Urs Fischer at Gagosian

Urs Fischer, Denominator (installation view) (2020–22). Database, algorithms, and LED cube, 141.75 × 141.75 × 141.75 inches. © Urs Fischer. Gagosian, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Gagosian. Photo: Jeff McLane.

I last saw Urs Fischer’s work in mid-2019. It was PLAY (2018), a sculpture-meets-dance-meets-animation piece that featured nine office chairs moving about the galleries at Jeffrey Deitch. The robotic dance party was aided by a network of cameras that processed and predicted how gallery-goers engaged with the furniture, and by choreographer Madeline Hollander, who introduced the human feeling of chance into the movements of the computerized chairs.¹ But the most inquisitive aspect of PLAY is that the chairs were programmed to continuously learn from their movements and interactions with the audience—they were learning to play, fine-tuning their performances along the way. Here was artificial intelligence throwing a wrench in performance theory.² Naturally, I was hooked.

I can’t advance the same enthusiasm about Denominator (2020–22), Fischer’s most recent jaunt in Los Angeles presented with Gagosian. Rather than chairs, Fischer turned his algorithmic theater on TV commercials—story-driven images pedaling products that we think we need. Installed inside a former Wells Fargo Bank on North Camden Drive in Beverly Hills (a temporary site for Gagosian exhibitions), Denominator is an endless montage of commercials culled from social media and broadcast television dating back to the 1950s, when color TVs first landed in U.S. homes.³ Fischer and his team scraped the likes of YouTube (where many ads can be accessed) and TikTok, archiving an initial 70 thousand commercials from across the globe. The artist submitted these ads to machine-learning algorithms (e.g., CLIP-trained models), which used customized code to cut up and then categorize the commercials by content, color, and composition.⁴ Presented as a deluge of deconstructed imagery, the slapdash sensibility of Denominator deviates from mass-produced advertising in that there’s no clear audience in mind. What, then, is being sold? Nothing new beyond what’s already in the ether. This is partly why my enthusiasm wavers towards Denominator relative to PLAY. While the latter work evinced an uncanny surprise, if I strip away the masterful, albeit clichéd, storytelling in TV ads, what Denominator regurgitates are semblances of image spam that ultimately generate the same consumerist impulse.⁵

In form, however, Denominator captivates—the piece is a colossal, 12-foot video monitor cube that plays its breakneck footage on all of its visible surfaces. The ads appear in incomplete clips, completely siphoned off from their original commercial context. In one sequence, a cute cat crouches before a bowl near another clip of a tennis player in a white shirt, his back hunching away from the camera in an echo of the crouched feline. Other cat ads, such as the “Mjau Mjau Mjau Flygresor.se” commercial, inexplicitly surround the tennis player. What you get is a “physically compelling” montage of ads that visually captivate, such that “our eyes are almost continually drawn to the screen.”⁶ Compelling, however, turns to cute, chaotic, and then visibly confused. It’s all very bizarre and zany, if we understand theorist Sianne Ngai’s definition of zaniness as “physical bombardment” that pushes toward “strenuous and even precarious extremes.”⁷ Indeed, sitting with this glut of video montages not only requires effort, but would also take a lifetime.

Consider this, though: Fischer wanted to present these commercials in a way that deemphasized their narrative pull and honed in on the marketable images that linger in our subconscious; he also intentionally overloaded Denominator with images so that, in his words, “no image has a chance to become prominent.”⁸ But opting for associative editing gets in the way of the latter goal. The algorithm doesn’t trouble this visual sense of prominence. For instance, the same Flygresor.se cat commercial appears twice in one frame. Or, there’s a moment where Denominator churns out a cluster of coffee cups from illycaffé, Costa Coffee, All Café, and Starbucks, all of them sitting merrily side by side on the screen. Yes, these cut-up, colliding images are deconstructed versions of the original ads. But, a new image undeniably comes into prominence. In this sequence of shots, I can’t help but think about coffee, which inadvertently heightens the economic function of this pictorial landscape. I guess that’s why I’m on the fence about Denominator: It only produces more irrelevant images that circulate in a culture already oversaturated with machine-made image spam.

In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin remarked on the “new objectivity” of photography, which transfigures “misery itself [into] an object of pleasure, by treating it stylishly and with technical perfection.”⁹ This treatment is informed by what Benjamin calls the “current fashion,” noting that photography can be wielded towards not only economic but also political ends.¹⁰ I would argue that Benjamin’s “new” photographic turn would now include advertisements—images driven by an “economic function” that “bring to the masses elements which they could not previously enjoy.”¹¹ Denominator attempts, with questionable success, to sit outside the pleasure and politics of it all. But Fischer knows the danger of advertising imagery—he’s shared his worry that ads have replaced the “images we have inside us.”¹² However, it seems that Denominator doubles down on instilling a barrage of new images, which, absent of narrative, introduces a troubling plethora of visual data culled from absurd algorithms. Because if ads are supposedly harmful to our internal image, what benefit lies in audiences viewing and potentially encoding these wanton images into iconic memory?

Owing to this doubling down, Denominator reads less as a send up than a submission to the givens of society. One such given is commerce. It’s not lost on me that Denominator was installed in a vacated bank, the conduit for consumerist activities. While I applaud Fischer for his zany separation of these ads from their typical convention—to sell products— the site of the former bank implicitly reinscribed the economic function of these commercials, thereby reaffirming their original intent: to persuade people to blindly trust in consumer products. In contrast, cultural theorist Stuart Hall writes that our “way[s] of seeing” mediatized culture must involve “looking hard and straight” at “lush advertising.”¹³ Fischer doesn’t make this type of looking possible since his algorithms prioritize the aesthetic over the social dimension. That is, the pictorial overload in Denominator is stylized, rendered into a preexisting logic of advertisement that’s hellbent on bombarding us with aestheticized, involuted TV images to the point of confusion. And ain’t nobody got time for that—we’ve got enough spam in our inboxes.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 34.

Urs Fischer, Denominator (installation view) (2020–22). Database, algorithms, and LED cube, 141.75 × 141.75 × 141.75 inches. © Urs Fischer. Gagosian, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Gagosian. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Urs Fischer, Denominator (installation view) (2020–22). Database, algorithms, and LED cube, 141.75 × 141.75 × 141.75 inches. © Urs Fischer. Gagosian, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Gagosian. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Urs Fischer, Denominator (installation view) (2020–22). Database, algorithms, and LED cube, 141.75 × 141.75 × 141.75 inches. © Urs Fischer. Gagosian, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Gagosian. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Urs Fischer, Denominator (installation view) (2020–22). Database, algorithms, and LED cube, 141.75 × 141.75 × 141.75 inches. © Urs Fischer. Gagosian, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Gagosian. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles. He serves on the editorial board of X-TRA.

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