Deborah Fisher

Virtual Studio Visit

I have no idea what this is going to look like when it's done, but I can say that this weekend is the first time I haven't wanted to throw it away.

I know, I know. In a lot of ways, this is really the same old schtick. There are, however, important differences that have been throwing me. I started with a 3'x3'x3' cube made of wood from my house, so there was this more straightforward structure v. material relationship. It's a structural shape, not a car part or a stick or some other found thing.

(This part almost works. To make it work better, it's gotten more literal. I'm going with trusses instead of boxes in the future.)

And the goal is really to smash the crap out of it, not just break it once.

And the last goal is to get less precious about the Materials. I've been using just everything I can find, taking stuff home from work, using my junk mail, figuring that anything is fair game. This has exposed me as someone who's much more interested in purity than I think I am. Looking at information on the materials makes me really crabby.

I think moving forward that I'm going to have to get over two hurdles. First, it's going to have to become structurally sound again--it's going to have to have made a structural metamorphosis.

And the amount and variety and patternation (if that's a word) of the Material is going to have to confound the desire to pick out individual New Yorker covers and such. I think that if the material becomes vast enough, it will kind of vibrate between particulars and massiveness in an exciting way. The trick is that it can't reach this state of vastness through scale alone. It's going to have to be some sort of trick, one that will probably involve Invoking Landscape and a Strong Sensation of Density.

Happy New Year!

I won't lie to you. I am having a hard time writing anything that doesn't sound slightly insane these days, but only because I am reading the newspapers. When Nassim Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot are not sleeping because of the economic system, and when they are not the only ones talking about the end of the financial system as we know it, and when ideas like dumping a bunch of iron filings into the ocean in order to slow global warming are being upgraded from Batshit to Plan B, well...you know that things are not okay.

I don't think western civilization or even America is going down the tubes indefinitely, but I do think that crises are opportunities. And that there are some legitimate crises on deck. And that we are in for a really messy, really total shift in worldview.

This really freaks me out. But I'm just going to try to keep making art, and keep letting all this information in, even though what I really want to do is jam my fingers into my ears and take up permanent residence at the Piplotti Rist show at the MoMA. And I will try not to rant or worry here or anywhere else about how we are all falling off a cliff. I am hoping instead this year to keep a steady eye on what's actually happening, and hoping that simply allowing this out-of-control reality to inform what I am doing in the studio is helpful--that it at least gets me across the water to this new worldview with my own intellectual integrity intact. I am thinking increasingly about active destruction instead of passive decay, and about controlling less and less of what I do. I am trying not to consider a bunch of things I used to consider. I am trying to throw out tricks that used to make what I do redeemable and give a lot more power to the sculpture itself, to be more monster-like, more self-creating, more retarded, more of a battle. I know, that's vague, and right now this strategy is mostly yielding Wrongness. My studio looks like Wall Street and my initial impulse is to be discouraged.

But if the goal is to have the internal studio world mirror the reality that I see, then at least I have the first step right. I have created badness and unsustainable chaos. The second step is redeeming this destructive reality, and that's a whole another kettle of fish.

Either something great's going to happen that I could never have discovered any other way, or I'll have to throw away a few hundred pounds of Irredemable Ugliness in a couple of months and start over.