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10/10/2006

Fischli & Weiss

Tate Modern, London

Flowers & Questions. A Retrospective

The first major retrospective of Swiss artists Peter Fischli (b1952) and David Weiss (b1946) to take place in the UK will go on display at Tate Modern in October 2006. The artists' creative partnership began in the late 1970s and this exhibition will span nearly three decades of their collaborative practice bringing together more than twenty significant bodies of work.

Fischli and Weiss' conceptually-driven output covers a wide variety of forms including sculpture, photography, film, video, and installation art, and often involves a dialogue between opposites, such as order and chaos, work and leisure, the everyday and the sublime. A childlike spirit of discovery underlies their artistic ventures and they revel in transforming materials. Working project by project, they have broken with artistic convention, made use of commonplace materials and, among other things, created an extensive archive of popular images, all with characteristic wit and humour.

This exhibition features early sculptural projects and iconic films. In the series Suddenly this Overview 1981, the artists attempt to chronicle the history of the world by hand-modelling, in unfired clay, narrative scenes such as Mick Jagger and Brian Jones Going Home Satisfied After Composing "I Can't Get No Satisfaction". The tragi-comic super-8 movie, The Right Way 1983, portrays the artists dressed in Rat and Bear costumes as they fight for survival in the wilds of nature, and provides a commentary on the struggle for artistic success. In the slapstick film The Way Things Go 1987, objects such as shoes, teapots, rubber tyres, buckets and balloons become performers in a chain reaction propelled by explosions and collisions that unfolds in a carefully staged setting.

This exhibition also brings together both early photographic projects, such as Sausage Series 1971, and Quiet Afternoon (Equilibres) 1984, in which the artists used photography to document ephemeral sculptures, and later photographic series, in which the artists expand their repertoire to investigate the photographic medium itself, highlighting the prevalence of visual cliche' in contemporary culture. These later works include the spectacular pictorial encyclopedia, Visible World 1987-2001, and the iconic series, Airports 1988-1999, in which the artists examine the aesthetic of the amateur photographer by creating deadpan photographs of tourist attractions and airports around the world. In the recent collection Untitled (Fotografias) 2005, the artists have documented colourful painted motifs from fairgrounds and transformed them into snapshot-sized black and white prints.

Alongside these photographic series, the exhibition will present the artists painstakingly hand-crafted polyurethane sculptures and installations which simulate banal and functional objects from their studio such as dirty ashtrays, Styrofoam cups and boxes of light bulbs, creating a type of anthropology of everyday life.

The exhibition at Tate Modern is curated by Tate Modern's Director, Vicente Todoli', supported by Assistant Curator, Juliet Bingham. Tate is collaborating with Kunsthaus Zurich, where the exhibition is curated by Bice Curiger, Curator Kunsthaus Zurich (8 June - 9 September 2007). The exhibition will tour to Deichtorhallen Hamburg (November 2007 - January 2008 (dates tbc)). It will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with texts by thirty contributors including artists, commentators, writers and filmmakers, which will be edited by Bice Curiger and designed in Zurich, in close collaboration with the artists.


Talks and discussions

* Fischli and Weiss in Conversation with Hans-Ulrich Obrist Monday 6 November 2006
Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss explore their collaborative practice in conversation with curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Since the beginning of their partnership in the late 1970s, Fischli and Weiss have continually delighted in the commonplace and the absurd, expressing their subversive humour through sculptures, photographs, installations, films and videos.
The speakers take visitors on a walk through the exhibition and discuss the artists' manipulation and transformation of everyday materials, their recycling of ideas, themes and objects, and the almost childlike spirit of discovery central to their oeuvre.
Tate Modern Level 4 West
£8 (£6 concessions), booking recommended

Creative Chain Reactions
Art, Advertising, Reference and Homage
Monday 13 November 2006, 18.30-20.00
In this discussion, the advertising creatives behind two campaigns inspired by Peter Fischli and David Weiss's The Way Things Go 1986-7 explore the conventions of homage, borrowing, and references in contemporary visual culture. Honda's The Cog (Wieden+Kennedy, 2003) was quickly followed by 118 118's pastiche (Meme London), which in turn gave rise to further video clips, trailers and short films.
A screening of the veritable chain reaction of films is followed by a discussion of creativity in twenty-first-century media culture and the viral spread of visual images.
Ben Walker of Wieden+Kennedy and Anson Harris of Meme London are in discussion with art and copyright expert Jaime Stapleton from Birkbeck College, University of London.
Tate Modern Starr Auditorium
£8 (£6 concessions), booking recommended

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10 october 2006 - 9 april 2007
The Unilever series: Carsten Holler

For Carsten Holler, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a 'voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind'. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don't have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Holler, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the 'inner spectacle' experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.

To date Holler has installed six smaller slides in other galleries and museums, but the cavernous space of the Turbine Hall offers a unique setting in which to extend his vision. Yet, as the title implies, he sees it as a prototype for an even larger enterprise, in which slides could be introduced across London, or indeed, in any city. How might a daily dose of sliding affect the way we perceive the world? Can slides become part of our experiential and architectural life?

Holler has undertaken many projects that invite visitor interaction, such as Flying Machine (1996) that hoists the user through the air, Upside-Down Goggles (1994/2001) that modify vision, and Frisbee House (2000) - a room full of Frisbees. The slides, like these earlier works, question human behaviour, perception and logic, offering the possibility for self-exploration in the process.


Tate Modern
Bankside London SE1 9TG
Admission £7 ( £5.50 concessions)
Opening hours: Sunday to Thursday, 10.00-18.00. Friday and Saturday, 10.00-22.00. Last admission into exhibitions 17.15 (Fri and Sat 21.15).

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