THE WORKER

CHRIS PARKINSON

There’s a deep sense of accumulation that underpins the work of Michael Fikaris.  

For more than a decade, he has insisted on “taking the line for a walk.”

This exhibition shows us how his wander lustful lines have led to a discipline void of boundaries, an accumulation of the pitter patter of the multitude.

In his Worker, a faceless, nameless, raceless, ageless, androgynous metaphor of humanity, we sense how the air hangs around the character as we sense their materiality, understanding the worker’s representation in relationship to what is going on beyond the frame as much as we understand its relationships tumbling from the frame.

As Michael draws from the multitude, he casts that competency back towards us, sign posting how the avant-garde, the comic, the benevolent, the public, the network, the mischievous, the honest and the abstract hold space together in both the picture plane and the plane of human existence.

Norman Mailer wrote of graffiti as the “mud-caked mouth of a hundred painterly streams [where] form might talk across the air to form.” This is both a practical and historically useful framework to begin our understanding of Fikaris. It is in this telepathy that Fikaris flourishes, holding court just as he might hold hands; essentially, collectively and simply.

Indonesian comic book artist punk Athonk Sapto Raharjo’s contribution to the 100 artistic interpretations of The Worker is demonstrative of the accumulation and alchemy that is at the heart of Fikaris’s practice. It comes as no surprise to hear Athonk describe Michael as a “visionary artist,” nurturing a connection across time, geography, disciplines and sub-cultures. It is this ethic that underpins The Worker, and it is this energy you feel vaulting from the 100 artists drawing inspiration from the amorphous, networked being.

In his book unravelling the fundamental relationship between lines and life, the British anthropologist, Tim Ingold, lures us towards understanding how we follow the lines of force and tension that are already present in the world, weaving and unweaving the fabric of our existence through movement and momentum.

“The principle of the line,” suggests Ingold, “allows us to bring the social back to life. In the life of lines, parts are not components; they are movements… Nothing can hold on unless it puts out a line, and unless that line can tangle with others. Every living being is a line or, better, a bundle of lines.”

Through Fikaris, it’s not just where the ends meet, but where lines overlap; where the meshwork inherent in the social and the creative sculpts the transmission of knowledge between the conceptual and the real.

To follow Fikaris’s artistic line is to appreciate the individual parts - the ‘bundle of lines’ - that weave their way towards and away from The Worker, and how they balance knotting, un-ravelling, connectedness and new directions.

The inherent membrane of unity is here to see, coiling and colliding, lines of flight moored, then unmoored, from subject matter, materials, individuality and collectivity. The Worker’s simplicity comes from the complexity of an intricate meshwork of lines, sometimes concealed, at other times revealed, sometimes shouting, sometimes retreating.

The Worker is the node through this network of the social, conceptual and interdisciplinary and, much like ourselves, The Worker is a network of rhythm, integrating the outside with the inside and vice-versa, balancing the cacophony of one way of being with the silence of the other.

And with this balance between the inside and the outside, The Worker tumbles towards a question of the centre and the periphery, both as subject and as representation, an amalgam of lines and lives located beyond binaries, resting resplendently in the interstitial and the inherently social.

Identifying the importance of the social in Fikaris’s practice and, thereby, recognising the inherent gregariousness of The Worker, is about presence. To follow this sense of presence in hand clasped unity with the centre and the periphery is to recognise the integration of Henri Lefebvre’s work into that of Fikaris’s, where “presence situates itself in the poetic: value, creation, situation in the world and not only in the relations of economic exchange.”[1]

From alchemy to revelry, these words about the artist Michael Fikaris breathe from the inspiration of those that have been inspired by him, my reading of their imaginative interpretations of this enigmatic form assisting me to find my own words to exchange thought.

Revelry. Intent. Space. Play. Business. Discipline. Love. Gathering. Ready-made. Abstracted. Alchemist Across The World. Refractions. Totemic. Studious. Outlined. Productive. Venerated. Mimesis. Contemplative. Bold. Transgressive. A Knight In Shining Armour. Dancing. Natural. Observed. Biblical. Back To The Future. Pedagogical. Constructivist. Lumbung (a collectively governed rice barn) Sculpted. Comical. Adventurous. Between Heaven And Hell. Larger Than Life. Familial. Repeating. Carnivalesque. Avant-Garde. Grecian Urn. Immortality. An Emoji. Skeletal. Meta. Auto-Biographical. Shamanic. Political. Excavator. Domesticated. Affirming. Borrowed. Nurturing. Amorphous. Prophetic. Defiant. Poetic. Allegorical. Bucolic. Benevolent. Shape-Shifting. Fluid.

Universal? Possibly.
Of the time? Absolutely.
Hey, Michael, is this where ends meet?

[1] Lefebvre, 47.