R.M. Fischer at Sandra Gering - New York - sculpture

Art in America, March, 2003 by Cary Levine

Since the late '70s, New York artist R.M. Fischer has been assembling industrial objects--plumbing fragments, lighting parts, pots, watering cans, clocks--into pseudo-functional sculptures that are not easily categorized. At once nostalgic and futuristic, his wacky inventions transform the mundane and prefabricated into the unique and fantastic, always with a touch of the comical.

Fischer exhibited five recent incarnations here. Dating from 2001 and 2002, these works are human scale and more anthropomorphic than usual, made from clumps of chrome spheres, wood balls, metal tubes and plastic globes, some of which light up. Looking as if they emerged one night from a botched genetic experiment in a lamp factory, these illuminated cellular clusters vaguely resemble heads, arms, legs and torsos, connected by vascular systems of looping wires, switches and transformer boxes. At the gallery, thick black electrical cords lay slack along the floor, connecting these polyluminous personages to their respective wall sockets. Suspended from the ceiling, the works hung listlessly, their dormant vitality contrasting with the inert objectness of the parts from which they were fashioned.

However, the humanoid qualities of these works remain ambiguous since they could equally be seen simply for what they are: giant light fixtures, albeit for some dubious new wave of home decor. As such, their scale is no longer life-size, but oversize--their capacity to serve as lamps clashing with the sheer impracticality of their bulk.

Ultimately, though, it is as sculpture that these works function most effectively. Moondog, for example, conforms to a more or less regular geometry, presenting a static symmetry to the viewer, who is reflected 13-fold in the work's bubbling conglomerations. Nitrog is intentionally unbalanced and more gestural, with its lopsided composition and the sweeping curves of its intertwining wires. Each work generates intriguing shapes and associations through Fischer's trademark fusion of otherwise completely banal items.

To walk among these composites in the crammed gallery space elicited awareness both of their physical materiality, as gravity pulled upon their drooping forms, and of one's own body, with its corresponding irregularities, bumps and orifices. Like all good grotesques, these works simultaneously attract and repel, provoking us into uneasy awareness of ourselves.