http://www.umoncton.ca/umcm-ga/lesmikeys
The Mikeys, then and now
In the spring of 1978, a few months before his monumental work The Americans celebrated its 20th anniversary of publication, Switzerland-born American photographer Robert Frank travelled to Acadia, and to the halls of Université de Moncton’s Visual Arts Department. He was flanked by his friend Francis Coutellier, professor of painting and screen printing, who had invited him to present to the students select pieces of his filmography, including Pull My Daisy and Cocksucker Blues. Their afternoon visit through the department’s spaces led them to the studios, one of them being occupied by students and future Acadian artists Jacques Arseneault and Paul Édouard Bourque. When Robert Frank spotted a pile of screen prints daubed with paint, he turned to Bourque, their creator, and said: “I like your paintings, they’re like the weather, always changing.” No one knew it at the time but these works were the first of a long series that would later become known as the Mikeys.
Initially an extracurricular project, the series began in early spring 1977, while the artist was a third-year student. Searching for a way to counter the multiplicity of images through the ritual act of painting, Bourque had pored through magazines to find an image that could be easily enlarged and transferred onto a silk-screen. Struck by the paradox of a child playing the role of a violence-prone adult, he was drawn to a publicity shot for the musical Bugsy Malone (1976), featuring a young Scott Baio in mafioso attire. Over the next few days he printed an initial run of a hundred or so screen prints on a variety of supports, some of which became the first works of the series, and were among those viewed by Frank a year later. Despite their extracurricular status, these works were first shown in the 1978 graduating student exhibition among Bourque’s other student projects.
The series was without an official name for a few years, being first dubbed by the artist’s entourage as the “character with the hat”. Bourque only chose its definitive appellation in 1980, following the suggestion of Patrick Condon Laurette, then assistant curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. At the time, Laurette was on the lookout for artists to show in the first major retrospective exhibition of Acadian artists, Acadia Nova, and the “character with the hat” was to take part. The name Mikey was adopted from a comic strip by French cartoonist Mœbius in which an alien intellectual called Mikey (spelled Miké in the French version) is forced to work as a slave when he would rather read books. In this mutant character, Bourque perceived a pertinent analogy to himself as the boss and the Mikeys as his submissive workers, whose mutated surface concealed a complex but intelligible universe. Thus, the series as we know it today was immortalized.
Following Acadia Nova, the series remained in production until early 1984, when a new series, the Cowgirls, interrupted it abruptly. One can spot the exact moment the transition occurred, in the Mikeys sporting the same blue screen print that served as basis for the Cowgirls. Over the next thirty years, Bourque sporadically addressed the series, producing new Mikeys on demand or as part of other projects. Despite its presence in exhibitions throughout the 1980s and being featured in magazines such as Arts Atlantic in 1981 and Vie des Arts in 1984, the series has gained recognition mainly through word of mouth, since most of the works either have never been shown publicly or are part of private collections. Venerated by the young artists who rediscovered it in the 1990s, the series has now become one of the most recognizable in the history of Acadian art. Indeed, when Yvon Gallant painted the artist’s portrait in 1981, he chose to represent him painting a Mikey. A reproduction of a Mikey was muse to writer Gérald Leblanc, inspiring his poem rouge. The Mikeys were even subject to counterfeiting, in 1978, when a series of prints now known as the Fake Mikeys were produced by Denis Richard with the offhand consent of the artist. Outside the bounds of convention, the Mikeys were born and live on.
This retrospective entitled The Mikeys of Paul Édouard Bourque brings together for the first time over sixty Mikeys created by the artist during his 35-year plus career, some of which have never been placed on exhibit. Included are selected variations from the series’ different eras: original screen prints from the 1970s, Cowgirlinterventions from the 1980s, xerographs from the 1990s (see works 50 - 52), as well as more recent compositions. Selected archival documents are also featured in the show: several photographs, one “virgin” screen print from 1977, examples of Denis Richard’s Fake Mikeys, and a slide show illustrating Mikeys that have been lost or destroyed. The exhibition is complemented by critical texts from Mario Doucette and Herménégilde Chiasson included in the publication which was produced with the support of artsnb and Université de Moncton’s Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen.
I wish to express my gratitude to the many art lovers who have generously lent works from their collections, as well as everyone who has contributed to the development and realization of this project. Thank you!
Rémi Belliveau, artist and curator
wonderful!
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