Marlborough Contemporary
Lars Fisk
1970 —
Born in Lebanon, NH
Education
1993 —
BA, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT
2005 —
MFA, Columbia University, New York, NY
The artist lives and works in New York.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2016 —
Lars Fisk: Mr. Softee, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY
2008 —
Lars Fisk: Trashbags, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
2006 —
Lars Fisk, Taxter & Spengemann, New York, NY
2004 —
Lars Fisk, Taxter & Spengemann, New York, NY
2003 —
Firehouse Center for the Visual Arts, Burlington, VT
2002 —
Lars-Erik Fisk: Volkswagenball, Robert Hull Fleming Museum, Burlington, VT
Selected Group Exhibitions
2016 —
6’s and 7’s, Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY
2015 —
Six Advertisements, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY
2014 —
Broadway Morey Boogie, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY
2009 —
Time-Life Part I, Taxter & Spengemann, New York, NY
Queens International 4, Queens Museum of Art, New York, NY
2008 —
Waste not, want not, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, NY
2007 —
Overbite/Underbite, Ritter/Zamet, London, England
2005 —
Greater New York 2005, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY
2003 —
BUY Contortions, Taxter & Spengemann, New York, NY
Biennial of Public Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, Purchase, NY
The DeCordova Annual Exhibition, DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA
2001 —
Emerging Artists Fellowship Exhibition, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY
2000 —
The Directors/Curators Invitational Exhibition, Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, MN
What's the Big Idea?, Contemporary Arts Center, North Adams, MA
1999 —
On the Ball: the Sphere in Contemporary Sculpture, DeCordova Museum & Sculpture
Park, Lincoln, MA
1998 —
Post-Pastoral: New Images of the New England Landscape, Hood Museum of Art,
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Public Collections
DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA
LARSFISKATMARLBOROUGHCHELSEA,NEWYORK
BYTheEditorsofARTnewsPOSTED10/13/165:24PM
Installationviewof“LarsFisk:MR.SOFTEE,”2016,atMarlboroughChelsea.
COURTESYTHEARTISTANDMARLBOROUGHCHELSEA
Today’sshow:“LarsFisk:MR.SOFTEE”isonviewatMarlboroughChelseainNewYork
throughSaturday,October15.Thesoloexhibition,theNewYork–basedartist’sfirstwiththe
gallery,presentsnewwork.
Copyright2016,ArtMediaARTNEWS,llc.110GreeneStreet,2ndFl.,NewYork,N.Y.10012.Allrightsreserved.
Phish’sArtDirectorCallsFourShipping
ContainersHome
ByPENELOPEGREEN|AUG.24,2016
MatthewJohnsonforTheNewYorkTimes
Lars Fisk has weathered two hurricanes in the four shipping containers he calls
home. Once planted on the edge of the Costco parking lot that abuts the Socrates
Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, the containers were moved last year
to a slim, weedy lot in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
To prepare for the next hurricane, Mr. Fisk, 45, a cunning sculptor who has been
making public art for two decades — and has been an art director for Phish, the
whimsical Vermont jam band, designing their elaborate Bread & Puppet Theaterlike spectacles for nearly as long — is considering pontoons.
Stacked two by two, Lego-like, the containers make a modest low-slung onebedroom dwelling that Mr. Fisk has decorated with homespun touches like a
leather Eames lounge chair, a tchotchke shelf over the narrow staircase, folk art
on the plywood-clad walls, a rag rug, skylights and hanging plants in macramé
slings. A jib crane cantilevers out through steel double doors on the second floor,
to hoist furniture and art.
With the doors shut, you would never know the containers had an inner domestic
life, which suits the resourceful and thrifty Mr. Fisk, who said he’s “fixed up”
electricity and water to the site and pays a modest rent for the lot. Most of his
house is made from scraps, he added, “though I did spring a bit for some fancy
reclaimed flooring from a Pennsylvania farmhouse.”
When you make public art, as Mr. Fisk does, you learn to be economical.
“There’s always a way to keep suppressing your lifestyle and your overhead and
your expectations,” he said.
One recent afternoon, Mr. Fisk served lemonade in Mason jars to Max Levai, 28,
and Pascal Spengemann, 45, directors at Marlborough Chelsea, the Marlborough
Gallery’s more youthful outpost on West 25th Street.
They sat in Mr. Fisk’s backyard amid Hobbit-ish rounded garden beds that were
edged in bricks and tufted with moss and shade plants; clay pots, jauntily askew,
were tucked in at odd angles. In the vacant lot behind, weeds had blanketed the
rubble underneath into a soft, green berm.
Next month, Mr. Fisk, a sculptor who turns familiar brands and objects — a Con
Ed truck, say, or a tree — into plump spherical versions of themselves and
deploys them on streets in Boston, New York and Amsterdam, among other
cities, is exhibiting inside for a change, with a solo show, called “Mr. Softee,”
opening Sept. 8 at Mr. Levai and Mr. Spengemann’s gallery.
The other day, most of the pieces had been delivered to Chelsea, though an
ottoman-size subway ball, gorgeously tiled with the figures 23 (for the 23rd Street
Station), was still being worked on in Mr. Fisk’s studio, a former garage down the
block from his home. Eyeing the piece, Meghan McKee, 42, one of his assistants,
said, “Tiles on a round thing, it’s not going to be perfect.”
The show is New York-centric and distills Mr. Fisk’s interests in architecture,
construction and signage, consumption, storage and waste. A nickel-plated steel
trash-can ball is cherubic, with handles like little wings. A cobblestone ball as big
as a side chair has a manhole cover hat. Pea-size pencil balls are like pencil pills,
made as meticulously as all the spheres are, by deconstructing and refashioning
the object they are appropriating. Mr. Fisk used tiny tools to do so.
“I try to reproduce the thing in every possible way except form,” Mr. Fisk said.
The “Mr. Softee” ball, which gives the show its name, is adorable and
anthropomorphic, like Thomas the Tank Engine, and comes with soft-serve
spigots. “Lot Ball,” however, is menacing, a 15-foot-high black asphalt sphere
with protruding lozenge-shape curbs inspired by the Costco parking lot that was
once Mr. Fisk’s backyard.
For seven years, Mr. Fisk was studio and facilities manager at the Socrates
Sculpture Park, a former landfill turned arts space, museum and public park,
camping out in the donated containers the park uses for storage and work space.
On weekends, he was both horrified
and entranced by the Costco scene
beyond his kitchen window. He was
struck by the contrast between the
Socrates campus, an area that still
felt, as he said, “rugged, lawless and
overgrown,” and the big-box store’s
lot, “this vast, perfectly immaculate
stretch of asphalt all chopped up
with graphics, the grid of the parking
lines, and the hordes of people
flowing in and out.”
Mr. Fisk did shop there once or
twice, for cat food. At Socrates, three
feral cats found his containers so
comfortable that they moved in.
When he trucked the household to
Red Hook last year, the cats came,
too.
The move was easy: two trucks, one
forklift and a day’s work to deliver
and snap the containers in place. As
Mr.Fisk’sshipping-containerhomeinRed
lovely as it is, the house isn’t nearly
Hook,Brooklyn.MatthewJohnsonforTheNewYork as elaborate as it had been in
Times
Queens, where it had a solarium and
a porch. They didn’t fit on the truck,
“so I edited them out,” Mr. Fisk said.
“He had the best view in New York City,” Mr. Levai said.
“Everyone has their fancies,” Mr. Fisk said. “But it was made out of what was
available. The containers were there, the plywood was there.”
Mr. Spengemann broke in, concerned that Mr. Fisk was downplaying his
domestic chops. “I don’t want you to miss the fact that there were some nice
touches,” he said. “The solarium was filled with rugs and music. I want to stress
the aesthetic component. Lars was always like, ‘That’s a nice couch.’ I’ve been to
an artist’s loft where there’s only an old army cot and no lights and it’s all about
deprivation. But Lars, he’s more like ‘Queer Eye’ for the junkyard.”
Mr. Spengemann and Mr. Fisk have been friends since they attended middle
school together in Hanover, N.H. “Lars was the first person I knew who was a
peer who said he was going to be an artist,” Mr. Spengemann said.
In the 1990s, after graduating from the University of Vermont, Mr. Fisk was
living in his studio in Burlington, Vt. Mr. Spengemann lived there, too, camped
on a futon in a closet; across the street were the offices of Phish’s management
company.
One thing led to another and Mr. Fisk, Mr. Spengemann and Rachel Comey, the
artist and fashion designer, among others, found themselves performing and
building for a Phish concert, at which point Mr. Fisk, for one, tumbled right down
the Phish rabbit hole, often with Mr. Spengemann’s help.
He went on to design acres of installations: entire cities with giant puppets and
arch signage. One installation, “The Garden of Infinite Pleasantries,” turned
portable toilets into Japanese pagodas in a Teletubby-ish landscape. Another was
an enormous clothesline strung from telephone poles and hung with
Brobdingnagian clothes that ringed the stage.
In an email, Trey Anastasio, Phish’s frontman, wrote that from the get-go, Mr.
Fisk had an appreciation for the absurd that fit the band’s ethos.
“More recently, at our Superball IX Festival in 2011,” he said, “Lars built a large
center sculpture out of these storage units. He had been traveling around the
country and noticing that there were more and more storage spaces popping up
on the landscape. People keep collecting so much junk that they need more and
more storage spaces to store it all, until the storage spaces themselves are
becoming a new form of junk. We ended up playing a late-night secret set inside
of the sculpture.”
After 10 years in Burlington, Mr. Fisk moved to New York City to attend
Columbia University’s M.F.A. program, after which he made a pilgrimage to
Joshua Tree, Calif., to work with Andrea Zittel, the artist, on her desert
homestead experiment there, gussying up a shipping container or two.
Mr.Fiskworksinhisstudio.MatthewJohnsonforTheNewYorkTimes
In 2008, the Socrates Sculpture Park, where Mr. Fisk had been an emerging
artist fellow and an exhibitor, offered him a job — and a shipping container. It
was in irresistible combination, he said.
The first year, he made the container his field office. He rigged up an outdoor
solar shower and an outdoor kitchen. “It was pretty crude,” he said.
By Year 5, he had added three containers, along with the solarium and a secondfloor porch. He now has a waterless toilet (called an Incinolet, it is electric and
burns waste into ash) and a claw foot tub. A mosquito net hangs over his
handmade bed. When it’s hot, he opens the double doors.
Container living isn’t ideal, he said, just cheap. Leaks are a constant problem
(though Mr. Fisk likes the sound of the rain on steel). So is condensation in
winter. “When you’re socked with extreme cold on the outside and you get this
wallop of a temperature difference,” he said, “the walls sweat like hell.”
Mr. Fisk has also learned that hot water is a luxury he can’t do without, and 30
inches is the minimum width his body can fit comfortably through, be it a
stairwell or a doorway. Furthermore, the dimensions of a standard container,
roughly 20 by 8 by 8½ feet, are too mingy on their own, which is why he has
arranged his two-story house to be two containers wide.
Mr. Fisk is handy by nurture: his father, a retired schoolteacher, built and
designed the series of Vermont-style houses the family lived in; his mother
worked for Stave, the handmade wooden jigsaw puzzle company in Norwich, Vt.,
where she began as a puzzle-cutter.
His inspiration, too, he said, was the design build movement of the 1970s. “They
talk about, like, ‘Hang out on your site in a tent for six months and watch the sun
rise every day,’” he said. “It’s true that there is much to be learned from just
feeling your way in the space.”
Later, Mr. Spengemann said, “Lars’s lifestyle is sort of predicated on a kind of
‘keep it lean and mean’ ideal. He wants to avoid the preciousness of the Brooklyn
homesteaders. It’s not demonstrative. He takes some pride in being resourceful,
and it sets him apart.”
In 1996, the year the two men met the Phish folk, Mr. Fisk made his first sphere.
“Streetball” is a gray concrete ball encircled by a broken yellow line. It is a
precursor of sorts to “Lot Ball,” the idea of “pavement as world,” as Mr. Fisk put
it. It’s what got him interested in ideas about confounding perspective and
playing with familiar American tropes.
Some years ago, one of Mr. Fisk’s UPS spheres was living on the lawn of its
owner, Chris Sharp, a sculptor and friend of Mr. Fisk’s from Shelburne, Vt.
