Dirty, naughty, big and very smart?

The New Museum bookstore in New York is quite small. The selection of books reads therefore as a curatorial project, which I assume it is. The current choice seems to deliberately match the ongoing exhibition by Urs Fischer. The usual coffee-table picture books, Russian criminal tattoos, pop up and street art, jostle with the ubiquitous David Shrigley.

The rest however seems to have a dominant theme, a mix of conceptual art and the abject, somewhere between the minimal intrusions of the 60’s and 70’s backed by philosophical reflection and body performances oozing blood, and offal, and dirt.

It is a curious nostalgia that emerges. Viennese Actionism replete with images of ritual sex, staged violence and self-abuse seem still to fascinate. I was surprised by the number of more recent publications and by the available reprint of Amos Vogel’s classic Film as Subversive art. Along with the Austrians there were the usual suspects of Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, Dinos and Jake Chapman, work that can seem rude, silly, filthy, self-important and often the product of not inconsiderable vanity. The preference also seemed very male and despite the occasional Yoko Ono book or something about Valie Export the shelves breathe testosterone. Essays on Husserl, classic conceptual manifestos, minimal scores and a range of works showing art without images create the intellectual balance but also reinforce the chauvinism. What seems most at play is how the corporeal overstatement of Schwarzkogler, Mühl and Brus finds an echo in the conceptual understatement of Isou, Weiner and Kosuth. Nothing screams object more loudly than conceptual art and little seems to dematerialize the body so well than the excess of performance. This mirroring also feeds a curatorial enterprise where our fear and love of physicality needs the cerebral as camouflage. In the museum the argument continues in the from of Urs Fischer’s Marguerite de Ponty

For the first time ever The New Museum has given over three floors for a solo exhibition. Urs Fischer perhaps best known for his now infamous exhibition at Gavin Browns Enterprise in 2007 where he dug a huge hole directly into the floor of the gallery, has apparently been working on this magnum opus for ten years. The top floor shows huge aluminium cast boulders of stylised lumpy matter. Towering above the viewer’s head they resemble a sci-fi set from a 1950’s B movie and carry all the wanton disregard for the environment that decade also had. They are a grandiose and obviously pompous statement that says very little! In the same room is also a smaller work where a bright pink cupcake is magically suspended in the air (by an electromagnet). Again one might be tempted to read in a consideration of the virtual but to be quite frank it seems more of a gimmick than a gestalt. The second floor shows Fischer at his minimalist most. A croissant is suspended in mid air with a butterfly perched on one horned tip. A monochrome grand piano has melted and a tongue pokes through a wall. The last work has drawn attention and it would be possible to draw dramatic arguments for the piece – “an interruption of the physical space of institution”, “a sly attack on the rigid walls of the white cube with a glory hole for art”, etc etc. Actually just like the hovering cup cake it seems more Coney island- freak show than anything else. The humour is echoed between floors where the fluorescent bulbs of light fittings have been replaced with a carrot and a cucumber. The kind of one off studio- sculpture that looks that it was the idea of an intern and perhaps should have left where it was made.

The first floor shows Fischer at his most elegant and one must also add luxurious. 40 tons of mirrored steel has been fashioned into boxes of varying dimensions and Fischer has screen-printed extremely high detailed photographic images so that we can see each object from the top and each side. The result is visually disconcerting, the reflections of the gallery space create apparent see through views of the structures themselves. The objects that Fischer has chosen are the scraps of bottom feeding American consumer culture, a lighter with a pin up décor, fruit loops, over coloured deserts, a pack of playing cards, a King Kong model, a chocolate éclair, a pair of cheap shoes. The choices may be informed by a deep critique of the American psyche. It would also be natural to link these works to the title. Marguerite de Ponty is one of the many pseudonyms adopted by the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé and used when he wanted to comment freely on fashion. I assume Fischer is intending something similar, the independence that the nom de plume gave the poet allowed for an unfettered attack on the excesses of consumerism. The difference is that Mallarmé didn’t need 40 tons of steel or three floors of a one of the world’s most important art centres to say it. Perhaps its better to head back to the bookstore!