ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

frayed, locks. Lano created what signifies a more exotic look and produced a more
exotic frontality for his essence of the blackface puppet.
Analogous to his Chinese ball juggler, the “Friday” is a rough sculpture. Its ears
are mere ridges on the sides of the head; the mouth is adequately articulated but without
the moveable jaw of the Lambert D’Arc minstrel marionettes (see figure 5). Its nose is a
semi-triangular bulge and its feet are rounded clubs. The teeth are set in a rounded white
ridge that is disconnected from the jaw line. The object is a coarse grotesque of the
human form.
Granted, it is difficult to distinguish between deliberate exaggeration and
accidental distortion caused by limited skill or artistic ambivalence. Some of the
aforementioned details may be intentional, designed to deepen the humorous burlesque of
the blackface body through the disproportionate features of a specific puppet frontality.
Yet there are subtle differences between details that are clearly exaggerations, such as the
wide, toothy grin, and the physical structure of the skull. As one sees from a side view,
the distended tooth line is less clearly detailed on the side than on the front. From the
front, a specific amount of shading, consisting of dark etchings in the upper and lower
sections of the mouth, and three layers of carved white wood, consisting of two higher,
framing rows and one deeper, central row, produce a sophisticated illusion of the
grinning minstrel mouth. Whether intentional or habit, Lano creates puppets that have
some specific, articulated details and some perfunctory characteristics. The features that
make the object more human, its ears and nose, for example, are perfunctory. The
features that make the object an exaggerated minstrel stereotype, such as its mouth, or an
exotic foreigner, such as its hair, are more carefully articulated.
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