I´m Your Puppet

 Objets trouvés. Found objects. In the right hands, so to speak, few words are as charged with artistic possibilities. And when the hands are those of someone as ingenious as puppeteer extraordinaire Pablo Cano, whose ¨Pablo Cano: Marionettes as Sculpture¨ exhibition has been extended through the summer at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, the results can be spectacular. The Miami-based artist, who was born in Havana in 1961 and was on the last flight exiting the island right before the Cuban Missile Crisis the next year, has an uncanny ability to find aesthetic potential in the most mundane objects.

In The Violinist (1997), for example, Cano works with, among other things, fragments of wood and paper, a dustpan, a small sieve, and one of those metal food steamers that open like flower blossoms, all combined in a graceful design to suggest the title character. Her violin is a small clock -- still working! -- housed in a metal case shaped like a violin. Cano´s ingenuity is such that even the kitschiest items gain a measure of dignity when pressed into service for one of his marionettes.

Earlier in the exhibition´s run, Cano served up live performances in The Florabel Theater, itself a work of art. It´s a small, portable theater, dating back to 1985, in which the artist presents his puppets in the quirky plays he concocts for them. It´s essentially a simple frame on wheels to which Cano has affixed his usual assortment of found objects, supplemented behind the scenes with a CD player, lights, and other theater paraphernalia.

Unfortunately, no additional performances are scheduled. But as I can attest from having seen To Sin or Not to Sin (2001), presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, which has commissioned a Cano work annually for the past decade, Cano´s live performances are magical. If you ever get a chance to see one anywhere, go for it.

That´s not to say that the marionettes, presented here as sculpture, aren´t magical on their own. It´s a wondrous sight to walk into the Coral Springs Museum´s spacious main galleries and see them dotted with puppets on pedestals as well as hung from the ceiling at various levels. A handful hangs from a rack alongside the theater, weirdly like outfits waiting to be put on.

The show is also supplemented with lots of Cano´s preparatory sketches, some in pencil and some in ink. Some of these are on simple paper place mats from Versailles, the wonderful Cuban restaurant that´s a focal point in Miami´s Little Havana. The artist apparently grabs his ideas on the fly and makes sure they´re preserved. The drawings are intricate but also childlike in their simplicity and directness.

The marionettes, sketches, and other related mixed-media works are loosely clustered throughout the galleries based on the plays with which they are associated. But unless you´re expecting to see these puppets perform in the theater, the groupings are more or less arbitrary, with the works calling out to you to experience them on their own merits. Radio Man and Pani TV Man, both from a 2005 play called The Beginning, recall the inspired whimsy of some of the anthropomorphic characters that populated the now-classic TV series Pee-wee´s Playhouse.

St. George & Dragon and Occidental Series, both from the 2003 production Canvas Construction, are wall-mounted works that come across as gigantic variations on playing cards. They´re echoed in a nearby space by La Cafetera and Princess Calle Ocho. Since there are no puppetry strings in evidence, I can only conclude that they are used as set décor.

For a trio of puppets in the far left corner of the museum, also from The Beginning, Cano introduces photographs of human faces into the equation. Madonna´s face appears on a marionette called Eve, with Orlando Bloom not far away as Adam. This, I think, is a big mistake. Part of the allure of Cano´s ¨characters¨ may be their combination of the alien and the familiar, but the presence of celebrity faces upsets the delicate balance.

A large selection of marionettes from the City Beneath the Sea production finds Cano working in a more traditional mode. The puppets aren´t exactly realistic, but they´re much more stylized, and they don´t rely on found objects at all. And although they´re beautifully (and obviously lovingly) made, they aren´t nearly as interesting as the artist´s funkier creations.

To me, anyway. I admit a hopeless weakness for three-dimensional art that´s dependent, to one degree or another, upon found objects. There´s something exquisitely sneaky about taking things that were intended to be used a certain way and then subverting that intention. It all goes back to Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism, the men´s urinal upended and labeled Fountain and attributed to R. Mutt. You don´t get much more subversive than that.