Peculiarly unsettling, as if of supernatural origin or nature; eerie.
Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking by Johann Heinrich Füssli, courtesy of the Louvre, ParisFell asleep last night sitting on couch with computer on lap and watching a DVD on the television. I was trying to watch Querelle (Fassbinder) and also reading some things online even though I was already dead tired. I swear that the night before last I fell asleep in the same spot, on my couch while working. I was cutting out shapes of paper, and my eyes eventually glazed over and I think I was sleeping but actually still working. Eventually my head would nod forward and I'd wake up but I know that my hands were still working even though my brain had shut off. Once I realized what was happening, I tried to keep it going to see if I could actually continue to be productive while I was sleeping. It reminded me of those stories where people sleepwalk and do insane things while they are asleep. I saw a documentary on this once where they featured cases such as this guy who drove across town and killed someone while asleep and another story where a guy raped this girl who was a friend of his while she was staying over his house one night. In both cases the sleepwalker was acquitted because they were able to prove that there is this medical condition where some people are able to function, or at least their body is able to function, but their brain is asleep....even rape or murder. The sleepwalker wakes up and has no memory of the crime they've committed. I saw this documentary on YouTube, it was a British documentary and it was incredible. I'm going to try to find it and paste it below today's writing. These cases were in the UK where they must be more lenient or open to abstract thinking, because if you tried the "sleepwalking defense" in the US I'm quite sure it wouldn't fly and you'd be sent straight to prison, where we send everyone. I was watching a documentary last night on PBS about the privitization of jails in the United States. Small towns with poor economies welcome a new jail, all the locals end up working there and become dependent on the new jail. More jails create 'better' economies for these small, lifeless towns, and more jails need to be filled with 'criminals'. They featured this guy who was down and out, had a wife and two small children, was traveling in California and stole $30 worth of groceries for his family and was busted. He went to jail for 16 months with no pryor criminal record. Jails need to be filled. It's horribly depressing. This country is getting scarrier and scarrier because it's more and more frightened of the boogey man, frightened of it's own shadow. As I get older the notion of leaving and moving to another country becomes more and more appealing, but I would never do it (never say never).
This was an unfortunate tangent that I'd like to write more about some other time, but back to sleepwalking and such....
What I was reading last night while I fell asleep at the computer was a book written by the artist Mike Kelley, called, The Uncanny. It's a great book he wrote about a show he put together several years ago that has to do with sculptures of bodies, mostly human. The show traveled and consisted of his own work and other artists as well as found imagery and objects he collected, things such as mannequins, wax museum imagery, dummies, bodies, limbs etc etc...things that represented the human body. The writing in the book is just as good as the art in the show. It's impressive how good a writer Mike Kelley is. A great artist and an even better writer. In one of the essays at the beginning of the book he mentioned an artist by the name of, John Duncan who in 1980 did a project where he had sex with a corpse and presented it as an audio piece titled, "Blind Date". I don't want to spend my morning dissecting (no pun intended) this project but it ties into the sleepwalking I mentioned above, and an article I just read this morning in the NYTimes about The Muppets (trust me, it does).
The article is titled, "Retired Muppets Will Move to Atlanta" and it features a staged photo (isn't any photo of a Muppet staged?) of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. The article is talking about Jim Henson's widow finding a suitable home for Henson's archive of his sketches and notes including puppets, some very old and fragile. About halfway down there is this paragraph:
Built from foam and fabric, each puppet character had multiple copies because of performance wear and tear. The gift covered puppets that could no longer be used to perform; in fact, the Kermit in question was a “photo Kermit” — used for photographs but with no opening for a puppeteer’s hand.
I don't find The Muppets particularly interesting. As a kid I did. I remember watching The Muppet Show every evening, even though I think I was technically a little older than their target demographic. I watched it because I thought it was funny, but I also watched it because I found it incredibly unsettling. The thin veneer of 'puppet' never worked for me and I always imagined what could possibly be going on just off the set, or under the set where the puppeteers were and how they created this mirage of bodies interacting. The puppets always seemed DEAD to me - mostly because they didn't' blink but also the way they stared at each other, these lifeless things with eyes, were always unsettling. And then there was the interaction between the puppets and the human guest on the show; Elton John, Lou Rowles, John Denver - what was it like for them to have to make eye contact and to 'act' with these tiny bodies that had character and personality, but in the end were not real. Course the fact that these puppets actually did have personality and character and feelings was testament to the writing of the show and the artistry behind the puppets - to be able to create empathy between a puppet and a human I imagine is no small feat, but the artists and puppeteers involved certainly were good at this. When the taping of an episode of the show was over, I imagined the lights being shut off and the doors being locked and a big closet with all these dead puppets, staring, lifeless. This kind of imagery or unsettling feeling is kind of what Mike Kelley was writing about in "The Uncanny". Even if you're not an artist, you will find the catalogue for this show interesting. I believe it is out of print but you can find used copies of it on Amazon or Ebay.
So, back to my point from the NYTimes article. This idea of a 'photo kermit' is what interests me. It makes sense that they would have a version of Kermit that has no hole for the puppeteer's hand - that is used only for photo shoots such as the one featured in the NYTimes article and pasted here, but let's just say it's ODD (or, uncanny).
Forget that it's Kermit the Frog, a popular figure in American Culture, but just think, a facsimile is created and used just for photography....a facsimile or doppelganger of a personality with a body is produced and set in front of a camera, a lifeless figure. The picture is taken, the photo is printed and published and what you see is a person (a felt frog) that you know a little something about, but in actuality, it's a dead facsimile. I can't think of another example of this extreme suspension of disbelief....where a caracter that is dead to begin with (a puppet) has a copy made of it (death number two) and there is no difference between the two. I'm thinking that maybe something similar happens when you go to a funeral and there is an open casket and you see the embalmed body, with make up and hair fixed by the undertaker to create a rendition of the person that was living and breathing a few days earlier. That's not exactly the same thing. Oh, I though of another example, I think I read somewhere that in Egyptian tombs they would create alternate, fake, mummies and bury them in different chambers to throw off would-be robbers from stealing the real mummies that were buried with gold and jewels. There must be other analogies but I'm going to move on, if you're reading this and can think of any other examples, email me if you have a moment (carter@carteroffice.com). Oh wait, what am I saying, I forgot that I do this in some of my own work. The sculptures:
....a body is created, a portrait, a stand-in, a double. I guess photographs do the same thing. Think of photos of dead loved ones that are kept in wallets or hung in the family den, or sometimes actually printed on gravestones.Writing about embalming reminds me of yesterday's writing when I mentioned Tammy Faye Baker. In her interview with Larry King she said she was going to be cremated because she, "didn't want bugs crawling on her"...and she was serious. This coming from a woman who's Christian beliefs require her not to be cremated so that when Jesus' second coming takes place, all the dead Christians will rise up from the dead. So if Tammy Faye is cremated, what will happen to her when Jesus comes back? Funny how her fear of, "bugs crawling on her" trumps her die hard Christianity.
I'd like spend the whole day tying together the sleepwalking, the sex with a corpse, the dead puppets, the uncanny and the suspension of disbelief....but maybe another day. It's 10:31AM and I have to get to my studio before the entire day is gone
To read the original NYTimes article, click here.
Here's a good link to Mike Kelley on PBS.
