Sin and Beauty ｜ Foster Mickley Exhibition
Text by Jun'ichiro ISHII
Translated by Kei Ota
日本語 で読む
If you walk along a beach today you may notice the plastic garbage around you before you notice any seashells. Given the nature of the contemporary art world today, any discussion would more likely focus on the realistic issue of plastic waste than about seashells of all things.
According to Foster Mickley, the beauty of a seashell can only be realized upon our discovery and engagement of the shell. We may be living in a time where we are quicker to analyze society’s “sins”「罪」as art before we heed attention to what is “beauty”「美」.
While it is important to think about the reality of our coastlines, it may not be enough to merely examine our “sins”, mourn our losses, and emphasize these issues at hand. One of the most important roles an artist does is to draw attention to the beauty around us —beauty that has been lost or obscured—and make it visible again. We write our own stories of beauty based on our own fascinations and discoveries. It is only by writing our own stories that we can open our eyes to the subtle beauty around us hidden in plain sight.
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In "Wish Exchange," Foster Mickley's work is composed of seashells collected from a number of beaches. During the installation at KIKA he carefully arranged the shells one by one on the floor of the gallery space and waited for the audience.
Every day of the exhibition Mickley spent whole days at the gallery, arriving early before the opening and staying long after the doors closed. He would periodically move the shells—tenderly re-positioning them, pausing in content, and adjust them again. In the morning when the gallery doors opened, Mickley’s “works” resembled the serenity of a beach at dawn.
When viewers began to arrive the shells began to move. As the day went on the shells traveled and shape-shifted throughout the space as people came and left. I often noticed that the shells I had seen earlier reappear in different places and in different ideas. In a way they were like small installations blooming up across the room in accordance with the viewers’ imaginations. Much like the fluctuating ebb and flow of the sunlight pouring from the windows the impression of the room changed infinitely as the hours ticked by.
Near the center of the room lay a static pile of sand. During the exhibition many shells had been crushed, having been accidentally dropped or stepped on. Mickley would then carefully relocate these pieces to the pile of sand as the tiny fragments were difficult to pick up and move. In other words, "Wish Exchange” appeared as a room awash with waves of imagination around an island of sand as its core of energy.
From an outsiders’ perspective one could say that there was nothing to see in the gallery. Yet Mickley had intentionally extracted the unnecessary in order to let these minute objects of beauty speak on their own. By leaving us with the barest room we were invited to scope out our own imagination. The physical act of crouching down and sharing space in the gallery with other people also evoked childhood memories of playing with others.
If the installation orchestrated by Mickley was a macrocosm, then there were countless microcosms generated by the audience by the end of the day. He tended daily to the seashells, showing up routinely like the way ocean waves greet the shoreline every day, like a gardener of the macrocosm.
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In 1849, the French Realism painter Gustave Courbet (1819 - 1877) presented a painting entitled, "The Burial of Ornans”, an enormous work that challenged the genre of history painting. At the time “history painting” in France referred to large-scale paintings with idealized depictions of ancient gods, martyrs, heroes, and royalty. Due to its depiction of a peasant’s funeral in the rural town of Ornans, particularly on a physical scale that was reserved for the great and divine, “The Burial of Ornans” was condemned by its Parisian viewers as outrageous.
Later in 1866 Courbet would go on to create “The Origin of the World,” a realistic painting that prominently featured a woman’s genitals during a time when eroticism and obscenity were strictly expressed in romanticized or idealized forms. Though perhaps because the painting was not presented to the public until 1988, little knew then that Courbet had been creating avant-garde works that deviated from societal norms already a hundred years prior.
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Later in 1974, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) (the eventual owner of Courbet’s "The Origin of the World,”) classified the human psyche in his theory called the Schema RSI. RSI was an acronym for "le réel" (the Real), "le symbolique" (the Symbolic), and "l'imaginaire" (the Imaginary). The definition of “real” or the Real is often referred to when describing Realism after Courbet. Known also as one of the cornerstones of modern art history, Courbet’s Realism left its impact precisely because it had expanded the boundaries of expression in art.
