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It is a pleasure to greet the return of artist Paul Zelevansky to these pages. “Presence: The Touch of the Puppet” makes a bridge of a certain kind with his earlier work, ‘“The Good Thing’: Mister Rogers' Neighborhood,” which appeared in June 2004 (Vol. 64, pp. 195-208). In the children's television series “Mister Rogers' Neighborhood” Paul discovered a radical pedagogy (referring to the presentation and performance of knowledge and action) using the personal and the everyday to get to the general and the phenomenological as a process that could lead to social and communal change. He went on to introduce us to the operation of this pedagogy as he has subsequently employed it in both undergraduate and graduate programs of art in which he teaches.
Now, in this latest work, he looks at visual culture, art, and performance through the frame of Presentation and Presence, using the ideal of the Puppet as “model and foil.” The essay begins: “In Art, as in life, meaning flows from the ways in which communication is extended: how and why it is presented, the values and coherence projected onto what is offered, and the fit between our needs and what is being asked for and promised in return.” Such is the indication that in the essay that follows we tumble into, implicitly, a radical pedagogy relating to the clinical operation of transference and countertransference. A few lines later we read: “The notion of an inhering spirit that acts for and through image, idol, toy or fetish, is perhaps the central thread running through all attempts to represent and simulate animate life.”
An extreme and astonishing example of what Paul Zelevansky brings to light is afforded by Jemima Brown, an artist living and working in London whose art practice has given birth to a life-size mannequin virtually indistinguishable at a certain distance from Jemima herself, named, appropriately, “Dolly.” Jemima has traveled with Dolly, has included Dolly in all her daily activities, at home and at work, an