Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty

Urs Fischer, Service à la française (left to right: Dental Hygienist; Repo Man; Landlord; Taxi Driver), 2009. Silkscreen on mirrored chrome steel, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist; Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich. Installation view: “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty.” Photograph by Benoit Pailley.

New Museum - New York

By Jeff Edwards

On paper, Urs Fischer’s New Museum exhibition “Marguerite de Ponty” has all the hallmarks of contemporary-art greatness: polish, intelligence, scope, scale, and a grand underlying concept-that of showing how easily fake images can fool us into abandoning lived reality. Yet once one is caught within the exhibition’s three floors of over-the-top, whiz-kid gestures, the sense of intellectual heft quickly gets buried under the show’s flash and half-resolved trickery.

The exhibition’s showstopper is Last Call Lascaux (2009), a subtle wallpaper reproduction of the entire third-floor gallery that covers the room’s walls and ceiling with a purplish, underexposed photographic image of its actual features. Referencing the Lascaux cave paintings, the title suggests that the images that have been our constant companions since prehistory are now ready to shove us aside and take over. It is a beautiful and technically astounding piece, but its brilliance does not linger. The disruptive presence of flippant faux-Surrealist sculptures such as a melting piano in painted metal (Untitled, 2009) and a butterfly perched on a suspended croissant (Coupadre, 2009) makes the whole enterprise seem forced, more a latest trick than a last call. Managed by a surer hand, the juxtaposition might have enriched the point that Lascaux is trying to make, but there is something ho-hum about the sculptures; we have seen them somewhere before, done better.

A similar mixture of ostentation and déjà vu flows throughout the show, sabotaging its conceptual underpinnings at each step. On the second floor, Service à la Française (2009) presents a jumbled assortment of massive rectangular chrome boxes covered with enlarged photographic images of 51 objects spanning the worlds of nature, kitsch, fashion, and commodity. Many of the items reproduced are semblances themselves, as in a tourist-ready sculpture of the Empire State Building with a tiny King Kong at its pinnacle. We are probably meant to think about ever-receding levels of reality in the world around us, but the glare of crowd-pleasing shiny glitz gets in the way, as do recollections of stronger works in the same vein, such as Jeff Koons’ better pieces, or Keith Tyson’s massive sculptural lexicon of reality Large Field Array (2007).

Not everything in “Marguerite de Ponty” falls flat. A set of massive aluminum sculptures on the fourth floor that enlarges a few tiny, squeezed clay lumps into titanic forms with cyclopean fingerprints weds beauty and whimsy very effectively. Yet far too often gimmickry thwarts wonder: once one figures out that electromagnets are behind the midair hovering cake of The Lock (2007), one feels ready to move on without a look back.

In some ways, the promise and disappointment of the show is best captured by Noisette (2009), a mechanical tongue in the Lascaux room that pops out from a hole in the wall at anyone who wanders by. One can take the piece as a tribute to the winking playfulness that permeates much of exhibition, yet it is also hard not to read it as an ironically appropriate salute to the show’s half-baked approach to hyperrealism.

(October 21 - February 14, 2010)

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