How Fišers’ exhibition scared me of the realness lying within myself

Miķelis Fišers’ Solo Exhibition “Disgrace” at Pauls Stradiņš Museum of the History of Medicine

The exhibition is set at the Pauls Stradiņš Museum of the History of Medicine – one of the scariest places in Riga centre. I have no idea whether this was an intentional move by the exhibition organizers, but the walk through the permanent exposition – and you can’t avoid it in order to get to the exhibition – turns into a notable and significant part of visiting the exhibition. Strolling through the halls, decorated with glass-cases showing wax figures sawing off legs of one another, wrapping injuries, making herb teas and exorcising evil spirits, I managed both – to wander off to my childhood when me and my classmates from Secondary School No 1 went to the museum to scream and fear together, as well as to recall superficial reflections on testimonies of ancient times, which strangely enough cannot be revealed on photos. However, they have to be shown somehow, so – it’s either sculptures or drawings.

Part of Fišers’ testimonies include drawings – scenes carved in small, black coloured, brightly lacquered or polished wood planchettes revealing various characters in various historical (also prehistorical) contexts. The scenes show aliens with their inclined eyes over half of the head, some known from Fišers’ earlier artworks, as well as ferocious lizards, bigfoots and ordinary people. Humanoids and lizards impassively hurt both types of humans, and the setting of it all is a formally flawless environment – in the best traditions of wood carvings the contours stay strong and expressive, while the volume and the environment – credibly striped. The stories are mostly very businesslike; just like the titles of the works, which merely record the things seen in the pictures, for example, “Reptiles Receiving Federal Stock Gold Bars from the Trustees of the Secret Government”, “Seasonal Mating”, “Ecumenical Service by the Wailing Wall”. The picture “Yuri Gagarin’s Heroic Death in Antarctic” is best at revealing the relationship of the businesslike and innocent pictures and their underlines – it might be possible to recognize aliens and lizards, but the space-suit might hide anybody. Yet, it’s Gagarin himself!

It could very well be that somebody enjoys indulging in rubbishy and ghastly interwoven story lines, however the author has provided clear indication saying that the exhibition is not about the scientific, artistic or any other kind of fantasy. It’s all about here and now, even though it might sound trivial. As far as I understand, the exhibition tempts to a sort of a collective psychoanalysis session – collective in the sense that there might be more than just one visitor at the same time and they might experience something simultaneous though inter unrelated.

The aesthetics of the black-and-white wood-carvings remind of something old; I immediately thought of the souvenir pictures popular during the 1960-ties/1970-ties which have actually influenced the author’s choise of form of expression, then of something from the European modernists influenced by the Eastern art. However, the heart beats stronger for another association – the one with the white stripes in the obraz cheeks of icons by Theophanes the Greek. Though they probably had some kind of a prescribed motivation, maybe something with the spatial efforts of the middle-age art, the stripes seemed to embody some supra-worldly sufferings.

Suffering is mentioned even in the exhibition brochure, which is full of various apparent and frantic messages, appeals to people; frantic because of a ban to speak overly openly. Not allowed. So, it says: “We have no direct evidence, yet we all are VICTIMS”, “Most people are totally IMPOTENT against manipulations and mind control, which for thousands of years have been elegantly cynically employed by our enslavers – the GREY ONES and the REPTILOIDS, fathers of religions and state systems alike, founded with the sole aim of humiliating and enslaving”; and once again the title of the exhibition resounds: “All inhabitants of the planet have for generations suffered a TREMENDOUS DISGRACE!”

True, the brochure can’t include both videos, which resolutely and without letting the viewer emerge into the conspiracy theory scenes displayed by the wood-carvings, takes the visitor back to “here and now” mentioned before. The sound from both works of art welcomes and leads into the exhibition, increasing emotions and brightening impressions. One of the videos shows the bare-footed artist walking over a stretch of glowing coal scattered in the grass. We see him pulling himself together, getting ready and starting the walk. It’s looped, and the sound of the coals frizzling and spattering repeats again and again. Yet, the most attractive one – not in the best sense – is the second video with two people in two separate screens constantly working on a sort of a language class in two interrelated tapes: “K-Pran? – PRAN.” The sound is a bit disturbed, the voice – modified, everything sounds and is seen as if through something else rather than directly, as if through some unknown transformer. And that’s right – lack of knowledge induces fear. In the picture the intermediary – the unknown transformer – is a kind of tapes, a sort of mask covering the faces of the speakers. So, I didn’t get scare of the lizards or the coals, but I really did get scare of the masks. More precisely – not of the masks, but of the relationship between power and obedience, which is the topic of the video. In case somebody didn’t understand it, the brochure gives an explanation: “In the universal language of hydroreptiloids the word ‘PRAN’ stands for ALL words and concepts in any language of the men, except for the word “compassion”. There is no such concept in the language of reptiles. (..)”

Observing this work of art, the poor art historian once again gets to think of good-for-nothing chain of associations from mostly resent art history and various visual trashcans. Maybe it’s worth pausing only by the Hollywood produced cannibal Lecter and more serious – Nigel Henderson’s series of the 1950-ties/1960-ties “Head of Man”, in which the author, manipulating his own portrait, makes a head out of anything, out of so many things and in a way that in the end the works seem to embody pure fear. Fear of everything that lies within ones head. (Sorry, I remembered an episode from the “Forced Entertainment” theatre play “And on the Thousandth Night…” the story of which was “Once upon a time there was a boy who was scared of the skeleton (pause) within himself”)

In order to stop fearing of God knows what and continue bravely to the meaning of Miķelis Fišers’ exhibition, one can read the exhibition curator Inga Šteimane’s interview with the author (arterritory.com). It’s a thorough, beauteous and free conversion, including on fear: “– Maybe somebody’s manipulating you? Leading you somewhere you haven’t noticed?/ – I’m sure that’s true./ – When you notice something like that, what do you do? Do you jump out of the train?/ – I don’t know what I do. It’s not like I get these great insights all the time. I try to treat the whole world as something fragile and volatile. Like an illusion.”

The usage of ‘All’ in the exhibition – we all are victims and we all experience disgrace – seems a bit confusing and irritating. It’s hard to focus. The functioning of the limited (and, surely, affected) “optics” is incomplete, impossible to immediately trace everything, to immediately react to everything. It picks up some suspicions, it pities all the poor ones and leaves it at it, as the disgraceful life, lead by the demons, goes on.

I guess I treated Fišers’ art somewhat superficially hitherto. I thought there’s no point in absorbing it more, because nothing can be understood anyway, as everything is so subtle and complicated. However, I observed and observed this time, until I accidently realised that I’ve stepped into Victor Pelevin’s novel “Chapayev and Void”.

On page 352 Pelevin, probably never having seen any of Fišers’ works (then again, why haven’t seen?), in a dialogue of Chapayev and Pyotr gives an exact comment for this exhibition: “What to do, Petka, – says Chapayev. – That’s the way the world goes, all questions are to be answered in the middle of a burning house./ I agree, – I replied, (..) The world is real and unreal. I understand it very well. Right now some very unpleasant people will arrive here… Understand me correctly, I don’t want to say these people are real, yet they will make us fully feel their realness”. Thus, what I just wanted to say is that Fišers’ exhibition really is almost to the fullest.