SOME OTHER SPRING: Urs Fischer Part 2
By Horace Brockington
Viewers soon discover the drawings possess a perverse humor. Fischer wants the drawing to be both serious and funny. For Fischer immediacy and directness come before dexterity and design.
Reflecting on his rather open approach to his work, the artists has stated: "You always have to find your way through the work itself .In the end all that counts is whether the art works takes on a life of its own. I try to create something, which is itself9
Fischer has stated that he is not essentially interest in design and technique but is more interested putting together the work with his own hands which provides him the option to stop when he wants. As Mirjam Varadinis notes "Fischer is truly a "maker". He does not rely on technology and design, immediacy and directness are much more important to him. As a result the making of the work tends to be spontaneous and unpredictable, resulting from the process of a dialogue between himself and his materials."10
Fischer has stated:
"As soon as I start to work with materials, something goes wrong. ?My work never ends up looking the way I had intended" 11
Fischer always begins s by making drawings, working out ideas on paper and then translating them into large-format paintings and sculptures. However the drawings never really function as direct sources for the final work, they merely become points of entry to the final works. His London Bridge studio has been described as wallpapered with drawings as notes. Often these drawings become part of his installations, as in the case of the collage felt ?tip sketches placed o a transparent plastic combined with a drawing of a tree with many branches in the work Eternal Soup of the Day, 2003. The entire assemblage resembles a bulletin board. The tree was intended to stand for a system that is equal on both sides. Fischer has stated "The problem with systems is that you only get to see part of them. You think that the roots are there to feed the tree, but maybe the leaves are there to keep the roots intact. Artists see themselves as individuals rooted in a culture, but they are also the ones who feed that culture?"7
Reflecting on his drawings installations Fischer has stated that to frame the drawing is uninteresting. The framing process for the artist makes the works far more important than they are intended. He has stated that his us eof the drawings for large collages pushed the drawings to a complexity that he enjoys.
These drawings become extensions of Urs Fischer?s lifestyle and studio activities, a place where Fischer spends a great deal of time. Urs Fischer studios are temporary working spaces, rented for a limited period, where material is produced with a view to specific exhibition projects. The artist has described his working environments, not as a place to make art, but as the site for their genesis. It in the his various studio environments that the basis for his sculptural environment find their fruition, often pulling together exhibitions from studio elements in situ days before the opening. Thus, the studio becomes a place to think, read drink, socialize, but rarely to fabricate work. Actual production is almost done in situ. By this approach the exhibition space replaces the studio as the site for art making. Fischer?s approach aligns him with of artistic tradition of the artist?s studio as a subject of art. However, Jorg Heiser notes that Fischer does not simply reduce the studio to a temple of wellness, for Fischer, the compulsion is to document the studio or the artist?s self.8
Fischer has stated that it is the challenge of bringing about something that makes being an artist fun, both the potentials and limitations.
"The work I make lies between (extreme ugliness and extreme beauty), so that the viewer has to engage more keenly. The viewer has to engage the area between the two ? The area between the extremes is full of diet, feel good about yourself, then trash the whole thing the next day, constantly swinging from one extreme to another?."12
Despite their radicality Urs Fischer?s installations are often grounded in his engagement with art-historical genres, landscape, portraiture, and still lives. Fischer never get caught up in the issues of strict categories of history of art since his work never precisely specifically reiterate rather they offer him a point of entry for his own investigations and act as the means of transgressing and transcending traditional boundaries. The sculptural aspects of his many of work, Fischer has grounded his work primarily in a dialogue with the still life (nature morte). Fischer sculptural "vignettes" of dead nature are apparent in his use of real fruits and vegetables are apparent in works ranging from an arrangement of bananas, pears, and apples whose decay is arrested by a coating of silicone (The Human Layer, 1999) to a direct coupling of half a pear and apple, screwed together and simply hung from a nylon cord (Untitled, 2000) From his earliest works, Fischer has built his practice this dialogue with still life or more specifically, French nature morte. The sculptural vignettes or "dead nature" are often literally enacted through Fischer?s recurring use of real fruits and vegetables, but equally in the arrangement of furniture that recall the backdrops of such genre paintings. Fischer has freed the still life from a long history of academic painting giving the genre a new vitality in three- dimensional form. These works can be viewed as Fischer?s attempt to transform the bourgeois genre into a metaphorical vehicle for the exploration of human condition.
