Puppets of Modern Art

In Carlo Collodi’s well-loved story, Pinocchio, a puppet becomes a real boy by seeking autonomous subjectivity in the face of constant outside suggestion and temptation. Introduced as a book in 1883 and widely-translated by 1911, Susan Stewart-Steinberg has argued that Pinocchio is an analogy for the modern subject. This allegory of “becoming real,” however, also uses the dialectics at work in puppetry itself, in which an autonomous figure both resists and succumbs to the puppeteer’s hand. All the while, the moral outcome hangs in the balance: what, or whose, authentic expression will prevail? In early-twentieth-century Europe, the artistic avant-garde’s practice of creating dolls, marionettes, and masks has been largely sidelined as private experiments, but the interwar years’ battle-ravaged bodies, trauma, and skepticism against institutions made the puppet a powerful tool to critique ideologies surrounding the body and its agency. Amid theatrical developments by Appia and Craig, and renewed interest in von Kleist’s marionette theory, the puppet could be seen to unburden artistic gesture of the weight of individuality to produce a link beween the micro-gestures of the war-machine age and the macro-gestures of humanity. In the hands of artists like Dadaist Sophie Taueber, futurist Fortunato Depero, and Bauhaus master Oskar Schlemmer, puppet-forms freed the gesturing body from its burden of affect, thereby highlighting the space between individual gestures and outside forces that conspire to confuse their meaning. At once highly eccentric and universally readable, the puppet offered the political power to mediate critical recognition of latent embodied knowledge.