Join the conversation! The 12th SITE SANTA FE International Coffee and Conversation series will be hosted on the first Saturday of every month through the run of the exhibition. Discussion will focus on texts relating to the 12th International’s curatorial vision, the featured artists, and their inspirations.

December Reading

On the Marionette Theatre by Heinrich von Kleist and The Secret Life of Puppets (pp 61-64) by Victoria Nelson.

On the Marionette Theatre by Heinrich von Kleist is an essay presented as a dialogue where a narrator discusses the grace and skill of marionettes with a dancer. Through this conversation, Kleist explores the relationship between self-consciousness, grace, and the human condition, arguing that marionettes, because they lack self-awareness, can achieve a natural and effortless grace that is often lost to humans. The essay, published in 1810, examines how conscious thought can hinder physical grace and spontaneity, suggesting that true artistry may lie in a kind of unconscious surrender to natural laws.

The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.