1. Sculpture
“I believe you start the day when you go to bed, not when you wake up,” said Urs Fischer. It was an unseasonably warm early February day, and the 39-year-old Swiss-born artist was in his studio in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn, wearing jeans and a pale blue sweater that mostly covered the tattoos that blanket his arms; around his neck he’d knotted, apparently for aesthetic effect, a silk scarf bearing a yellow and blue pattern. “I brush my teeth, I shave, I put clothes out, ready for the next day, I take a shower and I go to bed.”
Our conversation had turned to beds, because Mr. Fischer—who has made art in many different modes, from digging holes in floors to manufacturing reflective metal boxes with photographs of objects adhered to them to sculpting a tongue that, with the help of a motion detector, sticks out of the wall at viewers—had been making life-size sculptures of beds or, perhaps to put it better, sculptures based on beds, or based on things that, in some imagined world, happen to beds. One of these bed sculptures sat in the center of his studio. In its case, a bed appeared to have buckled under the weight of a load of concrete in which boot prints were visible. The piece, which he referred to as Kratz, wasn’t quite finished, he hastened to add as we stood over it. The concrete would need to look “more liquidy,” he said, running his hands through his hair briskly—a gesture he made often that afternoon, as though it helped him to think—and directing at the piece an expression of vague consternation. He likes, he said, “the perversion of something that looks soft.”
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