Frye's "Puppet Show" explores control and manipulation

"The Puppet Show" — the new exhibition of contemporary art at the Frye Art Museum — is definitely not a display of whimsical, child-friendly stories and creatures. It's a gathering of intense, smart, sometimes disturbing and occasionally very funny sculptures, installations and videos that, according to Frye Art Museum curator Robin Held, "is more about puppet-ness than puppetry."

Many of the artists — including some familiar names like Louise Bourgeois, William Kentridge and Bruce Nauman — use references to, or techniques of, puppetry to explore ideas of control, manipulation and the traditional role of puppets as stand-ins for human beings, acting out our desires and fears.

While the Frye did not organize this exhibition — it is the fifth stop of a traveling show originated by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia — it's a particularly apt fit for the museum and its focus on representational art. Several of the artists explore the puppet as a representation of the self, a sort of artificial body-double.

Dennis Oppenheim's "Theme for a Major Hit" may look kind of sweet with its numerous marionettes dressed in little felt suits, but when the marionettes and soundtrack are activated, you're hit with an overwhelming auditory and conceptual experience. The marionettes, whose faces are modeled after Oppenheim's, perform a manic tap dance, accompanied by a very loud song that repeats over and over, "it ain't what you make, it's what makes you do it." Knowing that this installation was created in 1974, when Oppenheim was questioning the relationships among individual creativity, performance and the body, adds another layer of eerie resonance to the work.

The mature content — and there is absolutely some work that I wouldn't put my young kids in front of — is also handled well. Other than Kara Walker's mesmerizing and disconcerting shadow-puppet short films, which are playing in a small gallery, most of the works that contain nudity or sexual and scatological references are videos that are displayed in viewing kiosks — plywood crates that reference puppet storage or small theaters — making these works avoidable, if necessary.

The layout of the show, with its numerous stages and viewing spaces, brings attention to the ideas of performing and viewing. Our role as audience is firmly fixed in this exhibition, which can be a bit frustrating at times.

With all of those acts of performance, the stand-ins for the human body, the strings and stages, I kept wanting to put my hands on (or in) a puppet, to exert some control of my own. Then again, this very experience may be a side effect of the goal of a lot of this art: It acts upon you in order to conjure up notions of power, creativity and individuality.