A view of Rachel Rossin’s “Haha Real” at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern
In The Weird and The Eerie (2016), the vital text by the late Mark Fisher, the cultural critic distinguishes the implications of these descriptors in compelling clarity. To Fisher, the weird summons its head-turning spell from wrongness: “A weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here.” (Fisher, 9). Far from false, “the weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.” (Fisher, 9). To comprehend these aesthetic terms, one must untangle a weird presence from an eerie absence: “The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something.” (Fisher, 9). In other words, the weird represents an impossible reality whereas the eerie alters our sense of the familiar: think about the weird green glow of radioactively tinted sunlight illuminating the eeriness of an empty amusement park.
A view of Rachel Rossin’s “Haha Real” at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern
Fisher traces the emergence of such themes to progenitors of science fiction like HP Lovecraft and HG Welles as early as the 1920s. In the wake of World War One, millions of traumatized Europeans reported collective fits of disillusionment and dread. Such trepidation defines the hair-raising potential of the weird and the eerie. These uneasy auras align not so much with horror as they do with strangeness. This war-induced trauma ignited several burning modern questions: how did it objectify soldiers as ghosts-in-the-machine, as pawns used to operate the instruments of death personified in objects like the German Siege Gun, Big Bertha? Amplified by the Industrial Revolution, the personification of objects — or the personalized marketing schemes intent on seducing the public — merged with viewing people as dispensable items: think of the heightened allure of the 1950s and 60s cult of the celebrity, that put-on-a-pedestal mentality glorified in mass media and Pop Art.
The main protagonist in Rachel Rossin’s Haha Real — the immersive installation currently inhabiting Houston’s historic Buffalo Bayou Cistern until November 10th — assumes its form in a digital reincarnation of The Velveteen Rabbit, among the artist’s favorite childhood stories. Written in 1922, Margery Williams’ existentially coded children’s tale plants the paradigm-shifting seeds of the aforementioned idea of mechanized personhood. As indicated on the exhibit’s introductory wall panel, the relationship between this soul-softening short story and Haha Real is that of a hit single and dystopian remix.
A view of Rachel Rossin’s “Haha Real” at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern
Its central premise orbits a boy and his toy rabbit. Outshined by his mechanical cohort of fellow toys, the lonely rabbit fades into the background as the boy diverts his attention to the whizzing energy of these modern marvels:
For a long time [the rabbit] lived in the toy cupboard or on the nursery floor, and no one thought very much about him. He was naturally shy, and being only made of velveteen, some of the more expensive toys quite snubbed him. The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon everyone else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real.
As prophesized by the worn and wizened Skin Horse — the oldest toy and would-be-sage of the collection — the rabbit receives life-altering news: “When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” One imagines the possibility of the rabbit’s vindicating clapback: “Eat [this] heart out you mechanized monsters!”
A view of Rachel Rossin’s “Haha Real” at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern
Submerged in the absence of its original presence, Haha Real lies eerily submerged in the depths of the infamous Cistern, the cavernous vessel formerly housing Houston’s public drinking water. Although the exhibit alters this intended context, such a liquid connection remains, if only for the aesthetic and sonic effect submerged in the ten-inch pool of water flooding the pit of its central concrete basin. This visual and auditory effect hinges on yet another relationship, that of water as a reflective surface for both light and sound. Upon entering—but before descending—into the bowels of the Cistern, the accompanying tour guide casts ambiguous light on Haha Real’s core ethos: how does its subject matter, message, and immersion in such an uncanny environment question the nature of reality? Essentially: how does it distinguish the reality of subjective experience?
If this cavernous-vessel-turned-exhibition space reads as eerie, then its visual and verbal contents read as weird once we accept the surrounding space as the site of our momentary reality. Perceptively, aesthetically, and mythologically…what’s real in here isn’t real out there, but here, our aesthetic perception of Haha Real’s morphing mythology continually questions the degree of such realness. Rossin’s chameleon-like rabbit morphs from flickering flame to windswept foliage, from placid bunny to rabid rabbit, from delicate sparks to all-consuming blaze.
A view of Rachel Rossin’s “Haha Real” at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern
The installation’s amorphous antagonist assumes its eerie form as the Cistern itself, like a Brutalist iteration a la Shirley Jackson’s slim but striking horror classic, the gothic novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959). As if its neon emission of blood-red light, the brooding swells of its sinister soundscapes, or the equally jarring omission of any light at all wrapping the audience in darkness isn’t enough, it doubles in size when one observes its mirror image reflected onto the water, a hellish basement clone rendering escape in any direction impossible.
Submerged in a sonic soup, Rossin cues these ethereal visuals to a weightless soundtrack. This carnivalesque discography haunts the Cistern—or “psychological theater” as Rossin puts it—with a spooky soul. Bouncing melodies of electrified synthesizers float through the air, the narrator’s uncanny timbre wafts and echoes and swirls, but everything eventually drifts downward, grounded in darkness at the shallow foot of the Cistern’s pooled floor.
A view of Rachel Rossin’s “Haha Real” at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern
Even when everything else falls silent, as the Cistern bathes in blinding black, a barely perceptible gurgle of water lurks somewhere far beneath in the darkness below. Swapping dramatic fizzle for poetic fade, Haha Real concludes with the glow of a single digital candle, a last light of consciousness flatly flickering on a circular screen until it fades to black, all of which “feels a little bit more like a dream.”
Haha Real is on view at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern through November 10. Soundscape composed by Frewuhn.
