Amy McLaren’s avatars
Amy McLaren’s sock puppet paintings at RIT City Art Space
Amy McLaren’s Puppet Show at RIT Art Space is anything but cute. At first glance, it might be mistaken for an adjunct to the Strong Museum of Play across the street. Well, there are a lot of sock puppets on display. Yet in her paintings of them, the puppets are a bit more like rearing cobras than soft wooly playthings. Puppet Show is a quietly understated and intelligent installation of her most recent narrative paintings and drawings using sock puppets as the embodiment of our current plague of online cussedness. (And offline, if you pay attention to the men and women behind the curtain.) It’s the perfect word for the idiocy behind most online flame wars between one side of an issue and another: an addiction to being right and making others wrong. An addiction to a set of ideas about the world and the people in it, and all the conflict that follows from that. All of it prosecuted behind a mask of online anonymity or at least the safe distance of virtual space. Slip that sock puppet on and you’re free to say anything nasty: boom, own that opponent! Nothing is accomplished. Nothing has changed. The temperature of the culture just notches up imperceptibly. But the armor of the worldview that drives all the chatter is just as much a mask. The wearer simply forgets that this is the case. No one really knows anything, as Socrates observed about himself, but we all behave as if we have cornered the market on The Truth.
What has always made McLaren’s paintings so endearing is that, while she depicts something serious, she makes it slightly amusing. It’s unpretentious and amiable, but it comes from a kind of sorrow at human frailty. Hence her disappointment when someone thinks the sock puppets are cute. She has the facility, the gift, in a different way, that Daumier and Norman Rockwell had: the ability to vividly convey the inner life of human beings through faces and body language. Her previous work displayed this gift in generous ways: everything was in medias res, a freeze frame of people in opposition, bodies in motion, faces full of passion and struggle. Some of the large drawings she did for this solo show prove that she can pull this off spontaneously, once-and-done, with paint sticks, drawing figures that look as if they’ll move when you turn away.
The centerpiece of her installation is a little striped tent pitched in one corner, with a table and lamp, and some sock puppets on the table. It has a “It Happened One Night” curtain two people can pull between them, sitting in opposite chairs (after picking a question to discuss out of a bowl.) Then, to speak, one of the interlocutors sticks a sock puppet around the edge of the curtain to make whatever remarks are inspired by the question. It’s absurd, because there’s no anonymity, but it does add a meta- quality to the conversation that makes the speaker think of whatever he’s having his avatar say almost as a third person. It adds a level of self-observation. The whole little stage for this forces the participants to observe the dynamics of talking with someone else through the illusory safety of the curtain and the knitted representative on one’s hand. The set-up makes online anonymity physical and silly and self-conscious. In the tent you know there’s another human being over there, listening. So you listen to yourself. And that’s the whole point: to listen. McLaren has stretched a banner across the front of the tent: “What would happen if we listened to understand instead of listening to respond?”
It’s a wonderful premise for a solo show, and McClaren fulfills the premise in a lovely, understated way.