A Graveyard Smash

For Urs Fischer, the best thing about being an artist is that you get to say which ghosts haunt your art. After a spin through Fischer's current show at the New Museum, I'd say that his favorite spook is Andy Warhol. Aside from a few exceptions noted in an earlier post, just about every image and object on view looks like a tepid reflection of something in Andy's oeuvre. I know what you're thinking. Tepid reflections are the stuff of serious art, these days. Fine, but you can't even see Fischer's work until you've brushed aside a dense forest of cobwebs and exorcised Warhol's remarkably persistent spirit. It gets a bit tedious and what, after all, is the point? Hardly present anywhere in this three-floor extravaganza, Fischer is absent even from his Self-portrait, which shows him demurely sleeping--a reprise of John Giorno sleeping in the Warhol movie Sleep.
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There is so much Warhol in this show that it needs a Warholian sound track, a pop song played over and over and over, ad nauseum, the way Andy did at the Factory. He favored hits by girl groups like the Shirelles. More suitable for the hopelessly haunted Fischer, I think, is The Monster Mash, that rock'n'roll version of the old-fashioned horror movie, as performed by one-hit wonder Bobby “Boris” Pickett.
Here's a link to the original 45, on YouTube
And this is a link to the same song, performed (sort of) by Boris Karloff.