FISCHERSPOONER

When Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner founded their art, music, and performance project FISCHERSPOONER in 1998 in New York, they had a mission—to make the stuffy and elitist art scene more open and accessible. Success came quickly. After their first orgiastic and opulent performances, like those at MoMA PS1, FISCHERSPOONER became the talk of the town and key protagonists in the city’s art scene. With their song Emerge, first published in the year 2000, they landed an international club hit that took them into the top 40 in the British charts and in 2002 even led to an appearance in the cult TV show Top of the Pops.

From June 30, 2017, FISCHERSPOONER will be presenting their dazzling and playful universe full of queer passion for the first time at mumok—in a show entitled SIR. A photo series by Yuki James will form the basis of an installation that FISCHERSPOONER have designed for this exhibition. The photos show Casey Spooner and many friends, acquaintances, and also anonymous men (recruited in the Internet), photographed in Spooner’s former New York apartment in various enactments and guises ranging from leather-and-chains bondage to frank male nudity, always within a warm domestic interieur and with the greatest possible expressivity. This use of the private ambience of an apartment as the stage for self-enactment raises questions concerning the borders between private and public space. Where does the private end? Where does the public begin? And in which intermediate spaces do we operate?

Today, identities are strongly defined via the social media, and thus presented both in public and in private. This exhibition both creates and challenges narratives based on characters and human relations that use digital technologies and social media.

The installation is an artistic extension of FISCHERSPOONER’s fourth album project. Also entitled SIR, this album will be published in fall 2017, produced by Michael Stipe (R.E.M.). It addresses the dissolution of the borders between private and public space.