Miyako Ishiuchi "Mother's"
at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
in the Nakameguro area
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The exhibition is a poem, an ode: starting with a tiny photograph of the simple woman next to a truck, in what appears to be postwar Japan, Ishiuchi builds a long poetic stanza. In lieu of words, large photographs of her late mother’s belongings: old lace, old silk, chemises and girdles, shoes, worn-out mittens. A wig, hair on a brush.
The whole exercise may be tedious, perhaps, without the punctuation — gorgeous prints of the old woman’s skin. Hand, foot, breast; these alone would make quite a powerful exhibition. But Ishiuchi wants to go further, infusing intimate objects with the personality, the soul of their owner. Yet, as much as I try, I cannot be convinced by the personification of these “portraits” of silk and lace.
You have to be a woman to understand
, my friend tells me. How the feminine rituals and their symbols, the bra, the perfume and the lipstick, can fascinate and alienate the little girl who won’t get to know and experience all these firsthand for another decade.
I don’t quite get it — maybe I am just on the wrong end of the Oedipus Complex. But even the artist seems to have her doubts, commenting on her works as they were displayed in the beautiful stage of the Venice Biennale: Freed from the reality of having been my mother’s personal effects, the items in the photographs became mere objects and I saw the simple, clear fact in the way that all waste had been whittled away, allowing them to stand on their own.
Is Ishiuchi genuinely naive about her work, unaware that she might be the only one projecting the soul of her late mother into the things she once wore or owned, hoping that the viewers will look upon this series arbitrarily with their own thoughts
? Or is she, perhaps, just too absorbed in the mourning process, obsessively searching the true person her mother was, beyond the parent — a woman?
Maybe what we are witnessing in Mother’s isn’t so much a portrait of Ishiuchi’s mother, but that of Miyako herself, through her obsession, through her mourning process. As Carl Jung wrote, Unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analysing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life
.
Such a self-discovering process through works of art is rather common, and never bothers me when the work manages to stand on its own. Mother’s more than achieves that, with its poetry, with its invitation to look at our parents as woman and man, beyond the symbol.
karl
2006-10-17
We discussed a bit about it already, but that will not give much insight to the readers of this post. But the sentence “You have to be a woman to understand” from your female friend is a confirmation of what Elena Gianini Belotti in her book “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”
In Belotti’s framework, the girls and their behaviours are manufactured by the social environment, schools, family and friends. We basically educate women to be future mother, we educate them to be women as into conforming to a predefined role. So, no you do not have to be a woman to understand, but you are certainly more intoxicated if you are a woman and then to comply to this model. Women have been programmed to be like that, they are not born to be like that.
It’s exactly the same for predetermined roles of boys.
Having fascination for your mother, for someone close from your family, a person might not seem reasonable maybe it’s not at all. Objects to have a soul by their own, memories and the work of the photographer give them the soul by manufacturing a possible vision of the person. Then as soon as it is displayed, people will certainly built their own, with their own social framework more or less reacting to cliches and stereotypes.