Freshly showered, Urs Fischer mopped his forehead, face, and neck with a paper towel. It was a muggy morning in July, and Fischer, the thirty-six-year-old Swiss artist, was feeling the heat. His frayed blue cotton shirt was stretched tight over an ample torso; through gaps and tears in the fabric, I caught glimpses of extensive virtuoso tattoos (floral, abstract, and figurative); more tattoos were in view on his beefy bare arms. We were having coffee and croissants in the front room of a loft apartment on Bond Street, where Fischer lives with his American girlfriend Cassandra MacLeod and their three cats. Any day now, they were expecting their first baby. Fischer was also getting ready for his first New York museum show, which will open on October 28th, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
With patient good humor and a lopsided smile—his mouth turning up on the right side only—he addressed a question I had asked him about art’s ability to have a life of its own, apart from what the artist may have had in mind. “I think art works best in people’s memories,” he said. “For me, it’s not just the act of going to see it on the wall. I’m not saying it’s bad to do that, although very often it can be disappointing, you know? But in the memory, with all the things you’ve heard about it, all the stories, art becomes this great, rich, flexible thing.”
Fischer’s own art, like Fischer himself, is highly memorable but hard to pin down. It consists, for the most part, of three-dimensional objects made from materials not usually associated with art. Fischer’s “Bread House” (2004-05) is just what the title says: a life-size one-room alpine chalet whose walls and roof are made from bread loaves in various sizes and shapes. I saw it in 2007, in an exhibition at the Deste Foundation, in Athens, and it has made frequent appearances on my memory screen ever since. In the Athens version (there have been two others), the chalet’s floor was covered with Oriental rugs, which muffled the crunching of fallen bread crumbs underfoot. I’ve read that there were live parakeets hopping around other installations of this piece, in Rotterdam and at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, in New York. There were no parakeets in Athens, to my recollection, but when I think of the piece now I usually see them, decoratively pecking at crumbs.
The Deste Foundation is owned by Dakis Joannou, a sixty-nine-year-old Greek construction and hotel magnate who is one of the world’s leading collectors of contemporary art. Also featured in the Deste exhibition, along with works by Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Chris Ofili, and other art-market headliners, was Fischer’s “What If the Phone Rings?” (2003), another hard-to-forget piece involving three life-like, hand-colored wax sculptures of nude women in traditional poses: seated, supine, and prone. Each figure had wicks implanted in one or more parts of her anatomy. The wicks were lit at the start of the exhibition, and the progressive melting, with its resulting cavities, disfigurations, and dripping or puddling wax, would continue until the end of the show, after which Joannou would have the figures recast and repainted. The process costs twenty-five thousand dollars, I am told, and Joannou considers this money well spent.
Since Fischer first began showing his work, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, in Europe, he has produced an enormous number of objects, drawings, collages, and room-size installations. “I love working,” he told Massimiliano Gioni, the young Italian-born curator of his upcoming show at the New Museum. “I don’t know what to look for in my work but I consider it a good friend of mine.” His pieces range in size and scale from an ordinary apple and pear—both real, halved, decaying, and joined together by a large screw—to a twenty-three-foot-high cast-bronze teddy bear sitting under a desk lamp, and a thirty-foot-high metal tree whose leaves are laser prints of more than two thousand of Fischer’s vivid, slapdash drawings. He has made collage paintings out of dust bunnies, and indoor rain showers of suspended egg-size acrylic raindrops. The raindrop piece is called “Horses Dream of Horses.” His titles can be as quixotic as his materials. One of my favorites is “Change of Taste for Miss Cocktail,” a cast-nickel silver rat wielding, with its tail, a large hammer that’s about to bash its silly head in. Many of Fischer’s earlier works are reproduced in the catalogue for the New Museum exhibition, but the show itself, which will fill all three of the museum’s exhibition floors, contains only work finished within the past two years; quite a lot of it was still being fabricated over the summer, and this was causing problems. “Urs made a lot of changes in the plans,” Gioni confided to me, about two months before the opening. “I’ve worked with him before, and I know this happens—it’s part of the Urs mythology to push things to the very end. Today, I went to his studio and learned that a piece that was supposed to be a bed is now going to be a horse. One of the five huge cast-aluminum sculptures that are being made in China is behind schedule, so we can’t ship it by boat. Sending it by air is going to cost forty thousand dollars. I’m not surprised, but I’m pissed off. Urs’s commitment to the work is beyond any reasonable level. Of course, all great artists think that way.”
