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.
.
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.

Herr Fischer's Haunted House

Urs Fischer has turned the New Museum into the art world's answer to the Addams Family house—dank in affect, dim in concept, and deliciously creepy. Naturally, I showed up for the opening party. Wandering from floor to floor, brushing aside the cobwebs, I met so many ghosts that I began to doubt that I would ever meet the man of the hour. At this Fischer show Herr Fischer was nowhere to be seen. I saw Lynda Benglis, in strange, protoplasmic form. I saw Barry Le Va and Robert Rauschenberg and George Segal. Salvador Dali, maestro of the melted watches, was in attendance, haunting a melted piano. There was a funhouse mirror reflecting Richard Artschwager's familiar wood grain and any number of unexorcized bits and pieces of Andy Warhol. Of all the works in this overstuffed show, my favorite was Cumpadre, a croissant suspended from a length of fishing line. Guess what perches on the croissant. A butterfly. What else? Fischer's butterfly is a distant relative of the parrot in Joan Miro's Object, the benchmark example of Surrealist assemblage. Cumpadre wants us to believe it has met Miro's standard. Do not be fooled. Step back and watch, as Fischer's object sinks to the level of public sculpture, something along the lines of Homage to the Generic Surrealist.