The
world of wooden people
Francis McKee
Catalogue
essay for Beagles and Ramsay 1996 - 2003 Published by Gasworks Gallery,
London.
Some words seem fated to sound old-fashioned. Artiste must
be one of them. Closer to the French etymology than artist
it hints at diva-like tendencies, pretentiousness, and a certain kind
of falseness - an unashamed willingness to acknowledge the fictionality
of a performance. Increasingly shunned, the word had its heyday
in the world of music-hall entertainment where burlesque, slapstick,
melodrama and histrionics were positively encouraged and there was a
knowing intimacy with the audience.
Music-hall combined a wide variety of acts, some moving downmarket from
the theatre and many moving up from their previous incarnations as itinerant
entertainers. Everything from popular singers to sword swallowers, jugglers,
conjurers, stand-up comedians and acrobats. Among these, it was perhaps
the ventriloquist who embodied the strange relationship between performer
and audience that typified the music-hall. Always absurd and often slightly
sinister, the ventriloquist and his dummy (it was a primarily male role)
were the most recent incarnation of a very old practice. Throwing the
voice and mimicking noises had roots in early religious phenomena such
as the Oracle at Delphi - a Greek tradition of prophesy in which the
gods would answer petitioners questions through the medium of
a priestess. In the middle ages the practice was also associated with
cases of possession and witchcraft - the devil and his peer demons speaking
through the bodies of ordinary people.
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the supernatural elements
of ventriloquism had been tamed and were now presented as entertainments
by performers rather than terrifying encounters with the actual presence
of Satan. William Edward Love, one of the most famous of these performers
in the 1830s and 40s, for instance, styled himself as a polyphonist
imitating not just voices but the sounds of machines and the natural
sounds of the landscape. He would create offstage, outdoor narratives
for his audience to visualise in their minds, transporting them imaginatively
from the theatre to the countryside or a city street. And yet, the darker
aspects of this art persisted in the minds of the audience as can be
seen in this description of one of Loves rivals by David Brewster
in 1834:
The ordinary magician requires his theatre, his accomplices, and the
instruments of his art, and he enjoys but a local sovereignty within
the precincts of his own magic circle. The ventriloquist, on the contrary,
has the supernatural always at his command. In the open fields as well
as in the crowded city, in the private apartment as well as in the public
hall, he can summon up innumerable spirits; and though the persons of
his fictitious dialogue are not visible to the eye, yet they are unequivolvally
present to the imagination of his auditors, as if they had been shadowed
forth in the silence of a spectral form.
This description is important for two reasons. It highlights the ghostly
qualities of ventriloquism - the effect of hearing a disembodied voice
or a voice animating a doll conjures up a sense of communication with
a spirit world beyond our material surroundings. This is one of the
most powerful forces that ventriloquism taps into. The performer, like
a medium, seems to allow a voice that is not his own to pass through
him or emanate from him. Uncannily, that voice can appear elsewhere
in the room divorced from the performers body or animating the
otherwise dead shell of a puppet or doll. Deep in the human psyche this
triggers the belief that a soul can survive the death of the body and
that inanimate objects may also become vessels for life.
Brewsters description also pinpoints the unusual impact of ventriloquism
on the senses of an audience. Although the performance seems to operate
by throwing the voice and creating an aural illusion, its real impact
lies in its ability to make the listener visualise an imaginary
scene. The Scottish philosopher, Dugald Stewart, who may have inspired
Brewsters interpretation, had concluded in his Elements of the
Philosophy of the Human Mind (1827) that ventriloquism is primarily
a visual phenomenon bearing a close relationship to painting. Certainly,
there is a case also to be made for ventriloquism as an element of sculpture
with its emphasis on tableaux, the silent statuesque demeanour
of performer who falls still while animating another object and later,
of course, in the appearance of the dummy.
In The Secret Life of Puppets (2001) Victoria Nelson brings both the
supernatural and art together in the main thesis of her book, claiming
that In the current Aristotelian age the transcendental has been forced
underground, where it has found a distorted outlet outside the recognised
boundaries of religious expression...We can locate our unacknowledged
belief in the immortal soul by looking at the ways that human simulacra
- puppets, cyborgs and robots - carry on their role as direct descendants
of graven images in contemporary science fiction stories and films...
