Listen to the audio version of this essay on Soundcloud. (Listening time: 10 minutes 43 seconds)
In many of Jamie Crewe’s videos we encounter a feminine subject in flight. Ashley is hopeful as she makes the journey alone to a rural idyll at the beginning of ‘Ashley’ (2020); Jacques is luminescent as they exit within the suspended final scene of ‘Adulteress’ (2017). Chantal (‘Chantal After James Bidgood and Jean Genet’ (2016)), encoded within a room of jewel-like signs, sets fire to her surroundings eventually destroying the infrastructure that enables her image to be made and seen. Heroines recur within traditions of myth, lore, and fairytale, as do their escapes. Yet in Crewe’s videos, agency is tethered to formal experimentation that forecloses conventions of both narrative structure and representational authority. The paradigm of this dissolution of narrative and image is arson – razing to the ground – as committed by Chantal. In other videos, dissolution is enacted through elaboration instead of annihilation, for example in the meticulous compilation of references and images into a stratum so dense that its form cannot be apprehended in ‘False Wife’ (2022). Crewe’s videos are one part of her practice that incorporates sculpture, drawing, painting, writing, and musical composition, throughout which feminised subjects and formal experimentation can be found. The way that feminine agency is conceived through technologies and regimes of spectatorship, however, has specific meanings for artist moving image, if not for experimental film in general, and it is this that I want to explore here.
A restless dialectic of making (the forging of agency) and dissolution (of narrative and image) is persistent within Crewe’s videos. Very often, dissolution offers escape though the terms – and extent – of this escape are ambiguous. ‘Adulteress’ (2017), based on Rachilde’s subversive, Decadent novel Monsieur Venus: a Materialist Novel (1884), combines moving image and text captions to reframe the story of Jacques Silvert. In Monsieur Venus, the feminised Jacques enters and then escapes a marriage to the formidable Mademoiselle Raoule Vénérande, a study in Sadian-esque cruelty. The marriage consolidates Jacques’ femininity with his intensifying loss of power. Escape from this dynamic ends in disaster. In ‘Adulteress’, Jacques’ demise is countered. Femininity no longer signals total dispossession but something more ambiguous. Lingering on the image of Jacques as they depart a party of friends and well-wishers, the disjuncture between image and text employed in the video upends the terms of the novel. Stepping out in public, and out of step with the text, Jacques is self-possessed, at least within the frame that has renarrativised the novel’s central dilemma. In the two-channel ‘Pastoral Drama’ (2018), a similar gesture is enacted to different ends. Eurydice’s story cuts to a continuous empty frame while that of her male counterpart, Eumelio, continues for several more scenes. Where Eurydice is drawn from Greek mythology, Eumelio is taken from Agostino Agazzari’s seventeenth century operatic version of the Ovid legend. In Agazzari’s version, Eumelio, the boy, replaces Eurydice, the wife and – gender reversal incomplete – Orpheus becomes Apollo, the male mentor to his boy-ward, Eumelio. In ‘Pastoral Drama’, Eurydice and Eumelio are in concert, a screen for each and a shared, shimmering world of handmade scenery. Their stories and the images that convey them overlap and diverge. Agazzari’s homosocial version was made for the seminary, a place apart from women. Instead of reproducing the quintessential Greek tragedy, it has a happy ending. The reversal of Eurydice’s fate in the form of Eumelio’s story stayed with Crewe when she first encountered it in her early twenties, mirroring for her the tense exchange between transfemininity and a scene of male homosexual desire. Between the two tales, of Eurydice and Eumelio, lies a gap and in it is concealed what Mason Leaver-Yap refers to as a ‘womanhood that cannot bear to be seen’. [1] Cannot bear to be seen: located at an interstice of accentuated feminine (Eurydice) and masculine (Eumelio) characteristics this womanhood is buried, subterranean. It is not available to view, whether because of impossibility, necessity, or obstinance. The gesture could go unnoticed; it is politicised because it might.
