Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty, New Museum

Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty

New Museum, New York, NY

21/10/09 - 7/2/10

Words like trompe l’oeil, hallucinatory, illusion, and hyperreal dot the press release for the current exhibition at the New Museum in New York. Urs Fischer’s first large-scale solo presentation in an American museum, Marguerite De Ponty, punctuates the end of a long 18 months doused in youth for this renewed New Museum. The younger programming was implemented in a conscious effort, as discussed by chief curator, Richard Flood, to help compete with spenditure. Fischer’s unique conceptual worth was solidified with the memorable “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” a historic intervention at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, using photographic wallpaper and intuitive layering techniques to confound and overlap the icons of Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, Sarah Lucas, etc., an audacious imposition of new and old.

Comparable curatorial inferences can be found in the New Museum survey. Marguerite takes up all three floors of the New Museum, the first solo exhibition to necessitate the space. Fischer takes great care to present the minute and feeble gesture, the grand, staggering sculpture, and many contradistinctions between.

Though the fifth floor houses life size models of warped grand pianos, melted lamp posts, dissected subway seating, proportion-shifting metallic crags and an electromagnetic floating cake, the most memorable work takes place on floors two and three. The installation Service a la francaise consists of more than fifty mirrored cubes flawlessly screen printed with an array of images and displayed on the concrete floor; subjects including a used matchbook, a blank audio tape, a cardboard cut out of Ashanti, cheese blocks and sneakers were photographed from all sides (left, right, front, back, and top), enlarged by varying degrees, and seamlessly adhered to the chrome surfaces.

The fluctuation of image and size unifies the work in a city-like community of objects. The collision and free associative selection liberates their everyday, conceptual tones. A cardboard cut out of Ashanti reflects onto a nearby settled block of cheese; they cannot escape one another in the systemized grid since the mirrored perimeter ricochets reflections in every direction. Fischer calls to attention ‘object vanity’ or commodity in sculpture and art history through this dizzying display of mirrors and mundane, remade readymades.

The third floor of the museum features a panoramic wallpaper installation. Every interior surface is meticulously rendered photographically, recreating walls, light fixtures, exit signs, vents, and doorframes in a gesture entitled Last Call Lascaux, a reference to the first known so-called artistic endeavor. The entire space is wrapped in a 360-degree image of itself, thorough efforts enacting a clever, one liner idea. One and Three Chairs, Kosuth’s notoriously philosophical installation comes to mind, seeming economical and anticlimactic by comparison.

Within the same room a floating, moon shaped croissant acts as a perch for a tiny artificial butterfly. The delicate nature of this suspended sculpture is a perfect diversion from the massive, enveloping anti-installation (wallpaper).

Fischer’s theatrics are only rivaled by his stupefying range of reference. Marguerite De Ponty somehow encapsulates an artist at his ambitious best, given absolute free reign and delivering the fantastically elusive.