Gingeras, has stated "These pieces most explicitly illustrate Fischer?s interest in transforming that bourgeois genre into a metaphorical vehicle for the exploration of base human condition: alimentary desire?These decaying fruits stand in for Fischer?s own worldview, one that oscillates between self- indulgent passivity and pragmatic action. The humble poetry of his titles—Routine: Automatic Melancholy; The Trick is to Keep Breathing Eternal Soup of the Day?confirms Fischer?s grounding in the most banal aspects of quotidian existence."15
Fischer?s work has also been compared with the Surrealist tradition. Jorg Heiser have equated the life size female nudes as candle to their roots in the Exposition de Surrealisme of 1938 with its shop window dummies dressed as crude fetish objects, a direct reference to the window displays of the " Grands Magasins".? Another untitled work by Fischer created in 200, consisting of a couple of a half an apple and half a pear suspended on nylon threads. The work echoed a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti created as part of the Surrealist Circle in Paris in the l930s in which above the ridge of a horizontal form that looks like a cross between a crescent moon and a banana, hangs a sphere with a peach -like crack. What aroused Giacometti?s contemporaries was just not the way the ball was hung like a pendulum inside a metal structure resembling the frame of a four poster bed, but the sexuality undertone of the work. Among the Surrealists the work set in motion a discussion on the Surrealist object as an expression of unconscious sexual desire. 16 However, Mirjam Varadinis observes that "Although it would wrong to seek historical or even systematic link to Surrealism, Fischer clearly engages in Surrealist play with levels of reality in order to generate powerful imagery, whose elements can easily be recognized but whose consequences resist classification "17
While Fischer?s works appears to reference certain elements of Arte Povera he distances himself from the politically charged role of the artist proposed during the period of Arte Povera. Fischer does not want to incite change or revolution. His form of "social art" is a little more generous that that espouse by German Celant. Fischer has stated:
"I don?t mean social in the sense of interaction. It has much more to do with my love of documentaries. When I look at a documentary and see how somebody drinks coffee, puts on his jacket and goes to work, I began to think he?s a nice person. I love gentle pictures of the ordinary things that people do .My work?has to be close to the things I think about all day long and the things I do"18
Gingeras has noted that, Fischer?s work is not a simple revisiting of Arte Povera?s ideologies of but rather Fischer appropriates its form and conceptual strategies to address the contradictory aspects of life and art.
Not surprisingly for an artist as open as Urs Fischer, he has defined his artistic inspirations as different for different reasons. He has cited Francis Bacon, Robert Smithson, Paul Thek, Michael Buthe, and Chris Burden. Although Fischer?s work has been compared to that of Fischl &Weiss and Hans Haccke, and George Herold, the artist appears a little reluctant to align himself to a strictly political invested kind of art, often describing his form of "social art" as a sense of interaction. He has countered that his work isn?t intended operate as re-enactment of his personal feelings or statement of his beliefs.
His works have often reminded observers of the artist Dieter Roth whose concern with food product and decay was an important element of his artistic agenda. However, is important to point out that this type of comparison is vague at best, given Fischer?s experimentation with materials is bound up with his preference for colors, and series of host of diverse intentions which explains his interest in the work of Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol. Fischer?s concern with fruit and gradual putrefaction in the artist?s work was an early phase in his career from which he appears to have moved on.
