The End of the Journey: The Public Privacy of Robert Fischer
Francesco Bonami
Look out there! These structures are some kind of humorous footnote to Donald Judd’s purity in Marfa or a disturbing presence in Walter De Maria’s lightning field, or a nosy appearance around James Turrell’s crater. You don’t know how things like these got as far as they have, lying motionless, disrupting the perfection of the surroundings. You don’t know how far they have come but you feel that it is far enough to have been forgotten. They sit there in the dust, in the rain, under the scolding sun, or under the freezing ice. They are not lifeless but still lifes in the Minimalist living room of American art. They address the failures of architecture and the success of the wondering spirit of the American misanthrope. They are things that could surface all of the sudden next to the rubble of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, like the lost ruins of some homeless Atlantis.
These “things” are Robert Fischer’s work, and they function as smart remains of some kind of dropout renaissance. We don’t know where they came from or where they will go, because they define within their skeletons their final state and stillness.
These sculptures rest as modest monuments to some unknown victim of a spinning migration. They don’t point out any direction; no one is waiting at either end of the journey.
There is a certain humbleness in the nomadic character of the American people.
The land, the environment, nature are accepted in all their grandiosity. The simple idea of building a house, a “home,” in stone assumes that architecture could compete with God’s creation, God’s best achievement, the American landscape. A person cannot challenge this landscape just by building a place where nobody could live forever, because from one generation to the other, nature presents itself as a challenge to move, a feature of our lives as a possible, but unrealistic, conquest. We move to worship the line of the horizon ahead of us, past the moving images that are bound to be left behind. The nomad knows that settling would mean striking a deal with mediocrity. In contrast to the arrogance of a few American cities, most American towns express clearly their acceptance of temporality, the understanding of our insignificance in front of God’s wrath and whims.
Mobile homes, RV’s, and trailers are icons of a culture doomed to update itself over and over, where “Past” turns rapidly into decrepitude.
Fischer’s work reveals all of this, shows us a kind of Paleolithic relationship with the present. Each of his sculptures looks back into the past and forth into the future, implicating an endless journey into the present. Inside his homes Fischer fosters a longing for that past we cannot carry along and the desire for a future we know we will never be able to fulfill.
Fisher’s structures “grow” on top of other, abandoned structures. His shelters take over what once was supposed to carry us toward a real home, toward a real future where we would have found at the same time a present to live in and a past to lean on. Yet looking at Fischer’s work more closely, we understand that is not about a journey but about its end, the final leg. The work is about the moment when the car, the truck, the plane, or the boat decides to give up, to abandon its route and relinquish its body to the landscape, the field, the backyard. They decide that is time for them to become another point of reference in the vastness of the landscape. These vehicles, once they have lost their function, assume a new identity. They transform their mechanical systems into organic visions. Fischer’s sculptures appear as new cardinal points on the existential compass of American culture. His work is not any longer about moving, but rather about the safe feeling of the return. We do not want to go out “there” any longer, but we come back “here,” where our artificial imagination has accepted the insurmountable reality of the landscape. Home is America and its unconditional negotiation with the land that defines it. Fischer’s work begins where the road ends. It starts where the way is lost.
Front or rear make little sense in Robert Fischer’s lodges; they circle around and around, any origin lost, the spirit abandoned in the agoraphobia of a history where domes and bell towers have never been able to replace mountains and tornadoes, where geraniums have never hung from window sills but grew stronger inside the back trunk of an abandoned wreck.
Robert Fischer’s idea is to keep building in the backyard of Minimalism, inside the fenced field of Land art. He cut the barbed wire of that protected territory where modern visions aged into pathetic dreams. He settles in a space, creating the inside from the inside, being outdoors and public, and yet sparing at the same time the philosophy of privacy and the undiminished glory of personal isolation.
Francesco Bonami is the Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.