{"id":1017,"date":"2017-03-21T02:21:37","date_gmt":"2017-03-21T02:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/?p=1017"},"modified":"2017-03-21T02:21:37","modified_gmt":"2017-03-21T02:21:37","slug":"dying-art-urs-fischers-sculptures-are-processes-not-artifacts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/2017\/03\/21\/dying-art-urs-fischers-sculptures-are-processes-not-artifacts\/","title":{"rendered":"Dying art: Urs Fischer’s sculptures are processes, not artifacts"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Full view of the 2011 Venice Biennale installation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When reading the Fusion article<\/a> by Ethan Chiel, \u00a0a particular moment immediately reminded me of art I’d seen. The pieces I thought of were two sculptures by Urs Fischer<\/a>, and they were displayed at the 2011 Venice Biennale. The most visually striking of these sculptures, to me, is his reconsideration of a classical sculpture,\u00a0Rape of the Sabine Women,\u00a0<\/em>but his rendition of contemporary man \u00a0is certainly more chilling conceptually.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Fischer’s “Rape of the Sabine Women”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jonathan Jones, an art critic who saw the exhibition, wrote that<\/a> “Fischer\u2019s candle-man haunted me later when I was walking the decaying streets of Venice. It will haunt me for a long time. It is a beautiful, funny, frightening emblem of time\u2019s fatal arrow.\u201d Times fatal arrow, then (death) dramatically effects not only the emblem of classical and “eternal” sculpture, but those of us who observe and admire it. Even art cannot be so idealized as to stop death.<\/p>\n

Chiel reports that the manager of a Twitter-bot account, which strikes me as something in\u00a0between performance and technological experimentation, said: “Bots are ‘processes, not artifacts.'” He continues, “A bot\u2019s survival beyond his lifetime or the lifetime of Twitter is ‘about longevity of the algorithm, more so than the actual piece of code running.'” The “code,” here, is Fischer’s wax, continuing to run down its own form until it disappears. Think of slowing this process\u00a0to the point that even after the death of the artist the sculpture would still be changing and evolving\u00a0as the artist intended.<\/em>\u00a0I think that here’s an interesting intersection, here, between art, technology, intentionality, time, and death.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Fischer’s melting man<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Continuing to melt<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When reading the Fusion article by Ethan Chiel, \u00a0a particular moment immediately reminded me of art I’d seen. The pieces I thought of were two sculptures by Urs Fischer, and they were displayed at the 2011 Venice Biennale. The most visually striking of these sculptures, to me, is his reconsideration of a classical sculpture,\u00a0Rape of … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Dying art: Urs Fischer’s sculptures are processes, not artifacts”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1017"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1023,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017\/revisions\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}