EN 
ES 
by Juan Butten
December 2012, MoMA, the kind of cold outside that makes you want to stay longer than planned inside any museum. I’d flown in a few days earlier, mostly for other reasons, but I’d read somewhere — maybe a flyer, maybe a friend mentioned it, I honestly don’t remember which — that the Quay Brothers had a show up, and I wasn’t about to let that slide. I walked in without knowing quite what to expect. The title alone warned you this wasn’t going to be simple: “On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets.” Even the name refused to be understood easily, and I remember standing in front of the wall text for a solid minute just trying to figure out if it meant anything literal at all.
The first thing I notice, crossing the door, is that they hadn’t separated the puppets from the projections the way you’d expect in a museum — glass case here, screen there, a clean line between the object and its ghost. No. The screens hung almost directly over the same miniatures used to film them, sets and puppets sitting right below the very footage they’d produced, so the whole room felt less like a retrospective and more like a workshop caught mid-breath. You see the illusion and the machinery of the illusion at the same time. They don’t let you forget that whatever is animating itself in front of you was built, frame by frame, by hand, by someone who spent months adjusting an old piece of fabric or deliberately scratching a porcelain surface until it looked properly worn, properly lived-in.
Stephen and Timothy Quay were born in Pennsylvania in the 1940s, twins, which I didn’t know going in and which changed how I looked at everything once I found out. Something of that upbringing — literature, music, a slightly sick fascination with the automated and the strange, the kind of childhood that produces either accountants or artists with no middle ground — leaks into every object in the room. Each puppet seems to be holding onto a story you have to pry out of it, not one that hands itself over easily. There’s a face on one of them, I think from Street of Crocodiles, that I kept circling back to. Half-formed, almost melted, like it had been left too close to a heater and nobody bothered to fix it. I’m not sure that was intentional, or if intention even means the same thing in a practice like theirs.
I stood for a while in front of one of the work vitrines — tools, sketches, loose pieces of an unfinished puppet, a jar of something that might have been glue or might have been paint, hard to tell under the lighting — thinking about the patience this kind of work demands. There are no shortcuts in stop-motion. Every gesture a character makes is hours of someone nudging an object a millimeter, photographing it, nudging it another millimeter, over and over until a few seconds of footage exist. You can feel it in the finished films, that density of hours. And that slowness, that almost obsessive care, is what gives the pieces the sense that you’re not looking at a doll but something closer to a soul stuck in time, or maybe a soul that got stuck on purpose because being stuck was the whole point.
Kafka and Švankmajer’s shadow is everywhere in the show, and I don’t think the Quays would deny it — there’s a directness to the influence that isn’t shy about itself. But it’s not imitation. They take those references and twist them until they sound like something else entirely, something of their own — a visual language that’s strange and familiar at once, the kind you feel like you’ve seen in a dream before but can’t place where. And there’s something in the work that only makes sense because they’re two brothers making it together, not one artist with a collaborator. A wordless conversation you can sense in how the elements lock into place, as if they’d spent decades finishing each other’s sentences without needing to say them out loud anymore.
I left the way you leave a long dream — not groggy exactly, but slow to catch up with the noise of the street again. Not with the feeling of having wasted an afternoon, but wanting to stay a little longer in front of those work vitrines, those worn-out tools, that jar of glue or paint or whatever it was. Eleven years later I still think about that show when I’m working on my own pieces, especially the ones that take forever and that nobody’s going to rush me on. That a finished object never tells the whole story if you can’t see, at least a little, the labor sitting underneath it.
