Fischli and Weiss
by: Shane McAdams | posted: Nov 30, 2009
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, better known simply as Fischli and Weiss, have been working together since the late 1970s. With equal parts “Wow! Huh?” and “Huh? Wow!” to riff on Ed Ruscha’s comment about his own work, the team has a knack for both thrilling and perplexing the viewer.
Probably best known for their mesmerizing video “The Way Things Go” (1987), they have the rare distinction in the art world of having crossover appeal with the non-art crowd. The video was recently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, included in Vic Muniz’s “Artist’s Choice” exhibition, where it drew throngs of curious children (and parents, too) looking for relief from the austerity of a number of less accessible shows. Equal parts playful and sinister, featuring a mousetrap-like sequence of chain reactions, the thrilling video piece usually enthralls viewers for most of its 30-minute length – a feat for video art up against minds and eyes shaped by Hollywood. Mouths agape and heads cocked toward the projection, the kids stood paralyzed as they watched lit fuses crawl along the screen, lighting flares, releasing bowling balls that slid into candles, igniting pools of liquid ablaze, and on and on. Undeniably entrancing but also, by the righteous standards of some, easy. It’s regrettable that such mass-appeal is often a mark of dishonor in the obscure and often joyless realms of the academic art world. It sometimes seems that the less accessible the better.
But Fischli and Weiss are far from Michael Bay in terms of willingness to pander to an audience. Always playful, but not always populist, they have an obscure side, too. Let’s say that a retrospective of their work wouldn’t necessarily seduce the same ten kids who were standing in front of “The Way Things Go” at MoMA. Their body of work over the past three decades is morphologically diverse, though conceptually takes cues from the rule and language-based art of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, bringing to it the arch, ironic sensibility of more recent art. This combination often leads to their work seeming consequential and rigorous, initially, only to depart on a note of slacker levity. It’s an odd combination, but one that usually serves it well. Though, it is often hard to tell whether Fischli and Weiss’s work is performing directly or indirectly; does the content consist of the visible material or, rather, a comment on the experience of relating to the visible material? One often gets the feeling Fischli and Weiss are most interested in harnessing and leveraging the thick air of oppression that hovers in the gallery or museum and transforming it into something familiar and lighthearted in order to assault a viewer’s expectations.
A prime example of this is Sun, Moon and Stars, one part of a current three-part exhibition at Matthew Marks in New York, featuring a collection of 800 magazine advertisements gathered from hundreds of international periodicals. Before the word go, the viewer is trying to establish a pattern to the sprawl of magazine pages. Though pattern finding is human nature, especially in art galleries where logic is often purposefully buried and concealed, Fischli and Weiss encourage such a reaction by orderly arraying pages of the project neatly across the surfaces of dozens of sleek tables. By doing so, they nod to the hermetic, dematerializing practices of artists like Lee Lozano, Hanna Darvoven, Hans Haacke, et al, asking the viewer to read the work as some form of rule or system-based project. Looking over the hundreds of ads, one quickly moves from having preconceptions about its conceptual rigor, then appreciates their formal arrangement, and finally settles on the absurd and often hilarious connections between the pages. As far as I could tell there was nothing specifically to decode in the piece: just a nearly infinite number of silly and bizarre Mad Libs-like connections to be made and a trip through various modes of expectation. Lately, this kind of restraint has won favor in the art world for being social and inclusive and open ended. But being open ended for all its lack of aggression also has great potential to lose the attention of those who came to art for a directed experience. As Peter Schjeldahl said of art that is too minimal: it “occasions” rather than “communicates” an experience.
This is where Fischli and Weiss have always been keener than the average practitioners of the indefinite. There are moments in their work when even the most abstract thinker will leave scratching their head. In Sleeping Puppets, consisting of two life size rag puppets, blankets and a breathing machine, the viewer is meant to see them as snoozing, costumed actors; though it is pretty clear the two are inanimate. Without knowing the history, the work comes across as nonsense, not open-ended. Without context, two napping stuffed animals lying at the far end of one of Chelsea’s most esteemed gallery spaces looks like a colossal waste of space, energy and attention, more than it does advanced art. However, when one discovers the rat and the bear represent the artists as they appeared in two prior films, “The Least Resistance” (1981) and “The Right Way” (1983), some light is shed on the situation. Considering that these films feature the duo meandering in somewhat desultory fashion through Los Angeles and the Swiss Alps (respectively), their slumber is somewhat justified – they’re just really fatigued. Beyond adding a logical precedent for their exhaustion, the two seem to represent a more examined look at contingency, whimsy, irrationality and the terms of miscommunication between the artist and the viewer. In fact, in “The Least Resistance,” when the bear asks the rat if he found work, he replies that instead he found money. Asked how, he cryptically responds, “Sources blame lack of rapport between painter and viewer.” Compare these two videos and the sculpture to “The Way things Go,” the sequence of perfectly planned events where not a single reaction or collision deviates from the original plan. As sentient beings and, essentially, dynamic systems, the two characters react and adjust extemporaneously to contingencies that confront them. Collectively, Fischli and Weiss’s work explores levels of control through its content while also passing it on in actuality to the viewer in shaping how they interact with the information. For instance, no one scratches their head while they watch “The Way things Go” while in Sun, Moon and Stars viewers meander, much like the artists do in “The Least Resistance” as they try to navigate through uncertainty.
The third part of the team’s current exhibition at Matthew Marks, fittingly titled Clay and Rubber, is comprised of more object-oriented work than either of the other two shows. It’s hard to truly appreciate these pieces without the context of other works. As matters of fact, the rubber and unfired clay objects are altogether unspectacular. The rubber is no more seductive than a tire and the clay as dry and parched as a mud pie. But next to other works which display objects from Fischli and Weiss’s studio in deadpan seriousness and mocking honor of the art world’s fascination with the biographical, these clay and rubber sculptures find context. They also find energy in the pop-transcendence someone like Jeff Koons tries to squeeze out of basketballs and vacuum cleaners. Where Koons’s work actually uses the context of the white cube gallery to isolate the inherent elegance in mass-produced, otherwise unspectacular objects, Fischli and Weiss’s clay and rubber forms don’t even have sexy industrial veneers. All they have is the sanctity of the gallery and the focused expectation of the viewer, a power that, as we find in Clay and Rubber can only engage for so long before the absurdity of the object, whether a stool from the studio or a chain made of mud, seeps to the surface of a viewer’s consciousness.
I wouldn’t blame anyone who saw a Fischli and Weiss exhibition for coming away confused or even feeling deceived. But I would send them back to keep looking. Their work lives best in dialogue with other pieces, all collectively addressing the nature of how we progress through the experience of seeing art, through different modes of engagement, from reverence to seduction, to incredulity, to comedy, to certainty and back again.
