Puppets, puppetry and the like are often relegated to being an obscure subgenre of the theater or sometimes of the art world but the exhibition, The Puppet Show, currently on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, points out the fact that puppets frequently infiltrate popular culture and bring along with them issues that loom large like agency, control, miniaturization and manipulation. These issues are explored by a wide range of internationally recognized artists who have created work that incorporates the visual, conceptual or mechanical mechanisms of puppetry.

Highlights of the exhibition include an untitled film by Rikrit Tiravnija and Philippe Parreno in which an expert ventriloquist operates dummies of the two artists. The script is apparently a kind of extended commercial for their friend Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s book, Interviews: 1 (Charta, 2003); they describe Obrist as being in the great realist tradition and even akin to Balzac. The film was shot on black and white 16mm film and is only very minimally edited so you can see one take where the ventriloquist runs out of air and has to start over.

In addition to the works on display, there is a ‘puppet storage’ room that contains many different examples of puppets from around the world, as well as props such as Guy Ben-Ner’s ostrich puppet costumes that were used in his video Karaoke, which is on display in the exhibition. Throughout the exhibition’s run there will be lectures and puppet theater performances by Los Angeles-based puppeteers. Susan Simpson will present Concrete Folk Variations, Chapters 1.75, and Caitlin Lainoff and Daniel Corral will be presenting, Le Petite Macabre, an abstract version of György Ligeti's "anti-anti-opera" opera Le Grand Macabre which was written in the mid 1970’s.