Mika'Ela Fisher adds an entirely new aspect to the Paris School's “Art Plasticienne”, the sculptural clothing. In its diversity, the components bespoke clothing and model or tailor's dummy merge into a total work of art and thus into an extraordinary form of body art. It's less about the type of presentation; Mika'Ela Fisher is too complex and pan-disciplinary for that between tailoring, photo modeling, acting, filming and chanson. Rather, Fisher is engaged with the fact that the bespoke dress becomes an essential sculpture. Working on the human body, taking measurements, processing the materials becomes the work of the sculptor, who releases the sculpture from the textiles and their cuts and gives it its own physicality.
It's hard to understand, but it's still the case that clothing is seen as a necessity, fashion design or at most haute couture, i.e. a luxury product, but rarely as a work of art, certainly not as a sculpture. Mika'Ela Fisher makes it clear that the production of made-to-measure clothing can be a manual act, but it can also be an artistic act, since it represents nothing other than sculpture: threedimensional images are created from solid materials.
It is characteristic of Mika'Ela Fisher as a maître tailleur (master tailor) to manufacture women's clothing using a manual technique and processing that is otherwise used for men's clothing. In doing so, she elevates work above anything sexual and yet creates new tensions between male and female. Fisher deliberately goes beyond the usual, daring to take her own new paths. Critical comments like "Impossible! You can't wear something like that!” provoke the artist to continue on the chosen path.
Mika'Ela Fisher learned the handcraft “from scratch” with Max Dietl in Munich. Playing with the techniques she had learned, developing them further and putting them together again, unintentionally in the experimental sense, open-ended, is particularly important to her. It is the basis for her that enables her to go further, to go beyond what she had learned and to break new grounds.
Mika' Ela Fisher's is always the sculpture's own bespoke model, but also allows the art connoisseur to slip into the role of the model and be their own sculpture. Your own forms become an art object.
In her work, Fisher remains minimalist, in a clear language of form, connected to the French "Art Plasticienne". She expresses this in a timeless style of textiles, but also in other media, such as installations in which the human body is part of the overall work of art that also touches on the field of performance. Mika'Ela Fischer shows the interplay of "identity - role - physicality"; just as expressively in her films, in the composition of photographs in which the artist herself appears as a model, optionally with the aforementioned tailor's dummies and even in improvised chansons. The body with its forms of expression such as the voice, intonation, speed and marble-like persistence in positions - the accurately drawn folds, which in reality is living material - all this becomes a medium for transporting art, turning people and the situation into a petrified sculpture, and therefore, at the same time, in an essential art object. As in classic body art, Fisher turns her own body and the body of the art connoisseur into medium and object at the same time. Mika'Ela Fisher's body art is not shocking at any price. Fisher tends to confuse by overturning and rearranging classic identities and roles such as between man and woman. She works on the body, with the body, through the body in the interaction of the two opposing aesthetic principles: the bright, Apollonian-sublime and the cruel Dyonisian-uninhibited. Friedrich Nietzsche believed that the two are united only in the Attic Tragedy. The concept and implementation of Mika Ela Fisher's Art Plasticienne are part of this classic tradition.
The artist's work undoubtedly belongs to conceptual art in the true sense, as Henry Flint defined it in the 1960s; her improvisations stand for this, but even more so her avant-garde self-image and the constant striving to try out new things, to subordinate technology and implementation to the idea, but at the same time to increase the technique and implementation in ability. For Fisher, the meaning of the work of art has the same value as the implementation. Coming from a craft background, Fisher sees her art as a craft that she has continued to develop over decades. She lets her work to mature and she continues to develop. This also includes the careful selection of the fabrics, some of which are no longer available on the market, or the careful design of the inner workings of the clothing that gives the overall appearance support, the yarns used and the tools used. "Back to skill" one could see the artist's understanding of the "savoir faire" with which Fisher also clearly rebels against the superficiality and indifference of our global "hysterically cool and technology-worshipping" society.
Written by Thomas Emmerling, Art Curator