Is Fischer a great artist? Not yet, maybe, but you can’t be around him without noticing an abundance of certain qualities—self-confidence, energy, ambition, and the ability to drive curators bonkers, to name four—that could make him a contender. The cast-aluminum pieces that Gioni mentioned have been in the works since 2005, when Fischer began squeezing, pounding, and poking lumps of clay into more or less accidental bloblike forms. “I make them fast, not thinking about composition, and select a few,” he said. “It’s very raw.” With help from Scipio Schneider, a graphic designer whom he met when they were both sixteen-year-old schoolboys in Zurich, he found out how to scan the three-dimensional clay forms into a computer so that they could be reproduced in large scale, and then persuaded other well-wishers to fund the complex and expensive process of casting the blown-up versions in aluminum. (The casting was done in China, to save money.) Some of these have been shown privately in Europe. The five new pieces that were being cast for the New Museum ranged from ten feet to eighteen feet high. Fischer showed me a booklet that he and Schneider recently published, with Photoshop images of the forms, in much larger scale, in simulated urban settings. Dull gray in color, the sculptures were monstrous and menacing but, at the same time, strangely human, and, in certain settings, very funny. One of them, which had materialized by a river in Shanghai, towered above a group of high-rise office buildings. Another blocked an intersection in downtown Houston. Fischer’s original idea was to make the forms that big, or bigger. The American collector Peter Brandt bought a thirty-five-foot-high variant, which will be installed next year on his property in Connecticut. Art probably can’t compete with the real world, Fischer concedes, but why not try?
Fischer is not a conceptual artist. Although his work generates ideas, it never starts with them; it starts with the materials he uses, and the way he shapes them. At first, he made everything himself, by hand, wherever he happened to be working at the time. Dozens of skilled people in Zurich and Shanghai were building and assembling the elements of his New Museum show. Fischer is comfortable with this; he supervises the process so closely that his presence—large, provocative, and omnivorous—is ingrained in the result. Francesco Bonami, an independent curator who has worked with Fischer on several group shows in Europe (he will also curate next year’s Whitney Biennial), calls him “a perfectionist in imperfection.” Fischer greatly admires Jeff Koons, but his own work is the antithesis of Koons’s; high-tech precision does not interest him. “Urs’s sloppiness is absolutely perfect sloppiness,” Bonami told me. “It’s almost the platonic ideal of sloppiness. That’s the interesting part.”
The notion of being an artist didn’t occur to Fischer when he was growing up. He was born in Zurich in 1973. Both of his parents were (and still are) doctors. Urs was their second child—his older sister, Andrea, is now a journalist in Zurich, with two children of her own. “I found out recently that my parents were worried about me, because I seemed lazy, and they’re really happy now because I’m doing something,” Fischer said. “I was never interested in school, and I didn’t like to do homework.” At sixteen, he enrolled in the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich, a general arts-and-crafts academy for students who were not on the university track. That’s where he met Scipio Schneider, who already knew that he wanted to be a graphic designer. Fischer’s main interest then was photography. “If somebody we knew said he was going to be an artist,” Schneider recalled, “you thought, What a loser.” Fischer, who had a studio for his photographic work, remembers vowing that he would not spend his life in studios. After the basic, first-year course in art and design, he enrolled in the school’s photography department, and supported himself by working as a bouncer at Zurich night clubs and house parties. What was that like? I asked him. Did he intimidate people? “I don’t think so, no. How can I describe this? You learn you can talk with people. You can have problems with people, but you can also talk with them.” In Switzerland, most people are so well behaved that bouncers don’t do much bouncing, but Fischer’s physical presence was, according to Schneider and others, an effective deterrent.