Even when ventriloquism was later reduced to the status of a music-hall
turn with the now classic tableau of performer and wooden puppet this
aura of the supernatural never faded from view. In certain ways, the
transition to the use of the classic ventriloquist's dummy added a new
dimension to this expression of the transcendental. Nelsons description
of these human simulacra as distorted outlets could not
find better embodiment than the vent doll. Ugly, pubescent,
often lower class and furnished with a regional accent the dummy is
a crude technical caricature of the human body. Each performance is
a comic spasm that explores the limits of language and nonsense. A surviving
1944 script for a ventriloquists music-hall act suggests that
at least one tongue twister is included in the performance, possibly
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppercorns or Theophilus
Twistle, less thrifty than some,/ Thrust three thousand thistles through
the thick of his thumb or
He was a thistle sifter,
He sifted a sieve of sifted thistles
And a sieve of unsifted thistles,
He was a thistle sifter.
These rhymes may show the proficiency of the ventriloquist but theyre
just as likely to showcase his mistakes and the points at which language
- a vital indicator of human difference from animals - teeters on collapse.
In Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000) Steven Connor
argues that the redundant apparatus of the dummy has a new importance
in a rapidly advancing technological society. Developments in science
and communication have already rendered the human body and the human
voice anachronistic and inferior to new components emerging from laboratories.
For Connor, the archaic dimensions of ventriloquism make it a
catch in the throat of media technology, the awkward sign of the workings
of the works.
That description might convey some of it's relationship to sculpture
too. The kinetic explosiveness of the doll and its crude but emphatic
figuration lie at the roots of sculpture and while those qualities might
be derided by high art they are the elements that give sculpture its
energy and impulse. Their legacy can be seen in works by artists such
as Paul McCarthy or Tony Oursler where both the low-fi technology and
the theatricality of the dolls is echoed in their approaches to figure
making.
Ventriloquism and the devilish qualities of the dummy offer one other
important gift to artists - the ability to break taboos and say the
unsayable. The raw energy of the performer and doll act, the mask afforded
to the performer by the doll and the blatant absurdity of the situation
opens up a space where anything can be considered and expressed, permissible
by virtue of it's comical and apparently nonsensical nature. The violence
inherent in the act of ventriloquism may underscore this dimension of
the phenomenon. The persistent presence of the supernatural and often,
the demonic, give it an edge which is frequently acknowledged in contemporary
interpretations of ventriloquism from The Exorcist through to the Chucky
movies. Steven Connor points to the roots of these interpretations in
the constantly repeated figure of an adolescent boy as the vent
doll. Connor argues that this doll is chosen because of the accepted
patriarchal ideology which demands that boys internalise a much higher
level of violence than girls. Looking then at the success of Chucky
films, he recalls their link to the Jamie Bulger case in 1993.
The nation was shocked by video footage showing a 2-year-old Jamie Bulger
being led out of a Liverpool shopping precinct by two 10-year-old boys,
who were later found to have battered him to death with bricks and an
iron bar. The outpouring of hatred towards the boys who had committed
the murder was extraordinary, not least because it seemed to confirm
the very thing that was being so massively grieved for, the so-called
killing, not just of the child, but of childhood itself. During the
trial of the two boys, it was suggested that they had been influenced
by videos of the Childs Play 1, 2 and 3 films, in which a doll
called Chucky comes to life and begins to hurt and murder. The dynamics
of mimicry and repetition are complex and chilling here. For children
to kill a child seemed to be the proof that they are really, like Chucky,
changelings, and not real children at all, and they have got it coming
to them...
Whether the films really had such an impact or were a sensation that
tabloids could not resist does not lessen the shock of this collision
of art and life. That such an association could be plausibly made reflects
the dark edge that ventriloquism still preserves under the cosy layers
of clumsiness and old-fashioned performance values. The artiste,
in this context, assumes all the charm of a trojan horse, smuggling
the transcendental and the demonic back into our clean and virtual world.