work types: performance

A small table set with an empty pie tin and a can of Reddi-wip. Fischer walks onto stage with a theater seat strapped to his body like a shield. Hello! We caught each other at a strange moment, not a particularly safe moment, especially for an activist. My name is Noah Fischer: I am an activist, or at least I was, before this moment. But I got myself all freaked out about the potential violence of the Left. And that’s what I’m working with now. So I’d like to get you freaked out too.

September 17, 2011, a talking coin circulated through the New York streets of Occupy Wall Street blending outrage and humor to proclaim broken trust in capitalism. In the utopian urban camp, the talking coin met an activist from the 1970’s known for throwing pies in the face of the powerful. Noah Fischer, the talking coin of 2011, speculates on methods beyond the violence of pies for confronting dystopia head on.

What does commencement mean for artists in the billionaire feeding frenzy of the Trump era? Commencement symbolizes the entry of studied, curious individuals into a world that they have been prepared to influence and impact. But what is this world into which graduates are entering today, and what impact can they have amid a reactionary crackdown on art and cultural difference, saddled with backbreaking amounts of debt?

On #J20- the day of Trump’s inauguration ceremony in Washington DC, I co-organized a speakout with  artists, poets, and activists responding to the following questions at the Whitney Museum.

Dear Friends, we need art now more than ever. Artworks are”real answers to the puzzle externally posed to them” as Adorno wrote. And what a puzzle! And what better form than theater? Ritualistic life-acting. Experiments for potential revolutions.

Like art markets and financial markets, Bank of NO isn’t confined by national borders. It conducts business in austerity-bound Cyprus and now the city of Leipzig. Bank of NO crosses over the waters of the Mediterranean and it also crosses the waters of history. In Leipzig it will now re-open Bankhaus Meyer & Co, the last private bank in the GDR whose owners became refugees from Nazi Germany in an earlier chapter of history. This makes a circular migration through time with people now crossing the Mediterranean in hopes of reaching Germany.

Bank of No: Event Program: February 1, 2016 7:30 PM, at Leventis Gallery: Lecture and discussion about new artistic practices related to politics and activism from the streets to art galleries. 10:00 PM, at Point Centre for Contemporary Art Dance Party …

Continue reading “Bank of No: Nicosia”

A journey from South Brooklyn to New York’s Halloween Parade  bearing an effigy of Queen Mother.  Collaboration with Pawel Althamer, Roman Stańczak and the Aaron Burr Society.  http://www.artforum.com/video/id=44186

In late June, I participated in a project oranized by Jerusalem- based artist Guy Briller called Going up: Jerusalem.

On Monday, January 23rd, Noah Fischer joined Jim Costanzo of the Aaron Burr Society to perform a distribution of stamped dollar bills and smashed pennies for the opening of a show titled “It’s the Political Economy Stupid.” The show is curated by Gregory Sholette.http://davidplakke.us/client/ACF_Political_24Jan2012/content/ACF_193_large.html

“Today, September 22nd, 2011 is the last day of Summer.  And tomorrow is the beginning of the Fall…of the Empire of Greed. These coins, though insignificant in value, are the seeds of change for a new nation built on equality and justice” With these words, spoken before the New York Stock Exchange, the seven performances of the Summer of Change conclude.  We distributed each American numismatic currency from the dollar to the penny at the feet of the Gods of Wall Street in a bid to break through the mythology of Free Markets.

Saturday September 17, 2011 a peaceful movement inspired by Tahrir Square in Egypt, Puerta del Sol in Madrid, and the worldwide rage against an out-of-control financial system blossomed in New York City just as the Summer of Change turns to Fall. Protesters who had hoped to occupy Wall Street were not suprised to find the pedestrian mall completely shut down by the NYPD. However, The protest went on anyway in other locations of the Financial District and it continues as of this writing. The Summer of Change project is taking part in

Midnight on Wall Street. Alexander Hamilton appears on a red carpet, saunters past the Stock Exchange, and approaches the Federal Building steps.  In the center of the square is a cardboard box inhabited by The Common Man. “Who is here that distrurbs my slumber?” “It is I who have some to see/if there is anything I can do for thee…”And thus ensues a performance in rhyme, a modern day Faust which, like Goethe’s great story, tells the tale of ambition, wealth, and ultimately, folly, and chilling horror.

High Noon on Thursday, the Father of our Nation shall dialog with the Common Man on the Federal Hall Steps of Wall Street. They will then distribute 400 US Quarter-Dollars to the Commonwealth for the latest numismatic offering of the Summer of Change. This is a joint venture of Noah Fischer and the Aaron Burr Society.

July 15th, Please Join us on Wall Street at 4:00 PM for the second event in the Summer of Change: A distribution of 200 50-cent pieces.  At 4:30 we will march in procession to the Irish Hunger Memorial (map) where Ed Kimball will screen archival 8mm footage on JFK (whose visage adorns the 50-cent piece).The whole event runs from 4-7 PM.This performance is dedicated to the memory of Maria Soledad Loya 1940-2011 

Coins, those age-old metallic discs struck with the symbols of national mythology,  just might unlock reason & light in the fourth year of the Dire Global Recession, an economic state whose laws do not apply within the stones of Wall Street; whose invisible great wall is impregnable to marauding justice, equality, and change.  So we present the Summer of Change; a series of numismatic ritual offerings to our nation’s bankers; those citizens worthy of prizes and honors; which we as artists are honored to bestow in public. Standing on The Street safely w

“The ability to construct symbolic objects attains its greatest triumph in money.  For money represents abstraction at its purest form; it makes comprehensible the most abstract concept …thus money is the adequate expression of the relationship of man to the world which can only be grasped in single and concrete instances yet only really conceived when the singular becomes the embodiment of living mental process which interweaves all singularities and in this fashion creates reality.” -Georg Simmel,  The Philosophy of Money

Act 1 of Lady Liberty: Tragic Story of a Torch Singer, a radio play begins with an interview between performance artist, Kalup Linzy and collaborator Noah Fischer.

Random Randal: Made in Kerala is an installation and performance by New York artist Noah Fischer in collaboration with Elisa Soliven, Anil Dayanand and the Students of RLV College in Kerala, India.  Fischer was invited to RLV College by adjunct professor Anil Dayanand along with dean Sidharthan Kunjan and professor Bipin Balachandran who also curated conceptual dimensions of the project.  In Malayalam the native tongue of Kerala, ‘Randal’ means lantern.

We write the year 50 according to the calculation of time by the cosmic comsomolzkis: In 1957 the Soviet Union managed to shoot a small ‘accompanist’ into orbit and thus gave the starting signal for space-travel. A sputnik-shock for the western world because finally it became obvious that the Soviet-Union was now able to reach America with rockets. From this zero-point TIME REPUBLIC takes off to tell another story of the 20th century about forgotten promises of a future past.

Revolutionary Timing is a performance by andcompany&Co., based on an improvisation at the first &Co.LAB in Amsterdam in May 2005 and performed in the lighting- and sculpture-setting of New York based artist Noah Fischer in the ground floor of the AT&T building in Manhattan in March 2006. The initial idea was to re-appropriate the revolutionary cutting technique of the filmmaker Sergej Eisenstein for the stage by the live-use of light and sound.