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The Fantastic Life of Minnie Rubinski - Manipulate Festival 2023
The Fantastic Life of Minnie Rubinski
by Gareth K Vile
In dark and curtained off space in the Fruitmarket gallery, a facsimile of a brain presents a series of video screens. At the hub of the brain is an enclosed space: inside this space, a seat and a soundtrack, a female voice recalling memories from a long time. Each screen is connected to the hub by a spiral of material that suggests the synapses of the brain, and each video screen has an episode from the life of Minnie Rubinski. Some scenes are sentimental memories, others are more fantastic adventures. In random order, they reveal details of Rubinski’s experience. Here, she is a child playing with her dog and presenting her father with a gift. There, she owns a gallery and is surrounded by celebrities. Another screen, and another detail: she is an investigative journalism; she is chased by crocodiles; the television sends her messages. A lover is remembered. A husband met, and then, on another screen, left.
Each video features a cast of puppets, filmed as they bounce between each other, that particular lope that comes with strings attached. The films allow the camera to close in on the faces, or bodies, or objects, emphasising the capacity for the fixed expression of the puppet to become a reflection of the viewer’s assumptions. Here, Minnie is happy: here, she is melancholy as domestic life pressures her: here, here, here, she rescues, she flies in a helicopter, she is reunited with her lover. Yet her face is static, her emotions the product of observation and circumstance.
Like the memories that they explain, the films are reconsidered, they are reinterpreted and are a fabulous mixture of the emotionless and the emotive. If some of Minnie’s tales are far-fetched, or even delusional fantasies, they are embedded in a medium that explores the uncanny nature of agency and imposition. The detail of the design, the use of cut-outs for those characters that, in the end, don’t matter, the way that each film fades into obscurity, never complete but hinting at another sequence: this installation articulates the endless process of memoralising and remembering.
