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"Disturbing" is a term that has long since become a cliché in the art scene. Yet it's exactly the right way to describe Gisèle Vienne's "Jerk." A youthful mass murderer acts out over two dozen murders using hand puppets and ventriloquism as the audience watches and hears how a person loses everything. Actor/ ventriloquist Jonathan Capdevielle has been playing this solo role around the world since 2008.
At Berlin Art Week, a one-hour film of the performance, which is based on a story by Dennis Cooper, will be shown at Sophiensæle. Violence always plays a key role in the work of French-Austrian puppet maker, director, and photographer Vienne. But in conversation, Vienne remarks that "Jerk" is the "most brutal thing we’ve done.2
Born in France in 1976, Vienne was raised in Grenoble, Freiburg, and Berlin. She speaks German well, with a charming French inflection, carefully choosing and accenting words in the way multilingual individuals sometimes do—because they’ve learned early on that language isn’t something to be taken for granted, but rather is something that is acquired and constructed. Such people intuitively know that the world is comprised of signs. But this doesn’t mean that they are quicker to crack codes.
"There is no such thing as motionlessness"
For Vienne, violence is a code that she cannot decipher. "Even today, I am preoccupied by why people inflict such violence on one another. I have to work through this constantly so I don’t go crazy! I now have a much better understanding of what sadly enables this violence, from how we perceive things to our economic and political systems."
The puppets in "Jerk" are small and sometimes crudely made—except for those of the victims. When choreographing, Vienne sometimes places life-sized, realistic puppets among her performers. "Just as there is no such thing as silence, there is no such thing as motionlessness," says Vienne, who is constantly on the lookout for the fluid and eschews the definitive. The uncanny dwells at boundaries.
It’s hardly surprising that so many of her works are set in forests, a zone of darkness, but also of possibilities beyond pure reason. So it seems almost like a supernatural coincidence that the first German solo exhibition of her puppets will be on show at Haus am Waldsee, a museum whose name literally means “the house at the forest lake.” Vienne has already built over one hundred of her puppets.
A feminist puppet history
Her solo show "This Causes Consciousness to Fracture" is subtitled "A Puppet Play," but we shouldn’t expect a theater piece. Rather, the museum will be filled with groups of teenaged puppets as well as a new short film. Vienne regards puppets as a symbol of dissociation, by which pain is displaced elsewhere from an individual’s body, allowing distance from traumatic experiences. These figures bear witness to these experiences, even if they do not always narrate them.
"And puppets invite sympathy," Vienne adds, although this varies from culture to culture. "My works are frequently on tour and when in Japan, I was often asked if it’s true that people in Europe throw away dolls in the household trash." In Japan, they would often be taken to a temple and ceremoniously burned, "regardless of whether the doll is a Barbie, a sex doll, or a religious figurine."
At Georg Kolbe Museum, Vienne’s puppets are placed in a historic building and are shown alongside objects by artists including Hannah Höch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Emmy Hennings, and other historically significant artists. The intention is to draw a feminist line through modern art and thus explore the question of why so many European avant-garde artists worked with puppets, marionettes, and objects. Vienne offers one initial response while describing durationality and her training methods, frequently referencing qigong, the Chinese practice of body movement that "we use to strengthen our fasciae while considering our entire body, not its individual parts." The historic avant-garde was also attempting to resist the European tradition.
"Numerous speeds are at play and they don’t align"
A further reason for using puppets is the fact that they underscore the mechanical and constructed, thus presenting even humans as a modern machine. Thus it is, in the end, unsurprising to hear that Vienne names Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Jacques Tati as her favorite artists. Each of these film comedians moved in a manner that was dancelike, yet much faster than Vienne’s dancers, particularly in her acclaimed "Crowd," which will be mounted once more at Sophiensäle in Berlin.
The forest, naturally, meets a group of ravers, dancing in a time loop to notably faster-paced techno music from Detroit (a masterpiece that Chris Dercon included during his brief tenure at Volksbühne). "Tati in particular showed how societal transformations reshaped the body in his late work, 'Playtime.' Numerous speeds are at play and they don’t align," Vienne explains.
What counts as slow and what is fast; what is animated and what isn’t; what comforts and what moves are all distinctions set in motion in Gisèle Vienne’s artistic vocabulary. These asynchronicities reveal humans as a product of their time. And even in the darkest zones, a small comedic light flickers.
This article first appeared in Monopol's special issue on Berlin Art Week 2024.