I’ve never hated Urs Fischer’s work; in fact at times I’ve liked it. This opinion is colored by the strange circumstance of my having for exactly one week worked as a part of his “studio”: I was one of a few people who helped him put up a show at the Blaffer Gallery in Houston ca. 2006. My principal duty, if memory serves, was tearing apart and gluing back together a small cardboard box of plaster mix. Fischer was smart and fully aware of the absurdity of art making as a life practice and a generous, thoroughly decent boss.
I also liked what he was up to in the early days. The crater at Gavin Brown in 2007 worked for me; it epitomizes the best possible outcome when you execute a simple idea on a large scale. But things can can get blown up too much, and like a photo enlarged beyond its appropriate DPI, the matter at hand gets bland and deformed. Fischer sold out, to use that archaic parlance. He decided he wanted to make a lot of money and live well. In his favor, he’s never been pretentious about his work, never much dressed it up in outrageous intellectual claims so far as I know, and is certainly better than a lot of jokers selling either inept or mechanical oil canvases for ludicrous sums.
It’s been quite a while seen I’ve seen one of Fischer’s shows. But then I heard some murmurs about his solo at Gagosian, so I checked it out a few days before it closed. I found it incredible, in a literal sense—hard to believe. I also liked it.
There was People (2022), a room with a mocked-up salon-style hang of painting classics from the National Gallery in London laid over with myriad projected talking heads, all yakking at you but in merciful silence. The install worked as a physical parody of the impulse behind mass art-appreciation carnivalia like the Van Gogh Experience, in which art is swamped by chatter and mulched into tokens for exchange, be they for social media or financial, as opposed to things to be with and think about. It also called to mind (the mind of my astute friend Alex, anyway) the weird 2008 exhibition Fischer curated with Gavin Brown at Tony Shafrazi called “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” that was less a group show and more a Lawlerish artwork.
Fischer is perfectly comfortable pointing out the downside of spectacle culture while out-spectacling everyone. The really good piece in the show was to this end, a jaw-dropping, ultra HD billboard-size monitor depicting innumerable bits of contemporary detritus slowly rotating as if without gravity, all at independent rates and in different directions. A small accounting of what must have been a thousand items: a mannequin head wearing a pink wig, a copy of The Communist Manifesto, a gingerbread house, a lucky cat statuette, a trumpet, a roll of blue masking tape, a Greek urn, an eggplant, a strawberry shortcake, a pretzel, a croissant, Mr. Peanut, a carton of yams, a cowboy hat, a K-Mart-branded trucker cap, a baseball, a shopping basket, a box of Crayola crayons, a bagel, a head of cauliflower, a candelabra, a model of some molecule, a green dish sponge . .
I experienced a sense of wonder looking at the work, called Chaos #501 (with the S annoyingly backward like it’s a witch house band), and also admiration. Fischer, always macho in his post-Warholian way, was casually one-upping artists who take high-concept, of-the-moment angles. You want big? Here’s a billboard. You want high-tech? Get me a server farm. You want a little cultural commentary, on the vapidity of popular culture, perhaps? Or would you prefer something about the erasure of distinctions between media and real life? Corporeality and disembodiment? Whatever. Just check out all this garbage really big, impeccably and even beautifully rendered as gleaming artifice, spinning in a vacuum.
One person I thought of while staring at Chaos #501 was Ed Atkins, who wants to make similar points in similar mediums but in a gooey humanist/mythopoetic vein that grosses me out; in particular, I thought of the flatscreen TVs, furniture, and fish plummeting to the ground in Refuse.exe (2019). The only piece by Atkins I’ve ever loved was the video at the New Museum in 2021, the centerpiece of “Get Life/Life’s Work,” where he simply animated his end of a difficult conversation with his mother. Otherwise it’s giant sandwiches of infants being assembled (Old Food, 2017–19), a disintegrating zombie guy putting his body parts through an airport security checkpoint (Safe Conduct, 2016), some twee Game of Thrones cut scenes bullshit.
The point is: refined intellectualism can end up more heavy-handed than overindulgence. Here’s the lede of the press text from Atkins’s 2019 GBE show:
I like spit now stems from the untitled sandwich video in Old Food, falls through Artaud’s list of wants—as seared into the slab of hardtack bread at the entrance—and ends with Refuse.exe, the simulation of some crap falling to a stage. Expression is trammeled, here: the heart is thwarted.”
Insert tear-down-cheek emoji here.
Fashion
Maybe you didn’t notice, but the entire fashion-art media complex ground to a halt over the last week due to a wedding between a certain art editor and a certain fashion writer. Between garment selection, travel, attendance, reflections on the life cycle and how one passes through it, handkerchief time, and hangover, Spigot was waylaid by what is already becoming known as the Wedding of the Century.
Genuinely though, your correspondent was touched to be present; it was all gorgeous and sweet and a very fun time. I felt none of the misgivings that I experience at other weddings, so I think the happy couple is well on their way to til-death-do-us-part.
The event was excruciatingly fashionable, of course. Its absolute eye-popping locus solus was the bride’s hair, which wrecking-balled the walls between fashion and art in a way that Demna Gvasdfasdf can only dream of. In comparison, Calder’s stabiles are rendered shaky; Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse is a snooze. Pope Julius II could have found no finer an architect for St. Peter’s than the stylist who lovingly hand-arranged every rib and spire of this flaxen dome. Mazel tov!
Wine
Cannubi Barolo DOCG 2016. I never drink Barolo; it’s expensive and I don’t eat much red meat. At a recent wedding-related event, however, I dined at Sparks Steak House in midtown, which is like Keens but 50 percent more Long Island; good food though!
This Barolo, at left, is extremely well balanced and rich but not got-it-flaunt-it like so many cabernets. I didn’t take notes, so I can’t toss out any cool flavor comparisons, though I do recall that the Pommard at right was dusty, lighter, and a little rosy/perfumy in comparison—too light. If a nice piece of meat falls off the back of the truck, you can feel safe going in on this bottle as a highly satisfying, nonesoteric companion for itMusic
I had never heard of “yellow” and “blue” Loveless, as they’re known, until last year when a friend played them after dinner—thank you lil pint of svedka! They are, respectively, Japanese and Korean comps of covers of every track on My Bloody Valentine’s transcendent 1991 album. The Japanese version came out from High Fader Records in 2013 on CD, and its artists tend to stretch less. I prefer the blue edition, for which I’m yet to find an authoritative date or determine if it was issued as physical media.
Anyway, the whole thing is fucking great so just listen to it all; a couple tracks to single out include “When You Sleep” by 조월 and “Come in Alone” by Ninaian. The original Loveless was, fun fact, the first album I ever listened to while on MDMA. Next rave you’re at, pack a flash drive with “Sometimes” by 기합 in your kit and ask the DJ very, very nicely to play it at sunrise.
Go Big!