Urs Fischer: Homo Ludens
interview by Lola Kramer
The morning after the opening of “Urs Fischer: Error”, an exhibition of work from the last two decades at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Connecticut, curator and writer
Lola Kramer sat down with Fischer at his studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. What began as a discussion about this exhibition turned into a conversation about play, community, and what it means to be an artist.
LOLA KRAMER : Before we get into “Urs Fischer: Error”, I thought we could talk about what isn’t included. Last year, you started a collaborative project with Spencer Sweeney and others, called Headz, that explored improvisation through jazz and drawing. It took place in a loft in Chinatown and developed over a year. Anyone who knew about it could come. I feel that this was a significant project for you, but by its very nature, it slips under the radar. Can you tell me about this?
URS FISHER : We didn’t advertise much to anybody. We just told a few people. It was only 10, 20 people [at first]. Then neighbors started trickling in, and neighborhood kids. The musicians brought someone, this person brought someone, and this person brought someone else. It just built up all on its own, and organically grew over a year into its own thing. Then, logically, after a while, you have a particular core group. It also ended in a beautiful place.
But this spring, Headz popped up again, in Berlin. When it happened in New York, it felt very much tied to local energy, specific to the city. How did it translate?
It was awesome. It was very different from the New York version where Spencer and I tried not to have the art world––whatever that is, it’s a bullshit world that doesn’t exist. But there are different pockets of the thing that we could call the art world. We tried not to have the people that are hopping from one opening to the next. We just want to have a community. In Berlin, we had only four weeks, five days a week. We didn’t have the time to build this community as slowly, so we reached out more to people who might be interested and hoped that they’d bring someone. It was much more tied to––and in communication with—its context. To my surprise, it worked, just in a different way. It didn’t die right there. As long as it’s disconnected from any place where things need to be [under] art world “governance,” and there isn’t a commercial or professional or curatorial attachment to it, it works. We’ll bring it to Paris in the fall. I think we want it to continue.
So the general idea of creating a temporary, free space for music and drawing will remain, but each iteration will adopt a renewed character and tone, depending on surrounding influences. Can you talk about what’s essential for you when you’re looking for a space?
In Kreuzberg, we looked for a neighborhood that has a tradition, like here [in New York], we were in Chinatown. You need a neighborhood that has a [sense of] tradition, or a multi-layered history of people living in other ways, which you have in lower Manhattan, where diverse people of all ages, who do it all differently, can come and create a mixture. It’s through somebody that knows this guy, or that guy who knows this little building. We had a small courtyard and then two buildings. Like a kind of compound. It’s cool, and it almost feels kind of shady and not “done up,” you know?
Was there any other advertising besides word of mouth?
We had some billboards outside for other people. We just made small drawings and then went to the photocopy shop. You could see them from the train. That was very funny.
What have you discovered while doing this project?
It’s like the “unlearning” we talk about now. Those who have a blank slate tend to feel more comfortable and could do more in Headz. The people who already engage in the visual arts as their profession, or their main activity, had a harder time to make that bridge...Which is to do something. That’s what the beauty was. For me, it was the creation of this environment where there’s no competition. It’s not a means to an end. They just do it. It doesn’t need to represent anything. But because you have so many drawings up on the walls by different people, we don’t stand there, pants down, alone, naked. It’s on the wall, and that’s you.
Even though people are producing drawings, making food, and playing music, it’s more immaterial. You’re making space for a community’s creative energy to emerge. But you’ve also invited the community to contribute to projects with you before.
It’s like the experience I had with the clay project at MOCA, for example: we all worked collectively, but I defined the material and the subject matter. It was just one material. But all the parameters are given by only using more material and making sculpture––basically like Minimalism, or Arte Povera. It’s this material thing.
In spite of it being a project that invites participation, there’s a significant difference for you between inviting the community to create clay sculptures with you at MOCA and inviting the community to participate in Headz.
Totally. I think with Headz it’s much freer. I see MOCA more like a work that I make or create with the participation of all these people. And being there, everybody has their own space, but with Headz, it’s not the same… With Headz, you synthesize the positive aspect of this experience, but you shape out the part that caps it or channels it into one direction, and the part that makes it more of an artwork in a traditional way. Headz is more open. It’s not there to become an artwork. It’s there as an experience and it’s not channeled through one single individual. Everything is interchangeable, the place is interchangeable. And there is no place for you to go back to. That’s the idea. It’s not even art. It doesn’t want to be art, or it doesn’t want to be an artwork. It’s just like, “Please, let us be.”