Like all his work, the piece is instantly recognizable; made from riveted metal, it’s
a deep UPS brown, and sports a yellow UPS logo. One day, Mr. Sharp was
surprised by a UPS driver who knocked on Mr. Sharp’s door and offered to
remove the ball.
As Mr. Fisk recalled: “He was very apologetic, saying that he was sorry that this
had ended up on his property, that it must have fallen off the truck or something,
and that he would send someone by to retrieve it. Chris tried to explain that, no,
this wasn’t the case, that it was an artwork that belonged there. But the driver just
couldn’t quite grasp that notion and insisted that it wasn’t a problem for them to
remedy the situation.”
Mr. Fisk is still tickled by this encounter. He likes for his spheres to behave not so
much like works of art, but more like oddities, as he put it, “that are somehow
familiar and at the same time nonsensical.”
AversionofthisarticleappearsinprintonAugust25,2016,onpageD1oftheNewYorkeditionwiththe
headline:ArtfulLifeinFourContainers.
By Steve Annear G LO B E S TA F F APRIL 16, 2015
Nothing describes the essence of Boston quite like the Red Sox and the MBTA.
That’s why when he was working on an art installation that’s now on display downtown,
sculptor Lars-Erik Fisk rolled the two iconic symbols into the piece.
As part of an ongoing series he’s been working on for the past year, Fisk created two
large spheres — one has the characteristics of Fenway Park’s Green Monster, and the
other looks like a morphed Red Line train — to display in the lobby and front entrance,
respectively, at 100 High St.
The Green Monster ball, which lights up and has a working scoreboard, is built from
steel, tin, and sheet metal, materials Fisk said are old-fashioned for a project like this,
but similar to what make up the actual sign at the ballpark.
“It’s a specific detail of the park that appealed to me,” he said.
For the Red Line ball, Fisk used polycarbonate to shape the sculpture before he added a
windshield, destination arrival sign, and headlights and tailights to the sphere to
capture the T’s look.
“I strive to make the spheres exactly as they are, and exactly how they occur, in the
world. I do that in every possible way except for the form,” Fisk said.
The T ball looks like a pod that could fit a single passenger on board, but Fisk said
people wouldn’t get very far in it.
He said he built the spheres after being contacted by an agent who was seeking public
art at the request of the building’s owners.
Because he enjoys having his work out in the open, where people can easily see it, he
accepted the challenge. Since installing the spheres this week, his artwork has been
turning heads.
Fisk said he picked his subject matter because it is immediately recognizable to
residents and visitors.
“Fenway was an obvious place to begin because of the city’s love of the team, and the
sense of pride that is specific to Fenway Park,” he said.
As for the MBTA, Fisk said, despite the love-hate relationship riders often have with the
public transit agency, its logo is synonymous with the city.
“I didn’t quite catch that people loathed the MBTA until the spring,” said the artist, who
is based in New York City but maintains he’s a Red Sox fan.
Fisk has similar work on display at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in
Lincoln.
Steve Annear can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on
Twitter @steveannear.
The Median Is the Message
‘Broadway Morey Boogie,’ With Over 100
Blocks of Public Art
By MELENA RYZIK SEPT. 11, 2014
SLIDE SHOW|8 PHOTOS
Damon Winter/The New York Times
IF Con Ed were in the market for a mascot, this could be it.
Looking like a cross between Pac-Man and a public utility vehicle, Lars-Erik
Fisk’s artwork was dropped on the median strip at Broadway and 79th Street on
Monday. A crane stood by as Mr. Fisk put the finishing touches on it, fielding
nonstop questions from passers-by.
“What is it?” they asked.
“A Con Ed ball,” Mr. Fisk replied, as if that explained everything. It is, at least, the
title of his piece.
Mr. Fisk continued detailing, adding lights and windows to his work, a sphere
painted in the familiar turquoise, gray and white stripes of a Con Ed truck, with
the company’s name encircling it. (The Consolidated Edison Company did not
participate in the piece.)
“I prefer that it not necessarily be seen as an art object and invite a lot of
confusion, and the best way to do that is in the public, where you’re not sure what
you’re going to see,” said Mr. Fisk, an artist who was once the creative director for
the jam band Phish. A little boy approached. “Did you make this all by yourself?”
he wanted to know. Mr. Fisk smiled. “I had a little help,” he said.
Mr. Fisk’s art had a lot of help in its landing spot. It is part of “Broadway Morey
Boogie,” an ambitious display of public art by a diverse array of artists that has
been dropped up and down Broadway, at 10 sites from Columbus Circle to 166th
Street. Organized by the Marlborough Chelsea gallery, a commercial venture,
with the help of the nonprofit Broadway Mall Association and the city’s Parks
Department, it is intended as a 10-artist group show, the first along Broadway,
where public exhibitions are usually devoted to a single artist.
It is also a far-reaching launching pad for the gallery, started two years ago by
Max Levai, 26, Pierre Levai’s son. Pierre, a veteran art dealer and patriarch of the
international Marlborough chain, helped inaugurate the Broadway art corridor
in 2004 by underwriting an exhibition by the sculptor Tom Otterness; a decade
on, Max is stepping into his father’s footsteps with this show, which opens on
Wednesday and runs through February.
Creating “Broadway Morey Boogie” over two years was “a huge responsibility,
and a very important one for me personally,” the younger Mr. Levai said.
Growing up on 28th Street near Fifth Avenue, he visited Chelsea galleries often
and began working at his father’s flagship space on 57th Street when he was 22.
Simultaneously opening his downtown gallery and envisioning this exhibition, he
didn’t want to squander the family’s reputation or his good fortune. His father
offered support but was largely hands-off.
“A show of many artists, which have a different vocabulary of expression, by
definition is difficult,” Pierre Levai said in his French-accented English. “I was
very happy not to get involved in it.”
With his gallery director, Pascal Spengemann, Max Levai handpicked the artists
— all Americans, mostly younger and midcareer, some making their public debut.
A few pieces are site-specific, and many are in a larger scale or a different
material from what those artists have worked in before. Not all are represented
by Marlborough Chelsea. “To make a statement,” Mr. Levai said, they wanted to
collaborate with other artists and galleries.
The exhibition’s title is a play on Piet Mondrian’s 1943 painting “Broadway
Boogie Woogie.” The Morey reference is to Tom Morey, the surfing pioneer who
created the Morey boogie board.
“We were envisioning a map where you were, like, surfing down Broadway, and
all these really engaging things were popping up,” Mr. Spengemann said. “The
emphasis was on fun.”
So there, on Columbus Circle, is a 15-foot-tall, two-and-a-half-ton concrete bear,
a camera slung around his neck, like a Central Park tourist. Called “Chronicle of
the latter world” and inspired partly by a roadside sculpture in the Yukon, it’s by
the Polish-born, Brooklyn-based artist Joanna Malinowska, 42. It was her first
time sculpting in concrete, and her first sanctioned public art piece, “with a
proper set of permits,” Ms. Malinowska said, as she surveyed the work in
progress. “I’m nervous. I hope it doesn’t kill anybody.” (Never fear: Copious
safety checks and insurance are required.)
Drew Heitzler, from Venice Beach, Calif., imported a 25-foot black rubber palm
tree to the leafy median at Broadway and 157th Street. His tree is pockmarked
with staples, as if it once held “Missing” fliers. Its underlying message relates to
oil production, railroad barons and Los Angeles noir.
“I hope that people wonder why it’s there, and maybe that will lead them to
investigate it,” said Mr. Heitzler, 42, who has a related show,“Paradies Amerika,”
at Marlborough Chelsea.
Some installations invite interaction, like the skate ramp boulders painted to look
like M&Ms, by Dan Colen, at Broadway and 137th Street. And some have more
oblique messages, like “Everything Is Permitted,” Davina Semo’s concretebunker-like building across from Barnard College, at Broadway and 117th Street.
“I don’t know if this looks like a sculpture,” said Ms. Semo, 32. “I’m very excited
to see what happens to it.”
Sometimes, pieces were rejected. Parks Department officials thought better of
putting Tony Matelli’s “Sleepwalker,” a realistic sculpture of a nearly naked man,
by the subway steps at Broadway and 73rd Street. The piece recently caused a
debate on the Wellesley campus in Massachusetts, where students protested it as
stalker like. Mr. Matelli is now represented by “Stray Dog,” which is also on view
at MetroTech Commons in Brooklyn.
As with all public art, the relationship with the community can be fraught;
looking over Mr. Colen’s work in Hamilton Heights, one neighborhood resident
grumbled that the area needed jobs, not art. Harriet F. Senie, a professor at City
College and a scholar of public art, wondered about the conceptual angles.“The
title of this exhibition — that’s not going to be meaningful to a non-art audience,”
she said. Context, accessibility and dialogue have to be considered, alongside
creativity, to make truly populist art, she said. “I hope that will be the outcome
here.”
The works will be presented with a hashtag (#Bwaymoreyboogie) and a number
to call for a recording about each piece, said Deborah C. Foord, chairwoman of
the Broadway Mall Association’s public art committee. “We’re also interested in
stretching people a little bit,” enticing them to traverse the avenue for highminded work, she said.
The gallery also hopes to sell the pieces; Mr. Fisk’s “Con Ed Ball,” for which the
gallery paid about half of the $20,000 production costs, is $125,000, said Mr.
Fisk, who is also the studio and facilities manager at Socrates Sculpture Park in
Queens. He spent hours on Monday explaining the piece.
“It’s more just something you play with, with your imagination,” Max Levai
advised a child. as he surveyed the installation eagerly. “It takes awhile for it to all
sink in,” he said.
And Pierre Levai, watching the exhibition finally unfold, pronounced himself
proud. “Most as an art dealer than a father,” he said. “As a father, it’s like the
strawberry in a very good cake.”
Phish’sArtDirectorCallsFourShipping
ContainersHome
ByPENELOPEGREEN|AUG.24,2016
MatthewJohnsonforTheNewYorkTimes
Lars Fisk has weathered two hurricanes in the four shipping containers he calls
home. Once planted on the edge of the Costco parking lot that abuts the Socrates
Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, the containers were moved last year
to a slim, weedy lot in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
To prepare for the next hurricane, Mr. Fisk, 45, a cunning sculptor who has been
making public art for two decades — and has been an art director for Phish, the
whimsical Vermont jam band, designing their elaborate Bread & Puppet Theaterlike spectacles for nearly as long — is considering pontoons.
Stacked two by two, Lego-like, the containers make a modest low-slung onebedroom dwelling that Mr. Fisk has decorated with homespun touches like a
leather Eames lounge chair, a tchotchke shelf over the narrow staircase, folk art
on the plywood-clad walls, a rag rug, skylights and hanging plants in macramé
slings. A jib crane cantilevers out through steel double doors on the second floor,
to hoist furniture and art.
With the doors shut, you would never know the containers had an inner domestic
life, which suits the resourceful and thrifty Mr. Fisk, who said he’s “fixed up”
electricity and water to the site and pays a modest rent for the lot. Most of his
house is made from scraps, he added, “though I did spring a bit for some fancy
reclaimed flooring from a Pennsylvania farmhouse.”
When you make public art, as Mr. Fisk does, you learn to be economical.
“There’s always a way to keep suppressing your lifestyle and your overhead and
your expectations,” he said.
One recent afternoon, Mr. Fisk served lemonade in Mason jars to Max Levai, 28,
and Pascal Spengemann, 45, directors at Marlborough Chelsea, the Marlborough
Gallery’s more youthful outpost on West 25th Street.
They sat in Mr. Fisk’s backyard amid Hobbit-ish rounded garden beds that were
edged in bricks and tufted with moss and shade plants; clay pots, jauntily askew,
were tucked in at odd angles. In the vacant lot behind, weeds had blanketed the
rubble underneath into a soft, green berm.
Next month, Mr. Fisk, a sculptor who turns familiar brands and objects — a Con
Ed truck, say, or a tree — into plump spherical versions of themselves and
deploys them on streets in Boston, New York and Amsterdam, among other
cities, is exhibiting inside for a change, with a solo show, called “Mr. Softee,”
opening Sept. 8 at Mr. Levai and Mr. Spengemann’s gallery.
The other day, most of the pieces had been delivered to Chelsea, though an
ottoman-size subway ball, gorgeously tiled with the figures 23 (for the 23rd Street
Station), was still being worked on in Mr. Fisk’s studio, a former garage down the
block from his home. Eyeing the piece, Meghan McKee, 42, one of his assistants,
said, “Tiles on a round thing, it’s not going to be perfect.”
