In an unlikely move, Swiss artist Urs Fischer, famous for cutting out gallery walls and tearing up gallery floors, has created a tour de force print show at the New Museum. Marguerite de Ponty, Fischer’s much-touted “first large-scale solo presentation in an American museum,” dedicates two out of three floors of the exhibition to a print-based inquiry of facsimile.
The third floor features an amazing exercise is monumental minimalism. The entire floor is transformed by “an installation that turns the Museum’s architecture into an image of itself—a site-specific trompe l’oeil environment. Each square inch of the Museum architecture has been photographed and reprinted as a wallpaper that covers the very same walls and ceiling, in a maddening exercise in simulation.” Even if the New Museum didn’t have a photo ban in the galleries (c’mon, New Museum! it’s 2009 and we aren’t allowed to take pictures? so lame), this wouldn’t have been an easy one to capture. The key is looking at the details- fire alarms and light fixtures are reproduced slightly askew from their proper location. The space is so huge that this may really be one of the largest printed installations ever made. It reminded me of both Deborah Bowness‘ wallpaper and Gary Kachadourian’s simulations of the banal but on a gratuitous, blockbuster budget.
Since I wasn’t allowed to take my own pictures, I borrowed this one from Libby Rosof’s Flickr site. Read Artblog’s post about the show. This image shows the ceiling… there are real florescent lights and tromp-l’œil ones.
The second floor was in some ways the opposite of the third… utterly full of stuff. More than fifty silkscreened chrome boxes create a fun house-like obstacle course of images and mirrors. The boxes are screen-printed with reproductions of objects, each facet of the boxes feature corresponding images of the objects. For example, a box featuring a block of cheese would have a front view of the cheese on the front of the box and a top view of the cheese on the top of the box, etc. It sounds pretty simple (and possibly dumb) but it’s a striking effect. And while I agree with some claims that these are clearly tailored for a collector feeding frenzy (they are like giant pieces of candy), as an entire installation the boxes transcend the saleability and become a really engaging piece about image culture and the way we perceive the world around us.
This picture is from the New Museum press release. Like the third floor installation, this work defies reproduction. Each box has a mirrored surface in the negative space around the image area.
Streetside, I was able to take pictures of the Urs Fischer window display which consists of some paperwork stacked on his shipping crates. The crates feature some slick labeling documenting the contents. The artwork is slick and so is the packaging…
Go see this show.
Like
Taken together, the mirrored pieces re-present objects as symbols, devoid of real presence. Like elements of symbolic logic, or a guidebook to dreams one can assemble and then reassemble the objects into various narratives. A common thread is sexuality, courtship and defilement: think ripe fruit, rotten fruit; the mummy; high heels and a partially eaten sausage.
[...] of the fashion designer. Did Rowley and Gagopsian cook up this idea while walking through the New Museum’s Urs Fischer show? Is it art or fashion? Is it real or fake? Is it just a publicity stunt to get a post on [...]