Urs Fischer

I first encountered the work of Urs Fischer at the New Museum- in person that is.  I had seen his work in magazines and online and there were advertisements for the New Museum show all over the subway showing a sculpture of a very realistic looking tongue poking through a plaster wall.  Bits of plaster lay on the tongue and the way in which the tongue was 'frozen' in movement was also realistic as if the photograph had captured a moment in time of a tongue moving through a piece of drywall.  The image above even has some marks on the plaster wall similar to that made by pencil accidentally scraping the wall.  Nice.  I was attracted to the visceral reaction of seeing this as an image.  I wanted to see it in person.

The show had many of these boxes with large crisp images on all sides of ordinary objects and pop references.  I wasn't attracted to these and there were many.  Here is an image of some of these boxes.  Their flatness was annoying to me, maybe...or maybe it is their size.  As I walked around them, they didn't make me take the imagery in a different light even if that doughnut is the same size as the phone booth. 

I did like the trompe l'oel piece in this show in which every square inch of the gallery was photographed and reprinted as a wallpaper that covers the very same walls and ceiling.  The absurdity of that is wonderful to me.  Obviously this is something that would be a useless photograph.

I've never seen Bread House (2004).  I'd like to see one of the bread houses (I think there is more than one).  From the Whitney site:

                                "Bread House (2004) is a life-size cabin built from loaves of sourdough bread, 

                                expandable foam, and wood. The quaint alpine structure is set on an arrangement 

                                of Oriental carpets and inhabited by four young parakeets that haven’t yet learned 

                                to fly. Over time the house decays, shedding crumbs on the floor and emitting a 

                                distinct, pervasive odor. As with all of Fischer’s works, the meaning lies within the very 

                                substances and processes of its making, whereby ideas become material and materials 

                                take on a life of their own."

I'm not sure how anyone can dislike the above piece... I really wish I'd seen it.  I'd like to stand in that pit of dirt within a white walled clean space.  Imagine walking in the gallery door to find this!!  Of course, major koodos goes to Gavin Brown gallery for allowing such a thing to happen to their gallery floor...  Here is a quote about this piece from the New Museum website:

                                     "In 2007, in a now-legendary exhibition, he excavated the floor of his New York 

                                     gallery, digging a crater within the exhibition space. Throughout his work, with 

                                     ambitious gestures and irreverent panache, Fischer explores the secret 

                                     mechanisms of perception, combining a Pop immediacy with a neo-Baroque 

                                     taste for the absurd."

The description, "Pop immediacy with a neo-Baroque taste for the absurd" hits the nail on the head.  I wouldn't have been able to necessarily put that together but in reading it - I completely agree and now appreciate Urs Fischer's work through that lens.

Separately, in an Interview magazine interview - I like what Fischer says about the artist and working.  It makes me think of that Tom Sachs show at Sperone Westwater I just saw:

                                   "If you don't enjoy making work, then it's bad. It's rough. Artwork is brutal for so 

                                   many people. They let it happen to them, but it's brutal. I like the idea of an artist 

                                   as somebody who works. A lot of the artists I like share this understanding. Like 

                                   Bruce Nauman. He always seems to have an understanding of what he does. 

                                   He does work."

Body pieces:  In re-looking at images of Fischer's work, I noticed several that had a direct sense of the body.  I love the way that the photographs are transformed with the object - the objects are in direct relation to the body - a banana jutting out like a huge errant nose and a screw embracing the side of a tuxedo-ed woman.  The banana and the screw make the photos of the human a hybrid between the object and the image of the person...and althought it is about the photograph, the image - they are all images of people and the objects placed on the photos interact with the body.  The melting bodies are also transformed - or transforming during the period of an exhibition - and that is also lovely.