Saturday, February 6, 2010
Urs Fischer
Finally made it to the Urs Fischer show, due to close this Sunday at the New Museum. I got many interesting impressions from it. Most of them had to do with being in a large, sunlit space full of large, conceptual objects; not a bad impression, but not significantly different from similar impressions. I suppose it's worth paying for. I had a guest pass.
Fischer has an interesting anxiety about organic form. One room features massive, Serra-sized sculptures, yet these sculptures are made from flighty aluminum rather than Serra's earthy leads and steels, and mostly hung from the ceiling rather than mounted on the floor. These are expanded from shapes formed from the modest dimensions of the artist's hands; they are as shapeless and absurd as the negative space of a hand when in pursuit of leisure or the flailing grip of small-hours indigestion. They are comforting in the way that King Kong's hand is a comfort to Fay Wray.
On another floor, you step off the elevator and are greeted by a 3-and-a-half foot long lighter with a picture of an underdressed lady on it. Further down, a similarly-scaled box of matches, half-opened, lay on its back. Closer inspection reveals that the mount for these blown up reproductions is a mirrored box; the mirror only pokes through behind the lighter's sparkwheel, where the thumb would ordinarily connect, or at the collapsed, rounded edges of the matchbox.
The gallery space is full of a few dozen of these Brobdingnagian objects. Many of them fit the 90 degree angles of the box; a VCR tape of Love Streams, a CD head cleaner, even a stomach-churning Froot-Loop-and-marshmallow dessert cube exploded to the size of a bus. More interesting are those things that do not fit the box; a pear, the artist's shoe, a motorcycle helmet, the seams of which objects become entire mirrored surfaces reaching forward into faceted, three-sided corners. The negative space of the artist's giant hand is once again represented, this time in the reflective surface surrounding a fizzy fluted mimosa. This is fun, but the message as I see it is self-evident: products tend toward a squareness the human form cannot mimic.
Funny, then, that he decides to open one of the exhibition's two reproduced books, an Italian collection of 19th Century nudes, so as to allow that negative space to shimmer through what it would not otherwise. After all, the book is the first reproducible and marketable media produced in the square format. Why the enforced organicism? And why not include a gun in this collection of objects? ¶ 8:36 AM
Finally made it to the Urs Fischer show, due to close this Sunday at the New Museum. I got many interesting impressions from it. Most of them had to do with being in a large, sunlit space full of large, conceptual objects; not a bad impression, but not significantly different from similar impressions. I suppose it's worth paying for. I had a guest pass.
Fischer has an interesting anxiety about organic form. One room features massive, Serra-sized sculptures, yet these sculptures are made from flighty aluminum rather than Serra's earthy leads and steels, and mostly hung from the ceiling rather than mounted on the floor. These are expanded from shapes formed from the modest dimensions of the artist's hands; they are as shapeless and absurd as the negative space of a hand when in pursuit of leisure or the flailing grip of small-hours indigestion. They are comforting in the way that King Kong's hand is a comfort to Fay Wray.
On another floor, you step off the elevator and are greeted by a 3-and-a-half foot long lighter with a picture of an underdressed lady on it. Further down, a similarly-scaled box of matches, half-opened, lay on its back. Closer inspection reveals that the mount for these blown up reproductions is a mirrored box; the mirror only pokes through behind the lighter's sparkwheel, where the thumb would ordinarily connect, or at the collapsed, rounded edges of the matchbox.
The gallery space is full of a few dozen of these Brobdingnagian objects. Many of them fit the 90 degree angles of the box; a VCR tape of Love Streams, a CD head cleaner, even a stomach-churning Froot-Loop-and-marshmallow dessert cube exploded to the size of a bus. More interesting are those things that do not fit the box; a pear, the artist's shoe, a motorcycle helmet, the seams of which objects become entire mirrored surfaces reaching forward into faceted, three-sided corners. The negative space of the artist's giant hand is once again represented, this time in the reflective surface surrounding a fizzy fluted mimosa. This is fun, but the message as I see it is self-evident: products tend toward a squareness the human form cannot mimic.
Funny, then, that he decides to open one of the exhibition's two reproduced books, an Italian collection of 19th Century nudes, so as to allow that negative space to shimmer through what it would not otherwise. After all, the book is the first reproducible and marketable media produced in the square format. Why the enforced organicism? And why not include a gun in this collection of objects? ¶ 8:36 AM
