“[Art is] a very intimate way of recording the experience of existing.”
— Urs Fischer
Urs Fischer is not a conceptual artist. His art exists to sanctify moments. Having started his creative life as a photographer in high school, Fischer went on to develop more techniques that would capture the gist of a life passing through time.
The best example of this might be the massive amorphous cast-aluminum sculptures he started creating in 2005 — the most recent of which was just installed in Las Vegas’s Fontainbleu Hotel. If you were to combine the working techniques of action painters like Pollock or abstract expressionists like de Kooning with the glossy output of Jeff Koons, you might get something like these sculptures.
Fischer’s process started with the instinctual and immediate sculpting of clay into abstract forms, hundreds of them, followed by a more deliberate process of selection. Of the process, Fischer told the New Yorker in 2009, “I make them fast, not thinking about composition, and select a few. It’s very raw.” The lucky selected few are then scanned into 3D computer files that can be reproduced at massive scale, literally casting the unthinking moment into permanent memory. Every wrinkle, fingerprint, crease, and incidental texture becomes a significant detail in a piece whose form is the arbitrary trace of momentary impulse.
For Fischer’s 2012 New Museum solo show in New York City, he started creating large mirrored boxes printed on all five visible sides with composite photographs expertly edited to give the impression of volume without any hint of lighting direction, place, or context. Each box depicts a single mundane item — a tourist-shop model of the Empire State Building, a pack of cigarettes, a camera, a pencil…you get the idea. His subjects and their arrangements are seemingly random with no Fischer-imposed narrative, purpose, or pop of meaning.
In the same New Yorker interview, Fischer described his selection process (or lack thereof): “It’s kind of arbitrary. It’s not about our culture now. It’s just objects I choose. I like that they are not very interesting things—or they are. It depends on your level of attention. And I don’t care about big or small. I’m interested in collisions of things, and how objects relate to each other.”
Such collisions are common occurrences in Fischer’s body of work, such as in his sculptures You Can Not Win and Bad Timing, Lamb Chop!
Through his artwork, Fischer presents mundane objects, asking the viewer to puzzle out a personal significance. Like all art, in Fischer’s view, everyone takes it away with them and owns it forever afterward in their souls. Fischer also sees art in memory as more potent than art in person in the present. These views combine, like the random objects that strike his passing fancy, to create Fischer’s unique approach to art-making.
“The thing in the way between an artwork and me is me”
— Urs Fischer
For example, Things, a sculpture Fischer debuted with Gagosian at 511 Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, explores the impact and influence of inanimate objects and their intuitive role in shaping the human experience. Various objects (a table, chair, car door, vacuum, wheel, copy machine, et al.) come together to define a living being, the rhino, highlighting the fluttering flow of inspiration and influence inanimate objects have on our sense of existence.
In this way, his heralded digital art series, CHAOS, is a brilliant continuation of a lifelong fascination with the arbitrariness of experience, the way life happens as a series of confounding juxtapositions that few but the artists among us stop to wonder at.
CHAOS is a series consisting of 1000 objects, paired together to form 500 creations, each one its own visual conversation. These works are composed of 3D representations of cultural artifacts and everyday objects — a head of broccoli paired with a sponge, a showerhead and a Nike shoe, a croissant and an atomic model, a CD and a wine key. The objects float against a white background, passing through, away, and toward each other with lava lamp-like grace.
Despite the befuddling nature of these collisions, there is no attempt at Duchampian disruption or Judd-like overthinking. Instead, as in so much of his work, Fischer is creating a moment as mundane as it is profound and as profound as it is mundane. If some Pompeiian catastrophe buried the western world, future generations would dig up and marvel at what might well look like Fischer’s body of work.
“For Urs Fischer, the seemingly mundane and often ephemeral objects that appear throughout his extensive body of work represent the data of human existence. More so than human feelings or emotions, he believes these tangible shadows of life form our understanding of the world around us.”
— Loic Gouzer, Founder of Fair Warning
For the next phase of CHAOS, CHAOS ENTROPY, Fischer continues to embrace the moment for its own sake by inviting collectors to fuse their CHAOS works together. Collectors can now merge two or more CHAOS sculptures to create new works and, in the process, destroy the originals, ramping up the arbitrariness of the groupings of objects.
Avoiding the stance of conceptual artist lording over an experience with a dissertation to offer the perplexed, Urs Fischer instigates moments, creating experiences that reflect contemporary existence and create a record of what it’s like to be alive, which is rarely (if ever) something that makes sense. His work more resembles spontaneous play than it does the contemplative message-making we’ve come to expect from contemporary artists, which is why his work speaks a language all its own.
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