The two-faced puppet has been in hot water before.
Over the summer, a middle-aged man sent scalding droplets flying onto the artwork in a failed attempt to douse a handful of pro-Palestinian protesters.
A few days later, the puppet’s trousers flew off as it was hoisted through the crowds outside the Democratic National Convention.
The puppet remains pantless. “He” has no legs, so the 12-foot tall can’t be accused of indecent exposure. Still, sensitivity warnings were put in place at the Chicago Cultural Center to appease more than two dozen City Council members who find the puppet’s other attributes distasteful and want it gone.
To me, the “U.S.-Israel War Machine” puppet characterizes what Abby Palen, its artistic director, intended: A scathing indictment of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and our country’s complicity in the bombardment that killed at least 48,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
But whether others agree or disagree, it’s a matter of free speech.
“It’s a criticism of governments, not people,” Palen, 26, told me on Monday as we sat outside the “Potential Energy: Chicago Puppets Up Close” exhibit.
Minutes before, I glimpsed the puppet’s bloodied palms and dual visage of a mustachioed “Uncle Sam” gripping a bucket of “tears” and a clean-shaven Benjamin Netanyahu clutching an MK-84 American aircraft bomb.
In another room of the temporary display, I saw another artist’s piece that incorporates a pair of pig heads fitted with police hats, symbolizing “oppressive systems” encountered by members of MOVE, a Black liberation group founded in Philadelphia in the 1970s.
Art can inspire new perspectives, elicit varying interpretations and yes, offend.
The problem with Ald. Debra Silverstein (50th) and her allies’ skewed perspective, is that they are forcing “their opinion” to be the “true opinion” for everyone else, Palen said.
Silverstein’s descriptions of the puppet as “antisemitic” and a symbol of “hate” are a “predictable and unimaginative” response that is “not about Jewish safety,” said Grace Needlman, the exhibit’s co-curator.
“Debra Silverstein does not represent all Jewish people in Chicago and the consistent insistence that she does” by some members of the media and the majority of her City Hall colleagues is insulting, said Needlman, who is Jewish.
‘Art is not about me’
Listening to the alderpersons trash the installation during a recent heated City Council committee hearing was embarrassing, Needlman said. It quickly became evident many of them knew “nothing” about art or puppetry. Some City Council members sounded like they had never stepped inside a museum, Needlman said.
Palen, of Rogers Park, was also in attendance, listening to negative commentary “with an open heart” while embracing dozens of audience participants and some City Council members who expressed solidarity.
The Kentucky native was demoralized after the puppet’s accompanying placard — which included the artwork’s title and the death toll in Gaza — was taken down as a concession to the disapproving City Council members.
Palen’s frustration only grew at the meeting when Palen wasn’t given a chance to read a statement that touched on free speech, peace and art’s ability to challenge the status quo.
“The art is not about me,” Palen said. “The only reason I’m talking about it and revoking my anonymity is because I think the art is being misrepresented.”
Abby Palen looks up to the Benjamin Netanyahu “side” of the puppet titled “U.S.-Israel War Machine” at the Chicago Cultural Center, at 78 E. Washington St., on Monday. Palen is the artistic director behind the puppet. Thirty-five other artists helped with the construction and “performance of the puppet, Palen said.
Zubaer Khan/Sun-Times
Puppets have been used in demonstrations in America since the Vietnam War when sculptor and dancer Peter Schumann popularized the satirical and politically charged art form at his Bread and Puppet Theater, where Palen apprenticed as a teenager. in Vermont.
Unlike racist or religiously insensitive iconography, protest puppets do not “attack the identity of an individual” according to Marissa Fenley, an assistant professor of theater and performance studies at the University of Chicago. Rather, these puppets either call out “outsized powers wielded by any number of interchangeable politicians” or bring attention to populations that are “displaced, erased or made invisible.”
The papier-mâché, bamboo, cardboard and fabric-based puppet Palen and 35 other artists helped create is consistent in that tradition, Fenley said.
“By placing Netanyahu and Uncle Sam as two sides of the same figure, the puppet makes clear and effective analogy to the mutually re-enforcing power held by the United States and Israel. One supplies the bombs; the other drops them. Both are equally culpable for the destruction of Gaza and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people,” Fenley wrote in a letter she submitted to City Council members
For now, the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events has no plans to evict the puppet from its current home, where I heard one visitor whisper to her companions as they walked by a “sensitive content advisory” sign.
The aldermanic outcries have only sparked curiosity and meaningful discourse — the highest compliment for an artist.
And while “U.S.-Israel War Machine” may not be a “talking” puppet, Palen’s voice is coming through.
“Almost everybody that I’ve encountered, they go and they look at the puppet, and they do not see what the aldermen see,” Palen said. “They see a very clear anti-war statement.”
Rummana Hussain is a columnist and member of the Sun-Times Editorial Board.
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