Ernst Fischer "18%"

ERNST FISCHER

2014/15

ERNST FISCHER 18%

CUE ART FOUNDATION

FEBRUARY 7 - MARCH 14, 2015 1

Each year, CUE invites ten individuals from across the country to anonymously nominate up to three artists for the solo exhibition program. Artists are invited to apply, and the final selection is made by an independent jury each fall. Jurors for the 2014-15 season were Magdalena Sawon, owner/director of Postmasters Gallery; Papo Colo, artist and former founder/director of Exit Art; and Gregory Amenoff, artist and former Chair, Visual Arts, Columbia University School of the Arts.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Gregory Amenoff Theodore S. Berger Sanford Biggers Thomas G. Devine Thomas K.Y. Hsu Vivian Kuan Corina Larkin Brian D. Starer

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CURATORIAL ADVISORY COUNCIL Gregory Amenoff Katie Cercone Lynn Crawford Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Sharon Lockhart Andrea Zittel

CUE FELLOWS

STAFF

Polly Apfelbaum Theodore S.Berger, Chair Ian Cooper William Corbett Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Deborah Kass Corina Larkin Jonathan Lethem Rossana Martinez Juan Sรกnchez Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow Carolyn Somers Lilly Wei

Dena Muller Executive Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director Hannah Malyn Development Manager Shona Masarin-Hurst Programs Manager

CUE ART FOUNDATION IS A DYNAMIC VISUAL ARTS CENTER DEDICATED TO CREATING ESSENTIAL CAREER AND EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR EMERGING ARTISTS OF ALL AGES. THROUGH EXHIBITIONS, ARTS EDUCATION, AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS, CUE PROVIDES ARTISTS AND AUDIENCES WITH SUSTAINING AND MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCES AND RESOURCES.

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ERNST FISCHER

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STATEMENT In my experience, things tend to happen just when you’re looking away. Our ideas have a way of getting away from us, ruling over us by hiding in the images and things that surround us.

Having spent a decade working as an advertising photographer and cinematographer, I have done my time managing systems beyond my control, and gained a solid sense of the fact that our most indomitable machines offer neither resistance nor substantive argument, but proffer interfaces smooth enough to glide through life on.

In the vain but sustained hope of delegating my art practice to a machine, I have spent the last year building an automated camera that expands the possibilities of microscopic deep-focus photography. I am more interested in my robot’s limitations than its capabilities. In an attempt to turn the tables on the information age cliché, I like to see what happens when I overwhelm the machine with information. For instance, if I introduce a quality of light that allows for areas of darkness and specular highlights, my algorithms will respond to the uncertainty and variance of the image data with a vision of the machinic sublime that is reminiscent of something Caspar David Friedrich might have painted on acid.

The resulting images are in some ways the polar opposite of Hito Steyerl’s “poor image,” that forlorn visual that has been given a new, degraded lease of life on youtube. The images I like to work with are of the highest fidelity, down to their finemolecular structure, seamless, and witness to a reality that exists beyond the validating structures of representation. My work expresses the hope that if machines where happy, they might finally leave us alone.

In this sense, I am still a utopian, and a photographer: The art, if and when it happens, happens in the blink of an eye in the gaps between the program and the world.

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IMAGES

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pages 9-15 Untitled, 2014 Dimensions variable

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pages 16-24 Untitled, 2014 Video stills

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WRITING

p. 26 Ernst Fischer “18%” by Brienne Walsh p. 29 “I Found That Essence Rare...” by Brian T. McCarthy

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ERNST FISCHER “18%” Brienne Walsh Through the lens of a camera, an object is captured.

But what happens when you zoom in on an object to such a microscopic degree that the picture no longer resembles the thing it’s supposed to portray — or even its molecular components? The image collapses in on itself, until it is nothing more than a pixelated, flat plane that transmits no information.

The components of looking without really being able to see — the exact moment when visualization is neutered — are what Ernst Fischer aims to uncover through his practice. In his exhibition “18%,” at CUE Art Foundation, the Swiss-born artist presents works that “zoom in on details too numerous or too minute to humanly process or comprehend,” as he puts it. At the same time, he examines the mechanisms of looking embodied by motion pictures and photography.

He explains all of this in his studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The space, which he shares with figurative painter Matthew Watson, whom he met while in graduate school at Columbia University, is tucked inside a large industrial building marked by nothing but unmarked gray doors. Although Fischer and Watson work in divergent styles and mediums, one

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senses a close camaraderie between the artists.

They bounce ideas off each other, sit down for lunch together, and will even lend each other a smartphone when necessary.

Fischer did not begin his career as a fine artist. After receiving technical training as a filmmaker in London, he spent nine years as a freelance commercial photographer, shooting successful ad campaigns for American Express, Volkswagen, Renault, Land Rover, Ford, Volvo and other major companies. While he excelled at taking photos of big machines, he also did editorial work for publications such as Dazed and Confused, Frieze, Graphic, The Guardian, Condé Nast Traveler, AnOther Man and I-D, and shot documentary footage for NGOs like Médecins Sans Frontières. All the while, Fischer maintained what he describes as a “quasi-secret lab practice.”