About 200 years before Lacan at the end of the 18th century, German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) had theorized the idea of “beauty” and “sublime” as separate oppositional concepts. Kant defined beauty as "the beauty of diversity in a finite world", while the latter was "the awesomeness caused by infinite space and power”. By differentiating these two ideas of thought, Kant was shedding light on key critiques of aesthetics.
Lacan identified beauty as a function of the Imaginary and the sublime as a function of the Symbolic. His Imaginary referred to the relationship between two parties lost in imagination, in each other’s ideals—like the child and their mother smiling at each other. There is also the myth of Narcissus who falls in love with his own reflection in a pool of water, but in so reaching towards his reflection, towards his ideal, Narcissus drowns. His euphoria is shattered by the stark reality of death.
On the other hand Lacan refers to the Symbolic as the symbolism of language and the ways it is used to maintain and communicate social orders. It is the Symbolic paternal figure who imposes the law and reality to disrupt the imaginary relationship between mother and child. Here there is always tension between symbolizing: what we try to put into words to communicate and what cannot be symbolized: what words fail to communicate.
The third party of the father disrupting the fantasy of the mother may be a nuisance, yet he may prevent the child from losing themselves like Narcissus falling into the euphoria of imagination and ultimately to hell in death. Castrated from heavenly fantasy in exchange for words leaves one in pain—in purgatory that is life itself, neither heaven nor hell.
If euphoria over an image is "beauty," then the act of symbolizing is “sublime". But, no matter how much we try to imagine death it will never be death itself. No matter how much we try to symbolize death with words it will never be death itself. Death is death; there are no words to mince its eternal cold reality.
Jacques Lacan was a psychoanalyst that defined the Real as "the objectionable reality of a world that is empty and unfounded, and can never be touched or possessed by man.” Since then, the art world also embraced realism. If we follow the trajectory of art history in the 20th century, it would seem that the emphasis shifted from beauty to truth.
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When I think about Foster Mickley's work, I cannot help but think about the keyword of beauty. His works are brimming with beauty, a concept understated within postmodern art history. But within this I do not mean that his works reflect pre-modern art. Rather, let us borrow the language used within the famous “relational art” movement from the 90’s, to explain that after the evolution of creation in the last century from "beauty" to "sublime" and to “reality,” where it includes human interest and desire as the standard of consciousness for critiquing art, Foster’s work foreshadows that we are approaching "beauty" once again.
Mickley's works are beautiful gifts given to the audience. Here again, the keyword of beauty is perhaps worth re-examining by contemporary art. Is it convenient, sentimental, juvenile, or shallow to desire beauty? Will matter-of-fact cold reality lead to a richer future for humanity as was once thought? In this day and age when the fervent effort to be real has taken precedence over our naive sense of beauty and created further discord, doesn’t Mickley's work bridge the disconnect of each other’s reality by the imagination of beauty? Beauty is not how it was relegated in the past as mere "pleasure of the retina," but something more intuitive and fundamental. Beauty is something that permeates the mind and speaks eloquently to each life that the viewer has lived.
Foster Mickley exhibition « Wish Exchange »
2021.07.16-18 / 07.23-25 / 07.30-08.01
Open 12:00 - 18:00 at KIKA gallery
2021.08.28-29 / 09.03-05
Open 11:00 - 18:00 at Tsubomido
Curation : Isabelle Olivier / Philippe Bergonzo / Jun'ichiro ISHII
Cooperation : Jama Gallery / Tsubomido / KIKA gallery
Jun'ichiro ISHII
https://junichiroishii.com/
Ishii (b. 1975) is an artist who has traversed through the “art peripheries/interlocal sites" of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, producing and exhibiting his work in more than 20 countries since 2004. Since 2020, as a residencies coordinator, he has been organizing a network of artist residencies at ICA Kyoto (Institute of Contemporary Arts Kyoto) while also producing exhibitions for artists at KIKA gallery, as a program manager. Ishii is also a part-time lecturer at Kyoto Seika University.