Beautiful Mourning – Miyako Ishiuchi “Mother’s”

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.