CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/26/2015

Pedro Reyes: The Permanent Revolution

In Pedro Reyes: The Permanent Revolution, curator and art historian Chus Martínez describes the artist's use of puppet theater as "not exactly a cabaret, nor is it television, nor is it Twitter, but it has something of all of them. The puppets tell the story of the relationship between the artists of the Mexican avant-garde, and an ideology: communism. The small theater, like the cabaret, radicalizes the way one approaches the telling of a story. Those who stay out late and frequent variety shows, or (the now almost extinct) monologue and comedy houses, or puppet theaters, or those who tweet, do not tend to be an audience interested in a kinship between political militancy and these other ways of approaching the present through the past of our ideological reception: the importance of performance, or the mise en scène as a form of understanding agency, intervention, the use of language, the use of fanfare, scale—the distinction between those who stand at the podium, onstage, or backstage—and those who are spectators." Featured puppets are Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.