Craig Drennen
Service à la françiase, silkscreen on mirrored chrome steel, 2009, (Left), Noisette, mixed mediums, 2009, (Right).
All images used courtesy of The New Museum.
Urs Fischer’s recent exhibition at the New Museum, called Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponte, was an especially large undertaking by the museum and marks the first instance in its history that one artist was given the entire exhibition space. This gesture from the museum, along with the presumed complicity from museum trustee and Fischer collector Dakis Joannou, raised eddies of complaint among art world insiders. Numerous reviews, including Roberta Smith’s in the New York Times, also noted the fact that exhibition curator Massimiliano Gioni did not try to create a unified exhibition spread over three floors, but instead stacked what appeared to be three separate project room shows on top of each other.
As viewers enter the second floor exhibition space to a room full of images on mirrored blocks, it becomes easy to say that what Bruce Nauman is to Rachel Whitread, Michelangelo Pistolleto is to Urs Fischer. The second floor of the New Museum is dominated by Fischer’sService à la françiase from 2009, a miniature city of silkscreened images on polished chrome blocks. And whereas Pistolleto may have exhibited this technique as early as 1971 as a way to include real viewer reflections with the photographic human image, for Fischer it’s all about depicting products.
The four sides and top of each chrome block have faithful enlargements of the four sides and top of one object. It’s likely the most expensive room of the exhibition, if the prohibition against strollers is any indication. Using products in the service of art is a recurring chord in the last 100 years of art. It’s a long time since 1917 when one readymade object at actual size could be a brazen critical gesture. The art world has seen objects lined up, stacked, chewed, burned, enlarged, reduced, left to rot, or simply softened– a familiar Oldenburg strategy that Fischer borrows elsewhere in the exhibition. However, it’s the glamorized display case– the vitrine–perfected by Beuys and popularized again more recently by the likes of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, that Fischer clearly prefers. The product images chosen for the reflective blocks include food, books, architectural models, and celebrity cutouts. They are simply things Fischer likes, or so he states in the published catalog interview. Yet it might be more interesting to look at the illustrated mirror blocks not as quotations of Pistoletto or architecture in miniature, but rather as a literal and eccentric transcription of the vitrine. Instead of placing his objects under transparent glass, the opaque sides of Fischer’s boxes hold images of the object “contained” from all sides. This move allows Fischer to distinguish himself from the likes of Hirst, while also allowing him greater ease of scale change. It also gives the mirrored blocks a clownish improbability, while still existing in literal space.
The fourth floor of the exhibition is dominated by deception. Five cast aluminum sculptures look, at first glance, as epic and expressive as a DeKooning bronze or even portions late Rodin. The aluminum is lumpy and organic, with oblique references to natural forms. Further examination reveals an enormous thumbprint on one of the pieces, and it soon becomes clear that a human hand simply squeezed a lump of soft material, with the resulting shape expanded in metal to heroic proportions. The set up and delivery of these works is clever for sure, and the implications run in both directions. One the one hand Fischer demonstrates that even the most mundane throwaway gesture can look grand when altered in material and scale. Or conversely, even the most heroically labored modernist form is, when reduced to its component parts, just a hand moving material around. The other genuine surprise on the fourth floor is one of an odd cluster of cast surrealist combinations. It’s called The Lock and in it there is an apparent subway seat with a support rail, a piece of cast polyurethane luggage protruding above the seat, and a cast cake that appears to float in midair. The trick occurs thanks to electromagnets and the piece is inscrutable even at close range.
Last Call, Lasceaux, wallpaper, 2009
It’s the third floor that provides the real payoff, however, with a piece called Last Call Lascaux. The ceiling of the entire floor was lowered several feet, and the walls covered with an actual-size photographic depiction of the walls themselves, printed on wallpaper. And while it’s true that Victor Burgin tested out this use of photography as a 1-to-1 index of an exhibition space in his 1967 piece PhotoPath, which was included in the seminal “When Attitude Becomes Form” exhibition at the ICA in London in 1969. And those with good memories might even go back as far as William Anastasi’s Untitled photoscreenprint on canvas from 1966, where the a photograph of the wall was cleanly transferred onto a somewhat smaller canvas hanging on the same wall. But once again, time and technological improvements allow Fischer to surpass the scale and scope of his artistic role models. Fischer had used this device before to great success at his 2008 exhibition/intervention at Shafrazi gallery. But this time the New Museum walls were empty when photographed. The result is both a pictorial and spatial success. The discolorations from the printing process are clearly visible on the wallpaper but it’s unclear whether they come from the actual lighting in the room or the ink on the paper. But it’s the door handles and wall fixtures that allow the parallax between reality and representation become apparent. Art of the last 20 years is peppered with mannered emptiness, but it’s rare to have reality and an actual size representation presented with such an intimate touch, at this scale. And if you think Fischer’s interest in vitrines was limited to the second floor, think again. The entire third floor, with its exoskeleton of wallpaper, is now an oversized vitrine– and museum goers now the objects inside it. If you think you’re not part of Fischer’s metaphor of containment, then look past the melting piano to Noisette, the flicking tongue that greets visitors through a small hole in the wall. It’s part adolescent bawdiness and part Jean Genet.
