jet set lady - a project by urs fischer

fondazione nicola trussardi
istituto dei ciechi, milan
may 3rd – june 1st, 2005
http://www.fondazionenicolatrussardi.com


in the monumental space of the istituto dei ciechi in
via vivaio in milan, the fondazione nicola trussardi presented
the first solo exhibition in italy of swiss artist urs fischer.
fischer has built through his sculptures and installations an
infinite anthology of mutations which modify the surface and
structures of everyday objects. his world is animated by an
endless production of distorted images, twisted, folkloric
dreams and corroded sculptures:
like hypertrophic three-dimensional cartoon strips,
fischer’s works describe an imaginary world in constant
development, at times escaping even the control of the artist
himself.

urs fischer domesticates materials such as wood, metal, glue,
wax, styrofoam, and plastic; he transforms chairs, tables,
fruit and vegetables into precarious assemblages.
in his hands, objects become surreal visual tales.
his vignettes are permanent metamorphoses:
they are still lives animated by a raw energy.
tinkering with common objects, and fidgeting with banality,
urs fischer attacks and wears down daily life.
he is an alchemist, a magician of substances: his universe is
suspended between art history and underground culture,
flirting with punk aesthetics while quoting and subverting
classical sculptural languages.

‘jet set lady’
urs fischer’s new work is a gigantic tree collecting an infinite
multitude of coloured drawings.
‘jet set lady’ is a sculpture in continuous movement:
it leans, as if subject to an uncontrolled energy, and multiplied as
if seen through the splintered lens of a kaleidoscope.



‘jet set lady’, 2005
iron, wood, 2000 framed drawings, 24 neon lights
700 x 700 x 900 cm
© urs fischer
produced by fondazione nicola trussardi, milano




‘house of bread’
in the contiguous space of the church of the institute,
fischer presents ‘house of bread’:
like something drawn by the coloured pencils of an imaginative
child, the house made entirely of bread is suspended between
fairy-tale vision and simple, archaic architecture.
like any other works by urs fischer, ‘house of bread’ has an
unstable destiny: it changes during the show, devoured by
a dozen multicoloured parrots.



‘house of bread’, 2004
bread, wood, expanding foam, light
533 x 472 x 366 cm
© urs fischer
---
writings by urs fischer

‘each work begins with a quick sketch, but as soon as I start
to work with materials, something goes wrong.
for example, the thing won’t stand up and my irritation about
that then leads to something else. my work never ends up looking
the way I had intended. I don’t consider those sculptures unsuccessful.
something else just developed while I was working.
it’s a two way street. your thoughts determine the images,
and it is the images, in turn, which determine your thoughts.’

‘cartoons just work for me; they provide a language that is very simple
and efficient. my choice does not relate specifically to the legacy of
pop art. rather, it has to do with pop culture, because the historical
pop-sters levelled the ground for pop culture’s place in art.
today it’s impossible to distill the source.
do influence come from popular culture? or from pop art?
on one hand, a campbell’s tomato-soup can become an artwork;
on the other, the style of andy warhol turns into an ipod ad.’

‘I like classical genres – they work.
if you think about how much attention has been paid to the classical
media in recent decades, it’s usually with the attention of getting
rid of the burden of history and making room for something new
- but to a certain extent just for the sake of it.
so you can really make up your mind that this discussion is over,
and you can only work on matter.
just like sowing on freshly plowed soil.’

‘art and life converge in a system which keeps on expanding,
which I can put all my concerns into, where I can use everything
that I see. when I watch a documentary and I see how someone
drinks a coffee, puts on his coat and goes to work,
I begin to like that person.
I just work in the studio. every day, if I can.
iIt’s like an intoxication.
in the end I try to bring all the levels and directions together.
first it’s raining, than you have a little stream, and sometimes all the
stuff come together to make a lake.
then everything flows very slowly.
some things evaporate or seep away.
and it goes on.
sometimes there are floods, droughts, and storms.
so it’s all a question of personal weather.’



