In Jacquie Meng’s 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. Meng’s work reinforces painting as a practice of playing with space and collapsing time. Smoke, light beams and patterned grass coalesce around the body and objects, materialising the uncanny potential of the ordinary. The self bounds between each painting: caught in the mirror, braiding hair in bed, soaking in the pool.
Mikhail Bakhtin, in his book Rabelais and His World, used 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 festive anti-hierarchical event which transforms the participant’s relationship to time and space through sociality, vulgarity and rampant materiality.
Vulgarity at the carnival is about the body, warping. High and low are integrated in the body through roleplay. Especially by the jester, whose performance is revered as entertainment and who 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.
Bakhtin described the carnival as “the true feast of time... It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed”. In Meng’s world the numbers have fallen and a face peers out behind the hands of the clock. Or the clock is in the face, the eye looking outward. Time does not need to be told but goes into flux. Self, object and spatial entanglement challenge the dread of fixity and immortalisation. Mosaics center the crack and the irregular.
Object-orientation is especially materialised through installation – the mosaic bench is a monument to sociality, play and the body’s pre-eminence. Idiosyncrasy and chance are central to Meng’s world, which echoes the entanglement of supposedly disparate identities and ignores aesthetic hierarchies.
The World Is My Playground rejects the demarcation of time; preferring a rowdy, encompassing present. And the jester is here too, recognisable through distinct attire and objects like the marotte. The jester reinforces the distinct and known language of the visual world: symbolism as a transhistorical form of communication. Bakhtin describes the monologue as authoritarian language, and dialogue as communal. The World Is My Playground is a visual, communal dialogue: the works speak their shared language, but come to the viewer for the final word.
Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington rejected attempts to understand her work in the language of art criticism and history. In an interview she responded to questions about the meaning of her paintings saying:
“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.”
The World Is My Playground is a visual world. It’s better not to get lost in the minilogics of art writing, and instead feel the carnival through the embodied, vulgar and festive playground of Jacquie Meng.