The show is New York-centric and distills Mr. Fisk’s interests in architecture,
construction and signage, consumption, storage and waste. A nickel-plated steel
trash-can ball is cherubic, with handles like little wings. A cobblestone ball as big
as a side chair has a manhole cover hat. Pea-size pencil balls are like pencil pills,
made as meticulously as all the spheres are, by deconstructing and refashioning
the object they are appropriating. Mr. Fisk used tiny tools to do so.
“I try to reproduce the thing in every possible way except form,” Mr. Fisk said.
The “Mr. Softee” ball, which gives the show its name, is adorable and
anthropomorphic, like Thomas the Tank Engine, and comes with soft-serve
spigots. “Lot Ball,” however, is menacing, a 15-foot-high black asphalt sphere
with protruding lozenge-shape curbs inspired by the Costco parking lot that was
once Mr. Fisk’s backyard.
For seven years, Mr. Fisk was studio and facilities manager at the Socrates
Sculpture Park, a former landfill turned arts space, museum and public park,
camping out in the donated containers the park uses for storage and work space.
On weekends, he was both horrified
and entranced by the Costco scene
beyond his kitchen window. He was
struck by the contrast between the
Socrates campus, an area that still
felt, as he said, “rugged, lawless and
overgrown,” and the big-box store’s
lot, “this vast, perfectly immaculate
stretch of asphalt all chopped up
with graphics, the grid of the parking
lines, and the hordes of people
flowing in and out.”
Mr. Fisk did shop there once or
twice, for cat food. At Socrates, three
feral cats found his containers so
comfortable that they moved in.
When he trucked the household to
Red Hook last year, the cats came,
too.
The move was easy: two trucks, one
forklift and a day’s work to deliver
and snap the containers in place. As
Mr.Fisk’sshipping-containerhomeinRed
lovely as it is, the house isn’t nearly
Hook,Brooklyn.MatthewJohnsonforTheNewYork as elaborate as it had been in
Times
Queens, where it had a solarium and
a porch. They didn’t fit on the truck,
“so I edited them out,” Mr. Fisk said.
“He had the best view in New York City,” Mr. Levai said.
“Everyone has their fancies,” Mr. Fisk said. “But it was made out of what was
available. The containers were there, the plywood was there.”
Mr. Spengemann broke in, concerned that Mr. Fisk was downplaying his
domestic chops. “I don’t want you to miss the fact that there were some nice
touches,” he said. “The solarium was filled with rugs and music. I want to stress
the aesthetic component. Lars was always like, ‘That’s a nice couch.’ I’ve been to
an artist’s loft where there’s only an old army cot and no lights and it’s all about
deprivation. But Lars, he’s more like ‘Queer Eye’ for the junkyard.”
Mr. Spengemann and Mr. Fisk have been friends since they attended middle
school together in Hanover, N.H. “Lars was the first person I knew who was a
peer who said he was going to be an artist,” Mr. Spengemann said.
In the 1990s, after graduating from the University of Vermont, Mr. Fisk was
living in his studio in Burlington, Vt. Mr. Spengemann lived there, too, camped
on a futon in a closet; across the street were the offices of Phish’s management
company.
One thing led to another and Mr. Fisk, Mr. Spengemann and Rachel Comey, the
artist and fashion designer, among others, found themselves performing and
building for a Phish concert, at which point Mr. Fisk, for one, tumbled right down
the Phish rabbit hole, often with Mr. Spengemann’s help.
He went on to design acres of installations: entire cities with giant puppets and
arch signage. One installation, “The Garden of Infinite Pleasantries,” turned
portable toilets into Japanese pagodas in a Teletubby-ish landscape. Another was
an enormous clothesline strung from telephone poles and hung with
Brobdingnagian clothes that ringed the stage.
In an email, Trey Anastasio, Phish’s frontman, wrote that from the get-go, Mr.
Fisk had an appreciation for the absurd that fit the band’s ethos.
“More recently, at our Superball IX Festival in 2011,” he said, “Lars built a large
center sculpture out of these storage units. He had been traveling around the
country and noticing that there were more and more storage spaces popping up
on the landscape. People keep collecting so much junk that they need more and
more storage spaces to store it all, until the storage spaces themselves are
becoming a new form of junk. We ended up playing a late-night secret set inside
of the sculpture.”
After 10 years in Burlington, Mr. Fisk moved to New York City to attend
Columbia University’s M.F.A. program, after which he made a pilgrimage to
Joshua Tree, Calif., to work with Andrea Zittel, the artist, on her desert
homestead experiment there, gussying up a shipping container or two.
Mr.Fiskworksinhisstudio.MatthewJohnsonforTheNewYorkTimes
In 2008, the Socrates Sculpture Park, where Mr. Fisk had been an emerging
artist fellow and an exhibitor, offered him a job — and a shipping container. It
was in irresistible combination, he said.
The first year, he made the container his field office. He rigged up an outdoor
solar shower and an outdoor kitchen. “It was pretty crude,” he said.
By Year 5, he had added three containers, along with the solarium and a secondfloor porch. He now has a waterless toilet (called an Incinolet, it is electric and
burns waste into ash) and a claw foot tub. A mosquito net hangs over his
handmade bed. When it’s hot, he opens the double doors.
Container living isn’t ideal, he said, just cheap. Leaks are a constant problem
(though Mr. Fisk likes the sound of the rain on steel). So is condensation in
winter. “When you’re socked with extreme cold on the outside and you get this
wallop of a temperature difference,” he said, “the walls sweat like hell.”
Mr. Fisk has also learned that hot water is a luxury he can’t do without, and 30
inches is the minimum width his body can fit comfortably through, be it a
stairwell or a doorway. Furthermore, the dimensions of a standard container,
roughly 20 by 8 by 8½ feet, are too mingy on their own, which is why he has
arranged his two-story house to be two containers wide.
Mr. Fisk is handy by nurture: his father, a retired schoolteacher, built and
designed the series of Vermont-style houses the family lived in; his mother
worked for Stave, the handmade wooden jigsaw puzzle company in Norwich, Vt.,
where she began as a puzzle-cutter.
His inspiration, too, he said, was the design build movement of the 1970s. “They
talk about, like, ‘Hang out on your site in a tent for six months and watch the sun
rise every day,’” he said. “It’s true that there is much to be learned from just
feeling your way in the space.”
Later, Mr. Spengemann said, “Lars’s lifestyle is sort of predicated on a kind of
‘keep it lean and mean’ ideal. He wants to avoid the preciousness of the Brooklyn
homesteaders. It’s not demonstrative. He takes some pride in being resourceful,
and it sets him apart.”
In 1996, the year the two men met the Phish folk, Mr. Fisk made his first sphere.
“Streetball” is a gray concrete ball encircled by a broken yellow line. It is a
precursor of sorts to “Lot Ball,” the idea of “pavement as world,” as Mr. Fisk put
it. It’s what got him interested in ideas about confounding perspective and
playing with familiar American tropes.
Some years ago, one of Mr. Fisk’s UPS spheres was living on the lawn of its
owner, Chris Sharp, a sculptor and friend of Mr. Fisk’s from Shelburne, Vt.
Like all his work, the piece is instantly recognizable; made from riveted metal, it’s
a deep UPS brown, and sports a yellow UPS logo. One day, Mr. Sharp was
surprised by a UPS driver who knocked on Mr. Sharp’s door and offered to
remove the ball.
As Mr. Fisk recalled: “He was very apologetic, saying that he was sorry that this
had ended up on his property, that it must have fallen off the truck or something,
and that he would send someone by to retrieve it. Chris tried to explain that, no,
this wasn’t the case, that it was an artwork that belonged there. But the driver just
couldn’t quite grasp that notion and insisted that it wasn’t a problem for them to
remedy the situation.”
Mr. Fisk is still tickled by this encounter. He likes for his spheres to behave not so
much like works of art, but more like oddities, as he put it, “that are somehow
familiar and at the same time nonsensical.”
AversionofthisarticleappearsinprintonAugust25,2016,onpageD1oftheNewYorkeditionwiththe
headline:ArtfulLifeinFourContainers.
(http://queenscourier.com/)
Lars Fisk: Living with the art
By Bob Doda
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011 12:00 AM EST
Leave a comment (http://queenscourier.com/2011/lars-fisk-living-with-the-art-530/#respond)
While covering the Talking Heads song “Cities” at Phish’s 1998 Lemonwheel Festival at Loring Air Force Base in Northern Maine, guitarist Trey
Anastasio ad-libbed the line, “I will build a city; build myself a city to live in.”
Out of the nine “one-act-only” Phish festivals that have transpired since 1996, those cities – far from the perils of general population – eight were built
by Lars Fisk (along with other creative collaborators), the studio and facilities manager at Socrates Sculpture Park. A celebrity in the Phish community,
being creative is second nature for Fisk. Just look at his studio.
“It’s five shipping containers, all together,” says Fisk, referring to the architectural living work of art he pieced together over the course of the last year.
The shipping containers are stacked like legos complete with standard furnishings, a spiral staircase and internet connection. Out on the terrace, his
floppy-eared Basset Hound, Freddy, hollers at a visitor but eventually finds a place to nap in the air conditioned enchanted environment.
“It counts for a whole new interest in architecture. Something I will pursue more in the next chapter of life.”
At 40, Fisk has accomplished much outside of being a well-known name amongst fans of a jam band that has been playing together since 1983. Since a
very young age, it was not always sculpture that interested him, but anything he could make with his hands. He first became involved with Socrates
Sculpture Park in 2001 for the park’s first emerging artist fellowship exhibition, a program that Fisk says is a “great way to travel, apply your trade,
meet great people and get support for projects.” Before that, the Vermont native had never been to Queens before. This year’s emerging artist’s
exhibition begins on Saturday, September 10 and with 20 participants, the show will be the biggest exhibition in its 10 year history. Fisk remembered
his first exhibit in the park:
“It was a series of spherical sculptures that I had been working on for a long time. They were some site-specific works but this one was specific to New
York. It was supposed to represent a crumbling, brownstone walk-up you might see in Brooklyn,” said Fisk.
And the balls haven’t stopped since. He has made a Volkswagen ball, a John Deere tractor ball, a school bus ball and a barn ball that was used as the
cover art on Phish’s 2002 release, Round Room. More recently, Super Ball IX, the band’s ninth festival held at Watkins-Glen Race Track near the
Finger Lakes was another opportunity to get spherical. Ball Square – as it was dubbed for the July 4th weekend constructed by Fisk and long time
collaborator Russ Bennett – was home to an enormous disco ball, a water mill, a tricked-out powerhouse storage unit (built at and shipped from
Socrates) and other pieces of interactive art that more than 40,000 people enjoyed. Reviews of the show and the response to Ball Square was
overwhelmingly positive; possibly a first for the band with a famously critical fan base.
“I’m really pleased to hear the reviews and, more than ever, I feel like I’m seeking out that response,” said Fisk. “I feel like it was one of the best shows
we’ve ever done, from my perspective. And I was just so happy with it, I was curious if others agreed.”
Socrates Sculpture Park on the Long Island City waterfront overlooks the Manhattan skyline and attracts 78,000 visitors annually. The idea of having
this public space converted from a once dilapidated wasteland is based on the belief that reclamation, revitalization and creative expression are
essential to the survival, humanity and improvement of their urban environment. But creating structures to be displayed outdoors can get tricky.
“The physical challenge of engineering a sculpture is getting it to stand up against weather, forces of nature and to the public itself,” said Fisk. “It’s been
new to me to face this challenge of helping an artist create these very unlikely objects. They are not typical things. They are tall. They are looming. They
catch wind. They are not things that have any regulation surrounding them. It’s been a fun challenge to keep them safe.”
A stand out moment during the last four years as studio and facilities manager at Socrates occurred while he driving heavy machinery to install a largerthan life art piece for the public to enjoy.
“You can’t normally drive a fork lift out in a public park,” said Fisk, who could feel the eyes of children and their parents watching him as he carefully
planned his course of action. “There were all these people absorbing the excitement around the installation, and then there was this cellist about 30
feet away from me beneath a canopy of these beautiful trees . . . and I was thinking what a dynamic place this is. We have this wonderful asset of a public
park that has great programming with many things happening at once. It never stops. There’s always something to receive here.”
For now, Fisk will continue to mentor younger artists and is eagerly anticipating the Emerging Artist Exhibition; what he calls the highlight of the year.
