Whether making work with moldy bread, melting wax, or Froot Loops screenprinted on massive mirrored boxes, Urs Fischer probes the inner workings of embodied experience and cultural production—reframing both process art and kitsch in turn. On the occasion of the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the US, currently on view at the New Museum in New York (through January 31, 2010), Artforum’s Michelle Kuo explores Fischer’s feverish range of materials and means.

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2003, nylon filament, banana, theater spotlight, dimensions variable.

SITTING IN THE KITCHEN IN URS FISCHER’S STUDIO, you hardly notice the mirrors. Yet there they are, panels upon panels of them lining the walls, casting an auratic glow onto the counters and quietly reflecting boxes of pasta and bowls of fruit, the remains of crushed walnuts or Vietnamese noodles from lunch. Mirrors are usually not a good idea for kitchens, amplifying every crumb and smear, but Fischer doesn’t mind, privileging instead the effect of visual extension: The area opens seamlessly onto the yawning Brooklyn loft, so standing at the stove you would not only see your torso reflected but also glimpse the vast work space behind you. The kitchen, in fact, seems to be the locus of the artist’s studio. Not because it is the center of activity (although it often is), but because it is the point at which the visceral and the virtual are most potently locked. Matter is molded, shrunken, macerated; chemicals combust or evaporate; quotidian things and substances are made specular, though even these projections are spattered with grease.

For Fischer, cooking is not alchemy. It does not purify or transcend. It is, rather, a rough science, a technology of adulteration and deformation—and it runs through the entirety of his giddily heterogeneous aesthetic, from large-scale aluminum casts to digital montages to heaving architectural interventions and motorized or mutating objects. If the artist acutely engages the problems of process art—transformation, scale, objecthood, systems, kinetics—it is in order to exceed even their most extravagant historical solutions with rapacious force. Oral stuffs of all kinds appear in his oeuvre: bananas, cigarettes, dough. So do gastric and organic systems, as in a life-size Swiss cottage constructed from golden loaves of bread at which live parakeets slowly peck away, or grotesque botanical hybrids created from halves of different fruits screwed together and left to fester. And while Fischer literally conflates oral and ocular cavities in numerous drawings and collages, in other works he collapses their functions. Eye and mouth and mirror become parallel apertures of voracious intake and metabolic circulation. Things and views, the real and the represented, are compacted with extraordinary stress.

Such procedures lead to a seditious mix of the highest of the senses, sight, and the lowest, taste. In a photograph from 1997, Fischer placed a real pear and a polygonal paper sculpture of a pear side by side on a silver serving tray, as if presenting a before-and-after sequence of diagrammatic optical transformation. Elsewhere the terms are shuffled, but the slippages of edible and optical are still pushed with delicate insistence. Comparisons are made between a raw egg and a carved egg, nested together in a 2000 assemblage, or a polyurethane pear and a real strawberry in a misbegotten gift basket from 2002. In Gänseeier Eclipse (Goose Eggs Eclipse), 2002, two eggs hang in front of a spotlight, the shadow of a single egg cast on the wall—the other egg thus occluded, lost in a blind spot—while in Untitled, 2003, a similarly suspended and illuminated banana and its foreshortened shadow couple like an Aristotelian contradiction. More recently, Neon, 2009 (created with longtime friend Georg Herold), mounts a carrot and a cucumber on fixtures as tubular substitutes for fluorescent lights. Each of these twosomes troubles a hierarchy that has been handed down from classical times through Condillac. In Fischer’s universe, the gustatory, the optical, the base, and the ideal are impiously interchangeable.

Libertine as all this may appear, such leveling is in fact the result of an investigation of sensation as sophisticated as that of Ernst Mach or Michel Serres. Early drawings from 1993, for instance, in which fingers are reversed or rotated and sutured to hands of the opposite orientation, inaugurate a series of works that wittily probe the chiral “handedness” of the body and its perceptual appendages. Untitled (Tongue/Léger Shift/Cookie Cutter), from the same year, extracts cylinders from a carefully mapped tongue in a deadpan take on Purist draftsmanship. More sordid implications are palpable in the clay, resin, and moldy bread excreted by two male busts, AM & PM, 2001. With their striated pigments dripping over, rather than fused with, the clay—a Fautrier-like detachment of color from texture—and with curdling and bubbling rot seeming to leak from every orifice, these sculptures launch a ghoulish attack on the human figure and its twin virtues of verticality and opticality.

This mastication and dissolution of good form has much to do with our densely packed contemporary modes of consumption and existence. Kitsch, after all, was identified by Greenberg and Adorno alike as precisely that which is “predigested.” A long line of artists have now emulated or appropriated the chewed-up, ersatz results. But at a moment when every entity and experience, no matter how specific or unique, appears to have been swallowed and synthesized in some way, not many artists have dived into the machinations of that teeming maw as deeply and cannily as Fischer. Quite literally, he takes up the irreverent pronouncement of that king of the kitschers to whom he is often compared, Dieter Roth: “Mein Auge ist ein Mund,” my eye is a mouth. (In Fischer’s Photoshopped Smoke Mouth Eye, 2005, an eye is framed not by lids but by lips, while smoke emanates from the hybrid hole.) Yet the artist does not simply repeat the subversive base materialism of the postwar generation, whereby modernist opticality is undercut from within and below. Nor is his an aesthetic of sheer accumulation, a reaction to alternating historical conditions of abstemiousness and insatiable Wirtschaftswunder abundance. Rather, he is a master morphological tactician, applying tremendous pressure to all manner of sensations, materials, spatial dimensions, and experiences—compacting them with the kind of brutal yet limber combinatorics normally achieved only through the digital.