Urs Fischer

In the show’s accompanying book, a similar hulking figure appears in digitized montages looming like some weird space invader over the (already fantastical-looking) Shanghai skyline and other city settings. (The images are excerpts from Fischer’s 2008 artist’s book Helmar Lerski.) Fischer had wanted to realize the sculptures at a larger scale;4 though monumental, they are tamed and crowded by the museum’s space. And one can only wonder about their grouping in the gallery with three additional sculptures, which feels random, though vaguely urban, if you recall the montages, and meditate upon the sculptures’ titular association with Mallarmé—flâneur, denizen of the city. The big pieces share space with the pink streetlamp (Frozen Pioneer, 2009); a piece titled Violent Cappuccino (2007), whose main component is one of Fischer’s trademark charred skeletons; and a cast polyurethane-and-steel ensemble called The Lock (2007), placed at the far end of the room against a wall. This consists of a section of seating from a city bus; just over the seat, attached to the wall, is a suitcase, and quite literally hovering, via magnets, between the suitcase and the seat, is a faux birthday cake on a plate. It is as if the seat is occupied by the spirit of a celebrant commuter.

Uncharacteristically pristine (for Fischer) and fragile (so much so that the museum limits occupancy of the gallery), is the suite of mirrored boxes, 51 altogether, on the second floor. Titled “Service à la française”(2009; the title refers to a meal whose courses arrive all at once), the work is installed throughout nearly the entirety of the room. Made of mirrored chrome steel, the boxes are of various sizes and proportions, ranging from low and flat (presenting the image of a packet of spent matches) to near-ceiling height (the Empire State Building topped by King Kong). They densely grid the space, and are meant to be walked among, like city blocks in a scale model, or gravestones. Each represents a different object or foodstuff that has been photographed from the top and four sides; each of those shots is cut out to the shape of the object and, screenprinted onto the surface, occupies the corresponding face of the box. The irregular mirrored borders around the outlines offer fragmentary reflections of the other objects, and of the people wandering through. (Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings are the obvious precedent.) In a nice allusion to the installations upstairs, “Service à la française” has a single ceiling-suspended element bearing the image of a section of chain—the kind of chain that might hoist up a giant aluminum sculpture like David, the Proprietor.

In this oversize still life, Fischer plays intriguingly with scale, making decisions based on each object in turn, rather than proceeding from an a priori rule. “What determines the ultimate size of each object is based on architectural reasoning,” explains Fischer in an interview with the show’s curator, Massimiliano Gioni. “There seems to be a certain size that is ideal for each of these objects.” Most often the images are of tabletop statuettes or common things like lighters that, in the image, have been greatly enlarged but “somehow appear no bigger than they were before.”5 In a couple of cases—the miniature of an English phone booth, for example—the photographic scaling-up results in a mirrored surrogate that is just about the true size of the thing that the statuette is meant to represent. Following some basic logic of relativity, the Empire State Building is the tallest element in the room, but of course it is many times smaller than the edifice itself. The food is larger than life (bread, sausage, congealed Froot Loops and, twice, a pear, in one image freshly sliced, and in another rotting), but images of a real ladder and broken guitar are near their actual sizes.

Although the boxes are insistently physical, much like Minimalist cubes, the objects depicted are inaccessible, even spectral in feeling. Paradoxically, reconstituting the objects as images on the faces of geometric solids only enhances the quality of flatness. Seeing our own reflections in this cold, glittering environment is hardly welcoming; we are made to feel our estrangement from the utilitarian and disposable objects that fill our consumerist world. Yet, disoriented though we may feel, we lose our bearings willingly and with pleasure, stepping through the looking glass and into a museum transformed.

Currently On View “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty,” at the New Museum, New York, through Jan. 24. (Click here for Official site)

1 Massimiliano Gioni et al., Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, New York, New Museum, and Zurich, JRP/Ringier, 2009. At 480 pages, the book fills a retrospective function (unlike the show), exhaustively illustrating installations, exhibitions, outdoor sculptures and other works from 1993 on. Though the volume is handsomely designed and the illustrations excellent, works are arranged in often vague thematic order, sections are not identified in any way and the works keep reappearing from different angles in different parts of the book. It is all rather chaotic, though navigation is aided by a checklist-type index. 

2 The croissant and a collaboration with Georg Herold in the tiny stairwell gallery, involving a sausage, carrot and cucumber as “light” fixtures, rotting rather than preserved, are the sole works containing actual foodstuffs, which Fischer has often incorporated as a medium à la Dieter Roth, his compatriot. 

3 According to Fischer, in Shovel in a Hole, p. 65. 

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., p. 60.

“Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty” is on view at the New Museum, New York, through January 24. The accompanying catalogue includes an interview with the show’s curator, Massimiliano Gioni, and essays by Bice Curiger and Jessica Morgan.