The park will also be host to a farmer’s market on Saturday’s during the summer. As for the next Phish collaboration, fans will have to wait and see.
“Just now, I’m sort of rediscovering Phish. I would drift in an out but it’s always there. They are just such incredible musicians, it doesn’t get old.”
For upcoming events at Socrates Sculpture Park, visit www.socratessculpturepark.org (http://www.socratessculpturepark.org).
By Bob Doda
[email protected] (mailto:bdoda%40q%75e%65n%73co%75%72%69%65r.com)
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Sculpting a Great Notion with Phish Festival Artist
Lars Fisk (Relix Revisited)
by Benjy Eisen on June 28, 2011
Here’s an interview originally slated to appear in the Sunday edition of the Coventry Courier, the newspaper we
created for Phish’s festival in August 2004. For Trey Anastasio’s more recent conversation with Lars on the Super
Ball IX site, click here.
___
From half-buried Big Boy to interactive rock gardens, the living-art environment that Lars Fisk creates has been an
essential element of every Phish festival, defining them from each other and from all other live music events. Only
Phish's IT festival had a Sunken City. Only Phish's Great Went had an "Elephant Walk." And only Coventry has a
Back Forty.
For months before each festival, Fisk works with a team of co-creators in building the interactive art installations and
thematic visual decorations that make your weekend here complete. In other words, they've built the cities that have
become all of our playgrounds for one weekend each year. And their intent is all for our delight.
Benjy: Can I get you to introduce yourself and explain your role in these festivals?
Lars: I am a sculptor and originally hitched up with the band in about 1996 when their management company moved
their offices across the street from where my sculptor shop was. So just out of neighborly-ness they invited me to
take part in their first big outdoor show. That was the Clifford Ball. And from there my role just became sort of an art
director position where I became the fellow that would oversee all of the visual design elements. So, that's my story.
Benjy: Were you familiar with Phish’s music before then?
Lars: Oh sure, yeah. I'm a Vermonter, and going to college at UVM, they were definitely on the radar. I'd go down
and see the band at the local Burlington bars. So yeah, I was a fan before I was an employee.
Benjy: Each festival has a central theme or themes laced throughout. Can you talk about the process of
coming up with them?
Lars: It most always has to do with sight. It is sight-specific thematics, I'd say. We find a location and we go there
and we get the vibe of the place and we see what the site is all about as far as what sort of people live there, what
they do, what the land seems to say about itself and we go from there, typically.
Benjy: I’ve heard people have deep and meaningful conversations about some of the past themes and then
I’ve also heard people take it on a silly or whimsical level. Do you delve into that dichotomy or discuss it at
all?
Lars: Yeah, absolutely. But a lot of it is sort of symbolism that comes from the whimsical. It starts first with the
ridiculous and the absurd. And then around that we create icons out of these whimsies. Basically we're inventing our
own symbolism usually, as we go. So if one person comes up with a notion to disguise a giant water tank, then the
next person might say, Well, one way to disguise it would be to put a giant pair of Groucho Marx glasses on it.' I
mean, that's just a typically known 50 cent disguise that everybody's seen before. From there we kind of riff from
that point and build it up to become a symbol. By the time you build it, at sixty feet across, it becomes serious. You
can't help but to revere it as a serious symbol. But then again, in the wider look of things, it's really just the site that
determines the scene and it all winds around that.
Benjy: What were some themes that got discussed for the past festival but never happened?
Lars: Oh everything always happens.
Benjy: What was the most challenging thing that you had to implement?
Lars: The elephant at the Lemonwheel has become almost a signifier now, where if somebody says a project is
going to become an elephant we all know what they mean by that because that was the most challenging to make
basically a robotic puppet out of a forklift with functionality, like the attachments of the fire truck and fireworks, just
added up to a hell of a challenge.
Benjy: Did Phish’s break-up announcement impact the designs for Coventry?
Lars: It did. And at the same time, that subject is really hard to know how to take on. It affected us but not in such a
conscious way. The symbol of the fence which is big in this part of the farm country where land is fenced in and
people are retained and together or livestock is all kept together in one happy family and then having this notion of
this all breaking up the idea of using fencing a lot as a visual design element took on a whole new significance after
the band made that announcement. So, the fence whole new meaning now.
Benjy: The installation area is called the Back Forty. Can you talk about what that name references?
Lars: Yeah, well it's funny because we always called….the Back Forty is just slang for the backyard or the land out
back where most of the people are not. We always referred to the back forty as the place where the artsy stuff goes
on, where the artistic visual installations go on. And it seems appropriate that after using that as a term for all these
years, that we'd use it as the actual term, as the formal term for this area, because it's kind of rural slang to say back
forty' to refer to the back area of the land that is less populated.
Benjy: Where there any challenges this year compared with previous years, maybe because of the new
site?
Lars: Oh absolutely. We've been kind of spoiled up there at Loring, having all the space and all the facilities that are
present already in a giant air force base and that we haven't had here. But we made do and we're really working out
of a working farm right now. Our visual design department is actually set up in the midst of a working farm, so it's
been kind of great because we find little scraps of this and that, and we just toss them in the mix. So it's been a
blessing also, to have to change.
Benjy: Can you talk about Russ Bennett and can you give an example of the back and forth that maybe
goes on between the two of you?
Lars: We're not exactly right or left-brain opposites or anything like that because we both have design that we put
into it. I come from a background of sculpture where he comes from a background of building construction. But there
are design issues with both so we put those two together and we make architecturally scaled sculpture out of that.
Benjy: Looking back on all of these festivals, is there one thing you’re most proud of?
Lars: We were talking about this the other day. We all seem to remember Lemonwheel being a pinnacle of our
design. It's hard to compare each to each other, but Lemonwheel I think was the best job that we've done with the
flat nothingness of Loring Air Force Base. To actually get into landscaping and building hills into the landscape that
was once flat, I think that all the landscaping we did there and thematically, just the scope of it, with the elephant
and everything, that just really stands out to everybody.
Benjy: Do you think you’re going to continue to do festival work beyond Phish’s final festival?
Lars: I don't think so. I think this is it for me. While Russ is getting more involved with Bonnaroo, but myself, I'm
actually in the midst of a graduate program at Columbia University. I've got one more year of that and then I'm
probably going to go back to my own independent sculpture.
Benjy: Well, you’re going to be missed. You definitely are a huge part of the whole Phish festival
experience.
Lars: Thank you very much.
!
Sculptor Lars Fisk has contributed his visionary artistry to Phish's amazing one-band festivals, starting with the Clifford
Ball, which set the whole ball rolling back in 1996. Fisk and Vermont builder extraordinaire Russ Bennett have served as
co-creative directors of every Phish festival (except for 2009's Festival 8, due to previous commitments). Their
responsibility is the visual design of each festival, which involves meetings with band members about possible concepts
early in the planning process. In addition to their own hands-on work, Fisk and Bennett hire artists and crews and oversee
the projects' implementation. Sometimes the construction continues during the festival, allowing concertgoers to witness
art being created in real time and to participate themselves.
Fisk and Bennett have reimagined and reshaped the physical landscape at Phish's festivals, creating intriguing centerarea environments that alter conventional frames of reference. For example, at the Great Went (1997), they evoked the
look and feel of the city of Rome and its piazzas, while at IT (2003) they engineered "Sunk City," suggesting a decaying
urban environment at some distant point in the future.
Fisk and Bennett are presently designing installations and making site preparations for Super Ball IX, Phish's ninth
festival, which will be held at Watkins Glen International - a racetrack in upstate New York - over the July 4th weekend.
Once again, the artists' imaginations have gone into high gear as they conceptualize a setting that will complement
Phish's musical flights. Fisk - who is currently director of the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York recently hooked up by phone with Trey Anastasio to take a retrospective look at past Phish festivals and offer a tantalizing
taste of what's to come at Super Ball IX. Here is a transcript of their freewheeling, far-ranging conversation.
Lars Fisk and Russ Bennett © Phish
Lars Fisk: Hello.
Trey Anastasio: Hey, Lars. Howdy-dowdy. It's your interviewer.
Lars: Wait a minute, who's the interviewee and who's the interviewer?
Trey: I don't really know the answer to that question. Where are you?
Lars: I'm in my shipping container house in Long Island City. it's a house made out of five shipping containers.
Trey: And did you just move in or did you make it?
Lars: It's like these five big whole boxes that I stacked up to make a house.
Trey: Were you able to buy them?
Lars: Well, they were donated from here and there. These are just the standardized containers that they send goods all
over the world in. They're all over. So you can get them cheap. And you can stack them up like Legos and cut holes in
them and make houses out of them. Pretty nifty.
Trey: . What a cool idea.
Lars: Yeah. So that's where I am.
Trey: I hear you've been going back and forth to Watkins Glen.
Lars: Russ was just there yesterday. I couldn't make it there because we're installing a big sculpture exhibition that opens
up on Sunday. Russ is nailing it down up there, and paving the way real nice.
Trey: I'm trying to think back and remember when we first met. You had just graduated from college, right?
Lars: At UVM. The University of Vermont. I was just out of school and boy I just thought I was the cat's pajamas because
I got my first solo rental and I felt like I was really moving out into the real world at that time and that was my tiny little
studio that just happened to be right across from [Phish management company] Dionysian Productions.
Trey: There was a woman who worked next to you who did an album cover for me, "One Man's Trash."
Lars: Oh, Gerritt Gollner. Oh man, she was such a great artist.
Trey: I remember that you had your studio over there and I remember wandering around and running into her and asking
her to do the cover. She did this cool, layered thing.
Lars: I think she's in Berlin now. She's always had her own way of doing things. And she's an incredible artist, really
something else.
Trey: So, it's early 1996, and you get this call from Phish, and looking back now, we have to remember that there weren't
festivals the way they are now. There wasn't really a roadmap and you get this call from [former Phish manager] John
Paluska and he tells you that we're going to do this event and we're going to name it after this guy, this Clifford Ball -would you like to do the art for it? I'm curious about what your thoughts were? I assume that you were shooting from the
hip.
Lars: Oh yeah. I mean none of us really had any idea what to expect at all.
Trey: Did you put the first team together?
Lars: Well, yeah. Well, I mean Russ certainly has to be given so much credit for nailing down the whole architectural
framework for all of the other creative people that came into that. But when I first started to consider what the hell to do
there, I was just a guy in a little quiet studio of his own just tinkering around making little objects which is what sculptors
do. They make things. And the way that it was presented to me was that you guys wanted to do a festival that carried out
over a few days' time. Time would be an element. Like there would be a duration of a long day where we could do
something creative. And so automatically I had to consider creating objects like I had been doing. But over time, and to
make the process of making the object interesting also. So what we ended up doing there became kind of a performance
of it's own. So I developed a sculpture, a whole number of sculptures that could be produced at that show over the whole
weekend and try to make the process of its making be as interesting as the thing itself.
Trey: And where those the balls?
Lars: Yeah. We called them Phish balls, and there was really no direct reference other than the fact that the surface of
these things was kind of scaly.
Trey: I remember. And they were carved out of one piece of wood but there was more than one on it.
Lars: Yes, exactly. If you can imagine a wooden totem pole. They were rounded out like a stack of balls, narrowly carved
out to complete an independently formed ball. They're stacked vertically like a totem pole. And then the process was that I
climbed up there with a hatchet and just chopped them down one by one.
Trey: So was a big part of the idea that it was going to -- I wouldn't say performance art, but that the creative process
would happen while the festival was happening?
Lars: Right. Exactly.
Lars at The Clifford Ball. Photo by Danny Clinch © Phish
Trey: I know that your art kind of went down that road for a while, you were doing various balls. You did the tractor balls
and all of that stuff. Was that happening before that? Was it a coincidence?
Lars: Yeah, it was kind of coincidental. It was funny because I had just embarked on this whole series which I worked on
for over 10 years, actually, this whole series of ball sculptures but that was right at the very beginning. So it's just kind of a
funny thing that the Clifford Ball coincided with that.
Trey: And then interestingly, and most people probably don't realize this, but you made a ball for the cover of "Round
Room".
Lars: Yeah.
Trey: For those people who are reading this who don't know, it's Lars on the cover. And I also often wonder if people
realize that that's just simply a photograph-- that the cover of "Round Room" is the photograph of the sculpture. In this era
of Photoshopping people may not realize that's a sculpture.
