In this film, artist Urs Fischer and his project manager Mario Winkler discuss the imposing LED-clad cube that is "Denominator" inside Gagosian gallery in Beverly Hills, where it was exhibited as a standalone piece between July and November of 2023. Twelve feet in all directions, this sleek object evokes the "primary forms" of Minimalism, while updating their formal asceticism with the imagistic surfeit that characterizes our times. Visitors to Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation in Marfa are sternly advised to put away their cameras; the opposite spirit reigns here. Like a cellphone scaled up to gargantuan proportions, "Denominator" is a receiver and transmitter in one, continually scraping the informational ether and redistributing its yield as an endlessly mutating mosaic. Moving pictures-drawn from an ever-expanding reserve of television advertisements, spanning from the 1950s to today-dance across its four facing sides to an algorithmically guided choreography. Ultimately, however, this work is less concerned with the history of product promotion than the current stakes of representation writ large. Fischer analogizes his mass-media monolith to an inverted Sistine Chapel: "It doesn't it doesn't hold you; it kind of repulses you... you're on the outside." An original soundtrack by John McEntire, founding member of Tortoise and The Sea and Cake, complements the presentation of this literally epic endeavor.