Jamie Crewe, ‘Adulteress’ (2017), film still, single channel video, 22 minutes
In this sense, the dialectic at work in Crewe’s videos conjures a transfeminine subject within what Angela Carter once identified as the high stakes project of ‘femininity as praxis’. [2] Crewe’s videos, the tethering of feminine agency to the formal dissolution of narrative and image resists the full force of violence that representation has brought to bear on transfeminine people. Crewe’s dialectic that puts femininity in flight is therefore in an uneasy relation with a world that simultaneously surrounds and isolates the subject. In ‘Ashley’ (2020), Crewe’s protagonist arrives at a remote cottage on the edge of a body of water, hopeful for what ‘her home for the weekend’ might provide. The isolated house as home casts anonymity and solitude as potential shelter for Ashley. Inspecting herself in a mirror, she reflects that ‘from certain angles I looked correct’. Over the weekend/duration of the video, Ashley’s tentative quietude collapses into disorientation. This is impressed through a compelling, spiralling, inner dialogue: ‘I couldn’t be certain’, she says. ‘Something had happened to me’, she says. ‘Something that didn’t make sense but with which no argument was possible’. ‘Am I ready to be eaten?’, she asks. ‘Let me see it’, she says. A sense of being watched is accompanied by uncertainty, of who or what is watching, or if anything is there at all. What is plausible and what is experienced are separate. This seems to reinscribe the pathologised terms of gender dysphoria. ‘Was that my body or my mind?’ Ashley asks, after she encounters an unknown threat. Crewe points out, ‘there is a third option, which [Ashley is] not ready to consider: that it was neither, and someone is really antagonising them’.[3] The video ends with Ashley fleeing, wearing a vast, shroud-like dress that simultaneously liberates the body by covering it and, at the same time, constrains Ashley’s movements.[4] To carry trauma, to carry grief, both are a constraint, dragging weights that plumb the depths of what Nat Raha has named ‘transfeminine brokenness’.[5] ‘What even was I, a shapeless neutered body, ineligible for love and sex?’, Ashley asks and answers simultaneously.
Jamie Crewe, ‘Ashley’ (2020), film still, single channel video, 45 minutes, 40 seconds.
‘Ashley’ can be located within a sub-genre of horror that imbricate women’s isolation and societal haunting as a kind of wicked double work (think Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) or George Cukor’s ‘Gaslight’ (1944)). In ‘Ashley’, the oscillation of isolation and scrutiny turns on a sleight of hand since we, the viewer, consign Ashley to being watched. In ‘False Wife’ (2022), this complicity of viewership, which is one throughline in Crewe’s practice, is perverted through formal experimentation in an apparent departure from her earlier videos. And yet, ‘False Wife’ seems to sweep up everything that preceded, interpolating it into a work of such distilled intensity that flight is experienced not by a feminine subject within the work but by us, viewing it. Comprised of a local website and a poppers training video, ‘False Wife’ was commissioned as part of legal scholar Chloë Kennedy’s research investigating identity deception.[6] A local website is not networked and yet it promises connection, the first clue that upon entering this work we might also be falling into a trap. Poppers training videos are user edited pornographic videos, usually amateur in aesthetic, that combine hypnotic sound, on-screen text, and (usually) gay erotic imagery to actively encourage and accompany the sniffing of poppers, a drug that intensifies, relaxes, submerges. Like other of Crewe’s works, pornography is referenced in ‘False Wife’ but is not made. Consider the literal deflowering – petals pulled from marigolds – that opens ‘Teleny’ (2015), a film based on the anonymous pornographic novel of the same name. In ‘False Wife’, transformation is not a pleasure but an ‘ordeal’. Hurt, spurned, rejected, jealous, bitter, petulant, hysteric—the modes of femininity that operate within Crewe’s practice are set to work differently here. Undulating imagery, persistent instruction and looping rhythms create an unsettling ground that collapses borders between self and other, possessed and dispossessed, victim and perpetrator. Over and over, control is taken and released. ‘False Wife’ is an amazing work, an object of total artifice that reckons with the historic degradation of the feminine. Like Crewe’s other moving image works, it’s another sensuous text, alive with possibilities, a startling recalibration of feminine subjecthood and the integrality of agency to it.
Jamie Crewe, ‘False Wife’ (2022), film still, single channel video, 15 minutes, 32 seconds.
[1] Mason Leaver-Yap and Jamie Crewe in conversation, 19 May 2021, KW Production Series. Available at: https://kwproductionseries.net/jamie-crewe/
[2] Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An exercise in cultural history, London: Virago Press, 1987, p. 71.
[3] Jamie Crewe and Caroline Elbaor, ‘Generating Friction’, BOMB, 20 September 2021. Available at: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2021/09/20/generating-friction-jamie-crewe-interviewed/
[4] The dress is designed by artist and performer Sgáire Wood who plays Chantal in Crewe’s ‘Chantal After James Bidgood and Jean Genet’ (2016).
[5] Nat Raha, ‘Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism’, in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 116, Number 3, July 2017, pp. 632-646.
[6] ‘False Wife’ was commissioned for Kennedy’s AHRC funded research fellowship ‘Identity Deception: A Critical History’ in partnership with the University of Edinburgh Art Collection in 2020.
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Laura Guy is a Reader in Gender, Sexuality and Culture at the Glasgow School of Art. Her writing on interactions of art and design with feminist and queer politics has been published widely. She is co-editor with Glyn Davis of Queer Print in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022) and editor of Phyllis Christopher’s artist monograph Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Politics, 1988-2003 (Book Works, 2022). With Fiona Anderson, Flora Dunster and Theo Gordon, she is co-editing a special issue of British Art Studies dedicated to queer art in Britain since the 1980s (forthcoming Spring 2025).
