Rachel Maclean introduces Spite Your Face

Travel out to Venice this year and you will find the 2017 Biennale. A beautiful, horrifying extravaganza of contemporary art from around the globe in the chocolate box surrounds of La Serenissima, the six-month, multi venue exhibition is everything wonderful and everything disturbing about art and the contemporary world all rolled into one baffling whole.

On the northern shores of Cannaregio, in a deconsecrated church, lies this year’s Scotland + Venice Biennale presentation, featuring the inimitable Rachel Maclean's 'dark Venetian fairytale' Spite Your Face. A 37-minute video plays on a loop, projected onto a portrait-oriented screen which replaces the altar of the Chiesa di Santa Caterina. The windows have been blacked out, light extinguished save for a floodlight on a statue of St Catherine to the left. Entering is a moment of wonder, stepping into the darkness as the sound of one of Maclean's signature twisted musical soundtracks suffuses the space. It sounds sweet, but it is ultimately, inevitably, very disturbing indeed.

The work has been created in a remarkably short time – Rachel Maclean last featured on these pages for her exhibition in Manchester’s HOME, back in autumn 2016. She went straight from that major production to starting work on Spite Your Face, travelling out to Venice for 10 days in December to explore, consider, and write her script.

The Venetian location is baked deep into the film, from the mimicked architecture of the church in which it is displayed to the mercantile gold which suffuses the problematic heavenly kingdom it depicts. Maclean explains there is more to the gold than meets the eye: “It’s partly this feeling of Venice and partly the relationship between the Baroque churches and these sort of luxury stores, the Pradas and Guccis. That feeling of wealth, and the wealth being explicitly displayed in diamonds and gold and glittery things. But also that Trump style, the dictator chic that he’s got going on.”

The political climate of last December was (as you will probably remember) fraught, and proved to be greatly influential on the narrative Maclean ended up creating. “I was interested in particular in the way that lies were used in the Brexit campaign and the Trump campaign", she says. "Untruths, bending of truths were used in quite a lazy way to benefit political advantage.” The role of the media in trying to disprove the lies is something she evokes in the work, the slipperiness of truth as a concept. “I became interested in that kind of narrative,” she says. “I don’t think that as humans we are as capable at objectively, rationally making decisions around facts and untruths as we think we are.”

Spite Your Face draws on the Pinocchio fairytale, grounding the narrative in a familiar structure but skewing it and layering atop to serve a darker contemporary parable. Says Maclean, “It’s something that’s very recognisable to Italians. The growing nose is this very accessible signifier of a lie. I wanted there to be a base level of accessibility where you know where you are even if there are other layers that are disjointed or strange – you’ve got this that holds it together.”

As in much of her work, she utilises established cultural tropes and refracts them through the lens of today’s mainstream culture: “I was interested in this very strict moral fairytale about the value of hard work and discipline and listening to your elders. Taking that and creating this slightly amoral tale where right and wrong are mixed up and complicated.”

The morals become confusing as protagonist Pic is drawn into a contemporary rags to riches narrative. He makes a wish on an iPad in the Other World Offerings temple – a digital recreation of the Chiesa di Santa Caterina – and finds himself transported by the blessing of a fairy godmother / Virgin Mary figure to a golden heaven where (through the application of a perfume named Truth) he is able to become a gilded hero punting rubbish perfume (named Untruth) to the masses.

Says Maclean, “I wanted it to feel like a critique of that rags to riches narrative – this character who’s individualistically pursuing this dream of wealth and fame, this specific notion of what success is. This Britain’s Got Talent idea that’s so prevalent in our culture that if you want it hard enough, if you work hard enough you can get there. And it’s this quite compassionless but seemingly positive narrative; despite all the socio-economic barriers to you getting there, you can get there, and if you don’t then that’s your fault. Because you’ve not tried enough, or dreamt enough, or whatever it is you need to get there.”

The work has sparked sensationalised headlines due to the depiction of sexual violence meted upon both Pic and his fairy godmother involving allusions to rape and castration. It’s uncomfortable viewing, made all the more dissonant by the awareness that each character is played by Maclean herself. She is violator and violated, and that paradox reflects the blurred lines the work displays around the changing cycles of power. As curator Richard Ashrowan, of Alchemy Arts, puts it,  "Rachel plays all the characters in the film so in a sense when violence is being done she’s also doing it to herself. That gives the artist a certain kind of legitimacy and power in portraying those kinds of acts – the fact that she owns all of those roles. She is the male aggressor and she is the victim of violence."

For Maclean, this is reflective of a broader narrative around the delicate power balance between the genders at this point in time. She says: “I’m disturbed by the rise in confidence in recent months of misogyny – particularly in the American election – and the legitimising of misogyny and anti-feminism. And also I think, more generally, an immunity to the violence against and exploitation of women’s bodies and image that is so much a part of our culture. Women’s images are used all the time to sell things and we’re so used to it that it becomes almost invisible. So I wanted it to feel violent enough and awkward enough to cut through that, so it really did feel difficult to watch and wasn’t just contributing to the exploitation of the violence that we’re accustomed to.”

There is a duality to the female figure in Spite Your Face. She is mother-goddess, fairy-lover, but also capable of this extreme violence. Says Maclean, “I wanted the female character to be complicated and not just a victim. It depends which way round you watch it, whether it’s his revenge or hers. I wanted her to be a powerful character in that moment and also to be an intellectual power.”

The film is looped, a necessity for the ad hoc drop-in viewers of the Biennale, but also a significant facet of the work’s meaning. Different entry points produce different narratives, different moments of glory and victimhood. It is also reflective of the inescapable cycle of triumph and despair, an allegory of contemporary designations of success and failure and, ultimately, life. Maclean explains, “I wanted it to feel like a narrative that was kind of unsatisfying, that you never really got a conclusion; there was never a sense of happily ever after. It just keeps looping round in this insane dizzying way where you feel the same mistake is being repeated over and over and over again – and it’s never going to stop.”