Lars: Yeah. That's the real thing. It was wooden. It's called the Barn Ball. The Barn Ball was the one that wound up on
"Round Room" and it was like a barn, like the quintessential red painted barn in the shape of a ball.. I doubt that people
recognized that there is a little figure inside that thing in the picture on the album cover because it's kind of murky and over
lit somehow. You can't even really see there's a person in there. The photographer and I were up all night making that
image for that. We were just shooting and shooting and shooting. And he had the suggestion that I climb inside there just
for the hell of it and then that was one of the shots that ended up being chosen.
Russ Bennett in Ball Square at The Clifford Ball. Photo by Danny Clinch © Phish
Trey: Getting back to the festivals, I think one of the other things that I remember emerging at that Clifford Ball was the
concept of a central focal point - we called it Ball Square. Do you remember the conversations that lead to the layout?
Lars: Well, that whole notion of creating like the village model that we use often in these festivals, it comes out of an
architectural necessity. So often these festivals have been in wide open areas of nothing. And it almost becomes a
challenge of urban planning because all of these people need to know where to go and have a place to go and have a roof
over their heads sometimes and shelter and all of the things that a city needs. So it became, all of a sudden as I became
more and more involved in these projects, a challenge to design as a planner or an architect, which for me, launched me
from thinking about art-making as these little objects to something much larger. Interventions of the landscape and
creating buildings for people to move in and around of and whole groups of buildings. And that was a huge challenge and
so much fun.
Trey: What were some of the early successes and failures in that regard? For instance, from Clifford Ball, and The Great
Went and Lemonwheel -- the first three - was there a steep learning curve? Because I remember the second two seeming
to me to be very successful in terms of the central areas where people would gather.
Lars: Yeah. Well, it was really fun for me because I realized the immense scale of these things. And so in thinking about
and entering into what to do for the Great Went, for example, we had done Clifford Ball and we knew what we were up
against. And so in thinking about the next show for the Great Went I looked to-- actually that I don't know if it ever would
come through in a design, what we did, but that design was based on Roman city planning. The Great Went was kind of
inspired by Rome and the piazzas of the city.
Trey: I remember the Port-O-Let Piazza, (laughs)
Lars: That's an incredible model, that city, as a design for humanity to be in as an entire city society. So I was looking at
the way roads were laid and the way that piazzas punctuated significant points at the end of roads. We were breaking up
the whole space of that Loring Air Force Base in kind of the same way and creating subspaces within the larger space in a
sort of Roman way of thinking. That's Renaissance Rome.
Trey: Wow. Did you model it specifically?
Lars: Yeah. Actually, that big laundry line was really based directly on the Piazza del Popolo in the Vatican.
Michelangelo's big basilica there and then Bernini's big arcade that wraps in a semicircle around the gigantic piazza. You
feel like you're inside the loving arms of God when you're standing in this piazza. So those gigantic clothing articles that
we had hanging on those ropes, that was based on the Piazza del Popolo, a stretch that I'm sure no one got, but that's
what I was looking at.
Trey: But it worked. I'm so glad you're describing this because it worked so well. I'll talk to people who will stop me on the
street and we'll reminisce about how powerful those festivals were. I remember taking the golf cart out and wandering
around in between sets. And one of the ones that I particularly loved was the sunken neon...
Lars: Oh, the Sunk City.
Trey: That was incredible. At IT.
Lars: That was modeled after like a Vegas, like a Las Vegas 100 years from now or 1,000 years from now, as if the whole
city had become like overtaken by nature, again.
Trey: Wow.
Sunk City at IT. Photo by C. Taylor Crothers © Phish
Lars: That was a good one, too, because we collaborated with Mike a bit on that too to produce some of the silly verbiage
on those signs.
Trey: On those neon signs. "Yeah is good."
Lars: Yeah is good. That was an instant motto. Yeah is good.
Trey: What was the Lemonwheel concept?
Lars: Well, that one was really outlandish. I think that one may have been my favorite just because it was really far, far
reaching. At that point we were going back to Loring Air Force Base, again, for the second year right after Great Went.
And what had struck me about being there and trying to create something-- some interesting landscape there, it was so
darn flat. And so we took it upon ourselves to try to change that. And we mounded up some miniature mountains in a
whole sort of undulating landscape. That was really an effort to make the actual landscape itself more interesting.
Lemonwheel Sticks. Photo by Danny Clinch © Phish
Trey: And then it sort of had an Asian kind of thing to it.
Lars: Yeah. It was modeled after a Chinese garden, There's an amazing Japanese garden at the Montreal Botanical
Garden. And this is not a Japanese garden. Japanese gardens are really serene and simple and minimal. Chinese
gardens are just crazy. They're really extravagant and colorful with a lot of fantastical elements like waterfalls and
miniature mountains and cliffs and architecture pagodas built into this really wild landscape. So it was just so theatrical
and that was a real inspiration for what we called the "Garden of Infinite Pleasantries". We had our temples. We had our
pagodas. We had our tea houses and our little pond with the illuminated lemon bonsai tree in the middle of this little
island. It was really exotic.
Garden of Infinite Pleasantries at Lemonwheel. Photo by C. Taylor Crothers © Phish
Trey: As memory serves by Lemonwheel, you were collaborating with a number of other artists. Wasn't that the year that
the artist who worked with the sticks and whatnot?
Lars: Yeah, Patrick Dougherty.
Trey: Tell me your process - how do you invite an artist like that into the fold?
Lars: Well, yeah, we give them little hints about it. We never want to like fully art director anyone that has their own artistic
practice of their own. But, you know, we try to inspire them by creating a substructure or an architectural sort of framework
that they can then jump from, that they can enter into thematically in some way. And if they're able to do that, then the
whole feel of the entire environment is that much stronger. Someone like Patrick Dougherty, who really doesn't
necessarily create works of art that are Asian in any way, but there's some sensibility to using natural materials and
weaving and incredible craftsmanship that really supported the whole feeling of this sort of exotic landscape.
Trey: His installation became a bit of a centerpiece the way I remember it. It fit in perfectly.
Lars: It did.
Trey: The other thing that it did was people were invited to walk into it, which is something that I remembered and always
liked about the different festivals. That there was often an interconnectedness, a pathway that people were supposed to
walk down. At It there was an actual elevated pathway, I think, that went through the sunken city. And you remember that
masking tape guy. So you were above him.
Lars: That was John Bisbee, a great artist from Maine who came up with that idea. Yeah, it just became this incredible
network, webbing of masking tape. It just got built on by passersby and that was an open invitation for whoever wanted to
participate in that project, to get a roll of masking tape and just add to this glom of stuff.
Masking Take Forest at IT. Photo by Bart Stephens © Phish
Trey: I remember driving around with Page after the festival was over and everyone had left and looking at that masking
tape sculpture.
Lars: Many of the installations created a cumulative effect over three days. Like the time when we had just plunked down
a whole truck load of little stones.
Trey: I've tried to describe that to people, the Rock Garden. I hope you guys do that, again, actually. I would love it if we
could do that again at Super Bowl because people were stacking these stones and some of them were tiny.
Lars: It's hard to describe the quality of it because it's just so vast. And the way you get the potency in that sort of
sculpture, like with Bisbee's masking tape thing, is through mass participation. So you have who knows thousands of
people all contributing to this one thing. It's just incredible what you can make with all of those hands doing a very simple
thing.
Trey: After everybody had left the festival site, it looked like the stones that had been dumped had all been used and
people had begun stacking these tiny little almost somewhere between miniature little teeny, teeny pebbles. You know,
there would be little walls that were made with stacking stones and they would get smaller and smaller and smaller. It's
like people started stacking and they couldn't stop. They just kept stacking anything that was around. So it would kind of
trail off into these very, very intricate little walls made out of pebbles. It was just amazing. I think John had the idea for
that, growing up on the Maine shore with a rocky coastline. It was a great, great idea.
Lars: It was. And the product was amazing. But also the process of that. I mean after a long day and in a dreamy state,
what a lovely thing to do with your time but just hunker down with a little pile of rocks and just stack them up. You're
thinking about gravity and the material and it's just nature. You're just building something with your two hands and rocks.
Trey: So are there plans for something like that this year?
Lars: Well, yes. Yes, there are. And I think what's going to be kind of special about this event is that it's going to use an
energy that we haven't really tried working with before in any of the festivals, I mean a physically manifested energy, a
kinetic energy that people-- that other artists and the audience folks can utilize to create stuff. So they can expect to have
a whole new energy source at this festival.
Trey: I'm assuming that that was inspired by the location...
Lars: Oh yeah, it was, for sure.
Trey: Because it's a very different space than the other spaces.
Lars: It is. It's got an energy about it. Like Loring or the Seminole farmlands that we saw in Florida, this place has a real
character of its own, that's very specific. And that definitely contributed to how we're thinking about our visual design
approach here.
Trey: . You just mentioned the Seminoles. I loved Big Cypress.
Lars: Me too.
Trey: I think the initial idea for that was "let's play outside on New Year's Eve" which got a big laugh at first. Okay, you
can't do that. It's December 31, come on! And then it wouldn't go away so we were looking at two spots. One of them was
going to be the "Big Kahuna" in Hawaii. And then we found Chief Billie from the Seminole Indian Reservation. And my
understanding was that our festival team had to go down there six months in advance and cut a field and plant a different
kind of grass. My understanding was that there wasn't a proper space. It was really just a swamp.
Lars: Yeah it was. It was the most rugged of all of those venue spaces, for sure. It was pastures with irrigation canals
running through. There were no roads. There was really nothing. That was a huge endeavor to transform that into a
functioning city.
Trey: I remember it being very spacious and very well thought out. And then there was a round concert area which is
strange and unique because it meant that when you were looking-- if you're standing watching the stage, you looked at
the wall-- it was hard to get your bearings because normally you're used to being in a rectangular concert space, but that
was a conscious decision to keep it organic. And then there was an idea that I remember, which was to make a wall of ice.
So like the wall for the concert venue would slowly melt.
Big Cypress. Photo by Danny Clinch © Phish
Lars: That was a big idea for sure.
Trey: I don't think that one happened.
Lars: Well, it got transformed. It ended up being a pyramid. And there were funny stories behind that involved the ice
blocks freezing together or an inability to actually get them out of the trucks. I forget exactly what it was. But there was a
major problem with these immense ice blocks. So that sort of changed the course of that idea.
Trey: The intent and I remember thinking in the planning stage for Big Cypress, being able to really see clearly, that there
was a craft and a skill that was being developed after a number of these festivals had come and gone. Like with the
planning of each festival the craft of the whole thing -- it was very cool to be a part of and to watch and think, okay this
time we're going to make the venue round. People are going to stay up all night, one of the walls is going to be ice and it's
going to melt away over time. And some of it worked and some of it didn't. You guys did the--the decaying city - The
Delta.. It was elaborate buildings being taken over by ivy. Tell me about that.
Lars: Well, that was just kind of inspired by the southern cities in the States here that just have a very different feel than
the ones that we know up north here. And as a Vermonter I've always just loved the cities like Savannah, Georgia. They
call them urban forests where it's a different sensibility to allowing trees and plant life where the nature of that plant life
sort of has its way with the built environment. And I was struck by that in my touring of the southern cities of America. We
tried to get that same feeling at Big Cypress in that we were in Florida and you get the sense that there's a jungle right
there and it's just awaiting its opportunity to grow back over whatever built environment that man has created. So that was
the drive behind that.
The Delta Village at Big Cypress. Photo by Danny Clinch © Phish
Trey: And that's sort of tied in with the new millennium.
Lars: Yeah. Thinking about the past and the future and all of that. Sure.
Trey: Right. One of the fun things people probably don't know is that backstage we had built an in-ground pool. I guess it
wasn't really "in-ground" but we raised the ground and put the pool in so it looked like it was an in-ground pool.
Lars: The whole experience of being down in the Everglades was just so wild -- so different than anything that we
Northerners had experienced. The Visual Design team were staying at Chief Billie's Swamp Safari just down the road from
the venue. We were camping out at a safari with all of these wild animals, and grass built huts.
Trey: I know exactly what you're saying. It just looked so unlikely that this thing popped up in the middle of that space.
And people kept saying there were alligators if you went two feet into the bush --you've got to watch out for the alligators!
And yet, the camping area was so well designed that everybody had almost like their own lawn the way it looked to me. It
was a wide space. The traffic was tough getting in, but once you were in it was like Eden or something.
