ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a nuanced interpretation of the semiotics of gestures enacted by both living and inanimate bodies as a means to confront further representations of the modern body and its relation to the crisis of vision and language that unfolded in turn-of-the-century Vienna. It explores theatrical productions created by Kokoschka and Arthur Schnitzler that included actors in the guise of pathological puppets or metaphorical marionettes. Kokoschka and Egon Schiele serve as key figures in the realm of the visual arts. Like Kokoschka, Schiele also explored the puppet motif in his visual art and actually emerges as the artist who most faithfully expressed the aesthetics of the pathological puppet body in Viennese expressionism. The chapter demonstrates that their gestural language might be contingent upon the metaphorical body of the puppet or marionette as signifiers of modern man's desire to control, or be controlled by external forces, including the hands, minds, and desires of others.