In Noisette, a motion detector activates a protruding prosthetic tongue from within a roughly cut hole in the drywall. It’s a naughty joke, of course, playing off the tradition of the glory hole. As work of art dealing with sexuality and the body, it is not at all courageous or groundbreaking the way Valie Export and Vito Acconci used to be or how Andrea Fraser still is. It’s simply a joke employing the technological sophistication of a Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum. Yes, the artist and audience are like anonymous lovers, sharing intimacy without seeing each other’s faces. And if you understand the additional juvenalia in the title, then the experience of the work drifts further south. Thankfully, Noisette’s crowd-pleasing gimmickry utilized only a couple inches diameter of otherwise austere wall space.
The truth is, Urs Fischer is genuinely talented, and his is a type of talent that makes itself increasingly known the more funds he has at his disposal. There are artists who can conjure remarkable work from the most modest resources, and Fischer is not one of them. He requires considerable material resources, a wide range of technologies, permissive venues, blank checks, and a reservoir of recent artistic role models from which to respond. The formal polish Fischer has given both his monumental and most ephemeral projects cloaks the fact that he is still a young artist who hasn’t shaken off his obvious dependency on sources. His “trees” of framed drawings—not shown in this exhibition—look a lot like Barry McGee. The whole he dug at Gavin Brown Enterprise in 2007 was a like Michael Heizer. His affinities to Robert Morris and arte povera artists have been well noted. But he may not, in fact, be the mannerist many reviewers have claimed, but simply young and so eager to become part of an artistic lineage that he makes his forefathers openly known.
Even within the genius-when-they’re-funded niche, Fischer has legitimate strengths. His greatest strength might be his ability to manipulate scale and material to profound effect. In this exhibition viewers can walk carefully through a mirrored miniature city plan on the second floor, as if everyone were suddenly a cautious giant. Then on the third floor the weight of space becomes palpable as viewers step into a tank of empty volume, becoming gradually aware of the massive illusion the wallpaper presents, while pianos seem to melt, and a human tongue sends earnest signals. But on the fourth floor viewers become small again, as they encounter gigantic wads of aluminum the way a soldier of Odysseus might have discovered the discards of a Cyclops. Upon reflection, Massimiliano Gioni’s curatorial decision to keep each floor a separate experience suddenly seems valuable, and perfectly tuned to Fischer’s sense of artistic timing.
It’s still too early to tell whether or not Urs Fischer is leaving his early experimental approach behind in favor of a market-friendly holding pattern to which many artists fall prey. One of the most unfortunate features of Fischer’s career is how often the term “bad boy” is used to describe him, and how he sometimes seems to adjust his output slightly to satisfy that expectation. Admittedly, the marketing of artistic persona is now part of the art world’s operating system, but a quick look at Fischer and his resume suggests that he is not a bad boy at all. After finishing art school with a concentration in photography at Schule fĂĽr Gestaltung in ZĂĽrich, and completing the highly competitive residency program at De Atelier in Amsterdam, Fischer has embarked a career of gallery and museum shows beginning in his early 20’s. He has gotten institutions to agree to his ideas, but nothing he’s done appears to have been done without clear permission and an “…umbilical cord of gold” to quote Clement Greenberg. He has not been a “bad” boy artist. In fact, he appears to have been a very, very good boy, one who answers mail and meets deadlines. The bad boy charisma— tattoos, spiked hair, and accessory pets– visible in Fischer’s personal appearance is comically similar to that adopted by hipster hosts on the Food Network or Travel Channel. (It’s not a stretch to consider Urs Fisher’s hip exterior and insider savvy as the art world’s version of Guy Fieri.) In other words, Fischer is “bad” only within the most carefully constrained and orchestrated parameters, and never for a second in any way that might derail his career.
Another question that hovers in the air regards the mission statement of the New Museum itself. As I walked out of the museum on a brisk winter day after visiting Fischer’s exhibition, I asked myself if it was truly the same museum where I saw the Bad Girls show? Is it the same museum where I sat in a faux waiting room looking at hardcore pornography masquerading asHighlights magazine until it was time for me to go say hello (and unfortunately, goodbye) to Bob Flanagan? Can this be the same institution a young Andrea Zittel raised chickens in the storefront window, or where Linda Montano told me my fortune? The answer is no. Clearly the museum staff and trustees want to balance the riskier shows like Unmonumental and Younger Than Jesus with monograph-worthy fair from artists with a proven collector base, like Elizabeth Peyton’s exhibition from a year ago and Fischer’s show today. This is not the end of the world, but it does indicate that the New Museum is an institution is much like the physical structure of its new building—a bit off-kilter but basically like all the others.
Craig Drennen is an artist working in Atlanta, GA.