As a fourth-generation creator — his father, Kaspar Fischer, was an actor, writer and sculptor, and his grandfather, Hans “Fis” Fischer, was a well-known painter and illustrator of children’s books — Ernst says that he “ran a mile from any situation in which I’d have to call myself ‘artist’ for most of my working life.”

Fischer’s experience as a commercial photographer led to an exploration of his relationship with the camera, which he calls “the machine.” Almost as if he wanted to destroy that relationship, he developed a microphotography rig that allows him to capture images that are between five and 50 times larger on the focal plane than they are in the real world. These objects vary from minerals to caviar to leeches. (He jokes that microphotography is only practiced by 60-year-old men in their backyard sheds . . . and himself.)

Using the rig to move the lens closer and closer to his subject, he takes hundreds of digital photographs at increasingly miniscule depths, which he then feeds en masse into a computer program that attempts to extrapolate information from the data to reconstitute a seamless rendering of the object. In subverting this process, Fischer ”cracks” the algorithm, which can interpret neither the specular highlights captured by the lens nor the sheer wealth of data. Instead of an extraordinarily detailed composite of the object, the computer spits out a flat image that resembles a topographical map. What Fischer hopes these images reveal is that machines, which are supposed to be able to emulate anything, including human vision, are just machines in the end. They cannot reproduce the mechanisms of “seeing.” They have limits. There’s something profoundly reassuring about that.

In “18%,” Fischer brings these explorations a step further. Rather than taking pictures of an object itself, he focuses on the reflection of the light source

that illuminates it. “The object is circumscribed, like the black hole that can only be ‘seen’ by virtue of it bending the light that passes close by it,” he explains.

The resulting images, which include a series of refractions through zinc crystals, vary from resembling oil slicks to screen noise to melting objects. He describes them as looking very “Goya.” Comparisons to Romantic painters, and, more specifically German Romantic painters, arise frequently in Fischer’s explanations of his own work, almost always followed by an apology. He describes such examples as schlocky and says that any move toward painterliness is preconscious.

But he need not apologize. Both the Romantics and Fischer are interested in the same thing: the sublime.

The space where something is transformed beyond all calculations and imitations. The moment of the divine. In the end, the quest to find this point of transfiguration is so beautifully human that the act itself is sublime.

In a cinemascope-format video projected on the front window of the gallery, Fischer has processed 3,500 jpegs he downloaded from the White Nationalist web forum Stormfront.org. He first began studying a thread of images on the site, published under the headline “post your all-time favorite piece of visual art,” after reading a 2014 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center that links Stormfront members to almost 100 ideologically motivated murders. The images mostly show works by Salvador Dalí, M. C. Escher,

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the Pre-Raphaelites and, yes, Romantic landscapes painted by John Martin and Caspar David Friedrich.

And so, using a frame-blending algorithm, Fischer has fashioned a flickering, fragmented, hypnotically pulsating film out of the pictures — an unplaceable tableau that forms a “rich void.”

To explain why he did this, Fischer uses a quote from Brecht: “Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones.” The questions Brecht’s aphorism raises for Fischer include, “What constitutes good and bad?” And, “When considering the supremacy of the white male in cultural production and society at large, what can a white male artist create that is neither ironic nor despicable?”

Perhaps Fischer’s ambivalence about this last question drives other aspects of his work. He may feel that he cannot create anything that would be read by others without a critical bent, so it would seem he produces voids that cannot be read at all. Another example of this is a series of images framed using acrylic panels that he culled from discarded flat-screen televisions.

The screen elements have patterns of white dots that get denser toward the center and function to frustrate a clear view of the photographs.

In total, the exhibition represents a glimpse of the infinite, and in the same breath a nihilistic impulse. No matter how close we get to the source of something, ultimately, much of the universe remains beyond our comprehension. An artist’s task, arguably, is to capture the moment of slippage when an object starts to shimmer near the void.

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This essay was written as part of the Young Art Critics Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICAUSA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. For additional arts-related writing, please visit on-verge.org Brienne Walsh is a writer and critic who has contributed to Art in America, ArtReview, Modern Painters, Interview, The New York Times, The Village Voice, PDN, Architectural Digest, Departures and Paper, among other publications. She is currently working on a book of essays.

Mentor Trent Morse is an arts writer and editor in Brooklyn. His book Ballpointists is forthcoming from Laurence King Publishing.

“I FOUND THAT ESSENCE RARE...”

Brian T. McCarthy

I.

What Fischer describes as ‘mineralisms’ tap our more chthonic impulses in dealing with the digital age.

It is easy to see that contemporary fascisms fetishize this ‘chthonic’, circulating the idea that to ramble among the flourishing virtual may grant us access to our material depths. Just look at Hollywood’s current stylistic emulation of painters such as John Martin to envision the technological sublime. The swirling mists of creation/destruction, appropriations of the sublime, and earthly impulses of previous epochs are translated into a contemporary aesthetic. (In conversation, Fischer mentions that the bulk of NASA’s Hubble telescope photographs are “wildly false color”).

