RACHEL MACLEAN: TOO CUTE
We were just a little bit disappointed to hear that Rachel Maclean doesn’t dream about emojis and giant bunnies eating cupcakes but the artist and filmmaker, who has curated her first major exhibition at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Too Cute!, really isn’t about sweetness; her work looks at how cute can be used to cover up something a little bit more sinister.
“I’m interested in and suspicious of, companies that use cuteness because I think it is there to distract you from investigating or interrogating what these companies are actually doing”. Comments Rachel on the subject of ‘cute’.
I think because cuteness is associated with childhood you understand [in childhood] that children haven’t had an experience of the world, and there is a very immediate reaction to things. So I think that be referencing childhood it often means that as adults you don’t put the filter on things that you normally would do. You just think ‘oh that’s cute’.”
Known for her distinctive satirical films Maclean examines the world of cuteness by curating works from the Arts Council Collection and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s collection to reveal how objects and images can have the unique ability to be simultaneously sweet and sinister.
“The Birmingham collection has so many Victorian items which would have originally been cute, but now look inherently creepy; like Victorian porcelain dolls.
It felt like there was a lot of mileage for doing a show about cuteness and the possibility for cute things to be sinister. Similarly, there were a few great pieces in the Arts Council collection; an Andrew Mansfield painting of a dog with doe-eyes, and the series of John Isaacs sculptures of animals that are slightly human personified – like a monkey that is just about to inject himself with a needle. So I felt like I had the start for something that would work.”
Maclean’s display showcases the multiple manifestations of sinister cuteness with works ranging from 19th-century oil paintings to internet-inspired installations. Artists include Gillian Wearing, Ana Maria Pacheco, Helen Chadwick, Paula Rego, Peter Blake and Hermann Sondermann.
“There are over 80 objects in the show but there are some things that stood out to me. I really love the John Greenwood paintings. He’s a painter I’ve always really liked, but to be able to get the chance show his work and to also see these paintings out of storage and in real life… for me, they have a quality that reminds me a little bit of slime and I am quite interested in that whole internet culture of cute materials.
There’s a James Riley painting in the show which is a child’s body with, what I understand to be, his head on top of it and it is like this big out of proportion head on this tiny body. So it’s got that classic cute tiny proportions but the fact of it being a middle-aged man’s head on top of it just makes it uncanny.”
The gallery has been transformed with the artist’s signature colourful style (bright sunshine yellow and feminine pink). While her own work is filled with colour, pastels and overall cuteness it has an underlying narrative that can take a while to unpick due to the ‘soft’ aesthetic.
“I think you can default to making things in masculine colours. Culturally we associate masculine colours with things that are serious, so banks, for example, insurance companies would use masculine colours, it’s part of our serious understanding of the world. Then things that happen in feminine colours, like pink, tend to be seen to be more frivolous. So if you want people to take what you are doing immediately seriously you could default to the masculine colours but for me, I think it is political not to, and you should take pink seriously.
To take a cute feminine aesthetic seriously, to alter your association with the female culture and experience more seriously I want people to be challenged by it. It’s not as simple as just a direct and common association that we have with colour.”
Much of Maclean’s work is about that space between childhood and adulthood and the uncomfortable tension between the two. “The aesthetic of something seen as benign, but you scratch the surface and it’s sinister or unsettling; almost all the work in the show has something of that sensibility to it and even though a lot of the work is not the materials I work in – a lot of it is sculpture or pairing – the imagery is all things that I am interested in within my work”.
Too Cute! will also extend the social commentary that pervades Maclean’s video work. Pinocchio-inspired Spite Your Face was written following the Brexit campaign and most recently Make Me Up depicts social media’s encouragement for women to adhere to societal ideals. Maclean’s hour-long film Feed Me featured in BMAG’s 2017 Arts Council Collection exhibition I Want! I Want! and examined the preoccupations of contemporary society.
To find out more visit birminghammuseums.org.uk/bmag/whats-on/too-cute.
