Years before Greta Gerwig’s Barbie blockbuster shattered the billion-dollar glass ceiling, Scottish visual artist Rachel Maclean was crafting pink-saturated mini-movies that weaponise the sickly-bright super-cute aesthetic of girl’s toys to make savagely satirical points about sexism, consumer capitalism and gender politics. Indeed, many of Maclean’s unsettling video artworks feel like psychedelic avant-punk versions of Barbie reimagined by a visionary surrealist horror director, like David Lynch or Julia Ducournau
“Barbie is really cool,” Maclean says. “Actually the way it’s worked out with the Oscar nominations is something I’ve experienced for quite a while, where if you make a film that’s too feminine-looking and about women, people don’t take it as seriously. Barbie is a much better movie than Oppenheimer, but some people just can’t take it seriously. But it also plays with that too, it’s a great film. I think it’s a sign of where our culture is at that people can actually get on board with that, because it wasn’t that long ago that you could make an entire film with just men in it.”
The Film Verdict catches up with Maclean at Rotterdam film festival, which is showcasing a decdicated sidebar of her audiovisual art, a lurid sensory feast of post-modern maximalist mash-ups spanning the last decade. The 37-year-old, who went to art school in Edinburgh but now lives in Glasgow, is surprisingly gentle and soft-spoken in person compared to the garish, grotesque, confrontational intensity of her work. Mixing live action and digital animation, comedy and horror, found sounds and creepy costumes, films like Feed Me (2015) and Make Me Up (2018) borrow from fairy tales, cartoons, social media platforms, toy commercials and children’s TV shows, pushing the limits of taste to nightmarish extremes.
“I like this sense of creating work that some people are just repulsed by,” Maclean nods. “Because the repulsion is maybe part of it too. It’s not about beauty in a straight sense, it’s also about something that they perceive as ugly, and they have to get their heads around that. Good taste is usually such an elitist and sexist thing anyway. It is a way of saying you’re implicitly better than other people because your taste is better than theirs. So for me, to take aim at that is to take aim at a certain kind of snobbery.”
Maclean’s war on the tyranny of good taste began at art college, where her brightly coloured, joyfully iconoclastic bubblegum-punk style clashed with the prevailing aesthetic culture. “I had loads of good tutors at art college,” she recalls, “but one guy wasn’t so good. One day I bought a pot of pink paint to paint with, and he just laughed at me. He was disgusted by this idea of painting in pink, and ridiculed me in front of the class. I remember thinking at that moment: I’m going to paint more pink.”
American photographer and performance artist Cindy Sherman was key early influence on Maclean. Both draw on classic movie archetypes, dressing up and playing multiple roles in their work. “At that time, a lot of the artists I was exposed to were men, and she was one of the few women that was kind of in the canon of art,” Maclean says “Also it was partly just seeing how much fun she was having with it, and questioning gender.”
Like Sherman, Andy Warhol and others, Maclean recognises the seductive, subversive power of classic big-screen iconography. Indeed, she is currently working in the screenplay to her first full-length feature, a dark Christmas fantasy set on a Scottish island. “I’d like to make more films for cinema,” she says. “There is a limit to how long you can keep making video art.”
World premiering at Rotterdam, both on the big screen and in gallery installation form, Maclean’s latest project is DUCK, a mind-bending mini-movie that uses digital deepfake simulation to deconstruct James Bond films and spy thrillers in general. As with most of her work, Maclean plays all the roles herself, heavily disguised by green screen and AI technology. Besides playing all the different Bonds, from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig, she also disguises herself as an army of gun-toting Marilyn Monroe doppelgangers. This dazzling deep dive into the Uncanny Valley is Maclean’s most technically ambitious work to date.
“I was drawn to Sean Connery and the Bond character in particular for practical reasons,” she explains. “Because, for deepfake, you need a very consistent character, somebody who doesn’t change their makeup or hair, so you’ve got enough data to train the AI model on. I also thought it was interesting just thinking about that ideal of masculinity. Bond is this kind of archetype of a desirable idea of British masculinity, both subjects which I quite like to satirise. He’s such an absurd character to an extent, almost a comedic character. It doesn’t take much to tip him into that mode.”
Like most of Maclean’s work, DUCK has an undertow of caustic social critique behind its shiny Pop Art surface. The horrors of misogyny, nationalism and neoliberal capitalism are recurring themes, especially how they impact on women and girls. But she is wary of sounding preachy or polemical, preferring to address these issues in a more ironic, playful, mischievous manner.
“It’s hard to think about art having a utilitarian function,” Maclean says. “I don’t think it works like that, but I think it can shift your perception of reality. Art is like a space for reflection. It can change things, but not in a direct A to B way. So much debate happens in this quite polarised way, but I think what art can do is actually speak in a totally different way about our experiences. I guess some art is like propaganda, but I’m not so interested in that. Also, I guess my work is satire. There is a degree to which I think the world is quite an absurd place too. It’s makes me angry, but it’s ridiculous. I want there to be a sense I take it both seriously and not at the same time.”