III
Urs Fischer?s works are an eclectic mixture of materials and imagery. His sculpture utilize common industrial and domestic materials-wood, wax, Styrofoam, mirror, glass, pigment, plastic, industrial tape, screw as well as found objects. He often varies the size of elements in the works, such that variation of forms functions as an allegory for an animated notion of sculpture, although Fischer occasionally produces kinetic works. His imagery fuse classical motifs, portraits, still lives and landscapes often assembled as huge rampant installations. These large-scale projects aim to engage the spectator into a dialogue with the materials means. However their conceptual investment moves the works into a more contemporary preoccupation in which many recent artists appear to renounce classical aesthetic conventions and undermines the traditional categories of art to be both simultaneously inside and outside the canons. Allison M. Gingeras has observed Urs Fischer is a sculptor?s sculptor, like Dieter Roth, Franz West, Charles Ray and Paul Thek. Fischer is firmly invested in a sculptural tradition without being traditional. 14
Urs Fischer have used his means of making works of art, to fabricate chairs, benches, couches and chaise lounges for everyday use in his studio. Thus there appears to be a deliberate attempt on the part of the artist to blur the distinction between which of Fischer?s chairs are suited for use and which are not. However, these functional pieces are considered utilitarian objects, they are conceived outside his artistic practice. Fischer?s preoccupation with for making and using his studio furniture is in the process of evolving into a commercial enterprise, future product line, and furniture company "Soft American" The title of the company is taken from a series of label created by Fischer and Eugene Tsai to identify a series of chairs using cheap standardized materials, such as polystyrene, plywood and packing tape and assembled out of pink and pale blue polyurethane foam with a pink elephant enthroned on the elongated backrest.13
Fischer recent works centered on the use of domestic objects: beds, tables, shelves, cabinets plates, etc. re-created by the artists in a series of complex reconfigurations which undermines their functionality and domesticity. Part of his selection of objects for his sculptures is a direct reference to the ordinary surroundings of his audience, although they he less inclined to directly used ready mades. Instead he makes casts of real objects. This approach in his artistic production changes not only the process of making his works, but t also the works themselves. The process of casting enables Fischer to invent new work.
Furniture becomes an important vehicle for Fischer?s musing on everyday life, existence, desire, boredom, but they also is inherent anthropomorphic qualities. The simple structure of table of chairs alludes to the human form without having to worry about realistic representations His objects come to life as counterparts that implicitly refer to people who are absent. Fischer?s domestic tableaux are not cartoon renderings of the scenes of everyday life, but an attempt to rationalize their physical construction.
Surprisingly, the solution to the human presence in a series of Fischer?s early sculptural works was the use of the skeleton metaphor. In these early works, his human carcasses were often engaged in some passive activity, such as lounging on a couch. The iconic sources of these skeleton works blend together various historical genres. While, Fischer has admitted that his initial use of skeletons were an early sculptural solution for the creation of a recognizable human presence in his work.19 However the works can removed from their iconic and historical inferences to the life and the inevitability of death. While equally subverts the tradition of memento mori, and the Mexican calaveras engravings, which took the form of humorous illustrations of skeletons intended to function as tragic-comic commentary social ills and political currents. Yet his reconfiguration of this traditionally imagery subvert the traditional memento mori. Urs Fischer characters offer no remorse. Presented in a couch or relaxed posturing they appear to take an on whimsical undertone. In a type ironic twist, Fischer?s skeleton types project what has been term a "post-mortal vitality".
Chairs are one of the essential items that Fischer?s use in his in works presented in a range configurations and materials?clay and wood constructions held together by wire and silicone (Last Chair Standing, 1997), found plastic garden chairs covered with blobs of silicone and sawdust (Chairs, 1998-99). Untitled (Chair for a Table that was too Tall, 1994) Fischer has mounted a plastic folding chair on wooded rails along with padding attached with parcel tape, alluding to the what Heiser views as two essential truths of design: human dimension are relative and form only attains clarity through reception, and through actual use.
Fischer has stated his fondness for chairs is directly tied to their sculptural qualities. John Heiser observes that Fischer "chairs " moves a rather a serene object towards active movement in a passive manner. Fischer?s chairs act out a full inventory of emotions and temperaments. Fischer?s reconfigured domestic objects become metaphors for as awkwardness, complexity, or burdens of the subjects who might use them.
Gingeras has described these works as operating somewhere between the heavy symbolism of Beuy?s "Stuhl mit Fett" (Chair with fat, 1963), and the seating arrangement of Franz West. However, Varadinis states that Fischer distances himself from the symbolic content of Beuys" Chair with Fat" as well as West?s fundamental idea of usability of the object. Fischer consciously eliminates functionality but without moving in the direction of abstraction20Fischer makes chairs whose whole point is the speed and alacrity with which their utility is supplied and the sculptural gesture of failed functionality caught off balance by their design.
Cats are another motif that runs throughout Urs Fischer?s work. For Fischer, cats refer to the serenity, what Jorg Heiser describes " as a wandering disinterest in the sculptural heroics"21. For them, sculptures are obstacles in the room. Thus the idea of what has been defined as a "museum cat" walking on the exhibits or rubbing itself against them-extending, interrupting varying form equally functions as an animated form of sculpture. The cats thus acts as agents of varying aesthetic experience.
