Peter Fischli & David Weiss

Peter Fischli (born 8 June 1952) and David Weiss (21 June 1946 – 27 April 2012), often shortened to Fischli/Weiss, were a

David Weiss (21 June 1946 – 27 April 2012) grew up as the son of a parish priest and a teacher. After discovering a passion for jazz at the age of 16, he enrolled in a foundation course at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zürich, where in his first year of study he befriended fellow artist Urs Lüthi. Having rejected careers as a decorator, a graphic designer and a photographer, Weiss soon came to view a career as an artist as a realistic prospect.^[1] He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zürich (1963–64), and the Kunstgewerbeschule, Basel (1964–65); he subsequently worked as a sculptor with Alfred Gruber (Basel) and Jacqueline Stieger (England). In 1967, he worked at the Expo 67 in Montreal, before travelling to New York, where he got to know the important minimalist art of the time. Between 1970 and 1979 he published books in collaboration with Lüthi. For most of 1975–78, he spent a great deal of time drawing in black ink, and had exhibitions at galleries in Zürich, Amsterdam, Cologne, and Rotterdam.^[2]

Fischli and Weiss met in 1978^[1] and subsequently formed a short-lived rock band, Migros.^[3] 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".^[4]

Works

Art critics often see parallels to Marcel Duchamp, Dieter Roth or Jean Tinguely in Fischli and Weiss' parody bearing work.^[5]

Wurstserie (1979) was Fischli and Weiss' first collaborative project, setting the tone for their future work.^[6] 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.^[7]

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 and Weiss exhibited 96 hours of video on 12 monitors that documented what they called "concentrated daydreaming"—real-time glimpses into daily life in Zürich: a mountain sunrise, a restaurant chef in his kitchen, sanitation workers, a bicycle race, and so on.^[8] 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.^[9]

Suddenly This Overview

Suddenly this Overview (1981) is a collection of unfired clay sculptures imaginatively recreating various events in human history.^[10] The figures range from those rendered in meticulous detail, to coarse, sketch-like pieces. As is implied by "The World We Live In" – the title originally envisaged for the work – this panorama of interwoven happenings in the world arising out of the artists' subjective viewpoint, with its assembly of events both large and small, questions what it means to be alive. First unveiled in 1981 as an installation consisting of around 200 objects, a new version comprising about 90 was presented in 2006.^[11]

Rat and Bear

The artists' first Rat and Bear film, The Least Resistance (1981) was set in urban Los Angeles, where the artists were living at the time. The Right Way (1982–83) was their second appearance and shows the two characters rambling through a mountainous landscape, of the kind that filled 19th-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.^[12] 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.^[13]

Polyurethane Objects and Rubber Sculptures

In 1982, the artists began their ongoing series of hand-carved and painted polyurethane objects depicting ordinary items found in their studio. Each object is a replica, down to the strewn peanut shells and scatter of rainbow M&M's, carved from dense, rigid foam and painted.^[14] In a 2006 interview Peter Fischli remarked, "Unlike Pop art, which turns one particular object into an icon, they are a collection of replicas of worthless everyday objects."^[15] For a series of Rubber Sculptures, they cast ordinary objects, such as a desk drawer Divider (1987), a Vase (1986/87) and a Dog Dish (1987) in a heavyweight black rubber.^[16]

The Way Things Go

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 (Der Lauf Der Dinge) (1986–1987).^[17] The resulting film enlists an assortment of objects, including tyres and chairs, as components in a domino-like chain reaction lasting thirty minutes. Using such common industrial objects, Fischli and Weiss created a continuous chain of actions and reactions involving balloons deflating, tires rolling, liquids draining, candles melting, balls dropping, fuses burning, wheels spinning, and much more.^[14] 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.^[18]

Well known in film circles, The Way Things Go won awards at the Berlin and Sydney film festivals and was described by