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Strings Attached: The Living Tradition of Czech Puppets
Strings Attached is a lavishly illustrated book containing four (4) essays by noted experts that trace the tradition of Czech puppetry and discuss its relationship to America puppetry. Included are essays discussing the National Museum, Prague, and puppet theaters, museums, collections, organizations, and publications in the Czech Republic.
The book accompanied an exhibition of the same name, held at the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art from March 8 to August 4, 2013. An exhibition checklist, profiles of the artists, a list of exhibition lenders, and helpful maps are included.
The book accompanied an exhibition of the same name, held at the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art from March 8 to August 4, 2013. An exhibition checklist, profiles of the artists, a list of exhibition lenders, and helpful maps are included.
166 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 7, 2013
10 people want to read
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June 3, 2021
Puppets are one of my major obsessions, so I was pretty excited to find out about this book, a catalog of an exhibition in Columbus OH:
https://www.columbusmuseum.org/blog/2...
The catalog available as an e-book on the Hoopla platform (which is quite annoying, but that's another story), and may be free if you're connected with a good public library. (San Francisco Public Library, for instance; this is why people live here!)
I know very little about Czech puppetry, so the historical overviews are definitely helpful. Unfortunately, the essays are packed with laundry lists of puppeteers and performance spaces; what contextual information is included would have been more illuminating with more illustrations. The blurb says this is "lavishly illustrated", but I certainly have a very different idea of "lavish". There are good photos, but for such a visual art as puppetry, a couple images interspersed between 2 pages of dense textual lists is rather deficient IMO. Maybe their intended audience is ok with this presentation, but I certainly need more visual referents.
There are also photos from what looks like the exhibition. But again, many of the views are from across the room, and it's hard to make out individual puppets and other display items. (I'm running Hoopla on an older version of Android, and could not zoom in, ARGH) And the captioning can be haphazard, with two images presented one after another, and multiple captions that do not clearly indicate their subjects. For example, the lower image on p. 136 has a very large and impressive-looking female puppet, but I haven't been able to identify it based on the two captions that immediately follow (Frantisek Vitek and Vera Ricarova-Vitkova). And on p.141, the upper image clearly includes Jan Svankmajer's Androgyn, and several other pieces. But the caption for Androgyn only appears on the next page!
Unfortunately, the blogpost I shared earlier seems to be the only document of the show at the Columbus Museum website. And it's similarly cryptic.
So this has been an interesting but frustrating experience. Perhaps you are less obsessive than I am and will enjoy this more.
https://www.columbusmuseum.org/blog/2...
The catalog available as an e-book on the Hoopla platform (which is quite annoying, but that's another story), and may be free if you're connected with a good public library. (San Francisco Public Library, for instance; this is why people live here!)
I know very little about Czech puppetry, so the historical overviews are definitely helpful. Unfortunately, the essays are packed with laundry lists of puppeteers and performance spaces; what contextual information is included would have been more illuminating with more illustrations. The blurb says this is "lavishly illustrated", but I certainly have a very different idea of "lavish". There are good photos, but for such a visual art as puppetry, a couple images interspersed between 2 pages of dense textual lists is rather deficient IMO. Maybe their intended audience is ok with this presentation, but I certainly need more visual referents.
There are also photos from what looks like the exhibition. But again, many of the views are from across the room, and it's hard to make out individual puppets and other display items. (I'm running Hoopla on an older version of Android, and could not zoom in, ARGH) And the captioning can be haphazard, with two images presented one after another, and multiple captions that do not clearly indicate their subjects. For example, the lower image on p. 136 has a very large and impressive-looking female puppet, but I haven't been able to identify it based on the two captions that immediately follow (Frantisek Vitek and Vera Ricarova-Vitkova). And on p.141, the upper image clearly includes Jan Svankmajer's Androgyn, and several other pieces. But the caption for Androgyn only appears on the next page!
Unfortunately, the blogpost I shared earlier seems to be the only document of the show at the Columbus Museum website. And it's similarly cryptic.
So this has been an interesting but frustrating experience. Perhaps you are less obsessive than I am and will enjoy this more.
Displaying 1 of 1 review