Swiss artist Urs Fischer: is he serious?
The weird and questionably wonderful work of the New York-based artist, who was in Hong Kong for his first solo exhibition in Asia, raises an obvious question: is he for real?
In 2004, Swiss artist Urs Fischer created an alpine chalet made out of bread (sourdough, to be exact). It was life-size and, in succeeding years, as it did the artistic rounds, it took on a life of its own. Oriental rugs appeared; so did parakeets that hadn’t yet learned to fly and pecked at their crumby surroundings. After a while, the original sweet-smelling edifice became less fragrant as its structure, sourly, rotted.
In 2007, Fischer had an exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, in New York. The gallery floor was dug up, leaving a crater that measured roughly 11 metres by nine metres and was two-and-a-half metres deep. Visitors could walk around it on a narrow ledge but there was a thrillingly stern warning at the entrance: THE INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH. The work was called You.
By 2012, Fischer was showing at the Palazzo Grassi, in Venice, Italy. The 18th-century palace is owned by French businessman François Pinault, whose company is the major shareholder of Christie’s auction house and who has one of the world’s largest collections of contemporary art. The Fischer exhibition, titled “Madame Fisscher”, was the first solo show by a living artist held at Palazzo Grassi. Fischer took out one of its internal walls.
Now Fischer is in Hong Kong, at the Gagosian Gallery, for his first solo exhibition in Asia. As its title consists of musical notes wobbling along a four-lined (not the usual five) staff, you’ll just have to hear it in your head as a brief, off-key impossibility. Before we meet, I spend some time reading up about Fischer, whose work I’ve never seen in real life, and I compile a list of specific little questions but, really, they could all be cast into one big one: how much of this is a joke?
“Urs” means “bear” in German and Fischer is, indeed, ursine. (He once worked as a nightclub bouncer.) Read his name sufficiently often and it starts to conjure up a separate, National Geographic identity – that of a bear, standing in some icy river, catching salmon with its paw. (When I tell him this later, there is a gleam of pleased amusement at the thought, but he says, not wishing to indulge himself, “In these grizzly movies, the bears look sad.”)