9 new sculptures approximate the fundamental types of metropolis site visitors lights, composing an infrastructure of vertical shafts and horizontal arms bearing suspended indicators, which flash and alter. These kinetic works sign unusually, every with its personal specific on/off rhythm and colours, flashing white, orange or lemon yellow. Typically, as a substitute of electrical lights there are opaque mirrors or easy discs of daylit stained glass. Just a few of the sculptures current solely dangling black wires, unplugged. One in every of these is topped with a crest of simulated snow. Peter Fischli’s deviated, schizoid site visitors lights generally recommend gallows. Or timber: symbols of life, or information. We might additionally see them merely as summary compositions of dots and contours. Or as psychograms: humanoid, diagrammatic. It’s a Constructivist forest transmitting a type of Arecibo Message from past, or inside. The sensation is wintery and transcendent.

Writing on the medium of electrical mild in Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan remarked how the content material of illumination (mind surgical procedure, an evening baseball sport, a television present) blinds us to the character of illumination itself. The message of electrical mild is completely radical, pervasive and decentralized. Its energy is to say nothing whereas eliminating time and area between people. It’s no marvel that of their earliest proposals to reinvent city life, the Situationists’ first thought was to reprogram the lighting. Jean Baudrillard, in the meantime, thought it acceptable to empty the brand new Centre Pompidou of all artworks and to don’t have anything inside however a number of blinking lights.

Fischli’s kinetic sculptures are constructed primarily of wooden, glass and cardboard, then painted. A colourful base coat has been calmed with many subsequent layers of differing grays and silvers combined with champagne chalk. The vertical poles home digital controllers that program the indicators.

A collection of photo-collages seize and recompose traces of minor vandalism all through town of Zürich, photographed over the past three years by Fischli. On Halloween and on the finish of the varsity semester, youngsters tag their on a regular basis environment with shaving cream—foamy graffiti-blobs that mark non-public and public property after which dissolve harmlessly in a single day. The artist has sliced into these photos and reorganized them as a type of mute, nocturnal photo-fairytale. The collages are mounted on aluminum plates and introduced in pairs.

A metal grate masking a gap within the pavement outdoors the gallery emits a recording of a observe session by the Zürich-based band One-Two-Three. What we hear is the sound a music that’s not but a music, or of trying to find a music. Fischli’s new sound set up in the meantime creates the phantasm of an lively, basement observe area in Los Angeles, the place basement areas are nonexistent.

at Reena Spaulings Tremendous Artwork, Los Angeles
till April 1, 2023