Melt with me in silence.

 

It is the series of candle sculptures by the Swiss anti-artist Urs Fischer that I am interested in. Over the course of a month’s long show his sculptures slowly self-destruct, melting away into long gnarly rivulets and pools of grey and red wax that puddle on the gallery floor. One of the two ephemeral sculptures I particularly want to share with you is a reproduction of a classical 16^th century sculpture that towers on its plinth above another 1;1 scale statue this time made from the mold of a living breathing person from today’s world. His untitled winning entry at the at the Venice art biennial back in 2011 featured a life-size wax cast of Giovani’s “Rape of the Sabine Women’ which melted alongside another wax sculpture of an observant modern-day viewer. More than a simple memento mori as here the pair of disintegrating statues represented the ultimate antithesis of the stuffy C19 concept that art is eternal and should outlive the artist. Here the child dies before the parent. The aura of this artwork was associated with Bologna’s original marble sculpture back Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. By the end of the show when the candle light flickered out for the final time there was no aura at all other than in the collective memory of those who had attended and documented the gradual demise of the show's instillation. It is in reproducing the film and photographs taken during the 2011 Venice art biennale and disseminating them in books, magazines and in online websites that allows the art to live on outside of the memory of those who witnessed its brief existence. To personally experience this artwork as it was intended again would have to involve the recreation of the original.

Then there is this film below capturing and thus replicating a sound art performance of John Cage's 4'33" which represents with its 273 seconds of silence the 273 Celsius it takes to achieve absolute zero. Here during this performance there is literally nothing to capture on film, but that is the very point of John Cage's composition. Outside of being played by a musician the composition only exists as silent notes on sheet music and has to repeatedly be performed for the silence to be witnessed, unless film captures the nothingness and in doing so the film too becomes art.

Then there is this film capturing and thus replicating a performance of John Cage's 4'33 which represents with its 273 seconds of silence the 273 celsius it takes to achieve absolute zero. Here there is literally nothing to capture on film, but that is the very point of the  composition and film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4

https://www.themoderninstitute.com/img/55fc448600757-large.jpg https://whitehotmagazine.com/UserFiles/image/2011/Venice%20Biennale%202011/UrsFischer_Rudolf-StingelCandle.jpg 

https://www.designboom.com/art/urs-fischer-at-venice-art-biennale-2011/

http://www.ursfischer.com/images/560839