Slapstick and the liberation of objecthood in the work of Rebecca Moss

Humour in visual art may be commonplace, but it is rarely foregrounded in any analysis. To sideline the humour in the video art of British artist Rebecca Moss, however, is to ignore the centrality of slapstick to her work. Slapstick often sees a performer transformed into an object, and this ‘thingness’ is central to Moss's investigation into gendered embodiment, as she develops a form of ‘neutral’ objectification which allows her to critique and to counter the disciplinary regimes that govern femininity. Meanwhile, animating the inanimate is crucial to another facet of Moss’s practice, her engagement with the Romantic sublime. Instead of the punishing idealism and elevated register of the sublime, Moss uses the ridiculous (conceived by Jean Paul Richter as an ‘inverted sublime’) to pursue a model that privileges participation rather than dominance.