After he’d spent two years in the photography department, Fischer said, “they wanted me to take some tests, to write stuff, and I didn’t see why I had to do this.” He quit school, went to visit friends in Amsterdam, and moved there in 1993, when he was nineteen. Amsterdam, unlike Zurich, was a lively center of contemporary art and artists. Fischer learned English there (he grew up speaking German), and got a grant to study at a professional art school run by Dutch artists. He also acquired a Bavarian girlfriend who was involved in filmmaking, and through her he began building and eventually designing film sets. (Fischer’s father, who rebuilt their hundred-and-sixty-year-old house in his spare time, had taught him a lot about Swiss carpentry and craftsmanship.) Most of the work he did in art school died a natural death, but a few things survived: a small wooden relief sculpture that offers a view into a fist—a partly clenched fist, open just enough on one side that you can look in and see the curled fingers—and three cheap, mass-produced chairs, altered sculpturally to suggest the positions people assumed in using them. It was a preview of two subjects—holes and chairs—that would appear many times in his future work.
A shift in attitude marked the advanced European art of the nineteen-nineties. Rejecting the subjectivity of the neo-expressionist generation and the market-savvy iconoclasm of American and British post-Pop, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Franz West, and other Europeans went in for eccentric, mostly figurative paintings and sculptures that invoked an aesthetic of messiness, cynicism, and decay. Echoes of this approach, but with more humor and less cynicism, infuse Fischer’s earliest work: the screwed-together apple and pear, two chairs that appear to be copulating, a collapsing cinder-block wall built on a bed of rotting fruits and vegetables. The wall figured, along with a group of drawings, in his first solo show, in 1996, at a gallery in Zurich. Eva Presenhuber, the gallery’s director at the time, had wanted to put him in a group show first, but he refused. He didn’t like the other work she was showing, and, he told me, “I was very suspicious about showing in a gallery.” He was making good money building sets, and was not at all sure that he wanted to be an artist. “His work was very strange,” Presenhuber said. “Hand-made sculpture, at a time when art was mostly conceptual, or appropriation—it looked like something I knew, but I didn’t know it in that way.” She offered Fischer a one-man show, and after some hesitation he agreed. He showed there again a year later, and when Presenhuber became a partner at a larger gallery in Zurich, in 1998, Fischer was one of her main artists. He got married that year, to his first and only Swiss girlfriend, and moved to London. The marriage ended, amicably, five years later, he said, “because we were always in different cities. I like to be with someone.”
Fischer’s current studio occupies a large warehouse in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, near the waterfront. I went over there with him one morning in late July, in his personalized BMW. Rock-band and travel stickers adorned the dashboard and the fenders; a big sticker on the rear bumper read “I ♥ Kippenberger.” Darren Bader, the only American on Fischer’s team of studio assistants, drove the car. Fischer likes fast cars and has owned a few, but he doesn’t drive. “I don’t know why not,” he said. “I think I would be a good driver.” He wore shorts and a dark shirt with white pinstripes. Running down one leg was a tattoo that read either “NEVER” or “FOREVER”—I wasn’t sure which.
The floor space in the studio, a hundred and eighty feet long by fifty feet wide, was occupied largely by cardboard models of the “mirror boxes” that would fill one of the three floors in the New Museum exhibition. There were more than thirty of them, ranging in height from two or three feet to eight feet (the same proportions as the finished boxes), and each one bore a single photographed image of something familiar: the Empire State Building, a raw T-bone steak, a London telephone booth, a cupcake, a sneaker, half a pear (greatly enlarged), a book, Teddy Roosevelt’s face (from Mt. Rushmore) on a cigarette lighter, a music stand, Froot Loops, a hanging chain. “This was something I started three, four years ago,” Fischer explained. There would be fifty-two boxes in all. The real ones, which were being fabricated to Fischer’s specifications at a workshop in Zurich, are made of metal, with a thin outer layer of polished stainless steel (not mirror glass), on which the silk-screened images appear to float in space. “I don’t want the body of the thing,” Fischer told me. “I just want the image.”
Getting this effect had been complicated and costly. Each image is a composite of many photographs, taken by a professional photographer in New York and minutely adjusted by computer to give an impression of volume on a flat surface. It would not have been possible to do this with the larger objects, like the Empire State Building, so Fischer used replicas—a tourist-shop model of the Empire State, a piggy-bank London telephone booth (with a coin slot on top). The complexities of the process eluded me, and Fischer didn’t feel like explaining it further. As soon as the cardboard models were all there, in about two weeks, he and his colleagues would begin moving them around, trying various combinations, to determine how the real ones would be installed at the museum when they arrived, in early October. I asked Fischer how he had decided on these particular images. “It’s kind of arbitrary,” he said. “It’s not about our culture now. It’s just objects I choose. I like that they are not very interesting things—or they are. It depends on your level of attention. And I don’t care about big or small. I’m interested in collisions of things, and how objects relate to each other.”
