“Over My Dead Body: Puppets, Performance, and Paralysis in Cardiff and Miller’s The Marionette Maker (2014)”

Best known for their interactive sound and video “walks,” interdisciplinary media artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller use musical, vocal, and mechanical sounds to complicate viewers’ perception of subjectivity, time, and place. In addition, the artists have designed a number of complex, multi-sensory installations, and tableaux vivants that include unexpectedly mechanized components. Commissioned and produced by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, The Marionette Maker (2014), the focus of this paper, is one such example. It consists of a modified caravan that incorporates multiple staged performances within its compartmentalized, dimly lit interior, wherein images of Cardiff and Miller appear, respectively: she as a life-sized reclining figure and he as diminutive marionette maker who is moved by a set of puppet strings. As this chapter argues, The Marionette Maker is thus ventriloquial not only in its forms, but also in its logic and themes, serving as the artists’ most overt engagement with a phenomenon (ventriloquism) that arguably underwrites, in admittedly more conceptual ways, their work as a whole.

Toilette scenes showing women primping before a mirror—applying makeup, lacing up corsets, brushing out hair—were everywhere in late nineteenth-century Paris. This talk will explore the widespread practice, detailed in French novels as well as in art and visual culture, of men paying for the privilege of watching a woman perform these intimate rituals. Why did the fashioning of one’s self-image hold so much erotic potential in the nineteenth-century imagination? How might we deconstruct the complex network of gazes at work in these images?