Lars: It was a vast, tropical loveliness.
Trey: And another interesting detail was that it being a sovereign nation there were no police allowed in there. That was
my understanding there weren't any. And it didn't matter everybody was incredibly well-behaved and there was no need.
Lars: Well, that was an interesting aspect that we were on an Indian reservation yeah. It was fascinating because a lot of
the people that we worked with during that production they were almost entirely Seminole Indians. We would go out with a
few of the Seminoles into the jungle to harvest palm fronds --the leaves of a palm tree. And we were instructed on how to
harvest these things in a way that the plant could continue growing. We went out in a pickup truck and machete and got all
of these palm fronds to build these things they were making for Big Cypress. To be in the company of these Native
Americans, it's really so special and to learn their ways and hear their stories. It was like nothing I would ever be able to
experience ever again quite like that.
Trey: That's why I always bring it up as such a magical experience. Maybe the fact that it wasn't on a decommissioned air
force base and that it was in this community of incredibly welcoming wonderful people it leant it a certain kind of, you
know, feeling or vibe or spirit or something. I just remember driving around and it just felt different. It felt peaceful. And
Chief Billie kept coming backstage and he was flying over in his plane or whatever it was.
Lars: He was in a helicopter. That was his vehicle of choice. And he was a character that guy.
Trey: And then, of course, we broke down the boundaries a little and we played at a time of day that we had never played
before or since, until the sunrise.
Lars: Yeah. And that was one of the things that I wanted to ask you about. That particular night was really the closest that
our visual design team has ever been to what you guys do on stage. Because we had that elaborate stage set with the
millennium clock, you remember that?
Trey: I do.
Lars: And I was curious to ask you about that how that feels for you--because you guys rarely bring in much by way of
visual hoopla aside of course from Kuroda's incredible light show. So how did that feel, having that clock and the Father
Time and having to feed him the...
Trey: The sausages? (laughs)
Lars: Yeah.
Meatsick Midnight at Big Cypress. Photo by C. Taylor Crothers © Phish
Trey: It felt great. And that brings me back to conversations with you and Russ and the band members a few weeks ago
where I said I'd like to do that more, a lot more. And I know Mike and I talk about it a lot. I think everybody would. I loved
intermingling the art and us onstage. And I would encourage more of that. I mean, you know, this year at New Year's Eve
we did this Meatstick thing with the dancers. But actually I know there's one Super Ball idea which I won't give away, but
to some degree, the stage is going to be intimately linked with the festival grounds.
Lars: Yeah.
Trey: Which I think is incredibly exciting and cool.
So, Big Cypress was great. Nothing is ever going to match it, I mean, until the next amazing thing happens, I could
describe looking out at these people, this audience that I've been staring at for 26 years or something in darkness, right,
every night. And people are dancing and they're delirious and they've been up all night. And the sun is starting to come
up, oh my god - that was just the most bizarre thing because the sky was all pink.. But it was really just the looks on
people's faces, like when suddenly God started to turn on the lights at the end of the party. Oh man.
Lars: Wow, that's a bittersweet thing.
Trey: It was moving to say the least. And then what was really bizarre about it was that we flew home right after the
concert and I was standing in my house about three hours after we got off stage. It felt really funny. So more about this
year. My understanding is that the site is especially unique.
Lars: It is. Well, yes, it's the race track. It's got some skid marks.
Trey: That should have been the festival title, Skid Marks.
Lars: I saw some incredible skid marks when we first toured the site. We found our way on foot on to the racetrack. You
wouldn't ever stand in the middle of a racetrack for obvious reasons. You wouldn't want to do that. But we were standing
there and I saw a skid mark on the embankment wall and it made me realize what incredible energy spins around this
place. Pedal to the metal baby.
Trey: And I don't know if people are aware of this but it is a NASCAR track and what's cool about it is it's not an oval.
Lars: Yeah. It's got all kinds of twists and turns. And it's a pretty neat space that we have.
Trey: It's more of a Formula One kind of track so I think it's got like 11 or 12 turns and narrow spots. And it's also in the
middle of some beautiful mountains. So you've kind of got the curvature of the mountains and the curvature of the track,
making a unique geometrical kind of combination that's different than a big swamp and different than a flat rectangular air
runway.
Lars: Right. Like a lowering. Yeah, the landscape is just gorgeous. It's beautiful upstate New York. Finger Lakes. It's
bucolic and lovely and agricultural and very unspoiled. But then you've got this track set right it the middle of it and it's a
really interesting dynamic to think about like NASCAR culture and people that are really into racing cars around in a circle
set into this landscape.
Trey: It's pretty far removed from anything.
Lars: It is. When you're getting into that area it's very rural. It's very much a farming landscape. It feels close to home for
you and me and it feels like New England. It feels very natural.
Trey: We talked a little bit before about bringing in other artists, as you have over the years. Tell me about your team this
year.
Lars: Sure. Well, we've got this ever-changing, ever-growing family of people that we've befriended over the years. And,
again, we're going to be calling on a lot of the creative people that we know in Vermont. But as we carry on in life and
meet new people and live in different areas of the world, and as we move along we just gather, gather always growing the
family. So we're going to have people from Vermont but then some folks from New York City involved and folks from
Maine and folks from Connecticut. We had a big think tank session in Vermont last week. We brought in all of the folks
that we've been familiar with for a long time and everybody is revved up and coming back to us just now with some really
exciting ideas
Trey: How does Independence Day play into your planning?
July 4th, 1999 © Phish
Lars: We've been thinking a lot about America and Americans and the whole history of our young world here. And we're
going to play with that a bit. We're going to really be looking at ourselves as Americans.. So it's certainly become a
significant aspect to the whole overarching concept to this festival.
Trey: What could be more American than a NASCAR track winding through this bucolic farmland in the mountains!
Lars: Absolutely. The fact that we're in a very significant subculture of America, this NASCAR culture is really kind of fun
to think about because for me it's a whole other culture, other than the one that I live in. But it's a really fun thing to goof
around with. And think about how something like NASCAR culture, like this group of Americans that are so enthusiastic
about this very specific way of life. And how that is just so very different than a lot of aspects of other American culture.
We're thinking about place and we're thinking about the time, America, as cultural differences and the Independence Day /
Fourth of July as being the birth of America.
Trey: It sounds great. One of my favorite things, probably I think the defining characteristic for me of the Phish festivals
that sets them apart for better or for worse than some of the other festivals, is the fact that we only have one band. One
day there's three sets, one day there's two, I'm not exactly sure. But to me the quiet time has been the missing piece that's
made the art work over the years. What I remember very clearly is when you talked earlier in the interview about the fact
that people took part in the rock stacking, the fact that people took part in the masking tape thing and that people took part
in the 5K road race. You know, people had time to contemplate these concepts that you've talked about, the Roman
concept. I know most of the times these concepts are not obvious and they're not supposed to be obvious but that there's
a lot of thought that goes into them and I know because we've had so many conference calls with the four band members
and you and Russ, of course, the four of us know what's going on and we're not going to give it away now in this interview,
but it's an incredibly cool idea. But the silence and the contrast between concert time and contemplative time is important.
And I wanted to ask what your take on that is? That was a long question.
Runaway Jim 5k at IT. Photo by C. Taylor Crothers © Phish
Lars: No. I hear what you're getting at. And I understand that, I mean, we all have a certain capacity for how much we can
take in the world of audio, in the world of visual. And, I think, that that's what makes a multimedia event great is to be able
to have that space and the frame of mind, the landscape, the soundscape, all of these elements that are contributing to
what you are taking in over a weekend and to have some profound moments that are quiet and the profound moments
that are really rocking your skeleton. And to have white space between it. And to be able to sort of have the room to digest
and take it all in. To be barraged is a difficult thing, but to be able to have these mindsets where you can really intake and
enjoy the full depth of what is being presented to you works well when you have it delivered to you in a very careful way.
And, I think, that's something that really differentiates these Phish events from the overload of a lot of experiences that
one can have these days.
Trey: It brings to mind the impact of Bread and Puppet on these festivals. For those people who don't know, Bread and
Puppet is a long-running theater troupe that uses puppetry based in Northern Vermont. For many years, they would hold a
pageant every summer on their grounds in Glover, Vermont. Political theater, I guess you would call it. But it's a festival
that is a very Vermont kind of thing. And I used to go every year and I'm sure you went.
Lars: Oh yeah.
Trey: And Russ, I guess, used to work on those. And there were unamplified music and theater in a field and it
was...quiet. Everyone would sit in silence and the pageant would come over the hill. It would have a theme. And it took, I
don't know, 15 minutes for that gigantic puppet show. And it was so moving and so memorable and emotional. And it's
those minutes where time becomes kind of irrelevant because of the beauty of this thing that's coming slowly over that
hillside. You can see the billowing of the puppets' fabrics and it's a different delivery of experience, where time slows
down. It's refreshing in these days when we are barraged with advertisements and the pace of movies and television and
the internet. It's very different to slow it down.
Lars: Yeah.
Trey: Russ Bennett has been known to quote a mantra of Peter Schumann, who's the main guy at Bread and Puppet. He
would say, "Slower, slower, slower, less." And that is so rare, exactly what you're saying. Everything is so fast and so
you're just bombarded with information. And I think back to that moment that I described at Big Cypress where you really
felt like you were away from life. It felt like an escape. The Phish festivals often feel like that to me, like some kind of
tranquil La-La Land. I remember hanging around by the flatbread pizza oven at Lemonwheel or the Great Went just talking
to people, just sitting on the golf cart and hanging out. And I think if there had been band number 17 was on the stage
going boom, boom, boom, you wouldn't have that. You'd never have that moment. And think about how profound your
experience was just walking on the track or next to the track before we even set up the festival. Just being in that space
was incredibly cool. So I just wanted to touch on that because to me it's such an important part of the planning of these
festivals.
Lars: In our business we call that the white space. In the visual art world you have that white space which just operates as
meditative space. It's non-space. That's important.
Trey: Right. Very.
!
!
!
Big!Ball!Maker!Lars-Erik!Fisk!
!
Barn!Ballby!G.!Blake!MacPhail!
!
!
The!season!of!harvest!moons!and!pumpkins!is!a!good!time!to!welcome!a!more!unusual,!man-made!
spherical!marvel:!Barn!Ball,!by!Lars-Erik!Fisk,!was!recently!given!to!the!Fleming!Museum!by!Betsy!
Wakeman.!Fisk,!a!University!of!Vermont!alum!and!prolific!artist,!has!received!wide!ranging!recognition!
for!his!work,!winning!awards!like!the!Rappaport!Prize.!He!has!worked!as!artistic!director!for!Phish!(who!
used!Barn!Ball!on!an!album!cover)!and!attained!an!MFA!from!Columbia!in!2005.!The!sculpture,!which!
measures!more!than!18!feet!in!circumference!and!comprises!actual!clapboards!and!fieldstone,!is!now!
permanently!on!view!at!its!creator’s!alma!mater.!Fisk’s!sphere!series!takes!iconic!and!familiar!images–!
often!notably!angular!forms–!and!condenses!them!into!signature!round!packages.!He!has!fashioned!ball!
sculptures!out!of!a!school!bus,!a!Volkswagen,!a!John!Deere!tractor,!a!UPS!truck,!and!even!a!street.!
Elsewhere!in!town,!at!the!bottom!of!the!hill!atop!which!the!Fleming!Museum!sits,!Train!Ball!has!
appropriately!taken!up!residence!at!Union!Station.!
!
Barn!Ball!was!conceived!“as!one!of!a!series!of!four!spherical!sculptures!representing!elements!of!the!rural!
Vermont!landscape-!barn,!field,!road,!and!trees–aspects!that!we!immediately!identify!with!the!
surrounding!agricultural!landscape,!which![Fisk]!humorously!reduces!to!their!most!salient!and!
distinctive!features,”!the!museum’s!press!materials!explain.!This!idea!fits!in!well!with!the!current!Fleming!
exhibit!chronicling!changing!human!relationships!with!agricultural!landscapes.!
!
One!apparent!reason!that!Fisk’s!work!is!so!compelling!is!the!tendency!for!the!audience!to!say,!“What!is!
that?”!while!also!registering!strong!recognition.!This!sort!of!cognitive!dissonance!is!one!reason!we!make!
and!view!art!in!the!first!place.!
!
