2007

Urs Fischer
Cockatoo Island installation
20 April – 3 June 2007
Cockatoo Island, Sydney

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My work never ends up looking the way I had intended. I don’t consider those sculptures unsuccessful. Something just developed while I was working. It’s a two way street. Your thoughts determine the images, and it is the images, in turn, which determine your thoughts.

Urs Fischer quoted in the exhibition brochure Urs Fischer, Kaldor Art Projects, Sydney 2007

By hilariously and deliberately failing to distinguish between creation and destruction, perhaps Urs Fischer offers a compelling conceptual challenge that can reaffirm faith in the creative act.

Michelle White, ‘Urs Fischer: Mary Poppins’, Glasstire: online journal of visual art in Texas, June 2006

You have to arrive by ferry to Sydney’s Cockatoo Island, once a convict prison, then a reform school and later a shipyards. Bleak and windswept, it has a very dramatic character. Its unused spaces, and its former functions as a dumping ground for all the chain-snatchers, reckless dole-bandits, lost souls and doomed felons of the mid 19th century and as a place for sequestering delinquent and orphaned children, give it a haunted feel. Responding to the ‘psychogeography’ of the place – especially the sandstone prison buildings up on the hill – Urs Fischer’s Cockatoo Island installation 2007 listened to what the stones have to say and addressed them with inscrutable and strangely redemptive sculptural works struggling for meaning: in the courtyard, a white fibreglass scribble seems to hover between a sort of intestinal muteness and a snaky expressive flourish, as if materials no longer have the strength to communicate.

Two plastercast hands of the artist were joined at the elbow, the piece hanging by wire – as so many of Fischer’s vignettes do – and a pink head held by a hand hung upside-down. The effect is some kind of violent allusion to Auguste Rodin, as if the crisis in sculpture were being played out in the antipodes, where The thinker no longer knows what to think. Plastercasts of hands are standard repertoire in art schools and art history, lost here and oddly poignant in this ghostly context. Alignments of skeletons (doing yoga, napping, having a smoko) take the despair of the situation head on, in a spirit of no-future black comedy. Chairs and dressing tables and vases have been violently smashed and then lovingly reassembled. Everything seems precarious, except the fierce creative act.

Read more about Urs Fischer.

View of the central courtyard of the old convict prison where visitors first encountered Urs Fischer’s Cockatoo Island installation 2007. Photo: Adam Free Courtesy Kaldor Public Art Projects