In his book Rabelais and His World, theorist Mikhail Bakhtin uses the literature of François Rabelais to outline the carnivalesque as integral to his theory of art. His history of folklore in literature posits the carnival as the people’s second life: “organized on the basis of laughter. It is a festive life.” The carnival is a rampantly physical, dynamic, antihierarchical event which transforms the participant’s relationship to time and space through sociality, vulgarity and visceral materiality. The carnival allows for the integration of everything that is typically separated by hierarchy. The concurrence of high and low is conducted through the body in carnivalesque roleplay. The jester’s vulgar roleplay is allowed and revered as entertainment; and the jester can play everywhere – even in the palace before the king. At the carnival, everyone is free to transgress. Bakhtin writes: “The material bodily principle is contained … in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable.” In Jacquie Meng’s The World Is My Playground uncanny distortion and self-portraiture as self-roleplay facilitate the emergence of new identities, chance encounters and transformation.
Vulgarity at the carnival is about the body, warping. In The World Is My Playground the foot is a map, the eye is a pool ball, the faces are contorting, and the world is synthetic. Exaggerated self-portraiture goes beyond self-representation into immersion with the thing-power of objects, which have a radiating agency of their own. The textures constituting the spatiality of these works impart the surreal nature of the infraordinary. Smoke, light beams and patterned grass coalesce around the body and objects and are entirely enmeshed. The textural experience of Meng’s works reinforce painting as a practice of playing with space and collapsing time. The self bounds between the paintings: caught in the mirror, braiding hair in bed, soaking in the pool.
Bakhtin described the Carnival as “the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed”. In The World Is My Playground the numbers have fallen and a face peers out behind the hands of the clock. Or the clock is on the face itself, in the eye looking outward. Time does not need to be told but goes into flux. The world is not complete. Self, object and spatial entanglement challenge the dread of fixity and immortalisation, making room for the potential something else.
Object-orientation is especially materialised in Meng’s installation practice – the mosaic bench is a monument to sociality, play and the body’s pre-eminence. Mosaic as a form centralises the crack and the irregular. Idiosyncrasy and chance are central to Meng’s world which is made whole through the entanglement of apparently disparate identities (such as East and West) and rejection of aesthetic hierarchies. The imagery selected superimposes the past, present and future through the combined aesthetics of the contemporary, analogue, historic and popular. The World Is My Playground rejects the demarcation of time into a rowdy, encompassing present.
Bakhtin describes the monologue as authoritarian language, and dialogue as communal. The World Is My Playground is a dialogue within itself, the works speak in a shared language of motif and aesthetic but come to the viewer for the final word. And the jester is here too, recognisable through distinct attire and objects, like the marotte. Identity is recognised through symbolism as a transhistorical form of visual communication. The jester reinforces the distinct and known language of the visual world.
In an interview surrealist painter Leonora Carrington rejected the interviewer in their attempts to understand her work in the language of art criticism and history. She responded:
“You’re trying to intellectualise something desperately, and you’re wasting your time… That’s not a way of understanding. To make it kind of into a sort of minilogic. You’ll never understand by that road… Canvas is an empty space… it’s a visual world. You want to turn things into a kind of intellectual game, it’s not.”
Bakhtin was obsessed with language. The World Is My Playground exists as a fundamentally visual world. It’s best not to get lost in the minilogics of art writing, and feel the carnival in the embodied, vulgar, festive visual world of Jacquie Meng.
