If someone wears a dress with full of stains and mud will you try to find beauty in that dress? If a painting is displayed on a piece of shit will it be admirable? When Anselm Kiefer visited India, he took a small morning walk along one of the beaches. And he confronted a lot of people were excreting beside the beach. Anselm wrote in a book that he found myriads of hues and forms in those people’s excretions and that gave him a special pleasure.

Mibin hails from Kerala who completed MFA in painting from Kala-Bhavana, Santiniketan in 2018. His last semester painting display was somewhat strange. He chose a weird place to display his paintings. It was quite like treasure hunting game. Apparently, the artist was challenging the viewers to find out his art works from the heaps of dumped materials; some were laying on the floor, some were hidden behind the objects and some were camouflaged enough to cheat.  Hence the choice of display place became a visual language which is powerful enough to communicate from the multiple angles to the spectators. Here the paintings and the place of display sank together for an unpredictable drama.

The artist’s deliberate choice of an unhygienic place for the display arose umpteen numbers of questions. Was that a protest against anything? It might be possible.

Purity or holiness is a highly celebrated concept of every society. Apart from the physical realms, the concept of purity has certain abstract connotations. The Purity of mind and the purity of the people have several moral shades of systems and institutions. As Indian social system has been controlled by the caste system, the people from the lower castes are considered as polluted still. The lower castes people are assigned to do the unhygienic works which the elite caste people do not do; working as manual scavengers, firing the dead bodies, manhole cleaners, sweepers, farmers and so on. The elitism has been observed by being hygienic in all the sense- physically and mentally. Thus the cleanliness became the monopoly of the elite caste.  A verse from the Upanishads, a sacred Hindu text, reads: “Those whose conduct on earth has given pleasure can hope to enter a pleasant womb, that its, the womb of a Brahmin or a woman of princely class. But those whose conduct on earth has been foul can expect to enter a foul and stinking womb of a bitch, a pig or an outcast.” The polluted castes were totally denied from the elite worship places and they cannot touch or talk directly to the upper castes people. Caste System is that in the first Chapter of Manu Smriti, there is mention of origin of 4 Varnas. This is mentioning which castes belong to Brahmins, which to Kshatriyas, which to Vaishyas and which to Shudras. Shudras are the polluted varna and believed to take birth only to serve the upper castes people.

Anything dealing with death, excrement, blood or dirt is regarded as impure. All bodily fluids are regarded as pollutants: urine, excrement, sweat, spit, blood, even tears. They feet are regarded as impure because they touch ground. Devout Hindus not only avoid meat because it is associated with blood and death but also avoid potatoes, carrots, onions and ginger they are grow in the dirt. Menstruating women are denied to enter in the temples and even in the certain parts of their own home. 

When the concept of purity and pollution link with art, it has created a lot of chaos in the society. Piss Christ is a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in urine (The crucifix was not “in a jar of urine,” as it has often been described, but in a large Plexiglas tank.) by Andres Serrano. Christian protesters attacked the work have risen to the artist’s bait and misunderstood his sincerity. It’s called Piss Christ and is said to be made using the artist’s own urine. It is far more polemical than, say, a Mapplethorpe photograph of sadomasochist rites where the artist portrays what he found beautiful and causes offence almost accidentally. Serrano did not innovate in the purely artistic dimension in his work. He specializes in humors, liquids, secretions, and the like, and Piss Christ follows this original line. But in it he went beyond formality and technique to presents us with something that challenges some of the most deeply rooted beliefs of the Western community. The aesthetic aspect of the urine has shattered by the dominated concepts of purity in the contradictory to blood. Christianity celebrates the bloodshed a lot. They pray before the bleeding Christ and have wine and bread as the blood and body.

Fountain is one of Duchamp’s most famous works and is widely seen as an icon of twentieth-century art. This work has changed the aesthetic aspects of the art in the world. By placing a urinal in a well furnished gallery hall created a lot of excitement and anger in the minds of the spectators. Some of them called it as a great mockery to the art. But it was above all. The contemporary British artist Tracey Emin’s My Bed was one of the installations that questioned the concepts of aesthetics. The Bed turned one of her life’s great low points, a bedbound drinking spree, into a theatrical arrangement worthy of Jacobean tragedy: a violent mess of sex and death. Amid the yellowing sheets there are condoms, a tampon, a pregnancy test, discarded knickers and a lot of vodka bottles. It’s also very kitchen sink. That blue slab of carpet speaks of lonely rented rooms. Historically, beds have largely had a lot of significant roles in the history of art; all those rumpled sheets on which nude women have flirtatiously turned their backs. Emin tried to break the entire romantic and poetical concepts regarding a bed.

Beauty may have some rational properties, such as “order, symmetry, and proportion,” but it is really an experience not explained by reason alone. It is understood through intuition and experienced with human feeling and emotion. An aesthetic experience could include a mixture of feeling, such as pleasure, rage, grief, suffering, and joy. Immanuel Kant interpreted aesthetics as a field giving priority to form over function. Beauty, he said, was independent of any particular figure with which it was attached. Aesthetics is closely related to the concept of aesthetic experience. Baumgarten who coined the term aesthetics, claimed that humans experience the world in two fundamentally ways—logically and aesthetically. Logically—that is a thorn, it will hurt if it pricks me. Aesthetically – we are enjoying a sunset, looking at seashells, enjoying a work of art. These things are beautiful because you are looking at them aesthetically.

What we call art, or more properly fine art, is therefore, according to the 18th and 19th century tradition of the aesthetic, those objects made by humans to be enjoyed aesthetically. So, Paleolithic European cave paintings, Native American wood carvings are not really art according to some because they were made by people before the emergence of aesthetic experience.

Mibin’s paintings and art works also awfully strange as his place of display. His satirical narration with odd forms would evoke certain mockery towards the viewers.  The masked figures reminding clowns, some figures are floating and flying, the landscapes with pond, monumental figures in clownish dress and devouring crocodiles and so on dominate his paintings. It is clear that the art works never compromise the aesthetical concepts of convention but move on by breaking it. He creates his own fantasy world with theatrical situations. “Sometimes the hallucination of people breaks the theory of gravity , size of bodies , and the sense of visuals and colours , in this stage human breaks all kinds of metaphysical theories in the world”- the artist says.

As a visual artist Mibin picks up the forms from the nature that general public may treat in a distance or see with a bit of fear. The crocodile might be one of the hated beings in the earth. While depicting crocodiles, the artist may try to express the unpleasant things regarding the society that he might have experienced. May be he is saying about a threat. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living Masked is one of the most discussed works of Damien Hirst. His work comprises of a 14-foot tiger shark suspended and preserved in formaldehyde, in a vitrine. This huge installation is enough to make excitement or fear in the viewers as shark is a fearsome creature.

He says- “For me and my works do not produce any kinds of message to the society, my works don’t have any kinds of burden to reform the people. I’m trying to depict what is my current hallucination, fantasy or thought, in other words. I’m just mentioning my present mind through the art”.

Somehow Mibin tries to explore another side of visual aesthetics- ‘marginalized aesthetics’ which is excluded from the established visual market.