Peter Fischli (8 June 1952 in Zurich) and David Weiss (21 June 1946 in Zurich), often shortened to Fischli/Weiss, are an artist duo that have been collaborating since 1979. They are among the most renowned contemporary artists of Switzerland. Their best known work is the film "Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go)." This was described by The Guardian as being "post apocalyptic" as it is all about chain reactions and the way in which objects fly, crash, and explode across the studio it was shot in. Both artists live and work in Zurich.
Contents |
Peter Fischli (born Zurich, 8 June 1952) studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Urbino (1975–6) and the Accademia di Belle Arti, Bologna (1976–7). David Weiss (born Zurich, 21 June 1946) studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zurich (1963–4), and the Kunstgewerbeschule, Basel (1964–5); he subsequently worked as sculptor with Alfred Gruder (Basel) and Jaqueline Stieger (England). Their first collaborative venture was a series of ten colour photographs, Wurstserie (‘sausage series’, 1979), depicting small scenes constructed with various types of meat and sausage and everyday objects, with titles such as "At the North Pole" and "The Caveman".[1]
Art critics often see in the parodying bearing of Fischli and Weiss' work parallels to Marcel Duchamp, Dieter Roth or Jean Tinguely.[2] For their work, they make use of a large bandwidth of artistic forms of expression: film and photography, art books, sculptures made out of different materials, and multimedia installations. They adapt objects and situations from everyday life and place them into an artistic context—often using humour and irony. Wurstserie (1979) was Fischli and Weiss’s first collaborative project, setting the tone for their future work.[3] In the series, ordinary sausages and slices of sausages became the protagonists of scenarios, alluding to situations such as cars in a traffic accident in an urban setting, layers of carpets and other situations.[4]. By the end of the 1980s, the duo had expanded their repertoire to embrace an iconography of the incidental, creating deadpan photographs of kitsch tourist attractions and airports around the world. For their contribution to the 1995 Venice Biennale, at which they represented Switzerland, Fischli & Weiss exhibited 96 hours of video on 12 monitors that documented what they called “concentrated daydreaming”—real-time glimpses into daily life in Zurich: a mountain sunrise, a restaurant chef in his kitchen, sanitation workers, a bicycle race, and so on.[5] For the Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997), Fischli and Weiss planted a flower and vegetable garden conceived with an ecological point of view and documented its periodic growth through photographs.[6]
The artists' first Rat and Bear film, The Least Resistance (1981) was set in urban Los Angeles, where the artists were living. The Right Way (1982-3) was their second appearance and shows the two characters rambling through a mountainous landscape, of the kind that filled nineteenth-century artists with thoughts of the sublime. A book called Order and Cleanliness (1981), setting out the ideas of Rat and Bear, is crammed with charts and diagrams, each attempting to impose a crazed order on the world.[7] Rat and Bear (2004) is a sculpture that incorporates the original costumes worn by the artists, presented in life-size boxes out of dark, barely-translucent Plexiglas, suspending the costumes inside.[8]
The Equilibres photographs (1984-1987), a series of images of household objects and studio detritus arranged to form tenuously-balanced assemblages, developed into the artists' celebrated film The Way Things Go (1986-1987).[9] The resulting film enlists an assortment of objects, including tyres and chairs, as components in an absurdly amusing and explosive chain reaction lasting thirty minutes. The film’s humour lies in the deliberate misuse of these objects, as they are co-opted into performing roles outside their normal function. Reminiscent of the physical comedy of silent films starring Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, here the actors are steaming-kettles mounted on roller-skates, rotating dustbin bags, rickety stepladders set in motion, buckets, tyres, bottles and planks.[10]
Originally made for documenta X (1997), Sichtbare Welt (Visible World) comprises three monitors each displaying an eight hour video made up of the artists' still photographs. The images, taken in arbitrary locations around the world, slowly dissolve one into another and, as is the case with the slide shows, there is no sound track. The work was shown on late night television in Germany every night for three months.[11] A later version of Visible World (2003) is a collection of 3,000 small-format photographs displayed on a specially fabricated 90-foot long light table. The encyclopedic collection of images — of cities, jungles, deserts, airports, stadiums, monuments, mountains, and tropical beaches, from all over the world — is composed of photographs taken by the artists over the course of fifteen years.[12] An Unsettled Work (2000–06), originally titled Freakshow; Monsters, grew out of Visible World and consists of pictures rejected from the prior work. A marked esthetic departure from their earlier pieces, this slide projection issues forth violent, sumptuous, and otherworldly images.[13]
Questions (1981-2003) is a three-part slide installation, consisting of 243 handwritten questions, with three questions projected at a time. Each set of questions slowly dissolves into the next. The questions range from the profound to the trivial. Examples include: "Can I restore my innocence?," "Why does the earth turn around once a day?," "Does a hidden tunnel lead directly to the kitchen?" and "Does a ghost drive my car around at night?"[14] The installation was the culmination of a series of works composed of absurd questions, including a book called Will Happiness Find Me?.[15]
Fischli & Weiss had their first solo exhibition in 1981 at the Galerie Balkon in Geneva.[16] In more than 25 years of activity, they have exhibited in some of the most important institutions and museums worldwide including Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2000); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2003); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City (2005); and the Rencontres d'Arles festival, France. A U.S. retrospective of their work was organised by the Walker Art Center in 1996 and subsequently traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Another retrospective of their work was held at Tate Modern, London in 2006, and traveled to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kunsthaus Zürich and the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. In 1995 and 2003, they represented Switzerland in the Venice Biennale[17], and also participated in the Swiss Pavilion at the Seville Expo '92. Their work also appeared in documenta 8 and 10 (1987 and 1997). In 2008 the Nicola Trussardi Foundation presented Altri fiori e altre domande, their first retrospective in Italy, installed in the 17th century rooms of Palazzo Litta in Milan.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss are represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Sprüth Magers Berlin London.
Their works are held, among others, in the collections of the Tate[18], the Guggenheim[19], the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.
Fischli and Weiss won the Golden Lion prize at the 2003 Venice Biennale for Questions, an installation of over 1,000 photographic slides of handwritten existential questions the artists had collected over many years.
2008 Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International [1]