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| Fleas and Syrup in a Fur Coat Jānis Borgs, Art Critic Reflections on the exhibition by Miķelis Fišers Miķelis Fišers. El Cosmos no perdona las faltas or the Cosmos doesn’t Forgive Mistakes 27.11.2009.–11.01.2010. Museum of Liepaja | |
| Miķelis Fišers belongs to the generation of Latvian artists who grabbed “..a knife to cut up our arses...”, to slightly paraphrase the title of a provocative installation displayed at Pedvāle during the 1990s by Gints Gabrāns – a companion to, contemporary of and no lesser cultural rebel than Fišers. Already then, they prophetically anticipated the disaster of experiments by the ruling “Martian” clique, and the transformation of “the years of plenty” into a global and Latvian fat arse credit crunch – where the final resolution increasingly demands something very sharp. This is nothing new. Since times immemorial artists have wavered between two options: to indulge in intimate navel gazing and to lock themselves away in an ivory tower of aestheticism, or to raise a rebel flag and reflect back also the pain of their epoch and society. Looking at it from the angle of cultural history, both trends have featured prominent artistic masters and great thinkers. Our epoch, however, with its harsh reality causes us to be acutely aware again (for the umpteenth time) of the profusion of social problems. And encourages us to rate highly the troublemakers. The mission of the artist here is to be a kind of fire alarm bell. | |
 Miķelis Fišers. The Wonderful Building. From the series 'El Cosmos no perdona faltas'. Oil on canvas. 155x195cm. 2009. Photo: Normunds Brasliņš | |
| Fišers earned the reputation of being an artistic hellraiser as early as the 1990s. Among his various multimedia manifestations, perhaps the greatest response was achieved in those days by painterly graphic art with very explicit depictions of “interplanetary” sexual intercourse between aliens a.k.a. little green men from UFOs and us, earthlings. Until then, images that lewd could have been seen only in the iconography (or to be more correct, pornography) of a public toilet or a common stairwell. It must be noted that in Western comics and other entertainment media the scenes of coitus between alien monsters and beauties from the Earth have been a favourite topic for decades. Nevertheless, Fišers’ filthy art caused even international scandal. In Vilnius, at least, his pieces were thrown out from an already prepared exposition, amidst huge uproar. In the eyes of the more conservative section of society Fišers (and in fact also the majority of avantgarde artists) is rated as a provocative doodler of dubious professionalism. Unbelievable – a man like this a pupil of Professor Indulis Zariņš himself! To tell the truth, his works did not possess any unintelligible, aesthetically complicated codes. None of your formalist “isms”. On the contrary, a direct and an apparently realistic message. Even an emphatically naive and infantile one. Even his later “very serious” conversion to painting in oils seemed a little suspect. Could this be some kind of a joke? Particularly vis a vis the professionally refined and glamorous ranks of “serious” Latvian painters. Can Fišers’ as if clumsy style and technique be compared to, for instance, the sophisticated school and virtuoso elegance of Frančeska Kirke, Ritums Ivanovs, Ieva Iltnere or Līga Purmale? This is how the adherents of traditionalism always keep comparing things and jumping to conclusions, and refuse to accept anything of a different kind. Way back in the deepest Soviet era, on such an occasion (if it even got that far) the press would be likely to flash angry headlines like: “How long are we going to tolerate Fišerses like him among our community of tomorrow?” or “Whose bread are you eating, Miķelis?”. And even a prosecutor or two might prick up their ears, scenting subversion. The realism of “doodlers”, the marginalism of those who draw on napkins, the most diverse forms of childlike imagery entered global art far earlier than the Almighty had even contemplated the appearance of Miķelis on this planet. One could triumphantly refer to archetypal images such as a hieroglyph-like drawing of a deer scratched onto the handle of a Stone Age knife – the oldest ever found in Latvia. The prehistoric artefact, however, cannot be compared to artistic manifestations and unfathomable depths of ideas by “a present-day free individual”. Those contemporary artists who work “Fišers-like” are sometimes being compared to the the dadaists, expressionists and the German Neue Sachlichkeit artists of the last century. However, the most fitting and closest artistic conceptual affinity should be sought here with the processes taking place in Western culture of the 1960s, against the background of declining abstractionism. The formula of Leninist propaganda – “art belongs to the people” – was, paradoxically, most vividly incarnated in the pop-art realism of capitalist Americans. In truth, however, it was not the system of socialist values that pop-art manifested with its emphasis on symbolism, but the totalitarianism of consumer society. The optimism and the keep smiling positivism also quickly triggered a certain diabetes effect in the global system of culture acts. And to a society shaken up by incessant historic upheavals artists administered new “doses of insulin, bitter potions, cod-liver oil and enema for constipation...”. The 1960s – 70s brought a heightened interest in reality and realism, now taking the forms of social criticism. The movements of anarchist neodadaism and Fluxus were refuelled by the trans-European nouveau réalisme , born in France, a trend stirred up by the editor-in-chief of the ‘Domus’ magazine and notable guru of art criticism, Pierre Restany, in search of new horizons for humanism and realism. German artists such as, for instance, former dederonians (DDR or Communist Eastern Germany) Georg Baselitz or Ralf Penk and others demonstrated an unprecedented power of expression. | |
 Miķelis Fišers. Bear, Wolf and Rabbit. Oil on canvas. 192x200cm. 2008. Photo: Normunds Brasliņš | |
| During the process of disintegration of the Soviet Empire, some unexpectedly charming aspects of socialist realism, as seen through the filter of Russian nonconformist socart, were revealed. This did not have any tangible impact on the development of Baltic art. With few exceptions – the socart by Leonards Laganovskis, for instance. It must be added that even the relatively limited experience of Soviet orthodox socialist realism in the post-war cultural activities in Latvia made many of our artists allergic to realism in general and led them to confine themselves within their own asocial shell of private interests. This in many ways stimulated them to turn to various expressions of “formalism” and to Sunday-like decorativeness. But in the 1980s, however, young (Soviet) Latvian artists saw as if afresh the enormous diversity of forms of realism and were able with their works to enter the flow of Western art. The work by Fišers now seems to be a direct post-Soviet continuation of this process. Thus the current “outer space” exhibition in Liepaja reaffirmed the artist’s loyalty to a theme already put in motion in the 1990s. With regard to this, however, the pronouncements and evaluations by the media display chaste naivete and point to the artist’s imaginary wish “to show the harsh daily life of space explorers and the capitulation of technology in the face of the Unknown”. Hidden behind the facade of Miķelis Fišers’ works and their surface of apparently plain and illustrative narrative lie deeper layers of thought and interlinings of concepts, revealing a serious side to this rather ironic artist – and which is to be respected. Certainly, Fišers is sometimes teetering on the edge of kitch, even gliding over its territory in smooth curves. Both in an aesthetic sense and in substance, with a few shades of banality in the revelation of contents. But kitch does not turn the author into a kitchman. Miķelis Fišers always keeps control over these elemental forces, like a cowboy controlling his impetuous horse. And one could say that, with art, things are not at all as harsh to deal with as with outer space: art forgives errors (if they occur) and always permits improvement. For the present-day generation, the conquest of space is something fairly commonplace, something that is occasionally mentioned on the second-rate news among an ad for the latest laundry powder, scenes of serial killer slaughter, and a swine flu emergency... Today’s young-sters would hardly be able to name a single astronaut. Media and the entertainment industry have made us accustomed to the idea that once upon a time we might meet the creatures from UFOs. One fine day we won’t even notice the little green men. We won’t realize that we ourselves have become aliens… Sixty year olds, though, do remember the global ecstasies and hysterical celebrations that followed every pathetic space flight. As easily as the multiplication tables, any child could recite the names of the first hundred space explorers and at least a thousand space technology related details. It goes without saying that the space triumphs of those days were nothing but a smokescreen for the obnoxious countenance of the military-industrial complex, and the efforts of the Cold War dinosaurs to drop over each other a handsome haul of A-bombs, as fast as possible, and go unpunished. However, a rather infantile picture was painted for society. In the 1960s, for instance, New Year’s greeting cards were infested with Father Frosts straddling space rockets, Snow Whites dancing on the Moon and pink cheeked babies in spacesuits. In 1968, the Soviet pavilion in the Venice Biennale featured an oil painting Circling the Earth by Soviet cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov. The piece was well up to the kitchy amateurish standards of some factory club painting circle. Yet the Biennale catalogue bore a solemn inscription: “...painters have often tried, as if looking from above, to imagine our Earth circling in the ocean of the Universe. But it is Leonov who has seen all that, both as explorer and painter. And he demonstrates his admiration of the wonder at the colours in outer space and its fantastically wonderful dawns.” This kind of rapture and sweet passion are not present in Fišers’ outer space. Here instead is manifested a continuation of quite human problems in a terrifying, mysterious and hostile environment (Draugs pameta (‘Abandoned by a Friend’), Ķīlnieks (‘Hostage’), Ardievas (‘Farewell’)). Now and then, one can even hear a strain of Latvian symbolist classics. Fišers’ Makrabriāna. Zudusī pilsēta (‘Macrabriana. The Lost City’) or the dance of the alien elfs in Dekompresija (‘Decompression’) resonate with the visions of Rūdolfs Pērle or Voldemārs Matvejs. There is a quite Ciurlionisesque atmosphere in the landscape of Apvienotās sistēmas (‘United Systems’). On Earth the world of paintings by Miķelis Fišers is like a continuation of his cosmic environment, only with a much greater effect of credible presence. They are impressions from the artist’s numerous travels (the Crimea, Mexico, Guatemala, the Caucasus) condensed into dramatic images of mainly mountain landscapes. With contrasting, dark shadows as in Roerich’s works and the intensive colourfulness of lights characteristic of Saryan. And without people. Fišers encounters them only in outer space and on faraway planets. His friends are the green men. And Fišers is suspected of being one of the “greenies” who, disguised as a painter, is actually carrying out space research. One way or another, it is a mission. There is no sense in trying to pin down the artist – like a butterfly from a collection in a box – within a certain classification, style or direction, as just about every art scholar and observer aspires to do. It is clear that during this millennium Fišers has grown more serious; he has taken a step, or some steps… Was it forward or backwards, or sideways – these are questions still to be answered. What front or up or down is there in space? These are but mere concepts of gravity. Of course, we could be sorry that, for the Latvians, one decent hellraiser may have been lost (or just downscaled, or bewitched into silence). One can also express concern that his star trek might lead to Mammon’s opulent planet of commerce, where hordes of former rebels and fierce lions of avantgarde have found a safe haven. So far, however, one thing is clear about Miķelis Fišers: sometimes his art is like fleas in the fur coat of the art community that make it scratch furiously, but other times – like syrup, or even valerian, dribbled onto fur that urges it to lick itself and wallow on the ground in ecstasy. /Translator into English: Sarmīte Lietuviete/ | |
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