It is the framing that counts. The architect knows it; the photographer knows it; the artist Frederic Church knew it so well that he asked people to view his 1859 painting The Heart of the Andes through opera glasses so they could block out the rest of the room. The peeping Tom who sees other people's lives framed by both the binoculars and the windows knows it well, and so does Dan Hurlin, an American puppeteer and miniaturist, who has brought two of his Everyday series to London.
In No 3: The Home of Bill and Sandy Kelly, Hurlin's autobiographical story of growing up gay in a small rural American town in the 1960s is framed by memory. Using a small Wendy-house style dwelling, silhouettes and a marionette of his boyhood self, Hurlin recreates his past like an artist carefully composing a painting. In No 7: The Heart of the Andes, Hurlin combines the story of how, as a child, he looked at books to block out the threats of the local bully boys, with an art history lesson in composition.
Both of these little shows are about ways of seeing, and both take the view of those lonely obsessives who watch rather than do. Like Blue Velvet without the sadomasochism, the first piece explores Hurlin's discovery of his own sexuality and his voyeuristic tendencies and juxtaposes them with the true story of an American photographer so obsessed with the work of the architect Louis Sullivan that he sneaked into a building due for demolition and was killed there. In No 7, the art lesson has accompaniment from a blind accordionist.
Hurlin certainly knows how to compose his stories, and there is much to admire in the skill with which they are constructed. But both pieces, and the first in particular, employ the distancing devices of camp so much that the performances, for all their autobiographical content, fail to have any emotional impact. They come across as sterile, sometimes even precious. The sense is of an artist who is more interested in form than content. With a shift in the balance these stories could be so much more than just quirkily entertaining curiosities.
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