Urs Fischer, 2007
Friday 20 April - 3 June 2007 Monday to Sunday, 8.30am - 5pm convict-built prison barracks, Cockatoo Island, largest island in Sydney Harbour
Urs Fischer has a reputation for spontaneously creating bold, imaginative art exhibitions, often using a combination of prepared pieces and improvised works made entirely in situ. In his sculptures mundane objects such as furniture, fruit and vegetables undergo an alchemic transformation from the commonplace into the extraordinary, often bearing the marks of their experimental evolution.
At the invitation of Kaldor Art Projects the artist visited Sydney in the winter of 2006 and viewed a number of distinctive locations in and around Sydney. Cockatoo Island is a remarkable place, with the different phases of its occupation extant like some great archaeological layer-cake. In selecting the island site, Fischer has focused on its convict prison, eschewing the great cathedrals of ironwork that are the shipyard buildings and turbine halls - it is clearly the convict, not industrial context that he wished to utilise.
The prison on Cockatoo Island dates back to 1839 when the largely untouched site was chosen to house a new penal establishment. Overcrowding soon followed, and by 1857 public outrage at the conditions of the prisoners resulted in a Board of Enquiry into the management of Cockatoo Island and a wider enquiry in 1861 into the public prisons in Sydney. The prison was closed in 1869 but the tradition of incarceration continued until 1908, including a reform school for orphaned or delinquent girls and as a naval training facility for homeless or orphaned boys.
After alighting from the ferry and bypassing some massive industrial buildings, a road leads up a little hill towards a complex of sandstone prison buildings atop the island. Prisoner dormitories ring three sides of the central courtyard, with the doors of the large mess hall opening onto a lawn area and guardhouse beyond. If one ever needed a candidate for a '˜haunted house' this is it. Wandering around the rooms has a suspenseful edge, a frisson as you discover each new artwork.
Fischer often works in the traditional artistic media of drawing, sculpture and painting and the classical genre of still life. Memento mori in the form of skulls and skeletons litter his work, which are very often iterations on a vanitas theme, a specific branch of the still life genre that depicts inanimate objects that symbolise the brevity of human life and the transience of earthly pleasures and achievements. His works either do this explicitly through their subject matter or, less theatrically through an impermance or fragility that is always immanent.
As someone who often uses humour (in common with his Swiss contemporaries Fischli & Weiss), Fischer draws on a collective consciousness of worlds of fantasy and magic. One wonders to what extent might any intended lyricism be inhibited by the brutal specifics of the historical associations of this place? How will the inherent theatricality of these poetic interventions sit with the real ghosts who dwell here?
The central courtyard is occupied by an enigmatic cast white line that activates and engages with the volume of the square. One of a series of lines that Fischer has made in different colours, it appears as a kind of magical 'doodle', an exciting zooming manifestation of the artistic process realised in three-dimensional form. We can see two-dimensional antecedents of this in his photographs and drawings, where it forms a snaking border between realities, both outline and element. The hermetic quality of Fischer's work never more apparent, at various times of day the fibreglass appears as bleached-bone, tree-root and then alternately intestinal, arterial, extruded from yet other vantages. Evoking a sense of wonder akin to his raindrops, Vintage Violence 2004-5 (Collection François Pinault), it forms the central pole around which the rest of the installation gains its orientation.
At a time when conventional exhibition opportunities abound it is refreshing to behold an ambitious staging of a commissioned artwork in such a logistically challenging location. Risk is also an inherent part of the artist's approach, trying out impossible solutions, pushing temporal limits while drawing multiple connections towards an exhibition deadline. Like the product of some charged particle, the 'doodle' can be taken as a literal synaptic embodiment of these network connections.
Inside one of the rooms suspended by screws and wire, two plaster cast hands are conjoined at the elbow, possibly emblematic of polarities such as renewal and despair, charity and discipline. In another room a suspended upside-down pink head being held by a hand. This Rodin-esque work contrasts the hand, which was cast directly from the artist’s arm during installation, with a partial head, cast from a carved generic head. The inverted gesture might indicate pensiveness, but the claustrophobic surroundings and intense pink evoke more anguished readings.
Disembodied limbs, involving plaster, moulds and robotics appear frequently in the artist's work... the gaol dormitory location (as opposed to a white cube) brings with it a new set of associations, implying a deeper meaning to the obvious focus on gesture. There is a definite 'spookiness' to these crucified apparitions floating in space, seemingly loaded gestures reminiscent of Fra Angelico's disembodied prayer hands in the San Marco Convent murals that served as visual cues for religious contemplation.
Chairs, real or otherwise appear often in Fischer's work in a multitude of variations and forms. Rarely functional, they serve as surrogates for the human form, 'good errand boys' as described by the artist. Across the courtyard in one of the dormitory rooms a cheap and old dressing table and chair have been smashed into small pieces and then reconstructed. The reconstituted chair perches precariously on the dressing table, an open drawer reveals a similarly shattered two-handled bowl. The viewer gets the impression these pieces are just managing to hold themselves together, a fragility emphasised by the nature of the arrangement - a fraught balancing act in momentary equilibrium.
Perhaps the most obvious marker of the artist's fondness of classical genres, Urs Fischer's oft-used skeletons are frequently the props used in a modern danse macabre. Whether they are smoking a cigarette, napping on benches or even doing a bit of yoga, they are a useful generic form and the perfect vehicle for black comedy. Humour isn't at the forefront in this instance, one leg seems trapped by material possessions, yet it's unclear if the skeleton wants to ascend heaven-ward or descend, or is most intent on struggling to extricate itself from worldly concerns.
Passing from the mess hall across a lawn that originally served as a defensive perimeter from the convict living quarters, the viewer is inexorably funnelled towards a monolithic work. The heavy wardrobe looks as if it has been abandoned; one of its heavy doors stands ajar with the promise of secret fantasy worlds beyond (with difficultly you can peer in to gain an oblique glimpse in a mirror). It stands silently at one end of the guardhouse, at the culmination of a central axis formed by the courtyard work and the skeleton. The seeming passage of time has allowed (transplanted) spinifex grass to colonise the top of the distressed wardrobe, complemented by an instant patina courtesy of bird strike, dust and rain...as though the site has instantly claimed the work. A direct ancestor of this piece is a similarly sand-cast aluminium piece from 2003 (The Dakis Joannou Collection), featuring a skeleton contemplating its own reflection in the mirror above a large dressing table. In contrast, this time it is the viewer who is actively involved, straining to catch his or her own reflection.
Taken together his vanitas still lives and memento mori subjects aspire to relate to a collective consciousness of human frailty, and while they draw on the residue of human habitation they avoid specific references to the history of the Island. To interpret this as an unreflective use of a heritage context would be to misconstrue Fischer's goals. It is the success of his sympathetic approach that he resists glossing over specific memory. In the resulting sculptures he's seeking to relate to the broader human condition, marshalling the historical associations of the gaol to constructively amplify the resonances of his work.
