Choose Your Fighter

Mia Vinaccia

75 Manners Street, Wellington

24 – 29 October 2020

Reviewed by Connie Brown for PhotoForum, November 2020

Choose Your Fighter was the pop-up exhibition from Pōneke-based artist Mia Vinaccia showing works from her graduate project. Seven portraits were included, each depicting a familiar character archetype from mainstream cinema, each printed large and installed poster-style to make the space feel like the foyer of the Embassy or, alternatively, a pre-teen’s bedroom. Not just for their exaggerated size, the images verge on cartoonish thanks to details like the dollar bill clip-art decal that frames Revenge is a dish best served cold, or the plastic vultures and cacti in I tried being reasonable. I didn’t like it. Such details punctuate all the images, in the pantomime poses the sitters assume, their cakey stage make-up, and their rented polyester garments, the itch of which is near-palpable. Such details, too, punctuate the veneration with which we typically view these types of images. From these lesions, the grotesque and the surreal seep, and with them, critical distance with which Vinaccia invites us to view popular culture and its representations of gender and power, and to laugh at them, too.

Leaving the exhibition, I wished there was a ballot box at the door, Hans Haacke-style, where we could answer to the show’s provocation. Maybe it’s because election season was making me anxious and the physical action of casting a vote seemed like a good way to release the tension. Whatever the source of my impulse, and whether or not the title was meant only rhetorically, it would have been a fun touch, which I suspect Vinaccia might have bedazzled or covered in leopard-print.

Mostly though, I’m interested to know whom of her seven characters popular opinion would favour. I’m interested to know who we’d collectively deem the strongest were a monarch, an outlaw, a ninja and a dominatrix to come head-to-head. They’re all in their battle poses, reaching for the gun, flexing the nunchaku or batting their eyelashes, so we just have to decide: what do we deem strength? Is it it beauty? wealth? charisma? patrimony? Whips and chains?

Quickly, however, any sustained attempt to compare these qualities unravels; my ballot box would be redundant. Vinaccia has told us nothing of the terrain on which this fight is to take place, nor the objective of the battle, and this makes all the difference among these varied candidates. Are we talking a UFC-style showdown, or a vogue ball, or the graduate recruitment programme at Deloitte? Because each favours a different victor.

Without this information, it would seem that in viewing Choose Your Fighter, we’re not being asked to attend to the nuance of the seven characters photographed. We’re not being asked to carefully compile and cross-reference lists of their strengths and weaknesses. To the question of ‘who holds power’, which seems at first to be the works’ central axis, Vinaccia seems to respond that it actually doesn’t matter, that power is contextual and the glory of any victory is temporary, anyway, because real-life doesn’t come with a credit sequence to suspend us forever in its glow. What matters is the emphatic superficiality of these figures. Because, really, none of them can exist in a terrain at all, only on smooth, spineless, airbrushed surfaces, like the pages of a script and billboards and green screens. Surfaces that, when cleaved in two, won’t crumble in the hand or weep any strange fluids. They can only exist as they are seen here: contained within a frame that matches their outfit where they don’t even cast a shadow, as if there should be a thin line of white-noise where these flimsy bodies have been cut and pasted onto space, made up of plywood and pixels just like the set pieces they are surrounded by.

Vinaccia is interested in these characters as images and cultural artefacts, which not in spite of but for their emphatic superficiality lay bare the machine of popular culture, which consists of a dense and complex, but formulaic and uncreative visual language. A corsage in You like me, you really like me, is enough to imply all the vodka-spiked depths of a prom-night drama, just as a Bible, a single red rose and a solid gold horse sculpture on the mahogany coffee table in Revenge is a dish best served cold, speak to the push-pull of corruption and loyalty that drives every Mafia film. In a cinematic context, these details make a narrative familiar and therefore marketable. Here, in Vinaccia’s images, they emerge as self-same signs that add up to stale stereotypes with the uncanny woodenness of wax figures sweating under tungsten lighting. In part, this effect is inherent to the still image. But it would not be nearly so effective were it not for the artist’s signature sense for theatricality and maximalism: these are, it should be noted, the wax figures of Madame Tussauds and not the Smithsonian.

So another way to describe this effect might be, in the words of Susan Sontag, as a way of seeing things in quotation marks. Quotation marks declare the thing they contain to be ‘so-called’. They contain a wink and an invitation to take it all bit less seriously. Vinaccia seems very on-board with this ethos, describing her images as conveying “not the truth of who we are, nor the fantasy of what we’d like to be, but a funky alternate reality where everything’s a little scarier, a little sexier, a little more vivid, and certainly a little more dramatic.” Let’s laugh at these stereotypes, at the ideas of masculinity and femininity and power and human life that they represent, and the ways in which we buy into them and repeat them and are drawn back to them over-and-over. It’s funny because they were to begin with.

But while I’m ready and willing to enter the artist’s funky alternate reality, I’m halted by the thought of those forms and proponents of power which aren’t accessorised or to be found contained in frames. Those who aren’t instantly recognisable, who move through the world not through the popular culture machine but in navy suits and behind corporate bodies, those who set the terrain, and who have set it to be one of tax havens, nanosecond economics and complex supply chains where they win every time. In future projects, I’d be interested to see the outcome were Vinaccia to turn her visual flamboyance, sense of humour and eye for detail on these darker, more understated and abstract presences. They’re already grotesque and already surreal, so were she to puncture them as she has these Hollywood tropes, what would seep out?

Connie Brown is a freelance writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her writing on contemporary art has been featured by Circuit, Art News New Zealand and Enjoy Contemporary Art Space.