---
urs fischer (1973)
lives and works in zurich.
he has had solo exhibitions in a number of international institutions
including centre pompidou, paris; kunsthaus zurich; ICA, london;
stedelijk museum, amsterdam.
the camden arts centre in london (2005) and the boijmans museum
in rotterdam (2006) are both currently preparing future solo shows.
urs fischer’s installations have been exhibited in some of the most
prestigious group exhibitions and biennials worldwide.
mong them: venice biennale; manifesta 3, ljubljana and monument
to now, athens.
more info on the artist
gallerie eva presshuber, zurich

The Objects/The Humans - Viviana Druga

The Objects/The Humans - Life And Death And Things.

http://www.vivianadruga.com





“The Violence of inanimate objects”[1], as Damien Hirst puts it, is what his art is all about. It is about the violence of an object, which has all the attributes of immortality while in contrast, the human doesn’t even approach it. It is about the violent idea that they, the objects, will exist forever while we will consume our limited existence contemplating their immortality.


Photo: Ciprian Muresan /Leap Into The Void After Three Seconds (Poster/2004)
We are living in an age of the pornography of the visible and everywhere we go in the city our visual sphere is assaulted by all sorts of images. There isn’t even a search engine invented to track image down on the Internet. This could only be possible if there was a text attached to it in order to identity it. That could mean that image is out of control and that it is so much image produced right now that it is impossible to cope with it. Steve Mann for example, a Canadian technician and artist, has invented a wearable computer, which he has been wearing for twenty years. This computer records everything he experiences and broadcasts it instantly on the Internet. What Steve Mann sees, the world sees in real time. Another use of the power of wearable computers is to filter out advertising and other elements of daily experience you don’t want to see and experience. What does this say about the world we are living in, in which humans turn themselves into objects? In which everything can be subject of your intervention and personal touch. Reality has become a term that remembers us that we are so far away from it. We are recreating reality constantly. We want to create our personal and subjective idea of reality. Linear history is not possible anymore.

Objects talk about humans. In becoming super clean, sterilized they show that we are decomposing. Sometimes the artists mythologize themselves by transforming their body into an art piece. We just have to think at Jeff Koons’ Out of Heaven, a series of photographs and Italian glass sculptures, where you see the actual coitus between him and Cicciolina, to realize that the artist has become the object of his art and to get a clear picture of the century of individuality and of self-eviscerating that the art world has become. “His body, airbrushed and gleaming seemed the ultimate readymade […] the works which he begun his career glistened as if they were still on display in the shop window. These ready-mades had an aura of desirable consumer objects. They were super-clean, like Space equipment or high-tech medical gear”[2].

The way artists deal with the idea of life, death and the transcendental is by creating something immortal that would transgress their existence. Our body is loosing its fleshy consistency as our experiences are constantly mediated. The mediated technology means actually the ubiquity of the self but also its fragmentation into a multitude of ‘selfs’, a process, which can only result into total disappearance of the real body. This evanescence of the body triggers its reinventing. This is what art does at the moment. “As experience is increasingly mediated and abstracted, the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological world is replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and presence. Authentic experience becomes both elusive and allusive as it is placed beyond the horizon of present lived experience, the beyond in which the antique, the exotic, and other fictive domains are articulated. In the process of distancing, the memory of the body is replaced by the memory of the object, a memory standing outside the self and thus presenting both a surplus and a lack of significance”[3].

The Romanian artist Ciprian Muresan is continuing Klein’s Leap into the Void (showing the artist jumping off a wall with his arms stretched) with the photograph showing Ciprian Muresan lying on the pavement with his arms stretched. Images depicting different forms of death are so present in our existence and are so many that it’s impossible to be touched by each of them. Gordon Burn is underlying an important aspect, the fact that “the technological media which enormously reinforce and heighten the illusion that death happens only to others have put a distance between us and our dying”[4].

