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5/6/2007

Peter Fischli/David Weiss

Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich

Questions and Flowers

curated by Bice Curiger

‘Questions & Flowers’ is a retrospective of the work of Peter Fischli (born 1952) and David Weiss (born 1946), who have been collaborating since 1979 and have together contributed significantly to the international renown enjoyed by contemporary Swiss art. The show boasts the most comprehensive overview to date of an oeuvre as varied as it is enigmatic. Comprising sculpture, photography, film and video, the work of Fischli / Weiss simply resists classification.

The artists focus their attention on unspectacular, everyday issues, as well as on the apparently banal. Their regard is deliberately uncynical as it takes us into the grey areas of our functionalist world. In their first joint creation, ‘Sausage Series’ (1979), which has since come to enjoy a certain popularity, the playfully experimental tendency of their work is already evident, in the form of an anti-heroic artistic programme unafraid to make us laugh. This is art that has over the past decades contributed to serious debates of a post-avant-garde while managing to appeal to a broad public at the same time.

The exhibition includes key groups of works by Fischli / Weiss, such as their well-known large-format photo series ‘Airports’ (1987 – 2006) or ‘Flowers and Mushrooms’ (1997 / 98), which developed out of the ‘Visible World’ (1987 – 2000) project, itself shown here as an illuminated viewing table some 30 metres in length, along which 3,000 pictures have been arrayed. The piece consists of pictures taken by the artists playing at being ‘meta-tourists’ at all of the world’s various ‘photogenic’ sites.

Early on in what was to become a sustained collaboration, Fischli and Weiss made two films, ‘The Least Resistance’ (1980 / 81) and ‘The Right Way’ (1982 / 83), in which the artists, disguised as a rat and a bear, explore the world. Manifest in both works is that same inclination to universalism and cunning empiricism that would make itself felt in ‘Suddenly this Overview’ (1981), a magisterial assemblage comprising hundreds of small, unfired clay sculptures. Here the duo have captured moments of world history, and, by altering their perspective, seem to have knocked historiography itself entirely out of kilter. The resultant panorama view of the world is subjective even as it transcends individualism. One of the disarming ‘Questions’ (1980 - 2003) posed by a group of works by that name, created by Fischli / Weiss over the course of decades, runs, ‘Is truth to be permitted everything?’

Peter Fischli and David Weiss have repeatedly taken on the world of objects. One product of this encounter is their perennially successful film about a chain reaction, ‘The Way Things Go’ (1986 / 87), in which purposeful significance and absurdity come together to form a perfect alloy before the viewer’s fascinated eye. As early as 1984 – 1987, Fischli / Weiss put the daydreaming principle of their method enigmatically on view in ‘Equilibres – Quiet Afternoon’. A random assortment of kitchen utensils and bottles has been playfully assembled without the aid of adhesives into labile constructions – such as a carrot hoisting itself gracefully out of a cheese grater into which a saucy knife has been plunged – were photographed hurriedly, before their imminent demise, and thus preserved for posterity.

It was no doubt only afterwards, once they had been studied at leisure, that these creations were given the finishing touch of a title like 'The International Style’, ‘Natural Grace’ or ‘An Expanding Universe’. In this way, too, many of their kneaded, carved and cast sculptures remain indebted to the ‘classical’ ideal despite their having been fashioned out of unusually 'ordinary' materials. The artists explore for instance the terrifying capacity for transformation manifested by black rubber, or use imitations of tools, bottles and utensils carved out of polyurethane to create a ruse. Fischli / Weiss surprise sceptical viewers with the everyday life of the museum itself. In the exaggeratedly ceremonial context of an exhibition, these imitations of everyday objects take on the appearance of ‘reverse readymades’.

In contrast, other groups of works deliberately direct the viewer to what has been unspectacularly repressed, to the literally subterranean level of our collective consciousness. For as much as we are lulled by the hypnotic power of ‘Kanalvideo’ (1992) or admire the film’s psychedelic aura, we are eventually forced to admit that what we are in fact watching is the record of a trip through Zurich's sewage system. Driven by their pronounced interest in collective objects of desire and bogeymen, Peter Fischli and David Weiss discovered a gigantic visual archive in the anonymous decorations of amusement park booths.

‘Fotografías’ (2004 / 05) is further testimony to the inimitable Fischli / Weiss precision deployment of formal media. What was once a gaily painted visual universe has now been drenched in a post-apocalyptic grisaille and coagulated into grimly concentrated mini-icons of our common Great Unconscious. The work of Fischli / Weiss makes use of surprise, the technique of ‘détournement’, and thus leaves room for amazement, as if to provide an antidote for a ‘disenchanted world’.

Opening june 6, 2007

Kunsthaus Zürich
Heimplatz 1- Zürich
Tues – Thurs 10 a.m. – 9 p.m., Fri – Sun 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
1. August (Swiss national holyday) 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Admission: CHF 16.— / 10.— concessions CHF 12.— per head
for groups of 20 or more. Young people up to the age of 16 free of charge.

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