Art Fux Redux

Why Even Fischerspooner Hates Fischerspooner

Paper magazine, spring 2002

This is the story of two art freaks who are scamming the world. Casey Spooner and Warren Fischer, co-founders of the art-rock collective Fischerspooner, are addicted to smoke machines. They make electro music that sounds like Berlin in the year 2020. They only perform in galleries. Their first CD, #1 (FS Studios), hasn't even been released in the U.S., and already singles like "Emerge" are more apparent on Luxx's dance floor than cases of coke nose. Their live performances — there have been five; the last cost backer Jeffrey Deitch $300,000 — incorporate elements of film, dance and sculpture, and have inspired critics to drown the duo in metaphors. It's "a Satanic Six Flags stage show" (V). It's "Part Paula Abdul, part Busby Berkeley" (Vanity Fair). It's "Siegfried and Roy on ecstasy" (The Face).

"It's a fucked-up pop entertainment spectacle," says Spooner.

"We're fabricating the illusion of entertainment," decrees Fischer.

Fischer writes the music; Spooner is charged with "performance and image," which basically means everything that gets attention. Some of his creations include an exploding glitter vest and a suit made from human hair. He's worked the stage wearing only a pair of Hanes and body paint, and has styled his dancers to look like a fleet of psycho kabuki stripper-hookers.

Are you pretentious?

Spooner: We are. We admit it.

Fischer: Admit it? Pretentious is a good thing. I looked it up. It just means "to feign—to put on airs of success." That's all. From the beginning, we've tried to mimic the sheen of popular entertainment.

Spooner: We're an arrogant, needlessly successful sham.

Fischerspooner consists of 15 people, more or less. This includes two choreographers, Fischer's wife (who directs videos), a photographer, a hat-maker, a "dramaturge" and a fleet of dancers who will do, wear and dance the Robot to just about anything. They look like the Factory of the '00s but automatically reject the comparison. "I don't think we're as reckless as that," Spooner says, nose a-crinkle. "There certainly aren't as many drugs. And I thought the films Andy Warhol made before he met Paul Morrissey kind of sucked."

But their similarity to the Factory's mission—blurring the lines between high and low art—is unavoidable. Their costumes are Spandex. Their hair is mulleted. Their performances are a Britney arena tour as imagined by Gerhard Richter.

"The music is the art," says Spooner. "They're one and the same."

"It's guilt-free fun," says Fischer. "That's what we provide for the art elite."

Casey was once a prop stylist. His last job was selecting lawn furniture for Outkast to sit on while being shot by Annie Liebowitz. "She was," he recalls, "unanimously and without a doubt an evil person. She's one of the people that no one says no to, and so she's become this total megalomaniac. That's when success is a curse—when no one really tells you the truth, and then you turn into a humongous, rich loser."

He relates the story of how he bought pool furniture that Liebowitz deemed too fancy for the Atlanta setting and, post-hissy-fit, dispatched him to Walmart to get something "more real."

"That's her problem," he says. "She's creating an illusion of 'real' when there's no real there at all!"

On the subject of "real," the following may or may not be true (the band revels in creating apocryphal tales of their past). Fischer, 32, and Spooner, 36, met in a video class at the School of Visual Arts. They were the most vocal critics of other students' work. Fischer had a nervous breakdown while filming a commercial for long-distance provider 10-10-321. Fischerspooner started up soon thereafter. Their first show was at the Astor Place Starbucks in 1998, or so the legend goes. Rock singer Andrew WK was there. Soon after, Fischerspooner was swallowed whole by the art world, being photographed by Terry Richardson for the cover of Index.

Are you political?

Fischer: I think we are, unintentionally. We're making a non-committee-based version of a pop show. There was this show at MoMA called "The History of Image and Pop Culture." The thesis was that religion and family have died as society's major icons, and entertainment pop culture filled the void shared experience more about Harrison Ford and less about Jesus. It made me think about what it means to be a celebrity. Which, by the way, I consider myself to be. I try to foist that on Casey as much as possible. [Spooner fakes crying.]

Fischer: It's a strange thing, being a celebrity.

But apres le deluge, le backlash. It's already easy to gripe that they're overhyped, that the electroclash movement will crash, and down will go Fischerspooner.

It hasn't been this easy to hate a band since the Strokes.

But like them, Fischerspooner deserves every magazine profile it's gotten: It's all about the product. Fischerspooner's album is excellent in patches, and their publicity campaign is revolutionary. By being a semi-fake band that creates its own hype—and gets sucked into the overhyped category by people who don't get the joke—they're both manufacturing the hype and commenting on it. They're absolutely genuine about their fakeness. And they have credentials.

Art gallery owner Gavin Brown was Fischerspooner's first manager. The two camps parted ways in 2000. To hear Spooner tell it, Brown was leery of the way the group intended to storm the no-man's-land between the art world and pop culture. "Gavin was always like, 'Where do I fit in?'" says Spooner. "He just couldn't handle us." (Brown did not return an e-mail seeking comment.)

Around the same time they were becoming unhappy, gallerist Jeffrey Deitch saw the pair in Index. "I thought they were making the freshest visual statement I had seen in a long time," says Deitch. "They have the potential to expand the art audience in a big way. They will take the vanguard into the mainstream."

Of course, that sort of task has been assigned to all sorts of downtown artists with similar results: They die, disappear or get co-opted beyond recognition. And that's where Fischerspooner blurs the lines between driven and unambitious. "I keep a low threshold of expectations," says Spooner. "In a way, we've already done what we set out to do. This is the moment we've planned for: to simultaneously pretend to be the biggest thing in the world and become that."

How are you going to combat the perception that you're so '01?

Fischer: So '01? We're so '98!

Fischer is now writing the band's second album. A couple of songs will be debuted at Deitch Projects in SoHo (May 16-18), an event that will encompass three nights of performances and a gallery show of films, photos and sculpture. A show in London will follow at the end of the month. This is the summer when world domination either will or will not happen. Fischer imagines the next round of press.

"I could write your article," he says. "'They're so full of shit, so pompous. Who do they think they are? A bunch of New York losers who don't have any talent.'" He pauses, enjoying himself. "You know, I think we're eminently hateable."

Spooner concurs: "I would hate me."