I need to get back into the habit of writing daily, otherwise my blog has a good chance of fizzing out….
We are planning to go up North for the weekend to visit family. The place is very remote, there is no cell phone reception (goodie, goodie, goodie!) and Internet is still dial-up. I assume we will be playing Monopoly at night. That’ll be fun. Of course I hope I will have some quiet time to take new photographs as well. It’s time for something else – no more birds and flowers :)
Oh, this winter is starting to get to me. It is raining, raining, raining. Alright, this is not quite true. In the morning when I make breakfast it looks like a really nice day, but by the time I’ve finished the clouds are back and it is raining again. The light is dull and grey.
I come from a cold winter country, with thick layers of snow, but I was never this cold in Germany. The houses there are well insulated. In New Zealand insulation is just starting to become more widespread. Old men walk down the road in the middle of winter in shorts and gum boots. Okay, the temperatures are generally above freezing point in Auckland, but they must be measuring it in wind-still corners. There is nothing between here and Antarctica and blasts from the South can freeze the proverbial off a brass monkey.
Thankfully the worst of winter lasts only a month or so. So it should be over soon. My magnolia tree already has buds, the first sign of spring. Hurrah.
You might have noticed that it was very quiet around the dedes lately and I have been putting photographs up on my blog. I did this as I was biding my time and holding my breath.
I have entered an installation of five dede puppets into the Wallace Art Awards, a very reputable New Zealand award for contemporary visual art. Yesterday I got an email saying that my work has been accepted as one of the Finalists. I accidentally opened the email without preparing myself and sat there squealing for a couple of minutes. It must have been such a strange noise as a businessman who has his office further down the corridor came running in thinking I was having a heart attack!
It is an annual award. You send in a photograph of your work first. From this a panel of three notable artists select the finalists. If your work has been selected, the next step is to send in the real thing. From there the work is further whittled down and some selected work goes into an exhibition from which the winners are chosen. The prizes are overseas residencies to further your artistic development.
The grand opening is on the 3rd of September, so I still have to hold my breath for a bit. But I can assure you for me and the dedes it means a lot that they are accepted. Getting thus far is just tremendous.
This week was supposed to be bird week on my blog. These images were the ones I had originally selected for today. These are shags sitting in a tree. You have to look at their heads. I call the sequence Air Acrobatics.
I am staying with the cathedral theme today. I like the little devilish figures on medieval churches. Their function was to scare people into believing. The masons of old had such great imaginations about what the afterlife would look like. As literacy wasn’t widespread the stories had to be told by easily understood pictures and sculptures like these. Of course the stories were also told orally, but we all know a picture is worth a thousand words.* Apart from this, the sermon was held in Latin, so most people didn’t understand what was being said. These sculptures were a great support in keeping the congregation in line.
I don’t know if it happens to other people as well, but I fall in love with the sound of words. The word gargoyle is one of my great loves. To my ears it has a ring like a mischievous giggle. I always thought the devilish goblins at churches are gargoyles, but I am mistaken. The figure here is technically a Grotesque. A Grotesque’s function is solely to scare people. The Gargoyles are the figures that also function as waterspouts to channel the water away from the masonry and protect the building from water damage. I finally found out that gargoyle describes the water channel function itself, not the goblin. How un-poetic. In German they are just called waterspout, or as my dictionary tells me: Gothic waterspout with grimace, now that is a mouthful.
*BTW in German the saying goes: a picture says more than a thousand words. Does this mean the Germans are bigger wafflers?
I really enjoy going through my images for my blog. Putting some up, one by one, makes me realise that I actually do have recurring themes. Loneliness and isolation obviously rate very high. But don’t send the men in white coats along, I am perfectly normal :). My images are just a counter balance to daily life, they help to de-stress.
Doesn’t this rooster look mean?
…Sorry, this is a human’s interpretation of an animal’s facial expression. Of course I have no idea what’s going on in his head. But he is certainly eyeballing the viewer. You have to admit he is an absolutely gorgeous creature.
A lot of things put us off at at first sight, but when we look again we might discover the beauty in the beast. Unfortunately we have the tendency to make our judgements hastily and move on to the next thing, always worried we could miss out on something important. We skim and skip all day long. Unfortunately this has quite the opposite effect: We miss a lot. Photography is a magnificent tool to stop the world and look again.
I have one friend who doesn’t want to look at my puppets. He finds them disturbing. Fair enough, but he won’t elaborate on what puts him off exactly. I would be so interested. Not everybody has to love them, but I am curious what they trigger in different people.
The stories that go with the puppets are of course reflections of my own experiences with people. Creating the puppets and writing up their traits is very therapeutic. While photography is a discovery of the visible world, making the puppets enables me to explore the non-tangible world, primarily relationships. When I have finished a puppet, I have looked at so many different angles of the same issue. While I still might not like the situation, I will have a better understanding and most importantly I will have kept my sanity in the process. For me they are like voodoo dolls gone peaceful.
