7/12/2001
Restaging the Everyday
SFMoMA, San Francisco
Recent Work by Beat Streuli and Fischli/Weiss. Organized by Benjamin Weil, SFMOMA curator of media arts, the exhibition raises questions about how the realms of the mundane, the familiar and fine art intersect.
Restaging the Everyday: Recent Work by Beat Streuli and Fischli/Weiss is
an
installation of two works by contemporary Swiss artists Beat Streuli and
the Swiss
duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Organized by Benjamin Weil, SFMOMA
curator
of media arts, the exhibition raises questions about how the realms of the
mundane,
the familiar and fine art intersect.
The short video Busi (Kitty), 2001, by Peter Fischli and David Weiss,
presents a
kitten walking towards the camera and lapping milk out of a saucer.
Recently
featured in The 59th Minute: Video Art on the Times Square Astrovision by
Panasonic organized by Creative Time, this work revisits a major theme -
the banal- in the Swiss duo?s oeuvre.
Since the late 1970s, Fischli and Weiss have worked in various formats -
photography, video, film, installation and sculpture - to
recontextualize the details of daily life. By elevating the
average kitten to the monumental arena of artistic exhibition, they build up
the viewers? expectation without delivering, thereby
developing a subtly humorous experience of the absurd. SFMOMA owns The
Way Things Go, a Fischli/Weiss video that documents an
intricate series of chain reactions produced by an elaborate assortment of
household items found in their studio.
Beat Streuli?s two-channel slide projection installation
Bondi Beach/Paramatta Road, 1999, echoes Fischli and Weiss?s fixation with
the mundane. In this piece, Streuli uses the camera as a
surveillance tool to capture scenes from the surroundings of one of the most
popular beaches in Sydney, Australia. Projected directly onto
the gallery wall, one enlarged image of daily activity slowly dissolves
into the next, walking the boundary between still photograph
and motion picture. The viewer hovers on the edge of two mediums
and is made poignantly aware of the contrast between the
scenes of work and leisure.
Please note: Restaging the
Everyday: Recent Work by Beat Streuli and Fischli/Weiss replaces media artist
Christian Marclay?s upcoming exhibition, which has been postponed until spring 2002,
due to the considerable damage his Manhattan studio sustained on September 11.
Image: Beat Streuli Bondi Beach/Paramatta Road (still), 1998 Collection SFMOMA
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