Micah Schippa-Wildfong at MICKEY, Chicago

Artist: Micah Schippa-Wildfong

Exhibition title: Civilization of Happiness

Venue: MICKEY, Chicago, US

Date: September 13 – November 10, 2024

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and MICKEY, Chicago

MICKEY is pleased to present Civilization of Happiness, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Micah Schippa-Wildfong.

CIVILIZATION OF HAPPINESS

3rd September, 1775, the surgeon John Hunter dissects an electric eel. He will discover the electrophysiology of the knifefish, how it generates its electric field and how it uses this field to sense its surroundings and kill its prey. Also in 1775, the American physician and politician Hugh Williamson, who had studied with Hunter, presented a paper “Experiments and observations on the Gymnotus Electricus, or electric eel” at the Royal Society. He reported a series of experiments, such as “7. In order to discover whether the eel killed those fish by an emission of the same [electrical] fluid with which he affected my hand when I had touched him, I put my hand into the water, at some distance from the eel; another knife-fish was thrown into the water; the eel swam up to it … [and] gave it a shock, by which it instantly turned up its belly, and continued motionless; at that very instant I felt such a sensation in the joints of my fingers as in experiment 4.” Their research would eventually be used to develop the electric battery.

On the first Sunday of 1969 Robert Barry went to Central Park with four capsules of radioactive material in his pocket. He had ordered them from a scientific supply catalog, choosing an isotope of his namesake, barium-133, the only one of twenty-two known isotopes of the element that does not dangerously decay within seconds or minutes. He walked to the Great Lawn behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, in two locations there, inconspicuously buried the capsules. He then snapped a quick photograph at each of the sites, leaving behind what he called 0.5 Microcurie Radiation Installation[1].

“Might not the dancers be real puppets, moved by strings, or better still, self propelled by means of a precise mechanism, almost free of human intervention, at most directed by remote control?” In an empty music hall a man begins to conduct an orchestra for rehearsal. Down the hill slightly, in another part of the city,² a wedding assembles. The bride is solemn despite her family gathering around her. Tears wash over the lifeless statue of her body. Unaffiliated birds fly above the storehouse of her wedding. It is tradition that she will receive a white ceramic bell filled with rice and flour, which the groom’s mother will later destroy in front of her. The train engine, racing as the bride’s heart, pulls into the station. It is to deliver people and musical supplies. The dead horses whose hair was used to make the bows beneath which the strings have now broken, delaying the rehearsal, all trembling, and the army, now amassing around the city, administered, also from a great distance, begin their evening drills. And further on there is a hunting party. Foxes running in the snow generate an electric field. Dancers, over-articulating their limbs, generate an electric field. We have kissed beneath these paintings. Not far off, yet deep at sea, there is the factory vessel, to which the bride writes her letters. She has secretly fallen in love with the ship. Thousands of herring a day it will harvest, and be brought back to the mainland, distributed into the hungering mouths of Europe. The migratory patterns of the herring are said to have shaped the settlement, and therefore the cultures, of the continent. Herring are spotted when their shoals send up a mass of shimmer beneath the water, like reflective glass beneath the waves. The crew of these deep-sea vessels must create their own culture or risk psychosis, since they remain at sea for years at a time. A sailor must dance alone in his white metal room. Each morning the captain must assemble and play his flute to purify the air. Hence, movement is precisely determined by the information from the environment, and by the complicated interplay of material interdependencies. A painting, hung above the captain’s bed, Max Ernst’s School of Herring Passing Beneath a Brown Moon, tilts slightly in the rocking. It is said, after the great migrations, many stateless peasants were forced to Romanize their names.

Micah Schippa-Wildfong

[1] Peter Eleey, “Thursday,” in The Quick and the Dead, exh. cat. (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2009), 31.
[2] Oskar Schlemmer