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URS FISCHER'S GRAND GESTURES AND COMMODIFIED SEX

Do grand gestures reduce to one-trick-pony-art in museums? That’s my concern about Urs Fischer’s three floors of aluminium blobs, purple wallpaper, and silkscreened mirror boxes at the New Museum. Ambitious and vaguely compelling, most of the work looks far more polished than his famed holes in architectural foundations, though also more ambiguous.  

The exhibition title, "Marguerite de Ponty", offers some interpretive clues to viewers. Named after the pseudonym of Stéphane Mallarmé, a French symbolist poet  of the 19th century, Fischer’s show references a movement that aimed to reveal absolute truths indirectly. Five giant aluminium replicas of small, squished mounds of clay on the fourth floor vaguely follow this logic; the change of material and scale monumentalises his casual touch (enormous fingerprints are visible). Yet the concept is dull, no matter how big and arresting the work. Better are the scattered companion sculptures on this floor, particularly a floppy pink aluminium light-post cast from a latex mould and a skeleton climbing cardboard boxes, both of which have an element of instability–of dynamism–absent in the larger "clay" pieces.   

One floor down, themes of fragility continue in a gallery featuring only a small croissant hanging from a thread and a lavender-coloured melting piano. The walls have been painted a deep purple–instantly recognisable by anyone who has worked with digital film as the exact tone of an under-exposed photo. Fischer created this effect by meticulously photographing an empty room at the wrong setting, and then stitching these images into a seamless run of wallpaper. The effect is stunning, even though Fischer used the same wallpaper trick two years ago in collaboration with his dealer, Gavin Brown, at Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Here the entire room glistens, almost magically. Fischer also dropped the ceiling of this space about a foot and a half, covered it with a reproduction of itself, lights included, and then ran the actual lights in the opposite direction. Notably, this is the first show to effectively handle the awkward architecture of the New Museum's chilly two-year-old building, though staging it has cost a rumoured $330,000.

The second floor enjoys less success, as it resembles a squished furniture warehouse. Rows of mirrored cubes and rectangles silkscreened with single images (a tall empire state building, a flat steak, a cupcake square) clutter the gallery: A clear sexual energy emanates, as most of these pictures suggest a fetishised male or female commodity. The effect isn't terribly original, as Martha Schwendener points out at the Village Voice, though it is in keeping with Fischer's aim to build relationships between objects.

With some of my initial astonishment waning, I began to survey the room once more and started to feel a little depressed. Tucked away in a back corner stands a warped set of crutches in light green, suggesting an obliquely defined state of depravity. If the grand gestures of Fischer’s warped work boil down to commodified sex, the greater truths he hopes to reveal seem rather bleak. As far as artistic statements go, I suppose that’s fine, but when the bigness of the world is reduced to a single note, it’s hard not to question the validity of this observation. 

"Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty" at the New Museum in New York, until February 7th

~ PADDY JOHNSON