File Note 03: Urs Fischer

‘Which situation should I declare real and which one a dream?’ This is the question that plagues the narrator of Kobo Abe’s Kangaroo Notebook. On a morning that should have turned out like any other, the first person narrator of Kangaroo Notebook awakens to find radish sprouts growing out of his shins. Although his doctor is repulsed, the narrator finds he now possesses the strange and unique ability to snack on … himself. An eerie adventure to rid himself of his malady takes the book’s protagonist into an increasingly hostile and mysterious world, one that in turn is surreal, playful and almost unassailably enigmatic. The plot is a weird and wild ride. Our slowly unravelling protagonist checks into a dermatology clinic and soon finds himself hurtling on a hospital bed to the very brink of hell.

As in Kangaroo Notebook, the work of Urs Fischer sends us on a journey into compelling, bizarre and resonant realms; we enter a sphere, wherein lies heaven, hell and everything in between. In a mixture of dream-world, fantasy and life’s labyrinths, Urs Fischer manages to be simultaneously fearful and jarringly funny. Labyrinths, doubles, dreams, mirrors and magic tricks: these are the tokens with which Urs Fischer plays his ontological games, as a most romantic observer and story teller. It is a gloomy psychological landscape that ranges from the plausible to implausible to simply impossible illusion. The work is in his flow a darkly surreal novel, at turns bizarre and ridiculous, then just as easily becomes normal and calm. Events that don’t seem to be going anywhere but suddenly illuminate at the end.

The work of Urs Fischer is not something to describe, summarise or paraphrase. It intrudes into the mind of the viewer, forcing him to begin to think and feel like Urs Fischer, in an infinite series of permutations. Therefore the analyst, whose stock in trade is his skill at putting his artist matter before his viewer in pithier or less redundant language, will find no purchase here. Form and content are not easily separated; each can and must be explained away in terms of the other, but the circularity of the argument will be closer to the free-play of endless investigation celebrated in the work, than to the ordinary world of logic and reason.

When in the Three Dialogues Beckett talks about the painting of Pierre Tal Coat, he objects to the notion that Tal Coat or Henri Matisse should be called revolutionaries, because he feels that they only managed to disturb a certain order on the plane of the feasible. When he is asked to elaborate what other plane there should be, he answers that although logically there could be none, the true artist has no choice but to turn away from it all the same, being weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road. Asked what remains for such an artist, a despairing and proud Beckett asserted that ‘the expression that there is nothing to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’. The different layers of narration and material in the work of Urs Fischer behave in a similarly transparent lucid manner, and the paradoxical nothing constituting the poetry of the work has a radiant power which shines through all the layers, and accordingly, each layer is influenced by the others. Urs Fischer’s work always maintains an element of lightness and is, in his bitter sweetness, sometimes outright funny.

Unable to understand or explain the work of Urs Fischer? I can accept that. Why? Because I’m done with all the circ’, circ’, circlin’ round. Because nothing is not something to be explained and understood. It is a negative, which cannot even be defined, as it negates understanding, and is incomprehensible. It should be dismissed. Urs Fischer’s work feels this need, and strives for the possibility, but the vision of nothing is visited on him, and he has no choice but to attempt to understand it. But understanding only works within the realm of logic, and Urs Fischer’s premises seem to transcend those boundaries. Maybe it shows a discovery of meaninglessness, or nothing. As if the complex nature of existence may turn impotence into omnipotence.