How do you see this next iteration of Headz evolving in Paris? In Paris, there is an excellent Northern African and African music and cultural scene. With the food, even. It’s almost like a seed. You start with the seed instead of just starting from scratch. You bring a few people from here and there, and they know how it works so they can kind of guide you. I would like much more to bring in this music. Or maybe even [include] a folk thing, from different pockets. I don’t know much about these music scenes, but you just want to start with these people and see what kind of crowd we bring in this way. I think we’ll try to make Headz more interesting, and use local energies.
You mentioned that you’re working on a publication.
Yes. I haven’t planned an integrated framework yet. It currently has 3,500 pages, and it’s a magazine, in 18 volumes. And they’re in pizza boxes. It’ll be out in September. The idea was to put everything in and to not be like: “This is good art, or this is bad art.” And when you put everything in and see the context, it’s actually incredible. This publication is a labor of love.
I’d also like to talk with you about Play, which you first exhibited in New York, and again in L.A. Play also unfolds over time, but through robotics and machine learning. The work is programmed to respond to those who interact with it physically in space, but it gradually gets smarter.
The chairs in Play function mainly according to behaviors, rather than a set script. The behaviors have different hierarchies. In different situations, they favor one behavior over another. A lot of their
movement is taken from the situation around them. They’re just there for you. They can be busy with themselves. In a way, they move you around that moment when your behavior is influenced by the other. If you get approached, you might stand still, or it might respond to you, so already you move differently. It’s like anything in life: what we bring to a situation is what it becomes. It’s what interests me with this work. There is no one thing that this “is.” Each time it’s a different experience, and it’s your own. It doesn’t necessarily happen the same way for somebody else.
Did you find people related differently to these objects? Children usually have an easier way to relate to this. They start running, Men typically try to figure out how it’s made. You can watch people just as much as the chairs. Our need for order is... immense.
You also collaborated with the artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander. At what point did you bring her on board?
At some point, we started working on the hardware and on the idea for what they should do. I’m not educated––or don’t have a sophisticated sense of movement––so that’s why I brought in Madeline. I wanted to bring in someone who understands and has a better eye for it. She started to refine the general animations and choreograph how they interact.
There’s a movie called Pumping Iron, and I think it’s the last time Schwartzenegger ran for Mr. Universe. It’s an excellent documentary. 1978 or ‘77. Interesting in many aspects. He hired a choreographer to transition from one pose to the next. In a way, that’s one thing that might be very technical. If you move in this way instead of that way, it speaks to you differently. Working with Madeline has been educational.
Can you tell me how the title came about?
The day when we had to send the title off, I took a book from a bookshelf… it’s called Homo Ludens, or The Playful Human. It’s all about play, and in this case, it’s all about play as the basis of culture. It’s an interesting book. It’s probably the first English word I ever learned. I had this little tape recorder that said “play,” and you could press that button, which is also the font we used for the show.
This sense of play feels vital to your work in general. I feel like the exhibition at the Brant Foundation captures this. Like your relationship with fantasy and fiction, for example. I think of Invisible Mother, where you have a skeleton bending backward across a chair, placed inside of a fountain. It’s tortured, but there is a level of humor. What was the idea for this?
Yes, it’s a little dark. I wanted to make a skeleton Pietà. Initially, there was a skeleton sitting and a skeleton holding the other like a dead Pietà. There were originally two figures. And then because it looked so shitty because the skeleton sitting didn’t have enough volume to hold up the one that’s lying there, I removed the one on the chair and used the chair in the other’s place.
It seems like you’re not afraid of the macabre, and of addressing mortality. Your wax candle portraits make me think of the memento-mori, for instance… especially the self-portrait. Maybe this is a strange question, but have you ever made any sort of “funerary” objects?
No… but I want a screen at my gravesite. I want to have a screen with some stuff playing. A screen where they have the 5,000 best funerary sculptures come up. Maybe with an advertisement in between.
Have you ever been to the Santa Maria della Concezione catacombs in Rome? There are skeletons of monks dressed in robes and staged in animated positions. And different types of bones decorate the crypt’s walls and ceilings. It’s macabre. Almost Disney-like.
I’ve seen images. That’s so funny. One of the first Disney films was actually the dancing skeletons. Isn’t that the first Disney film? Ub Iwerks was the first animator, a German-American guy who worked for Disney. I don’t think Disney started it.
