Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/130754
An installation view with Untitled (Bed), 2011 at the center. 2011, which stole the show at the last Venice Biennale, is made entirely of wax. The largest piece, a wax cast of Giambologna's 16th-century marble statue The Rape of the Sabine Women, is over 20 feet tall. Each sculpture is also a candle that will burn down to nothing over the course of the exhibition. Despite the hype, Fischer remains modest about his work. He is unwilling to be pinned down on what his art means, or how it should be read. When I ask what made him want to collaborate with so many people for his clay project, he shrugs and says, "I don't know. It's fun." He goes on: "I think art's so conservative sometimes. I'm personally not interested in a lot of it. I'm always happy when the art handlers say, 'Wow, that's a really cool piece.' It's not about, 'What does it all mean?'" Works guaranteed to delight the audience at the Grand Avenue retrospective include a suspended shower of fat blue raindrops (Horses Dream of Horses, 2004) and a house made entirely of bread Untitled (Bread House), 2004–05. MOCA trustee Peter Morton, who has lent works from his own collection to the exhibition, observes, "I look at Fischer's approach as open source because 96 CULTURED he eschews conventional art hierarchies." When I suggest to Fischer that many of the volunteers' sculptures seem to borrow from Fischer's imagery, he answers, "I think most of these people don't really even know my work. We had a lot of kids who just came and made these things, totally in their own minds." So does it please him that the subjects he has favored in his work—cats, candles, skeletons and food—are the same that children choose? "There are not that many things in the world of the human. How many things can you think of? These are the same images I like too, but these are the images that are in people—they're not my images." Fischer shares what he calls a "basically non-academic approach to art" with European figures such as Petter Fischli and David Weiss, Franz West and Georg Herold. MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch calls it "a renegade art history," which Fischer "wrestles...with the grace and strength of a champion athlete." Fischer's work is ultimately about the joys and confusion of everyday living. As Morton puts it: "For him, art is part of life, rather than removed from it. He is ensconced in his work, and similarly, it with him."