Performance Objects of the SoupTalks Project
The FOOT SOLDIERS are in charge of Metaphor Security, they enter while audience members are making this pledge by the poet Gary Snyder:
I pledge allegiance to the soil/of Turtle Island/
and to the beings who thereon dwell/
one ecosystem/in diversity/under the sun/
With joyful interpenetration for all.
FOOT SOLDIERS, 1998
(20″w x 60″h x 5″d bamboo control 36″w), found objects, fish line
$2,400
. . . .
The marionette bust of Niccolo Paganini was one of the first objects I built for the SoupTalks Trilogy and was given the dramatic entrance of coming from the chest of the assasinated Storyteller playing a Bach Partita — a poetic birth of the trilogy’s musical narrator.
PAGANINI, 1985
6″w x 6″d x 42″h
$2,900
. . . .
This installation combines four objects:
“Adam & Eve” turtle body puppets (50″w x 12″h x 36″d), wood and foam core, covered with silver lame;
Proscenium Theater (48″w x 28″h x 12″d), wood and styrofoam core, covered with polymer clay;
Chorus of Civilization (36″w x 24″h x 6″d), polymer clay figures on wire, painted lace fabric, white fish line, bamboo control.
The Chorus is given birth by the mating turtles, Adam and Eve. The Chorus is holding a curtain of blood covered lace and singing the ending of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” The proscenium’s painted curtain (not shown) falls for the first time, a dramatic ending to the first part of “Voice of the Turtledove.”
BIRTH OF CIVILIZATION
42″w x 64″h x 30″d
$12,000
(This piece is installed in my Snohomish studio, please contact me to view.)
. . . .
The Old Blind Storyteller, a performance object created in 1989, was operated with my left hand in the back of its head, operating his mouth and a tongue! Now preserved in a reflective pose, “taxidermied,” and mounted on a wood pedestal, 2019.
TAXIDERMIED STORYTELLER, 2019
12″w x 12″d x 60″h
$2,900
. . .
I destroyed this drawing to create a new artwork pictured below to feature artist Peter Requiem’s wonderful Box of Light, 1990.
STORYTELLER’S BOX OF LIGHT, 2019
perforated steel, drawing; 24″wide x 18″ tall x 11″ deep Collection of Karen Guzak
. . .
Notes: Old Blind Storyteller, Performance Object.
. . .
Field Marshal Mikhail Kutozov and Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, leading players of the French Invasion of Russia, known in Russia as the Patriotic War of 1812 and in France as the Russian Campaign.
(Objects vary in sizes but all were modeled in polymer clay, 1989-90, held in place on a threaded rod attached to a base of velour covered wood holding a representative number of manufactured military figures corresponding to the specific marshal’s historic strength. Click on the thumbnails to learn about each Marshal.)
. . . .
French Armies of 1812. Photograph by David Emery was published in Puppetry A World History by Eileen Blumenthal, Abrams Publishers, 2005 (pictured above).