Urs Fischer
Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York, USA
Urs Fischer’s art is like a salesman who can hypnotize you into listening to a spiel that you didn’t know you needed to hear. As gauzily vacuous as an advert for antidepressants, allergy meds or sleeping pills, the invitation for the exhibition, entitled ‘You’, depicts nothing more than a butterfly ecstatically melting into a rosy, shimmering haze. The gallery has issued no press release, and the same cryptic, candy-hued image is all that out-of-towners or lazy art-lovers will find on the website. But the flattering title (um, me?) and inane butterfly are as weirdly hard to resist as media images marketing that experts – with the aid of focus groups – tailor to appeal to millions.
Of course, given his penchant for wrenching extremes and messy, ad hoc materialism, Fischer has something entirely different in store, quite the opposite of pharmaceutical bliss. Entering the gallery, you see only a four foot-high child-size door. No releases or clippings wait on the desk, having been replaced by a stack of flyers warning ominously, in part, ‘The installation is physically dangerous and inherently involves the risk of serious injury or death. Access is granted to you entirely at your own risk.’ Pass through the portal, and you’ll find yourself stepping from a lintel-like crust of concrete into a dim, smallish room – an antechamber or waiting room of sorts – with no floor to speak of, just a layer of rubble. (Wear high heels and the disclaimer will be eminently easy to keep in mind.) Beyond lies another opening leading to a larger, brightly lit room in which Fischer has excavated a huge pit, digging deep into the soil beneath the gallery. Your role now becomes clear – to complete the work by climbing into the soil crater.
Fischer’s art often involves change or decay, but always a pleasurable element of surprise. For an earlier Gavin Brown intervention he cut a large, wobbly oval from a wall; for another he constructed a chalet from loaves of sourdough bread. The last Whitney Biennial saw him again gesturing toward Gordon Matta-Clark by slicing more holes in walls and continuing his experimentation with melting sculptures through revolving candle-laden branches dripping wax. Fischer works with a light touch, balancing crudeness and delicacy, goofiness and art-historical weight. At the same time, there’s something slightly sadistic about being lured into this site; given the time and place it’s hard not to think of the aftermath of a terrorist act when experiencing You, and to be thankful no body parts are visible among the stray pipes, wires, and odd bits of trash mixed in with the dirt and concrete. Whether this is intentional is hard to say. But humour certainly helps propel Fischer’s bold sense of scale, and he expertly plays the fussiness of the sappy invite against the macho gesture at the gallery, which would be Earthwork-worthy if he wanted it to be.
Kristin Jones
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