Urs Fischer Books

One of the most striking and remarked-upon pieces at the 2006 Day For Night Whitney Biennial was Urs Fisher's, and the curators gave it pride of on entry, the first walls that viewers encountered had been torn open. Those new gallery entrances led through to an outsized candelabra, composed of two detailed aluminum tree-branches suspended parallel to the floor, each with a lit candle at one end, spinning in slow motion and creating interlocking circles of wax drippings on the floor. Those who remember it will not be surprised to find, in this survey of recent works, that Fischer has long been disorienting viewers with materials such as mirror-lined walls and gigantic plush bears.

Beautifully designed, text-heavy and smart, Album is a deliberately unrepresentative compilation of genre-hopping textual and visual material placed in orbit around the work of the influential young Swiss artists Urs Fischer, Yves Netzhammer, Ugo Rondinone and Christine Streuli--all of whom were born in the early- to mid-1970s, and all of whom represented Switzerland at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Finely printed on uncoated paper, the book includes specially commissioned critical texts, conversations, reports and visual essays that address, sometimes straightforwardly, sometimes obliquely, the larger issues implied in this group's work--such as notions of time, the animal and the human, shock and materiality. With a similarly eclectic mix of historical analysis, literary tableau and art-world journalism, the book imagines a psycho-geography of Switzerland, from its Alps to its art-filled bunkers. Sensitive to the nature of its context, informative and discursive rather than promotional, the book is rounded off with a survey on the future of biennials in relation to the present-day "fair mania" and a selection of critical views.