Since he moved into the Brooklyn studio, earlier this year, Fischer has spent a fair amount of money on it, putting in skylights and a combination kitchen and office space, up a flight of wide stairs from the ground-floor studio. He took me upstairs and introduced me to other members of his team: Scipio Schneider, on leave from his Zurich design office to coördinate the mirror-box project; Dominique Clausen, another longtime friend, who was overseeing the Photoshop work on the boxes; and Mia Marfurt, a computer whiz. Except for Darren Bader, our designated driver that morning, all of them are Swiss. So is Carmen D’Apollonio, who was out of town; a fashion designer who has her own clothing line in Zurich, D’Apollonio has been Fischer’s invaluable associate since 2000. “Carmen doesn’t like art,” Fischer told me. “She thinks it’s unnecessary, but she can relate to it, and you cannot manipulate her opinion. She will not lie. I kind of trust her as a first audience—the galleries I wouldn’t trust.”
A long table near the kitchen was set for lunch: three loaves of French bread, various cheeses, deli meats, spreads, olives, pickles, a few bottles of San Pellegrino water, but no wine or beer. (Fischer likes to drink, but not when he’s working.) The kitchen equipment was high-end; the counters were onyx, as befits an artist whose current work sells for upward of half a million dollars on the primary market. “If you spend so much time in a place, you want to be happy in it,” Fischer said, smiling his half smile. Lunch was convivial, at times boisterous. Schneider cut the bread and tossed hunks of it to the rest of us. There were jokes about the withered herbs in the planters—someone had sprayed them with denatured alcohol instead of water, by mistake. Fischer presided over the table without effort, a benevolent godfather.
Fischer has travelled a lot, and lived in several cities—Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, Berlin. Something about the mirror-box models downstairs made me think they might relate to New York, where he has been based since 2006. He said, “I love the Manhattan skyline. I see it every day, coming back from Brooklyn. Nobody could invent that—it’s the sum of so many things. It’s not Paris by Haussmann. There is one building I look at when I cross the Manhattan Bridge. A huge building, much taller than anything around it, that’s probably from 1890 or something. And the façade of that building ended up on a very narrow street! I like the uncontrollable—that’s what makes it so lively here. But the show is not about Manhattan.”
Fischer’s work got noticed very quickly in Europe, for reasons that are not immediately clear. The early pieces were rough and frequently ugly—shoddy, throwaway objects slapped together—but there was a kind of magic to the way he transformed his material. “His things didn’t have a contemporary look,” Gioni said. “They looked primitive. He’s playing with very deep archetypes—the fairy-tale house, the tree that every child climbs—but he’s not telling you what to think about them. He’s not an artist with a message.” Mick Flick, an adventurous German collector whose grandfather supplied the Wehrmacht with weapons (and went to jail for war crimes), bought a lot of Fischer’s early work. By 2003, he was showing with Sadie Coles, in London, and Gavin Brown, in New York. For his 2003 show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, he sawed a big hole into one of the gallery’s walls and stood the cutout against an adjoining wall. A year later, he had a major exhibition at the Kunsthaus, Zurich. It included a lot of early work, in many different materials—painted styrofoam or polyurethane heads and body parts, glass and mirror labyrinths, a broom seemingly held up by a balloon, skeletons in peculiar situations—and some of the more recent set pieces, including “Horses Dream of Horses” and “What If the Phone Rings?” Now and then, his constructions and deconstructions echoed work by other artists—Gordon Matta-Clark had cut cross-sectional pieces from houses in the nineteen-seventies; Bruce Nauman and others have used wax heads and cast body parts—but Fischer’s work was not derivative. He used whatever he felt like using, and gave it a life of its own.