I digressed again, didn’t I?
The blog is supposed to be about the dede puppets and it is time to introduce the latest addition to the troupe: Push-Push. She is a nice enough puppet, but she is always blowing her own trumpet. If you look past the glitter, you will find she is plain boring, and doesn’t have many ideas of her own. She loves to slip into her colourful circus gear and a real transformation takes place: “Look at me, look at me, look at what I can do” she calls out. And then she shows you tricks as old as Methuselah. “Yawn,” I say and walk away.
This image is a close-up of a spider web with dew. It is an allegory of what’s going on in my head at the moment. I have all these great and sparkling ideas but the path there…
I want to share a couple more surprising tidbits from my reading lately.
So, the reigning powers tried to marginalize popular theatre (I am not just talking about puppet theatre, but all forms of entertainment for the masses). In the article The golden age of the boulevard Marvin Carlson describes the rise of popular theatre from fair ground attraction to permanent stages around the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, where all the entertaining stages conglomerated. The Boulevard got the nick-name Boulevard of Crime in the 1820s, not because it was dangerous to go there, but because what was on show. The Almanach of Spectacles 1823 published the numbers of crimes performed on the stages (for twenty years):
… Tautin has been stabbed 16,302 times, Marty has been poisoned in various ways 11,000 times, Fresnoy has been murdered 27,000 times, Mlle Adele Dupuis has been the innocent victim of 75,000 seductions, abductions, or drownings, 6,500 capital charges have tested Mlle Levesque’s virtues and Mlle Oliver, whose career is scarcely launched, has already tasted the cup of crime and vengeance 16,000 times.
Sounds like a normal year on TV to me.
John Houchin recounts in his article The origins of the cabaret artistique how the cabaret moved from a place where artists performed their own material for their peers to a public establishment to make money.
By 1900 the cabaret had become a competitive, commercial undertaking. Owners and producers had to devise a point of difference to stand out and attract audiences. The Cabaret de l’Ane Rouge (Cabaret of the Red Ass) had a large fresco depicting the crucifixion of a large red ass. Singers presented café-concert fare and the announcer was a huckster who encouraged the audience to drink. In the Cabaret du Néant (Cabaret of Death) visitors were served at coffins and lighting was provided by corpse lamps. The Cabaret du Ciel (Cabaret of Heaven) featured harp music, a master of ceremonies dressed as priest and a man costumed as an angel sprinkled the audience with holy water. The Cabaret l’Enfer (Cabaret of Infernal Regions) offered the alternative to celestial bliss, a glimpse of hell: The decorations that hung from the ceiling were sculptures of bodies writhing in pain.
All I can say: Move to the side Goths. We have seen it all before :).
Both articles were in Schlechter, J. (ed), Popular Theatre, Routledge 2003.
I have mentioned before on my blog that I am obsessed with eyes. Tree eyes fascinate me, even though I find them sometimes tricky to photograph. I have to think about the camera settings a little bit longer. But with so many other things, the dede puppets pretty much stopped my eye collection in its tracks.
When researching puppets you very quickly come across the name Peter Schumann. He founded the Bread and Puppet Theater in 1963 in New York and in the 70s moved to a farm in Vermont. There they still hold puppet events and workshops today (bread and puppets). A really interesting story.
I was amazed by Peter Schumann’s article “The Radicality of the Puppet Theatre” (reprinted in Schlechter, J (ed). Popular Theatre, Routledge 2003). Amongst other enlightening aspects, he points out the clear difference between actors and puppets. An actor tries to fake a character. He tries to become somebody he is not. Ergo an actor’s success is based on his capability to deceive the viewer. A puppet on the other hand is the character. It is what it is and the stories emerge from within the puppet.
It makes all perfect sense to me.
This image here I took six years ago. I like the juxtaposition of the lines with the round crater. For obvious reasons I originally called it “Square peg in a round hole.” It is just a close-up of some rocks we were climbing over at the time.
When I accidentally came across this image today, a totally different interpretation jumped out at me.
There is a little story to go with it: A friend of mine, a school teacher, was once asked by one of her pupils: “Tell me Miss, what was the world like when it was still black and white?” I just love this story. The pupil was of course referring to black & white photography and TV. When I first heard the story, I thought it was so cute I laughed. Today, my answer would be: “The world was more colourful then…” as there must have been so much more room for imagination.
Today, when I glanced at the photograph, I instantly saw a smiling face with a rock hurled at it from a giant fist. When I showed my discovery to a friend, he couldn’t quite follow. So I coloured it in for him in Photoshop. Now the image is called: “Honestly, I didn’t see this coming!”
However this is a very disturbing interpretation, and I went looking for another image. It took me a while, but this time it is called: “Life is beautiful!” It shows two playful figures in the sun.
Thank God you always remember what you saw last. I have difficulties seeing the giant fist now when I look at the black and white original.
dedepuppets 