's best known works, such as Dead Troops Talk and The Vampire's Picnic, explicitly draw from the puppet-infested literary heritage of Grand Guignol and gothic storytelling, while one of his most riveting pictures, A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October, 1947, features a ventriloquist's dummy-surely a strong contender for the title of 'grisliest of puppets'. In short, the puppet, as the proverbial sacrifical lamb of modernity, has suffered immensely at the hands of modern and contemporary art's ardent antipictorialism-so much so, even, that a puppet liberation front or some other such organ rooting for a wide-ranging revaluation of automata, dolls, dummies, idols, mannequins, pawns, pet toys and stuffed animals, teddy bears and wax figures seems called for. And this, perhaps, might be the exact juncture where we come face to face with the work of Jos De Gruyter & Harald Thys.