A number of important European collectors and museums got on board after the Kunsthaus show, but until recently his work was little known outside Europe. This may be one of the reasons that Fischer moved from Berlin to New York. “Some artists are confident and clueless,” Gavin Brown told me, “but Urs is not clueless.” Fischer’s entry caused a stir at the 2006 Whitney Museum Biennial—two enormous holes in two gallery walls, providing a long view of a painting by Fischer’s close friend Rudolf Stingel, an Italian artist with whom he had shared studios in Berlin and New York. For his 2007 show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, he excavated the gallery’s main room, bringing in contractors to dig an eight-foot hole where the floor had been, and calling the result “You.” Intrepid visitors climbed down into the pit; others peered nervously from above. The New York critic Jerry Saltz called it “one of the most splendid things to have happened in a New York gallery in a while.” Brown, who is closer in spirit to his artists than most dealers are, takes pride in knowing that “You” could have been done only in a commercial gallery, “where the landlord didn’t know what we were doing, and where by the skin of our teeth we could get away with it.” (Chris Burden had done something similar—and much larger— in 1986, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, with a piece called “Exposing the Foundation of a Museum.”) “You” has been sold, and the piece will be re-created, under Fischer’s supervision, by a private foundation in the New York area.
A lot is riding on the New Museum show, both for Fischer and for the museum. Since its reopening, in 2007, in a new building on the Bowery, this thirty-year-old institution has sought to play a more central role in the presentation of cutting-edge art. Its young and adventurous curators have been doing the kind of exploratory theme shows that MOMA and the Whitney rarely attempt, for a growing audience that seems avid for membership in the downtown art scene. “I’m very curious to see what Urs is going to do there,” Rudi Stingel said the other day. “The New Museum has always been something like Off Broadway, but Urs is not ‘off.’ Maybe he can turn this around.”
Lotti MacLeod, Urs and Cassandra’s baby, was born on July 25th. She was awake when I visited the Bond Street loft a couple of weeks later, calm and lovely in her cushioned carry-cot. One of the three cats paused occasionally to study her. Both parents radiated parenthood. (Cassandra is an artist herself; three of her small, rather haunting paintings of familiar objects—cats, food—hung on the wall.) The doorbell rang, and a delivery boy came in with a present for Lotti, in a long box from Bonpoint; one of the cats promptly jumped on the table and knocked it off. Fischer said the New Museum show was coming together slowly. When I asked about the new piece, the horse, he said, “No more horse. It doesn’t work, it became a joke—too funny.” In its place, he had decided to use two freestanding crutches, the kind that fit on the forearms, which would be cast in aluminum. “It’s kind of the same as the horse, because it’s very leggy,” he said. “The crutches will communicate with each other.”
Fischer was going to Zurich the following week, for a few days, to check on the mirror boxes, and after that he was off to China to see how the last of the big cast-aluminum sculptures—the one that should have been finished long ago—was coming along. I asked him whether these sculptures had names. “They have pseudonyms,” he said. “The pseudonyms that Mallarmé used in his fashion magazine.” He couldn’t remember them at the moment, but he e-mailed four of them to me: “Ix,” “Miss Satin,” “Marguerite de Ponty,” and “Zizi.” (The tallest, still unfinished sculpture had not yet been named.) “I wanted names for them, but I thought it was nicer to have a name that’s a pseudonym. Otherwise, if you give a name to a sculpture, it’s really the name.” Fischer is a great reader, I knew, but I had heard that he read mostly about art and artists. Had he also read Mallarmé? “No,” he said. “Well, I do, a bit. But no.”
Three weeks before the show opened, I learned that the official title was “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty.” The mirror boxes hadn’t yet arrived from Zurich, but were expected soon—all by air freight. Fischer was insisting that Gioni have the third-floor gallery’s ceiling lowered, at enormous expense; when that was accomplished, he planned to paper the walls with photographic replicas of the way they looked after the last show was taken down, scars and all (don’t ask), as a backdrop for some large collage paintings that he was working on in his studio. “Urs doesn’t think it will work, philosophically, unless he does this,” Gioni said. “I told him that philosophy shouldn’t cost that much. In this last month I have thought a couple of times of killing him.”
Reached by telephone, Fischer said everything was fine. The ceiling of the third-floor gallery was being lowered. He had signed off on the catalogue, which had been giving them all nightmares, and he was sure the new pieces would get finished in time for the opening. “I’m not worried,” he said. “Now it’s playtime.” ♦