I think it’s called Silly Symphonies or The Skeleton Dance. I remember at one point in the cartoon there’s a skeleton which takes a bath and puts a towel through his ribcage to dry himself off. Can you talk about your fascination with the figure of the skeleton?
Where I grew up, there is this classic medieval motif of the skeleton. In these pictures of skeletons, they’re usually alive. They’re doing stuff. I always liked that as a kid. The skeletons I use don’t come from a youth or “cool” culture. Mine are more like the medieval ones. They do things. Here’s a good one [shows iPhone]. This one’s called the Basler Totentanz (The Basel Dance of Death)... I never saw this in person, but I know it from pictures. It’s the same thing. It seems like the bare essence of us in some way. It’s almost like these stupid little figures people use to draw. It’s paired down. It doesn’t have features, it doesn’t have long or short hair. It doesn’t have any identifying body shape. It’s almost like a line-drawing, or like when you play hangman.
With a game like hangman, or in these cartoons, something morbid or scary becomes playful. It doesn’t really matter what age you are.
It’s like the way Steven Spielberg always uses a child to tell the story. I used to read this interview book about 15, 20 years ago when it came out. It was a series of interviews with directors like Spielberg, Bertolucci, and others. The interviews from the 1970s are interesting. Anything Spielberg did was criticized at that point. But in it, he shares his vision, more in terms of what he would like to achieve, and you just hear this guy’s mind... And then we know what happened after, and what Spielberg came to stand for. In my generation, he was the guy that made all of the great movies. Everything he did was not done at that point.
Like in E.T. He’s able to access a childlike frame of mind as an adult. Which isn’t always easy.
It’s all childhood related. I started to watch this documentary called Spielberg. They go in the order of how he makes things, I think. The guy must’ve had a shit-ton of therapy. But, wow. He’s amazing. Everything in his work relates to his childhood. Like, everything. From being bullied when he was the only Jewish kid in his non-Jewish neighborhood... Close Encounters [of the Third Kind], now that’s a good one. Have you ever watched that? When Richard Dreyfuss builds the Devil’s Tower in mashed potatoes, and how he uses sound. His outlook is from a child’s perspective. It’s beautiful, but it’s also demented.
That moment with the mashed potatoes reminds me of your sculpture Big Clay #3. It’s childlike and fantastical. Things in this realm don’t always look as they appear, or they feel larger than life. Banal objects or material can become animated through challenging the boundaries of sculpture. For example, in Horse/Bed, you have a very dignified looking horse, but there’s a hospital bed imposing itself through it. It’s a classical, idealized, and heroic form, turned surreal. It’s absurdist. How did this come about?
It’s a strange piece. My oldest daughter had some weird random thing, and she fell very ill, so we were in intensive care. I was sitting next to this hospital bed for two weeks, and I was just staring at it. It can massage you, it can heat and cool, it vibrates. It weighs you. It’s this weird machine that can sit you up and lower you. It does everything. It fascinated me.
When did you decide to combine it with the horse?
That comes out of a much crazier sculpture of a horse-drawn carriage. The carriage has a roof but no closed front, and it’s got two rows, so one can ride as a passenger. There were supposed to be a multitude of objects flying through it like a big gust of wind, that would be chaotic. They look like they have no gravity and [everything would] tumble through it. They would all have been attached at some point to that horse or carriage. One of these objects, the biggest and most complicated of them, was the hospital bed. It was way too crazy to get it done, financially. It was impossible to even go near it. I had to abandon that project, but then one day I was on the computer, and I just moved the horse, slid that bed into the horse. And I thought, “Okay, that’s it.” It does the same [thing], just in a reduced way.
Then came the rhino.
Later, with the rhino I picked up this idea of “things” passing through you, tumbling through you… I thought it’s good to have this dramatic protagonist, and something that comes from further back in time, and like you say, heroic, but it’s the heroism of nature, from long ago, and it comes through to the present.
Does the horse have anything to do with Charles Ray’s Horse and Rider?
No. I think we worked a bit when Ray was working on his sculpture. It doesn’t come from that. It comes from the horse and carriage. I was looking for a protagonist that moves, that implies motion. That’s why I had the carriage. I was looking for a taxidermy horse that also shows slight movement. It’s got one foot forward, but ever so slightly. It is an old, taxidermy horse. That’s a whole other story. Sculpting taxidermy, no mystery actually.
The idea of selecting a protagonist is an interesting way of pushing the sculptural form.
Charles Ray’s sculpture is 2014. My sculpture is from 2013. If that answers your question.