While!public!and!media!interest!continues!to!roll!back!to!Fisk’s!ball!series,!the!artist!has!recently!moved!
away!from!these!intriguing!spheres!in!favor!of!garbage-inspired!work.!His!Trashbags!sculpture!is!
currently!on!display!at!Ridgefield,!Connecticut’s!Aldrich!Contemporary!Art!Museum,!and!consists!of!a!
single!block!of!black!marble!sculpted!into!a!63”!high!pile!of!full!garbage!bags.!The!museum!opines!that!
Trashbags!“represents!a!paradox!of!everlasting!disposability,!addressing!the!issue!of!waste!and!the!
underlying!question!of!its!permanence.”!Fisk!continues!to!surprise!viewers!with!ongoing!projects!that!
question!consumption!and!are!themselves!as!tempting!and!addictive!as!colorful!packaging.!
!
Robert!Hull!Fleming!Museum!
at!the!University!of!Vermont!
61!Colchester!Avenue!
(802)!656-0750!
!
-!See!more!at:!http://artmapburlington.com/content/2008/big-ball-maker-lars-erikfisk#sthash.51u4rDto.dpuf!
Barn Ball arrives at the Fleming Museum
The Robert Hull Fleming Museum is excited to announce its recent
acquisition of the large spherical sculpture Barn Ball, created by New
York-based artist Lars-Erik Fisk. A gift of Mrs. Betsy Wakeman of
Hanover, New Hampshire, Barn Ball was placed on permanent
display in the museum's lobby earlier this month.
Measuring over 18-feet in
circumference, Barn Ball
represents one of the most
familiar components of the
New England landscape: a red
clapboard barn with white
windows atop a fieldstone
foundation and filled with hay
(replaced here with sisal for
fire-safety concerns). Fisk, a
1993 graduate of the
University of Vermont,
conceived Barn Ball as one of
a series of four spherical
sculptures representing elements of the rural Vermont landscapebarn, field, road, and trees-aspects that we immediately identify
with the surrounding agricultural landscape, which he humorously
reduces to their most salient and distinctive features. By packaging
the idea of a barn into a simple sphere, the artist encourages
viewers to consider whether their ideas about the rural landscape
have any connection to the physical land itself.
"We are delighted to welcome Lars Fisk's Barn Ball to the collection,"
said Museum Director Janie Cohen, "Lars's unique take on an iconic
Vermont subject brings the Fleming Museum's Vermont landscape
collection into the 3rd dimension. We are deeply grateful to Betsy
Wakeman for this generous gift."
SPECIAL UVM RECEPTION:
Lars-Erik Fisk's Barn Ball
September 10 at 5:00PM
Come meet Barn Ball artist and UVM alum Lars-Erik Fisk '93 during
this special reception with Free Food and Giveaways. Fisk has
exhibited his work both locally and at major institutions on the East
Coast. He has participated in numerous artist-in-residence programs
around the country and served as art director for the band Phish; a
collaboration that resulted in Barn Ball appearing on the cover of
their 2002 CD, "Round Room."
Trashbags, 2008
Slum Ball, 2001
Marble
Concrete, steel
63' x 58' x 46'
7' in diameter
Carved out of a single block of marble, the artist references piles of trash bags commonly found on our city streets. He also wishes to recall
classical sculpture, with the trash bags likened to the human figure. He is driven by the notion of a traditional sculptor's challenge, transforming
a material as unyielding as marble into an object that has folds and bends like fabric. The piles of bags, six feet high, are meant to represent a
paradox of everlasting disposability.
Slum Ball is the most recent in a series of Fisk's works that celebrate the transformation of everyday forms. Here, he has compacted the
functional and ornamental features of the distinctive Brooklyn brownstone into a concise sculpture that has been poised on raised ground near
the water's edge.
!
April 1, 2007
If the Vehicle Is Round, Wheels Are Unnecessary
By PHIL PATTON
IT looks like a Volkswagen Microbus, the sort that starred in last year’s film “Little Miss Sunshine,”
somehow squeezed into a sphere six feet in diameter.
The ball is the work of the artist Lars-Eric Fisk of Burlington, Vt., who specializes in sphere-shaped
sculpture. His work has been shown in museums including the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in
Lincoln, Mass., outside Boston, and the Dartmouth College museum.
In the catalog for the DeCordova exhibition, he called the sphere was a “simple, seamless form expressing
movement and the concept of endlessness and timelessness without a beginning, without an ending.”
“Everyone gets it,” Mr. Fisk said of his use of the sphere in a recent interview.
He completed the VW ball in 1999. “I don’t know why, but the VW ball keeps surfacing every few years on
the Internet,” he said.
The VW ball is in a private collection. Mr. Fisk, who was born in Vermont in 1970, has made other balls
with auto themes: a school bus, a green John Deere tractor, a drab brown U.P.S. truck and a white Mister
Softee ice cream truck, complete with lights.
“A U.P.S. guy saw the U.P.S. ball and stopped by the house of the owner,” Mr. Fisk said. “He thought it
was a package ready for shipping.”
His spheres come with windows and steering wheels. He does all the work using metal and glass
fabrication skills he taught himself. He has also sculptured a street ball, a sphere of asphalt marked with
painted dotted lines. Mr. Fisk’s barn ball, with wood painted red and a window, was used for the cover of
the Phish album “Round Room.”
He has moved beyond the balls into new modes of sculpture. “The new theme for some reason seems to
be garbage,” he said. Among his latest pieces, shown at the Taxter & Spengemann Gallery in Manhattan, is
a sculpture of a garbage can and another of a garbage bag. PHIL PATTON
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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Woodwork
08.12.04
AUTHOR: MARTHA SCHWENDENER
06.09.04-08.27.04 Anthony Grant, Inc., New York
If this show is any indication, more artists should work in wood. The possibilities from rough-hewn
rusticity to polished perfection, a kind of nature/culture dialectic contained in a singular material were
known to the modernists; just look at the Brancusi show at the Guggenheim. Here, contemporary
artists take a crack at carpentry, with results as varied as Richard Artschwager’s wonderful
confessional constructed out of a plywood shipping crate; Lars Fisk’s Tree Ball, 1998, an uncanny
sphere of bark-covered wood; and Matt Johnson’s two-by-four bent into an impossible shape that
conjures classic Minimalist sculpture. Los Carpinteros, Paloma Vargas Weisz, Hadi Tabatabai, and
Georg Baselitz also weigh in with some impressive craftsmanship. Wood, it seems, engenders a
particularly imaginative thoughtfulness with regard to form and composition as evidenced, for
example, in Claes Oldenburg’s Landscape with Lighthouse (Provincetown), 1960, assembled like
Synthetic Cubist collage out of bits of wood that became detached from other objects and lost before
being found by the artist.
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article now. July 13, 2003
ART REVIEW
ART REVIEW; Sculpture Sprouting on Campus
Becomes, Literally, an Art Exercise
By WILLIAM IMMER
PURCHASE— THE Biennial Exhibition of Public Art staged by the Neuberger Museum of Art
here offers a chance to consider some of the very latest ideas in sculpture from around the country
-- and get exercise at the same time.
The roadside of the winding road that leads to the cluster of college buildings where The Art Guys,
a duo from Houston, chose to space nine male mannequins. (After artists are selected for the
exhibition, they come to the campus of Purchase College, where the Neuberger is located, to pick
the sites for their work). The figures, dressed in business suits, all have their heads in the ground,
either ostrich-like from fear, one assumes or else because they were driven to plunge to earth. In
this drive-by (or stroll-by) drama, the artists, Michael Galbraith and Jack Massing, have created
something absurdly comic but with strong overtones of unease.
The Art Guys are not alone in their disquiet. Maria Elena Gonzalez, who was born in Cuba and
now lives in Brooklyn, has chosen to hang her piece underground in one of the security tunnels
that run under the campus. The catalog reminds us that the shootings at Kent State in 1970
prompted many colleges to build networks of tunnels through which military personnel could
move. The work itself is a carved bird with a large wing span, based on decals that keep birds from
flying into windows. Ms. Gonzalez's caged bird is caught by a surveillance camera and seen by
viewers above ground on a monitor.
In the college library, the New Yorkers Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser show their digital animation
on a small screen. The animation is set in a rudimentary version of the library itself, populated by a
cast of characters engaged in odd, if not nefarious doings.
Several artists make good old-fashioned objects, embellishing something they came across when
they picked their sites. Nina Katchadourian from Brooklyn chose a field of small boulders and
added what she calls ''parasitic rocks.'' The additions are actually cast resin rock-climbing grips
used for practice in climbing walls or rocks. In phosphorescent blue dotting the boulders they look
alien or like an infection -- the piece is called ''Outbreak.'' But they're beautiful in a surreal way and
as a troop of children demonstrated on my visit, also very serviceable.
Lars-Erik Fisk from Vermont ruminated on the fact that the Purchase College campus is almost all
straight lines, and set about making something that would suggest that something sinuous is
possible. Using cast rubber, Mr. Fisk made a model for a traffic median that looks like a steak. The
piece, which conjures up the Claes Oldenburg of decades ago, sits outside the museum basking in
what the artist calls its ''meaty softness.'' Allan Wexler has pondered lawn watering in Westchester
County. His ''Drawing Water,'' a perfect pun, is a 100-foot-long green hose supported by a
meandering scaffold of pine sticks and ends in a sprinkler. By its playfulness. this work, like Mr.
Fisk's, emphasizes the hard-line architecture of the campus -- though Mr. Wexler contends that
the piece's only meaning is beauty.
Peter Sarkisian of Santa Fe has made something of a condensed cousin to Mr. Wexler's
contribution. ''Waters'' is a simply a clear glass of liquid in a showcase window lighted by an
overhead flashlight that sweeps across it. Mr. Sarkasian left nothing to chance; the glass is
narrower at the top in order to not cast a shadow. The piece seems designed as an ode to purity
but to maintain it, Mr. Sarkasian had to substitute baby oil for water.
Political works with precise themes include a large curtain of indigo-died fabric by Ritsuko Taho of
Japan and Cambridge, Mass. It roughly resembles an American flag with tie-dye-like circles for the
stars but comments about the recent war with Iraq make up the stripes.
Dogged earnestness characterizes the work of the Brooklynites Brad McCallum and Jacqueline
Terry. The two are investigating the history of the land that is now the campus and they know that
slaves belonging to early owners of the property are buried both inside and outside a still-extant
small cemetery. The artists used sonar scans to detect where some of the slaves were buried.
There is a grand marshal of sorts, a well-known artist who, as Biennial Honoree, has a work
exhibited in a prime space, the museum's courtyard. This year's honoree is Tom Otterness who has
become a sharp satirist in an unlikely medium for humor: bronze. In ''Kindly Gepetto'' the creator
of puppets is about to take a hammer to his creation. The power that a sculpture can have in the
right place is demonstrated by Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquart from Miami. Their ''Alice,'' a
fiberglass girl in a pink sundress festooned with dragonflies, pops out of the chimney of a historic
house on campus.
One of the most alluring works has no physicality. Rather it is an audio work of ambient sounds
devised by Bill Fontana from San Francisco, an odd mix of sounds that include rain, horses hooves
and sounds from inside Big Ben. To a visitor standing on a sidewalk it sounds convincingly like
onrushing motor traffic and you hesitate to cross the street.
''The Neuberger Museum of Art Biennial Exhibition of Public Art'' is on the Purchase College
campus through Oct. 19. Information: www.neuberger.org. or (914)251-6100.
Photos: Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquart's ''Alice,'' left, pops out of a chimney. ''Head First'' by
the Art Guys, are figures with ostrich-like tendencies. ''Waters'' by Peter Sarkisian is a clear glass of
liquid in a showcase window. (Photographs by Jim Frank)
ump to:
About the Pri e
The Rappaport Pri e Artists Rappaport Pri e Artists
About the Rappaports
Resources
ome
Lars-Erik Fisk
Prev
Next
Lars-Erik Fisk was awarded the 2002 Rappaport Pri e for
his playful and creative series of spherical sculptures.
e calls the sphere a basic form, one that we can all
understand, but is at the same time the least likely form
for these sub ects to assume. In combining the
dissimilar, I want to find how we might recogni e
something by seeing it for what it is not. Using whatever
organic and manmade materials are required to produce
the traditional construction upon which a particular form
is based, Fisk compacts the salient functional and
distinctive features of the original into a concise and
humorous ball in order to render it universally accessible.