Portraits also appear in Fischer work, but not in the classical sense. His sitters have been described as the protagonists of horror movie than real individuals Fischer covers some of the figures with several layer s of wax until they are almost become in distinguishable or disfigured. In this context Fischer deliberately fuse the boundaries between ugly and beauty in what has be defined as an attempt to subvert traditional hierarchies and question deep rooted patterns of perception.22
Urs Fischer?s art struggles with the impossibility of achieving a state of balance. The often-contradictory aspects of Fischer?s work evoke his struggle with equilibrium– the emotional versus the physical. precision versus the impulsive. The diversity of Fischer?s visual imagery contributes to the sense of the unexpected and subverts an easy classification of his complex production. As Fischer has stated "The extreme is full of contradiction"?struggle with life?. Constantly swing from one extreme to another"23.
For Fischer, toppling, collapsing, dismantling and demolishing have nothing to do with the beauty of failure, but rather create a disjunctive robustness. As Varadinis has observed, Fischer?s work similar to that of Bruce Nuaman puts you on an edge, that forces you into a heightened awareness of yourself and the situation. However, Urs Fischer works are not likely to induce anxiety because they always contain a sense of humor24.
Urs Fischer represent a growing generation of young artists you abandon purely conceptual strategies in favor of a re-embracement of the material means and the "object" as a vital component of contemporary art making. The starting point of Fischer work is partially directly reliant on the choice of materials and the total unpredictable problems that emerge in dealing with them, the work now resides in the image itself. While many young artists rely on technology as the driving force for this re-engagement with objecthood, Fischer represents a group of artists, in which materials and craftsmanship act as the driving force in their work. Urs Fischer?s approach to the material means undermines expectations and extends his process to the what can be described as the " simultaneous incorporation of various styles, " They result is a exciting body of work that becomes whole because the very lack of unity and a result of its plurality.
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Urs Fischer, et al. (Mirjam Varadinis, Jorg Heiser, Bruce Hanley)"Kir Royal" Kunsthaus, Zurich, JRP/Ringier, 2004
Urs Fischer " Good Smell, Make up Tree" Geneva SW JRP ?Ringier Kunstverlag, 2004 (Music by Garrick Jones)
Urs Fischer," Centre Georges Pompidou Espace 315: Espace trois ?cent-quinze, creation contemporaine et prospective", Paris c. 2004
"Espace 315, Koo Jeong-A Urs Fischer,” Le Journal du 315, Centre Pompidou
Carmine, Giovanni, " Urs Fischer. Personal Weather", Flash Art, Jan-Feb pp. 84-87
Gingeras , Alison "Urs Fischer" Artforum, May 2003, pp. 158-159
Kunstpreis der Bottcherstrasse in Bremen, Bottcherstrasse, Bremen 2003
Ruf, Beatrix (ed.) Urs Fischer.Time Waste. Radio Cokkie und kaum Zeit" Edition Unikate, 2000 (
Obrist, Hans ?Ulrich, "Manifesta 3: Borderline Syndrome. Energies of Defence", Ljubljana, 2002
Bonami, Francesco, Obrist, Hans Ulrich (ed.) " Sogni/Dreams .48th Venice Biennial of Visual Arts", Turin Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo per l?Arte. 1999
Manchester, C."Urs Fischer KooJeong-a; Centre Pompidou Espace 315" Flash Art v. 37 (May/June 2004) pp. 145-6
Zamet K. London, England (" Exhibit: Urs Fischer Sadie Coles HQ", ArtPapers v. 27 no.3 (May/June 2003) p. 52
Michel, A. "Urs Fischer, Hauser & Wirth 2", Art News V. 98 no. 4 (April) p. 126
Ardenne, P. et.al "Urs Fischer, Centre Pompidou" (Exhibit) Art Press no. 301 (May 2004) p. 82-3
Lafuente, P. "The Failure Man" Art Review (London, England) v.54 (December 2002/January 2003) p.64-5
Anna Helwing, "Fundamentgefummel. Stormy Weather von Urs Fischer" Kunst ?Bulletin March, 1999pp.18-24
"The author acknowledges Gavin Brown Enterprise, NYC for their assistance"
Horace Brockington, 2004
