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9/10/2008

Noah Fischer

Claire Oliver Gallery, New York

Claire Oliver Gallery presents Monitor, an exhibition of new objects by Brooklyn based artist Noah Fischer. Fischer creates sculpture, photographs, and theatrical installations that share a common fascination with electric light. The lo-tech rawness of this work short circuits modes of visual consumption (film, TV, Youtube) calling into question the ultimate function of our entertainment- based culture as it runs on the tracks of technological development. With this new exhibition, Fischer zooms in on a particular object, using multiple strategies to disorient any relationship to it.

The object that we call "monitor" is at once ubiquitous, obsolete, and in the end, perhaps a non-object because we gaze into its pixilated illusion, never directly at its shape and mass. Today the clunky beige boxes adorn sidewalk trash piles because their cathode ray tubes have recently given way to the solid-state flat screen. In a backwards-alchemical shift, they have morphed from object of desire into "e-waste." In this sense, they are the monitor of the speed of consumption.

Noah Fischer's new group of sculptures ask us to re-consider these objects at the intersection between trash and promise. Promise not only of new vision technologies, but of the aesthetics of Modernism in its search for the perfect form. These aesthetics, Fischer argues, have resurfaced through the Apple computer product line, deeply influenced by Donald Judd. To take an example, the iphone, our new monitor, is accompanied by rhetoric concerning a sublime state reached through reduced geometric form and infinite function. This is an object that toys with transcending its object-hood.

Yet there is trashy side to this story. Behind the sublime promise of the iphone is a vast coal-powered global production industry and even more, a trash filled past; an ever-increasing pile of dead bodies; threatening to gobble up the living present. There are the toxic beige monitors sent to China to be scrapped amid Dickensian conditions. Then, there is also a different kind of trash that directly contracts the iphone promise: a flow of distracting information that tick and buzz like electric insects looping in the brain. Together, cycles of product obscelence and distracting information/obsession lead to a question: does this object we call "monitor" have any function besides to perpetuate the global trash cycle?

Contrary to the rhetoric, objects cannot really be transcended: like bodies their physical fact is absolute reality. Fischer brings the carcass of glass monitor tubes and plastic shells together with hand-hewn and computer generated wooden form to create hybridized benches, chairs, and tables, tweaking "monitor" to a basic physical function: to rest our tired physical bodies. In another strategic reduction, Fischer revamps monitors as simply lanterns. Perhaps we just gaze at screens like electric campfires; mini-suns to warm our hearts and minds.

Opening: Friday, October 10, 6 - 8PM

Claire Oliver
513 West 26th Street - New York
Free admission

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