I’d like to get back to “Urs Fischer: Error”. You’ve said that you’re attracted to the idea of “error,” and that “anything we do successfully in life is a potential error.” I feel like some artists who get attention early on become afraid to fail. Or that failure as a necessary and positive part of the creative process becomes harder to access. Do you think that experimentation and discovery through failure, or “error,” is critical to being a successful artist?
I think it’s also about humility. There is no humility if you believe you are in control... A friend of mine told me the following analogy. It’s a longer story, regarding who told him that, and the circumstances, but it was a very successful and wise artist in his early 90s. My friend said, “How do you do all of this?” And he said, “These two hands. The right hand: it’s all of your accomplishments. Everything you ever did. And the left hand is all of your dreams. If the right hand is bigger than your left hand, then that’s it. You’re done.” In a way, it’s just a story, but there is something to it. People tend to place value on the wrong things.
That is only production for its own sake.
That’s a traditional New York artist’s problem: product. That comes from the city and its demands, and the lifestyle. It’s very easy to fall into a lifestyle that demands you to perform in a certain way.
That’s why I think Headz is a significant project.
It’s the anti-product in a way. The other thing is, I think, a certain social prestige, in whatever world you operate in, you can be a noncommercial artist that is more concerned with the “curatorial circuit,” or, that’s the wrong wording, but it’s more about remembering that we have nothing to do with that. You might want to appeal to these people, or to a common sense of what’s interesting now, or how things should be done now, and that can also corrupt you. It’s not even just a moment. It’s like anything that you hold onto and want to maintain. It’s tough–as a human being, not only as an artist–to keep clarity around your motivation and your motives for doing anything. You’re usually not conscious about most of that. Not only that, but you’re not ready to sacrifice. You see, for example, we smoke cigarettes or Juuls, and I was thinking about this recently. My daughter ate some candy, and I said, go give some to her pet rat, and she would not. So we humans will eat things that we would not feed to pets, that we think is bad for them. The other thing is that we drink things that
we would not water our plants with. We wouldn’t pour alcohol on our plants. The plant would just die. It’s very hard to gain a certain level of control, awareness, consciousness, or mindfulness around what you put in and how that intersects. I don’t know. The good thing is that nobody needs it.
Needs what?
Nobody needs to have a career or be successful. Nobody needs to make an artwork. When all of the things come together I’m just very thankful for it, but... if you manage to that’s incredible. There are some moments when I think I just got somewhere and can be totally wrong. In these moments, I’m just thankful for this, and for anything that we have. The rest is just missed opportunities. Maybe that’s good for one’s life. Some people need to have that journey, and perhaps more than having a successful art career.
Do you think of art as serving a function?
It’s serving a function. I think it serves less of a function in the present. I think the most substantial purpose it has is in the long term.
If it’s good.
Well, even when it’s not so good. Let’s say we looked at these old murals, that are okay. They are not the best, but they work as a little memory capsule from the past. We will have many more. We have now entire movies, we have color photographs of our parents. When my children are grown up, they’ll have thousands of iPhone videos of themselves growing up. Maybe that’s not synthesized enough. I think artworks capture the past, at least the ones we encounter now that come out of a little Apollo or Sputnik. If you think of historical moments, or civilizations, that’s kind of what’s left of them. Art communicates through time, with fewer references.
I read somewhere that in the future you imagine your works living on in reproductions, centuries from now. You said that “the work will live on like fantasy.” And “that some live even better as just an image.” So, ultimately, would you say that art is about forming a connection to others?
Yes, and belonging to a community. We can belong to something, and this thing can reflect back on you, and through that you see yourself. And you can also push that away.
Or you can talk, you know what they say, like how all of the conversations go in the art world, conversations that are closer to living in a small town where people are bitching about each other: “Look at these people. They paint the house orange. You can’t do that. It’d be he, or he and she did that.” And it’s not related to art—just because it happens in the art world doesn’t mean it’s art.
I agree... I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. We didn’t talk much about individual artworks, no?
Sometimes it’s helpful to get to know an artist through other entry points and let the work just “be,” like you said. That can sometimes be the most exciting interview for me.
Oh, for me too. The other kind can sometimes be very interesting. I don’t mind an occasional thing:, like a conversation that goes through individual works, and it’s like, “What’s there?” But that needs more time and distance in order for it to make sense. Where the artist, or the author or creator, whatever word you want to use, gained an awareness of what it was.
To go back to Spielberg... Actually, to round that off, him talking about these things from back then, it’s pretty interesting because there’s a lot of awareness.
I’m still pretty self-critical...