Text by Emilie Oursel
A DEAD TREE IS BETTER THAN NO TREE...
German born artist, Alex Fischer took a radical turn in 2005,
passing from ‘traditional sculptures’ to a direct, sometimes brutal,
interaction with reality.
The artist began a physical struggle with nature, sculpting wood
to better express its destruction by human:
‘I have to attack to illustrate reality’ says the artist.
He sculpts directly on trunks of trees, inscribing messages on them
with hammer and chisel or attacking the wood with a chain saw,
to make the raw natural body of the tree appear like stigmata of present world.
‘Grown to death’, ‘Kickit’, ‘Rumble in the Jungle’,
the titles of his works sound like punk songs, and introduce the viewer
in a mental struggle between the politically correct and black humor.
In 2000, he realises ‘Apple Z’, a trunk of tree with its ‘head’ sculpted
in the form of a big ‘Z’ and a red apple placed on top of it.
Apart the reference to Guillaume Tell, ‘apple + Z’ means,
for users of Mac computers, ‘going back’.
The whole stresses the impossibility to ‘go back’ of human destruction in forests.
It forces the viewer to get a certain assertion of the fact.
Alex Fischer plays out of anachronism, non-sense and visual disturbance
to make his message being more effective.
With ‘Grown to death’ (2001), he replaces the pillar of an exhibition room
by a trunk of tree, with an electric chain saw directly plugged in,
as if the victim was attached to its killer.
He pushes this concept further by acting directly on place, in forests and parks.
In Brazil, he realises ‘Kickit’ (2007), a football ball bas-relief
sculpted on a tree to denounce deforestation in Amazonia,
where disappearing spaces of forest counted in football fields / minute.
In New York he made ‘Invisiblelost’ (2007), where he cuts out the bark
of a tree and paints it then into military camouflage to make the work invisible.
Alex Fischer turns art’s process of creation into a principle of destruction.
‘Trees are always an image of life’, says Alex Fischer.
Yet the artist persists in marking the scar of death on them.
We could understand it by referring to what the German thinker
Dietmar Kamper calls ‘the mimesis of terror’.
« The terror, which surfaces in naked fear, leads to a strangely inadequate reactions,
to reflex of playing dead, which seem to compete with the fatal paralyses of society.
Something unintended is unconsciously expressed in this :
evidently, the only way to manifest life is to portray the dead as something lifeless. »
Thus, Alex Fischer’s sculptures confront society with its own presuppositions,
its fears and paralyses in front of an ecological Casus-Belli,
which cannot be deleted neither resolved.
Life, at an apocalyptic post-history, can only be pictured as something already
dead or lifeless, or ‘playing death’ while waiting for the crucial moment.
Yet, Alex Fischer’s art is not simply a raw against present turn of events.
The text becoming prevalent in his work, it reveals a second thoughtful layer,
where natural and civilized worlds’ relationship is introspected.
The artist plays out of the different status of the tree :
being both a wilde life bringing fresh air to the world and a domesticated material used
to produce paper at the beginning of civilization and allowing them the first process of printing.
The artist uses these characteristics to make of tree both a material,
a medium and the subject.
He inscribes messages on trunks of tree in an attempt to give them a voice:
‘não me toque’ (don’t touch me), (2005), ‘ I wish you wood smile’, (2008).
The tree being art becomes a speaking subject, a communicative object,
to oppose to sculpture tradition focusing on human self-representation,
as questioned by the German artist Stephan Balkenhol, or even Land Art,
where nature stays a beautiful canvas for art’s resonances,
like with the wooden sculptures of Giuseppe Penone.
The biggest work Alex Fischer ever made is in the Nairobi National Museum:
The first rocket on African grounds, NNM-AFR, (2015)
carved from a 30 m Eucalyptus tree in the Botanical garden of the Museum.
This work reflects the impossibility to reach out for a new planet
after the destruction of earth.
Since then, he only makes chainsaws from trees,
a sort of giving up quintessence to his long loosing fight against devastation.
Alex Fischer makes of wood both emotional stigmata and strategic media,
which drive the viewer into an interactive relation with them.
Tree loses its status of inanimate object, still-life arranged by human,
and advertises of its presence and existence.
He avoids the visual clichés relating to ecology
and distinguishes himself from masters’ actions,
like Joseph Beuys and his famous 7 thousands of oaks planted during the Dokumenta 7.
The artist follows a personal involvement,
physically confronting himself to nature’s strength,
often acting on place, even in secret, refreshing activist art for what it is,
self-ruled and skiping institution’s accreditation.
Actually, the artist is always ‘collecting basics’,
but they are not related to nature, but human civilization.