Channeled equally well through a confrontation with the sublime are the vagaries of digital capitalism — where the proliferating networks of blog culture (in this

case hypnagogic streams from a neo-fascist website) meet an adolescent desire to find a mode for its re-valorization. . .

In some senses Fischer uses micro-photography as a way of troubling these impulses. The micro-physical — its palpable, uncanny ‘mineralism,’ progressive layerings of a surface detected by the rig as what is produced as the object only through its digital incidence and refraction — is a kind of counterhagiography for the ways in which we confront, and channel, the technical. In an era when science and its ideologies (corporate capitalism and the ways in which techno-fetishism and the behavioral and aspirational impulses of the age dovetail with our modes of being captured) have become so ‘sublime’ as to almost operate like a dog-whistle.

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II.

III.

Remember this?

In conversation, Fischer suggests that perhaps, in naturalizing technology, we might be reacting to our longing and sorrow about the slow-motion collapse of the biosphere that we are living through and with: creating new cybernetic species — and new forms of technological rapture — to counteract a decline in genetic diversity.

Is it any wonder then — in our age defined by ‘solastalgia’ (this feeling that somehow we have killed nature) — that technology has come to serve as something just beyond the limits of human apperception and which, in practical terms, is no longer really our instrument to use?

Lacan’s diagram for the screen. Adjacent to the diagram the legend “La réalité est marginale” [reality is just on the margins], figures the screen as a mechanism by which we both block reality out and simultaneously re-integrate it — in a kind of “differential inclusion.”

For Lacan, this was no small thing: in fact, the screen came to serve as the primary metaphor for the ways in which our instantiations of the technical mimetically shape us. We imitate it; we incorporate it; it serves as (an unseen) limit for our desire and our true capacities.

This is also what might be meant by ‘capture.’

The ‘posthuman’ in a symbiotic relation to technology, responds to its desires and dictates in what Lacan would have called perfect méconnaissance — “false recognition.”

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Capitalism — as machine — as apparatus — as mirrored in the acrylic base of the sun bed, in Fischer’s microphotography rig: the apparatus that seems “alive,” autonomous because it doesn’t work as intended — and the unintended consequences stand for “nature”; maybe Fischer’s attempt is to — yes — set this far from us, in a parallel plain — strange — visibly other.

IV. “Even the animals are not shut off from this wisdom, but show that they are deeply initiated into it. For they do not stand stock still before things of sense as if these were things per se, with being in themselves: they despair of this reality altogether, and in complete

assurance of the nothingness of things they fall-to without more ado and eat them up.”

G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 61 The acrylic sunbed — the perfectly modeled object of consumption, which in turn models the perfect consumer-subject — is ‘interrupted’ using 18% grey for a reason, we might say — 18% grey being the gradient that all color film is calibrated to, equivalent to the average density of Caucasian skin. All photography is a recording of deviation from this nominated ‘neutral.’

Fischer’s work seems to propose that the long prophesied collapse-into-identity of “machine/ human” may have fulfilled itself and that to willfully misunderstand the machine — to restore, in a way, its misanthropic properties — may be a workable strategy to get out of this. Forcing the breakdown of its/our smooth functioning, and sleek topographies.

To re-liberate the potentials of the apparatus, is to release — through the strange fissures between the idea and the actuality — an agency outside of our too-close proximity to technological progress, opening vistas only we can see.

larger sense that we all have been captured — never happens. The apparatus doesn’t catch it because the apparatus fails too much, you see, and we tend to make a swamp out of this failure.

Forms of technological fascination indeed betray a certain psychological horizon, but we dare to call it “progress.” If the screen is designed by you — Caucasian, male — you can slip into this identification very easily. Instead of the screen that is a substitute for an ethics of confronting the other, we have here an ethics that would be ‘unmediated,’ actually facing — if that’s at all possible.

VI.

As artists we have license to fish things out, yank them out their embeddedness in history. What we can bring out is the actuality of what is — actual becoming: far stranger and more accidental than we might think. And what do we see? Flashes perhaps of “progress” read against the grain. “Post-human,” yes, but . . .

V. The indications of the object through his “mineralisms” are thus chance glimpses into a parallel world that we already inhabit, where technological capture - in the

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CUE Art Foundation’s operations and programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, corporations, government agencies, individuals, and its members.

MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY ANHOLT SERVICES (USA) INC. // THE GREENWICH COLLECTION, LTD. // THE JOAN MITCHELL FOUNDATION // MILTON & SALLY AVERY ARTS FOUNDATION, INC. // THE ELIZABETH FIRESTONE GRAHAM FOUNDATION // AGNES GUND // FOUNDATION FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS // THE NEW YORK COMMUNITY TRUST // THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS // NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS // NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE CITY COUNCIL // NEW YORK STATE COUNCIL ON THE ARTS WITH THE SUPPORT OF GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO AND THE NEW YORK STATE LEGISLATURE

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All artwork © Ernst Fischer

Catalogue design by Shona Masarin-Hurst

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