What do floating croissants, melting lampposts, and giant silk screen posters of Ashanti have in common? Well, it’s hard for anyone to be too sure, including Urs Fischer, the Swiss artist whose work is currently on exhibition at the New Museum.
The exhibit, “Marguerite de Ponty,” which opened on Wednesday, Oct. 28, takes its title from one of the pseudonyms of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, and is the museum’s first show dedicated to a single artist.
Fischer, who was born in Zurich in 1973 and now works and resides in New York, has had several solo shows at European institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His playful, imaginative, and often absurd pieces are characteristic of the type of progressive work the New Museum has devoted itself to exposing since opening in 1977.
Although Fischer has exhibited his work at several New York galleries—including the now infamous “You,” a 38-foot-by-30-foot hole dug into the floor of the Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in 2007—”Margurite de Ponty” is his first solo show at an American museum, which is why the stakes for both the museum and Fischer seem so high.
The works found on the second floor seem at first to be a random and puzzling array of mirrored boxes, with enormous silk-screened images of everyday objects such as books and cupcakes. But as viewers meander through the bright, cube-littered gallery and recognize iconic images of the Empire State Building and Ashanti, they realize that they are walking through the landscape of Fischer’s imagination, where objects and icons appear as they please, and the line between reality and fantasy has blurred.
The use of reflections from the mirrored boxes which incorporate the spectators into the work obscures this line even more, and forces the viewer to contemplate his or her relation to the objects. This idea of disintegrating the boundary between viewer and artwork is reminiscent of the work of conceptual artist Dan Graham, and the larger-than-life images of iconic and familiar objects clearly allude to ’60s pop art.
While the second floor gallery offers fun and interaction, the installation on the third floor is meant to engage the viewer psychologically. At first, the gallery appears to have only two sculptures, which are “Cupapadre,” a floating croissant with a butterfly perched on top, and “Untitled,” a soft but solid, melting lavender piano—a reference to Salvador Dali. However, the understated shift in wall color—from brown to gray to purple—emphasizes photographs of the museum’s architecture that are covering the room.
This optical illusion does not succeed in disorienting viewers—it only serves to take away from the power of the photographs and divert attention from the main installation.
Even if Fischer and the museum did marginally miss the mark, the raw power and magnificence of this exhibit still achieve enormous staying power.
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