Pinocchio:
a real BOY
While
working on an installation involving tricksters, gender shifting, and
relative realities, I rediscovered Pinocchio, one of my childhood heroes.
Like many kids in the US, I grew up exposed to the Disney version, not
the original. I couldn’t remember what happened that made Pinocchio’s
donkey ears go away, so I searched the Internet for the story. What
I came away with was a much better story than I remembered from childhood,
and one that inspired this new series of work.
Culling
images from Carlo Collodi’s original stories published in 1883,
Pinocchio: a real BOY, explores the bad boy puppet that wants to become
real. Unlike the better known Disney interpretation, Collodi’s
marionette is not cute, cuddly or remotely nice. Rather, Collodi’s
Pinocchio is a naughty imp with no impulse control. In our time he would
be considered a hardcore delinquent and consigned to a juvenile lockup.
Only through a series of harsh, even impossible adventures, is he improbably
transformed into a “real boy”.
In
the spirit of the original story, I construct an edgy, dystopian visual
identity for Pinocchio, an unsanitized view of a classic character.
Pinocchio becomes a demented construction that (in turn) gets his feet
burnt off; locked up in jail for being stupid; and gleefully kills the
Talking Cricket. All of the images are literally taken from the original
stories; no embellishment required. Rediscovering children’s literature
with Pinocchio makes for an unsettling experience. These older stories
bear little resemblance to the whitewashed, politically correct fiction
now fed to children. Pinocchio represents a past where children had
to prepare for a very harsh world, one where many children died long
before adulthood.
The
first set of works in glass translates the drawings to ruby-red, etched
flashed glass for presentation, and operates within the boundaries of
the existing text of the Pinocchio stories laid out by Collodi. Acting
only in an interpretive mode, these works pull the most decisive and
dramatic moments out of the written words.
The
second set of works in glass start with the idea of Pinocchio becoming
a real boy. Pinocchio becomes an avatar used to explore gender and identity
politics. These works add text, changing the interpretation and meaning
of the visual images. Executed in clear plate glass, these works circle
back on what it means to be real, and question whether it is a good
idea.