Picture of the week

I don't know the context.

Screenplay - Barry Purves

Amazing. No sound, though. excerpted video clip with sound, here.

Size matters

The first time I saw Ron Mueck's sculpture I saw it online. It was a picture of the giant woman in bed surrounded by museumgoers, and I wasn't sure whether they were toy people surrounding a real woman. I really love this woman's face, her pose... I've since seen some of Mueck's sculptures in person and they have never been quite as wonderful as my initial response to them in 2-d. I think it's because I knew they were fake and couldn't hurt me. That is, my body wasn't threatened by their size. They were either extraordinarily large, or too small, to be taken for a real person.





Oddly enough, i wasn't impressed by Mueck's attention to detail either. There was something so artificial about putting in the hairs on his sculptures one by one, and painting them that pink skin color.

I think his most successful works are probably the giant woman, because of my personal preference for her face, and "Dead Dad." "Dead Dad" is so diminutive. I overheard some woman saying that Mueck's father had died in Australia while he was in the U.S., and Mueck wasn't with him when he died.




I keep trying to figure out why his sculptures don't appeal to me on a visceral level. They are after all of the human body. I was much more afraid and curious about this life-size figure I saw in "Role Exchange," an exhibit about doppelgangers and role exchanges. When I walked into the gallery I thought it was another person, until I realized I was the only person in the room. As I walked around looking at other things on the wall, I kept seeing him in the corner of my eye, and thinking he was real. I was afraid to approach him. He really looked like he could move at any moment. I touched one of his fingers to see what it felt like. It was a little rubbery, but pretty realistic.

I attribute it to the size of Mueck's sculptures. They're just too large or too small to be frightening, too unlike the regular human body. Size trumps verisimilitude. I would be much more afraid of a badly worked life-size wax figure than one of Mueck's creations. It's well worth it to watch Mueck's work process though. He starts by sculpting a clay figure the size he wants it, and makes a mold out it. He breaks open the mold, takes the clay out, and paints this fiberglass stuff on the inside. Once the fiberglass is formed, he takes the mold away, and he has his figure. It's cool watching him working on the clay sculpture, smoothing out the clay under a figure's armpit.

picture of the week

I think this is Sarah Kane.

real men in red outfits

the sultan's elephant

and something else altogether...

Hi, and welcome to Woodenhands, a puppetry and everything else blog. I'm starting this blog because of the puppetry unit to come next semester at Brown... but also because I have all these curious links I'm dying to share... so I'm gonna. If you have an account with blogger already you can let me know your username and I can enable you to post to this blog. If you don't, it's really easy to sign up with blogger (blogger.com) You can post videos and it hosts 300 mb worth of pictures.

All the links to the left are sites I think are worth going to... obviously... but I am going to make formal posts of some of them, to elaborate on why they're connected to puppetry and how I stumbled on them, etc.

In my mind puppets aren't just puppets, they're dolls, automatons, robots, toys and you should feel free to post your really scary wax museum experience or your impromptu brush with ventriloquism. if you want to.

Anyway, that's it for the intro. Email me or Meg with any questions you have about anything. I think I'm also going to start this thing where I post a random picture every week and you can feel free to use it as a writing prompt or just gaze upon it lovingly.

Thanks,
Chen