Damien Hirst is using as ready-mades medical equipment, all sorts of drugs in different shapes and colors (The Void, 2000), which can release humans from pain. He says in an interview: “ I like to create emotions scientifically”, like a doctor removing pain in a sterilized white hospital room using devices for lifting up pain or mediating a soft transition towards death. In Pharmacy, 1992, an installation showing the life-size recreation of a chemist’s shop functioned both as a restaurant and as a gallery. The restaurant Pharmacy gets dirty, has to be cleaned, is art within a real environment where it can be modified so it is alive whereas the gallery Pharmacy stays the same, untouched, unmodified so it is dead. But the fact that it is dead and unmodified makes it eternal whereas by contrast we are the ones who are decomposing.

For the work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), the real tiger shark bought by Hirst from Australia was replaced because it was not properly ‘marinated’ by an exact artificially created replica. Hirst says that, as a conceptual artist, he is using formaldehyde to preserve an artwork for posterity but what he is actually doing is preserve an idea. He had to replace the cow’s head with maggots on it in A thousand Years (1990) because it was rotting and stinking. “You’ve got to take the smell away in order to make people look at a […] horrible thing. So if you want to see your dad dead…”[5]

Of course, Hirst is also laughing the art market in the face when selling For the Love of God in August 2007 with earn £35,000,000, the equivalent of 100 million dollars, but if it didn’t cost that much would it be more interesting? If it would have been made out of a cheap plastic? Hirst is playing a lot with what art is. He is constantly using his example of ruining a sense of visual comfort you might be used to. The image of the platinum replica of a real skull adorned with diamonds is deconstructing the skull as a visual icon of death. These lines will make a clear idea of Hirst dichotomy about life, death, beauty and humor: “It boils down to death. I mean, we’re […] dying. It’s shameless. What […] are we doing, dying? It’s so delicious, it’s so beautiful, it’s so fabulous. I don’t have to buy a […] microscope to see how fabulous it is. The real gear, the stuff that we’re living in, rots. And things that rot are so […] colorful. It’s amazing on absolutely every level. And we’re dying. It doesn’t make sense. So everything’s about celebrating, and about living. It’s about living.”[1]

-- viviana druga.



[1] Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 13

[2] Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art. Who are the Style Police? Controversies and Contexts in Recent Art, p. 394.

[3] Tony Godfrey [citing Susan Steward, On Looking, 1993], Conceptual Art. Who are the Style Police? Controversies and Contexts in Recent Art, p. 395


[4] Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 12


[5] Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 180 (referring to Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad)


[6] [6] Gordon Burn, On the Way to Work, p. 79

ArtSlant - Prosthetic Objects

ArtSlant - Prosthetic Objects


A group show at Wallspace gallery a few blocks away from the Sarah Sze exhibition at Tonya Bonakdar also deals with the transformation of everyday objects, but in a much less extravagant, more lo-fi fashion. Including work by Jay DeFeo, John Divola, Martha Friedman, Daniel Gordon, Ryan Kitson, Jiří Kovanda, Kiyoji Otsuji, Adam Putnam, Laura Riboli, Judith Scott, Martin Soto Climent, Erika Vogt, Christopher Williams and Mark Wyse, the exhibition--Drag, Swagger, Fit Together--draws its name from a recent video piece by Laura Riboli which depicts two metal objects interacting with each other in stop-motion animation. The objects somewhat resemble large flat paperclips or bookends and fit together rather suggestively, their movements just measured enough to appear oddly sensual. In the same room a pair of green stockings are stretched out over a white canvas, with a high heel shoe inserted in the crotch area, alluding to male genitalia. Opposite this hangs a photograph by Jay DeFeo depicting a pair of reclining disembodied legs, perhaps a mannequin’s, with ripped pantyhose. Similar prosthetic limbs reappear in the show in a 1949 photograph by Kiyoji Otsuji.