Conductor’s hallway
301 Camberwell New road, Camberwell, London se5

Robert Fischer

What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? Is it still the thing or has it become something else? When you rip the cloth off the umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella? You open the spokes, put them over your head, walk out into the rain, and you get drenched. Is it possible to go on calling this thing an umbrella?
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

I’m still undecided about what to call Robert Fischer’s sculptures. To describe them too literally – as hybrid habitats or even mobile homes – seems to render them as obsolete as their component parts once were. They are rather things that tend towards being other things, structures which have been nurtured by and eventually taken on the appearance of fantasy, and which now seem to bed a descriptive language equally intangible and greater than the sum of its parts. ‘They are my better life, while they are also my real life,’ Fischer explains of the abandoned vehicles he restores with mirrored and clear glass and then fills with photographs and other personal memorabilia in a way that both invites and deflects interpretation. As products of the imagination these sculptures confound traditional notions of function: a boat with a trailer may be as useless as an umbrella without its cloth for those who notice the rain, but in Fischer’s child-like world where things are no longer weighed down by their quotidian uses, a trailer can fly as easily as an airplane can float.

An abundance of practicality co-exists with the resolute refusal of conventional logic in these works however and it is an insistent naivety which sustains their apparent self-sufficiency. Lighthouse Boat Finding its Own Way (1997) includes a build-in-beacon to light up a route authorized only by chance. And Disappearing Boat (1998) calls to mind a child who, covering their face so as not to see others, feels suddenly secure that they too must be hidden from view. Ignited by Fischer’s quasi-Surrealist imagination, the conceptual travel possibilities of these vehicles seems unbounded, and if there is logic to them at all, it is the poetic logic of bricolage that Robert Frost described when he spoke of poetry as being ‘a fear of association.’

Fischer has said that he likes to make of the public gallery a private ‘container for my space’. He works on site, building walls within walls and arranging his collection of nostalgic artefacts wherever he finds himself in a way that makes a very personal habitat of the once neutral space around him. Yet his is not a nomadic project, for it is more about wondering than wandering, and has developed not from any perennial instinct to keep moving but rather from an unrequited longing to find a better place to settle, a longing that has already brought him from Minneapolis to New York and now to London.

Like his recent exhibition at New York’s Art in General, ‘Hiding Places for a Dense City,’ Fischer’s installation at the Conductor’s Hallway will be a glass house built on the sands of fantasy. With its surfaces more vulnerable than hardy, more easily shattered than easily seen through, the structure works as a kind of metaphor for the fragile nature of privacy itself. No doubt Fischer has packed his umbrella to come here as London has a reputation for rain. But if, by chance, he does not come to need protection from the weather and the abandoned umbrella finds itself involved in a chance encounter with the developing sculpture, then we will only have to wonder whether it would be possible to go on calling it an umbrella at all.

 

This exhibition has been independently organized by Sophie Howarth. Sophie is also a curator at the Tate Gallery and Chair of the 1999 East Wing Collection of Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute