“All of life’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” — so Shakespeare’s melancholy fool, Jacques, meditates in the famous opening monologue of As You Like It. The Frye Art Museum’s new travelling exhibition “The Puppet Show” (May 16 to September 13) unfolds like a variation on this line: “All of life’s a puppet show, and all the men and women merely puppet-masters.”

The Frye Art Museum Puppet Show.

Moving beyond bubbly childhood memories of the Muppets and Pinocchio, “The Puppet Show” is a dark and often disturbing exploration of the allegorical role of puppets in sculpture, photography, and video. As a result, the exhibit is less about puppet theatre and more about a broad concept of “puppet-ness.” How do people use puppets as a double for themselves? How do puppets serve as instruments of transgression, regression, self-reflection, and violence?

A dazzling array of well-known contemporary artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman, and Kara Walker, pose responses to these questions that are strange and surprising, disturbing and violent, and humorously weird by turns. Bourgeois’s Henriette, a dangling, abstracted puppet appendage, showcases the bizarre physicality of the puppet body. Nauman’s video piece A Violent Incident evokes a Punch and Judy show, as a romantic dinner is disrupted by a sudden, inexplicable act of violence.

The most memorable and eye-catching work in the show, Dennis Oppenheim’s Theme for a Major Hit, features seven marionettes who break unexpectedly into mechanical tap dance as a strange folk song loops over the loudspeaker: “It ain't what you make, it's what makes you do it." The jerky gyrations of Oppenheim’s marionettes are both hilarious and upsetting, as the lack of human puppeteers suggests ominously that the dolls barely need their human “others” in order to come alive.

The most fundamental question of “The Puppet Show” is not, therefore, about the history of puppets, or the invasion of puppets into popular culture, but rather, What do puppets, who have their own strange and mysterious life utterly separate from humans, know about us?

Turns out, the things that we “make,” actually make us.

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