BRITISH ART SHOW 8 T SHOW 8
Linder’s Diagrams of Love: Marriage of Eyes Rachel Maclean’s Feed Me
THE GRATEFUL 8
The vivid work of Rachel Maclean and Linder is set to light up British Art Show 8 in Edinburgh. Neil Cooper asks them about politics, performance, princesses and Playboy
A t i rst glance, the pink love-heart framed around a blue-eyed and smiling i gure looks every inch a child-friendly Disney character. Only the fact that the cartoon creation appears to have a bag over its head while apparently shooting itself in the head jars somewhat.
The image is from Feed Me, the new hour-long i lm by Rachel Maclean, which is being screened as part of British Art Show 8 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. As with much of her back- catalogue, the i lm takes familiar pop-cultural tropes and subverts them with a cut-up narrative. ‘I’ve always been interested in the fantasy of childhood,’ says Maclean. ‘Children’s TV likes to imagine childhood as something that’s innocent and sealed off from adulthood. I was also thinking about Britney Spears and her transition from child to young adult, and how her career began to unravel. That’s typical of Disney princesses who are always about 15 or 16, on the cusp of becoming a woman.’
Such a concern for gender politics is there in the work of Linder too, whose Diagrams of Love: Marriage of Eyes also appears at BAS8. For the last four decades, Linder has subverted through a series of taboo-busting photo-montages and expansive performance-based work. For BAS8, seven dancers from Northern Ballet will perform Children of the Mantic Stain, a work inspired partly by the writings of surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun. ‘I like the hallucinogenic quality in both Colquhoun’s writing and paintings,’ says Linder. ‘In the midst of my research, I stayed in the artist’s l at above Raven Row gallery [in London]. The l at has never been changed since the last occupant, Rebecca Levy, passed away in 2009, aged 98. I was mesmerised by her choice of carpets, which are a triumph of 1970s design. I used to stare at the carpets in the half-light and see things that weren’t there. For the rug design, I created a photo-montage of Levy’s carpets and added all-seeing 70s glam rock eyes so that the rug looks back at you.’
38 THE LIST 4 Feb–7 Apr 2016
Both Linder and Maclean’s work is driven by a political root as much as a performative one. ‘A lot of my motivation for making art comes from being angry,’ says Maclean. ‘I’m really interested in looking at fairytales to explore class and gender politics, displacing them in a way that’s historical but also contemporary.’ Linder says she doesn’t deliberately set out to make political work, ‘but it always turns out that way. I often work with something that’s been discarded, such as a 1964 Playboy or a Good Housekeeping cookery book from 1948. I hijack the images around us, taking them somewhere they’re not meant to go. I make things right by making them wrong.’
This chimes with Maclean, who grew up on ‘girls magazines, MTV, Disney and computer games: that all feeds into my work, but becomes warped somehow.’ While her i lms are deeply theatrical, Maclean has yet to work in a live arena. ‘I think it would be fun to do that at some point. I’d like to get loads of people on board and do something Busby Berkeley-esque.’ While Linder’s performance work has been documented on i lm, the medium itself is something she’s yet to fully exploit. ‘I recently collaborated on a i lm with [French fashion house] Maison Margiela featuring a dancer dressed in a coat made of blonde wigs. I remember the huge cinemas that my parents took me to in the 60s before the multiplexes took over. That’s been replaced by the tiniest screens imaginable that we hold in our hands. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about all this, so I make work about it instead.’
Feed Me and Diagrams of Love: Marriage of Eyes, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Sat 13 Feb–Sun 8 May. Children of the Mantic Stain, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, Wed 30 Mar.