Volkswagenball, true to its name, compresses a 1 60 s
olkswagen bus into a sphere. Like the rest of the Ball
series, it is free of pretension, immediately understood,
and fascinating to behold.
What did the prize mean to you?
The Rappaport Pri e allowed Fisk to participate in the
Skowhegan School of Painting Sculpture, a highly
competitive residency program, where his focus ...could
again turn to the process of creating new work. This
turned out to be an intense experience, writes Fisk, to
be surrounded by a whole new community that ultimately
led me to reconsider my artistic practice. It was in this
environment that I was reminded of the importance of
the academic community and decided to apply to
graduate school to earn a Master s Degree in Fine Arts.
Where is he now?
After winning the Pri e Fisk began showing with the
Taxter Spengemann gallery, which curated the solo
exhibition Lars Fisk in 2004. e also participated in the
prestigious show reater New York at MoMA s P.S. 1,
an exhibit showcasing that city s most prominent
emerging artists. Fisk, having returned to ermont,
expanded his Burlington studio to include an artist-inresidence program and continues to be a pillar of support
in his art community.
Lars-Erik Fisk
Volkswagenball, 2001 Steel, glass, and vinyl
4' diameter
Lent by the Artist; Courtesy Victoria Anstead Fine Art,
New York, NY
ARC IVE I
LI
T
A Whole New Ball Game
Lars-Erik Fisk re-invents the wheel
By Daniel Kraus
From Gad y August 1999
Imagine looking at a photographed picture of
a countryside barn—its solid stone
foundation, chipped red paint, spider-webbed
corners, sun‑glistened windowpane and dry,
crackling hay. Imagine slapping your hand
down on this picture and crumpling it into a
ball. Now imagine doing the same thing to
the actual barn. Now do the same to a city
street. A tree. A UPS truck.
READ IT!
Madness? Well, sort of. Genius? Well, kind
of.
From the brain of sculptor Lars‑Erik Fisk do these concepts
come. When he is not designing the huge, multi‑media stage
shows for the legendary band Phish, he plays with balls. Big
balls. Really big balls.
Fresh off a big gig at the DeCordova Museum in Massachusetts,
the twenty-eight-year-old Fisk has enjoyed a success rarely seen
at his age or in his profession. He is already emerging with an
art form recognizably his own. This is because his "Balls" series
is undeniably irresistible. It's just too bad that Fisk receives
much of his art appreciation via mass destruction. Let's face it,
when you see a ball, you want to roll it—no matter that it is a
$10,000 art piece that has been slaved over for nearly three
months.
Witness the sphere today, gone tomorrow fate of Fie d a , a
mind‑boggling, sod‑covered grass‑like thingamajig four feet in
diameter. While it was showing on the front lawn of the Hood
Museum at Dartmouth College, one of its admirers couldn't resist
the urge to prove that he got game. Moments later, Field Ball
became Field Dome. Only days later, ree a —a ponderous,
eight-foot sphere of asphalt and yellow dotted lines—was
formally introduced to the concrete pillars of the Hood's front
gate. The gate survived. ree a didn't. Local detective Daniel
Gillis decried it as "irreparable damage to the piece, but also the
aesthetic, cultural and educational value that such works of art
bring to the community."
Well, yeah, but... they are a s. And, as such, they contain an
undeniable potential energy, screaming to be released. One can
hardly blame the "vandals" for their attempts at "liberating"
them. Least of all Fisk. "I forgive them," he admits, "after the
sadness of losing them passes. I mean, I'm glad they're so
compelling. They beg to be rolled."
Compelling they are, pulling off the monumental trick of being
equally as fascinating to eight-year‑olds being dragged to the
equally as fascinating to eight-year‑olds being dragged to the
museum to experience some "culture" as they are to art
connoisseurs. In Shakespearean terms, the balls play to the
groundlings as well as the upper balconies. But no matter where
we sit, as human beings we suffer the obsession of finding order
among chaos. By nature, we separate, sanitize and categorize.
Civilization itself is an attempt at ordering disorder. Fisk's art
takes this instinct to the extreme—if you could take the uneven
curves and edges and ripples of a maple tree, how would you
package it? Where would it be located in Wal‑Mart? The balls
represent life with no assembly required.
The destruction of Fisk's art, then, satisfies our opposite urge,
the urge to play, expel energy and destroy.
All this rolled into a simple ball.
Fisk likens his art's effect to Cubism in the 1920s. "People looked
at that and said, 'My God, a café table doesn't look like that!
That's ridiculous!' Likewise, [in my work,] the object being
transformed is irrelevant. The transformation is what's
important." To subtract, reduce and distill an object until it is an
abstracted symbol of itself entails asking the question, what is
its essence? How can one say "barn‑ness" or "truck‑ness" in the
fewest words possible? About a , Fisk says, "Everything
about UPS is brown. The drivers wear brown, they always have
brown hair and brown mustaches, and they drive brown trucks
and deliver brown packages. If I can get people to look and say,
'Wow, UPS brown is really a swell brown' and appreciate and get
a different understanding of it, I'm happy."
The sphere is merely the least likely form for these things to be
represented in. Not to mention that a sphere has no beginning.
No end. No edge. No borders. Just a spinning infinity of an
object that normally has all of the above. It's hard to imagine
that ar e would be anywhere near as potent as ar a .
At once, then, Fisk's work is the most interesting fusion of
realistic and abstract art. He only uses materials true to the
source— ree a is made from a tree, oo a from roofing,
and ar a from wood, stone and hay (as the only ball with an
interior, it has been installed with an inside light that can be
turned on and off ). But because of their new, perfect and
completely inappropriate geometry, we are forced to reevaluate
their commonplace standing. Banal objects we wouldn't look at
twice are suddenly the most fascinating things we've ever seen.
Suddenly, everything's a toy. Suddenly, we're kids again.
But unlike that catchy pop song whose simple chorus wears old
fast, the balls have a complexity that can strike deeper chords.
ar a , for instance, is a slyly sarcastic response to the
over‑romanticization of the "classic countryside farm," the kind
of cute, winsome paintings you see on calendars and refrigerator
magnets and in films like e rid es o adiso o
y. By
skipping the step of reproducing the barn on a trinket and
actually squashing the barn i o a trinket, we come face to face
with our own absurdity.
Fisk's intentions are refreshingly low‑falutin'. "I want to ignore
this concept of the artist's ego, the artist as a higher being. I
don't believe an artist's invented forms can be any more
interesting than a basic form. A sphere is already
understandable and accessible to everyone." By removing his
role as an "innovator," Fisk becomes more of a laborer,
hammering and molding toward the already existing goal. "In a
hammering and molding toward the already existing goal. "In a
lot of modern art, the craft of it is not as important as it once
was," laments Fisk. "People look at stiff, conceptual art pieces,
like a canister of horse piss, and they don't really respect that as
they would a neo‑classical stone carving of a figure, because
they can understand all of the effort that went into the ra of
it."
Fisk's own craft of employing vast technical know‑how toward
the most rudimentary of shapes has his fans demanding,
" ow???"—not only because it is a natural part of the audience's
giddy befuddlement, but also because of the apparent
preposterousness of creating such endearing monstrosities. Each
ball, although similar in form, represents an unprecedented
challenge of construction. How does one begin to sphericize the
unspherical world? Within this question lies the rare promise of
almost total artistic freedom—because of the ensured and
preconceived end result of a ball, the artist now finds that his
palette includes almost every single object existing within the
modern world. Yet, this is severely tempered by the near
impossibility of the task itself—it takes a lot of work to look
effortless. However, Fisk has so far succeeded in transforming
everything but the kitchen sink. Well, okay, he did that one too
( i a ).
Exhibit A: ree a . A flawlessly bark‑covered nub of a tree.
People regularly ask Fisk, "Where did you find this plant? Did
you grow it?" On the contrary, Fisk got himself a huge maple log
and chainsawed and carved at it until it was a solid 250‑pound
sphere. Then he stripped bark from other tree drums, made it
pliable by soaking it in water, taking excruciating pains to make
sure the bark looked seamless and hiding the axis where the
ridges meet with a natural knot in the bark. Add some wood
glue, and presto‑change‑o.
Strange reactions are normal for the balls. When a private
collector bought a and displayed it on his front lawn, he
was greeted one day by a pair of UPS workers. "We just wanted
to let you know that we're here to pick up our thing out there,"
they said. "We're not sure how it got here. Maybe it fell off a
truck." On the owner's protestations that it was a work of art,
they kindly maintained, "It's no problem. We'll take it. Free of
charge." Later, a postal worker expressed his admiration of the
new "drop box" but admitted that he had no idea how to open it.
Exhibit B: e e ordova a . Fisk's most recent work was
created for the DeCordova Museum's "Sphere in Contemporary
Sculpture" show. The objective: to make a ball out of the
DeCordova Museum, a rather complex brick building. With three
months to finish it, Fisk began. Since you can't exactly buy these
bricks at the local Home Depot, twelve hundred delicately
shaped bricks with compound curves (curving side‑to‑side as well
as top‑to‑bottom) had to be hand‑made from a pickup
truckÐsized lump of raw clay. Fisk found himself in the dubious
position of hanging directly beneath his suspended, 5,500‑pound
concrete sphere, gooping on the clay that was needed for the
bottom of the ball, only to find much of it succumbing to
gravity's pull. Once Fisk dealt with all the bricks shrinking by
twenty percent (leaving a huge gap), he began the three‑day
process of 1,930 degrees. This process ended with Fisk opening
the oven to find blackened, warped and exploded bricks. With
time waning and heart breaking, Fisk abandoned the project.
All of this strife stems from his stubborn refusal to construct the
balls from anything but genuinely indigenous material. He could
balls from anything but genuinely indigenous material. He could
have stopped working with the completion of the concrete ball
and just painted it to look like DeCordova. But it is commitment
to the transformation of the native object that makes this series
pure, and with this in mind, Fisk dove back in, grinding the
warped bricks into submission and adding color to the ones most
in need. Pascal Spengemann, curator of the Firehouse Center for
the Visual Arts, calls Fisk a "generous" artist. "He doesn't make
us wallow and suffer through the difficulty he goes through. He's
not one of those guys who make us say 'Wow, look how many
moth wings he used to make George Washington's face.'"
All the work is paying off. Almost every ball (that hasn't been
destroyed) has been snatched up by museums or collectors. In a
time when a lot of art just makes people nod their heads in
hesitant "appreciation," the balls enjoy a wondrous "lightness"
about them. Balls are like playthings, and playthings are fun and
easy to relate to—fun to such an extent that it is hard to report
on Fisk's work without using such gratuitously horrible puns as
"Sphere and Loathing," "Sphere and Present Danger," "From
Sphere to Eternity" and "Blood, Sweat and Spheres." Their
appealing charm suggests that Fisk could continue in this rather
circular direction for some time. "I want to play this out some
more," he admits. "I don't consider myself very cunning and
creative. Right now, I just apply my formula to things and get to
work."
It would seem that Fisk need only beware of the temptation to
become too clever or tricky. What makes a ball like a
work so well is its spare succinctness—it is recognizable, simple
and, most importantly, mute. Fisk doesn't work like many
painters do, discovering the true form of the piece along the
way. Instead, he handles his sculptures as an architect handles
the construction of a building. This painstaking method guards
against the danger of being swept away by an attractive
gimmick. Paint can only represent something, anyway.
Architecture is that thing; we have no choice but to physically
contend with a building that we see and, inherently, to consider
what the building is used for and what's inside of it. The fact that
Fisk represented the DeCordova Museum is really incidental. The
fact that he figured it out and transformed it is essential.
On the conceptual horizon for Fisk are o a s (modeled after
o
the ceramic tile and mosaic New York subway stops), r i
ow a a (a ball for the Burlington, Vermont, Millennium
Celebration that doubles as a time capsule via an opening top
dome) and oo s a (use your imagination). The idea of
travelling to a different culture and encapsulating, say, a
Japanese garden into a ball has enticed Fisk for some time.
Although the intent to "ball" a revered culture is slightly more
dangerous than his previous work, Fisk sees it as the natural
function of his position as an artist. "Art is about getting people
to look again and give themselves a new perspective on things.
Or, at the very least, remind them of it."
In the meantime, the balls' strict set of guidelines continue to
inspire people to come up with their own concepts of reimagined
banality. Can't you picture them? s er a ? o a ds
a ? iver a ? The ideas just keep on rolling.
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