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RACHEL BUTTON
Cropping
2024
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Jessie Spencer Smith & Phoebe Haig, Skipping RopeGallery Two, 02 Nov 2024—01 Dec 2024
When I was a child at the Easter show, my mum would ride the carousel, saying she couldn’t stomach the speed of the rollercoaster. The carousel is an apparently innocuous ride that harks back to the pleasant amusements of a nineteenth-century carnival. The leisurely spin of the mechanism provides the opportunity to wave to your friend standing on the sidelines. What an agreeable creature.
The writer Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that carnival is inherently counter-cultural.[1] In this space, rule-breaking is condoned and orthodoxy upturned: the clown becomes king, and the king a clown. Carnival, Bakhtin argues, is a place where leisure and iconoclasm go hand in hand.
Yet Bakhin’s carnival only considers the liberation of the human from subjugation. What happens to animals in this topsy-turvy world? Do they share in the leisure of this subversive festival atmosphere? Do they hope for Bakhtin’s revolution? Perhaps not - before the advent of cogs and engines, carousels were often powered by animals walking in a circle. The animal, dragging a representation of itself, was subsumed by its own likeness.
In the production of her images, Jessie Spencer Smith crops the carousel to abstraction. Cropping reflects the rational discernment of the human. There is a violence to this device , as it is a decision of visibility and representation. Just like a jockey’s tool, the crop embodies the will of the cropper. Bakhtin theorises that in the context of carnival, a thrashing can be subversive in the humiliation of an authority figure.[2] Since no hegemony is unseated in the violent cropping of the animal, this violence has no end. The horse is caught in endless thrashing, moving laterally rather than hierarchically. Round and round they go.
Smith and Haig’s paintings suggest to us that representation is always imbued with an undercurrent of violence. One crops and one submits. One directs, and one is directed. If animals enable the myth of human liberation, they at least deserve some recognition for their labour – and a chance to crop back.
In a truly subversive world, the horse would sit on the human.
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At a high school where I teach, a lone turtle lives in a glass tank in the corner of the science room. Above his tank is a description of his species and a name that has been crossed out and rewritten again and again. The students just can’t seem to decide, or perhaps two camps are fighting over the right to name him. Stuck in a tank all day, he looks at me, and I gaze back. The students ask what I’m looking at.
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Can the cropped crop back? Smith and Haig’s works are enigmatic. In one instance, Smith’s cropping of the carousel has borne a new creature. It stares back through disembodied eyes, looming like a spider over a trapped fly. The fibreglass ornament is given sight. Similarly, Haig’s dynamic paintings consider representation of living animals. Cowboys wrangle steeds, a horse kicks back, and a dog in blurred motion strikes. (I have been bitten by a dog, and the snap takes milliseconds. One minute, you have a working hand; the next, it is ripped to shreds.)
Haig crops the dog at its most violent, bursting with potential energy. I am enamored of this blurring. The rabid dog and the carousel are defiant of what is being done to them. They refuse to submit to the act of being painted. They willfully resist transformation into a body of work. They have dashed away a split second before. They may not be able to prevent capture, but they will put up a damn good fight.
The evasive nature of this materiality reinstates its power. It reminds us that the birth of an idea is nothing without the forceful becoming of its material body, what Jacques Derrida calls the subjectile. Without the subjectile, the artwork could not exist, as it is ‘a violent obstetrics [which] gives passage to a gushing forth of life’.[3] The subjectile initiates, influences, limits and guides the universe. In giving rise to the possibility of representation, the material cries out for acknowledgment.
The buttery oil paint slips past. You’d better run and catch it.
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Is reinvigorated representation itself a kind of retribution? I recall a scene from the film ‘Mary Poppins’ (1964), where a carousel vomits out its passengers onto a racing track. The wooden horses revert back to racehorses without changing back into flesh. The characters frantically crop the horses to go faster, but the flesh is wooden. The crop has been emptied of purpose. How can wood or fibreglass feel pain? The surface has become ungovernable, invincible. Derrida calls the subjectile treasonous because it can ‘betray, not come when it is called, or call before even being called.’[4] The painting has its own intentions - it surpasses the artist’s control.
The anomaly of this show is a dark monotone painting of chains and ropes – intertwined, knotted and hopelessly entangled. These enigmatic objects hang suspended on a luscious background – a velvet curtain that melds into strange half-creatures. I think I can see a horse’s head to the left, but maybe I’ve just got horses on the brain. It reminds me of Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare (1781) – the spectral mare that comes with blank-eyed retribution to terrify the sleeping figure. The psyche sends the horse without consulting the human.
Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, oil on canvas, 101.6 cm × 127 cm. Image in the public domain.
A nightmare is a state where the brain is traitorous: there can be no claim of human sovereignty. The state of dreaming is truly subversive because it renders the human at the mercy of the material.
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The leisure of the carnival cannot exist without subjugation. It takes both to keep the whole circus going. If I were to ride a carousel horse, and do one turn about the field, have I moved, or am I back where I started? Whose revolution is being devised, and who is being left behind?
[1] Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Indiana Univeristy Press, 1984, p. 262
[2] ibid, p. 203
[3] Jacques Derrida, ‘Maddening the Subjectile’, Yale French Studies, no. 84, 1994, p. 168
[4] ibid, p. 157
[2] ibid, p. 203
[3] Jacques Derrida, ‘Maddening the Subjectile’, Yale French Studies, no. 84, 1994, p. 168
[4] ibid, p. 157
RACHEL BUTTON combines writing, painting and video making into a multifaceted visual arts practice. She has exhibited at neon parc, caves, Kings, Gallery 17, AAAB Gallery and Blindside. Rachel was featured at Artforum (2022) as part of the exhibition 'Be My Once In A Lifetime' at the Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery. She also publishes essays under the title 'figleaf'.
Edited by Kaijern Koo and Juliette Berkeley.
Documentation by Nina Rose Prendergast.
This piece was commissioned in response to Jessie Spencer Smith & Phoebe Haig’s exhibition Skipping Rope as part of TCB’s 2024 Emerging Writers’ Program.
The TCB Emerging Writers’ Program is generously supported by the City of Merri-Bek.
Edited by Kaijern Koo and Juliette Berkeley.
Documentation by Nina Rose Prendergast.
This piece was commissioned in response to Jessie Spencer Smith & Phoebe Haig’s exhibition Skipping Rope as part of TCB’s 2024 Emerging Writers’ Program.
The TCB Emerging Writers’ Program is generously supported by the City of Merri-Bek.
