Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better soon be discovered at the Guggenheim museum in New York
For more than three decades, Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) collaborated to create a unique oeuvre that brilliantly exploits humor, banality, and a keen rethinking of the readymade to realign our view of the world.
So what’s Their secret? Humour, above all else, in sculptures, installations, videos and photographs. These Jacks-of-all- trades became known via The Way things Go, an experimental film created in 1987, where small events lead to a merry game of counterweights, pendulums, rocking chairs, various scaffolding and gears, as many makeshift objects as we find in their sculpture. The fragile balance between the ordinary objects in The Way Things Go is a sort of living expansion of their series Quiet Afternoon (1984-1985), precarious installations which they photographed. Today, the duo is among the best-known contemporary Swiss artists in the international scene. For this reason, for more than 10 years their best works are priced at more than USD 100,000 at auction. They even set a record high of USD 1 million in London in 2013 (with Floß, an installation sold for more than USD 962,000 including fees at Phillips), but their market deflated considerably after this peak. It could take off again thanks to an event for the less prestigious, as the incongruous, poetic, and jubilant spirit of their work can soon be discovered at the Guggenheim museum in New York, from 5 February–20 April 2016.
Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better offers the most thorough investigation to date of their joint production, revealing the ways they juxtaposed the spectacular and the ordinary in order to celebrate the sheer triviality of everyday life, while creating an open-ended interrogation of temporality, visual culture, and the nature of existence itself.
(“Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better,” Guggenheim, February 5–April 20 This retrospective promises to be the most thorough examination of the artist duo’s decades-long partnership)
The retrospective will demonstrate the intricate interrelationships among Fischli and Weiss’s seemingly discrete works in sculpture, photography, installation, and video, each of which they used to confront, examine, and lampoon the seriousness of high art. In particular it will establish a sustained dialogue between Fischli and Weiss’s work with the moving image and their sculptural practice, with signature projects like Suddenly This Overview (1981– ), hundreds of unfired clay sculptures that pillory established truths and myths alike, and The Way Things Go (1987), an inane filmic study of causational activity, appearing along the museum’s ramps. The exhibition will further consider Fischli and Weiss’s extended meditations on the banality of existence, with key objects from virtually every body of work within their oeuvre, including Sausage Series (1979); Equilibres (Quiet Afternoon) (1984–86); Grey Sculptures (1984–86/2006–08); Rubber Sculptures (1986–90/2005–06); Visible World (1986–2012); Airports (1987–2012); Polyurethane Installations (1991– ); Question Projections (2000–2003); Fotografías (2005); and Walls, Corners, Tubes (2009–12), among others.
Read the full article on Art Market Magazine Issue #21
Peter Fischli David Weiss © Quiet Afternoon
1984.C-print
13 x 9 1/4 inches each; 33 x 24 cm each
