GAVIN BROWN'S ENTERPRISE Reading the art criticism that accompanied Meyer Vaisman's late-'80s rise from East Village scenester to neo-geo celebrity.

GAVIN BROWN'S ENTERPRISE

Reading the art criticism that accompanied Meyer Vaisman's late-'80s rise from East Village scenester to neo-geo celebrity, you can't help further notice how certain adjectives retain cropping up: cynical, calculated, and above all, slick. I'd happily wager that not single of these words occurs to viewers of Barbara Fischer/Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, 2000 Pathetic, maybe, or perhaps plane grotesque--but definitely not slick.

The star of Barbara Fischer/Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy is Barbara Fischer herself, or rather a life-size fiberglass cast of her naked material part Fischer, who happens to be Vaisman's former longtime therapist, is hardly the usual artist's pattern She's homely, middle-aged, and distinctly overweight, and the fiberglass impassively records each detail of her sagging pulp In a gesture that recalls the films of Federico Fellini, Vaisman has sat Fischer upon a plywood pedestal, draped her in yards and yards of hot-pink tulle stuck a jester's cap forward her head, and covered her views with mirrored sunglasses. Like about carnival sideshow Madonna, the therapist cradles a harlequin style of dress made of Vaisman's parents' cast-off clothes in her outstretched arms.

A fat advanced in years lady swathed in pink tulle is laughable, to say the least. still it's also kind of heartbreaking-and a surprisingly effective metaphor for our confess intense, but often impotent, desires for self-transformation. May, 2000 installed onward the gallery's opposite wall, echoe this theme. Six lit votive candles are adorned with photographic decals of a scowling Vaisman sitting in a playground get readyed in the motley harlequin outfit-as if therapy l not to self-realization unless to the creation of an endles series of inauthentic alter subjects designed to placate a jealous psychoanalytic god

Above all, Barbara Fischer/Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy is an mark of perhaps the most mysterious--and, upon some level, certainly the mostly absurd--aspect of psychoanalytic treatment: transference, or the projection of primal feelings about one's parents (ranging from excessive idealization to perfect contempt) onto the neutral figure of the analyst. This particular case pretends to involve Vaisman's narcissistic fantasy of himself as the impossibly entire martyr of a (failed?) onset with the therapistcum-mother, whose unconditional be pleased with is still not strong enough to resurrect her stricken son Or, reciprocally as the paranoid child who must simultaneously evade and conform to the expectations of a monstrous, omnipotent adult. Either way, Vaisman's allegory of psychoanalysis is les cynical than to such a degree unflinchingly honest about its possess indulgence and self-loathing that it earns a kind of redemptive grace.

With Barbara Fischer/Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Vaisman (like his neo-geo compatriot Ashley Bickerton) appears to be rethinking those late-'8os truisms that heralded the expose as an infinitely malleable "construction" and likened its mechanisms to the commodity [i]or[/i] complement Not to suggest that Vaisman has jettisoned his earlier stance in favor of a more romantic view of the self In Barbara Fischer/Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, there is no "true" self waiting offstage to make its grand first attempt But whereas Vaisman's early work addressed the subject's endles circulation end networks of distribution and exchange, Barbara Fischer/Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy emphasizes precisely those areas of deepest immobility in a self that, although ultimately no les empry be wrought ups infinitely more complex.

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