More on Urs Fischer
A Whole New Museum
The Urs Fischer–izing of a four-story institution.
Fischer’s fourth-floor installation at the New Museum. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photograph by Benoit Pailley/Courtesy of the New Museum)
Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown’s gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power. It’s set expectations for his full-building retrospective at the New Museum incredibly high, and he’s working hard to meet them. Fischer has lowered ceilings, added lights, and closed off doors, trying to get the effects he wants in this cold, almost soulless exhibition space. So much so that the curator Massimiliano Gioni mused to one writer, “I have thought a couple of times of killing him.”
Thrill seekers, be forewarned: There’s bravura work but no drop-dead moment here. Each of Fischer’s three floors is beautiful, and each has an elfin elusiveness and deep material intelligence. They also have dead spots and duds. Fischer is weakest at smaller discrete sculptures and best when he’s taking over entire spaces or reacting to other artworks nearby. (Also, at a rumored $330,000 to stage, the show is another example of an art world that doesn’t know when to say no.) Had Fischer made a swashbuckling statement by (let’s say) demolishing the museum’s second and third floors, he would have wowed everyone. Instead, thankfully, he took the hard way, putting together multiple ideas: exploring the sculptural-philosophical-experiential qualities of fullness on the fourth floor, emptiness on the third, and a mixture of both on the second floor. (For the record, the only hole here is a little one in a third-floor wall; a pink latex tongue sticks out, making it seem like the museum is clowning around, blowing you off, talking back, enticing, or hitting on you. A sight gag, and a great illustration of the weird ways museums have desires, needs, ideas, and consciousness.)
Read more: Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty — New York Magazine Art Review
