Peter Fischli & David Weiss
Encyclopedia
Peter Fischli and David Weiss (21 June 1946 in Zurich), often shortened to Fischli/Weiss, are an artist duo that have been collaborating since 1979. They are among the most renowned contemporary artists of Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

. Their best known work is the film "Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go)." This was described by The Guardian as being "post apocalyptic" as it is all about chain reactions and the way in which objects fly, crash, and explode across the studio it was shot in. Both artists live and work in Zurich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...

.

Education

Peter Fischli (born Zurich, 8 June 1952) studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Urbino (1975–6) and the Accademia di Belle Arti, Bologna (1976–7). David Weiss (born Zurich, 21 June 1946) studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zurich (1963–4), and the Kunstgewerbeschule, Basel (1964–5); he subsequently worked as sculptor with Alfred Gruder (Basel) and Jaqueline Stieger (England). Their first collaborative venture was a series of ten colour photographs, Wurstserie (‘sausage series’, 1979), depicting small scenes constructed with various types of meat and sausage and everyday objects, with titles such as "At the North Pole" and "The Caveman".

Work

Art critics often see in the parodying bearing of Fischli and Weiss' work parallels to Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

, Dieter Roth
Dieter Roth
Dieter Roth was an Icelandic artist of Swiss German origin best known for his artist's books and for his sculptures and pictures made with rotting food stuffs. He was also known as Dieter Rot and Diter Rot....

 or Jean Tinguely
Jean Tinguely
Jean Tinguely was a Swiss painter and sculptor. He is best known for his sculptural machines or kinetic art, in the Dada tradition; known officially as metamechanics...

. For their work, they make use of a large bandwidth of artistic forms of expression: film and photography, art books, sculptures made out of different materials, and multimedia installations. They adapt objects and situations from everyday life and place them into an artistic context—often using humour and irony. Wurstserie (1979) was Fischli and Weiss’s first collaborative project, setting the tone for their future work. In the series, ordinary sausages and slices of sausages became the protagonists of scenarios, alluding to situations such as cars in a traffic accident in an urban setting, layers of carpets and other situations.. By the end of the 1980s, the duo had expanded their repertoire to embrace an iconography of the incidental, creating deadpan photographs of kitsch tourist attractions and airports around the world. For their contribution to the 1995 Venice Biennale, at which they represented Switzerland, Fischli & Weiss exhibited 96 hours of video on 12 monitors that documented what they called “concentrated daydreaming”—real-time glimpses into daily life in Zurich: a mountain sunrise, a restaurant chef in his kitchen, sanitation workers, a bicycle race, and so on. For the Skulptur Projekte Münster
Skulptur Projekte Münster
Skulptur Projekte Münster is an exhibition of sculptures in public places in the town of Münster...

 (1997), Fischli and Weiss planted a flower and vegetable garden conceived with an ecological point of view and documented its periodic growth through photographs.

Rat and Bear

The artists' first Rat and Bear film, The Least Resistance (1981) was set in urban Los Angeles, where the artists were living. The Right Way (1982-3) was their second appearance and shows the two characters rambling through a mountainous landscape, of the kind that filled nineteenth-century artists with thoughts of the sublime. A book called Order and Cleanliness (1981), setting out the ideas of Rat and Bear, is crammed with charts and diagrams, each attempting to impose a crazed order on the world. Rat and Bear (2004) is a sculpture that incorporates the original costumes worn by the artists, presented in life-size boxes out of dark, barely-translucent Plexiglas, suspending the costumes inside.

The Way Things Go

The Equilibres photographs (1984-1987), a series of images of household objects and studio detritus arranged to form tenuously-balanced assemblages, developed into the artists' celebrated film The Way Things Go (1986-1987). The resulting film enlists an assortment of objects, including tyres and chairs, as components in an absurdly amusing and explosive chain reaction lasting thirty minutes. The film’s humour lies in the deliberate misuse of these objects, as they are co-opted into performing roles outside their normal function. Reminiscent of the physical comedy of silent films starring Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...

 or Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton was an American comic actor, filmmaker, producer and writer. He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".Keaton was recognized as the...

, here the actors are steaming-kettles mounted on roller-skates, rotating dustbin bags, rickety stepladders set in motion, buckets, tyres, bottles and planks.

Visible World

Originally made for documenta X
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...

 (1997), Sichtbare Welt (Visible World) comprises three monitors each displaying an eight hour video made up of the artists' still photographs. The images, taken in arbitrary locations around the world, slowly dissolve one into another and, as is the case with the slide shows, there is no sound track. The work was shown on late night television in Germany every night for three months. A later version of Visible World (2003) is a collection of 3,000 small-format photographs displayed on a specially fabricated 90-foot long light table. The encyclopedic collection of images — of cities, jungles, deserts, airports, stadiums, monuments, mountains, and tropical beaches, from all over the world — is comprised of photographs taken by the artists over the course of fifteen years. An Unsettled Work (2000–06), originally titled Freakshow; Monsters, grew out of Visible World and consists of pictures rejected from the prior work. A marked esthetic departure from their earlier pieces, this slide projection issues forth violent, sumptuous, and otherworldly images.

Questions

Questions (1981-2003) is a three-part slide installation, consisting of 243 handwritten questions, with three questions projected at a time. Each set of questions slowly dissolves into the next. The questions range from the profound to the trivial. Examples include: "Can I restore my innocence?," "Why does the earth turn around once a day?," "Does a hidden tunnel lead directly to the kitchen?" and "Does a ghost drive my car around at night?" The installation was the culmination of a series of works composed of absurd questions, including a book called Will Happiness Find Me?.

Exhibitions

Fischli & Weiss had their first solo exhibition in 1981 at the Galerie Balkon in Geneva. In more than 25 years of activity, they have exhibited in some of the most important institutions and museums worldwide including Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art
The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art is situated in the Plaça dels Àngels, in El Raval, Ciutat Vella, Barcelona, Spain. The museum opened to the public on November 28, 1995. Its current director is Bartomeu Marí . Previous directors were Daniel Giralt-Miracle , Miguel Molins , Manuel J...

 (2000); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is the main art museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The museum began in 1847 with the collection of Frans Jacob Otto Boijmans . Much of the museum's original collection was destroyed in a disastrous 1864 fire...

 in Rotterdam (2003); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City (2005); and the Rencontres d'Arles
Rencontres d'Arles
The Rencontres d'Arles is a summer festival of photography, founded in 1970 by the photographer Lucien Clergue, the writer Michel Tournier and the historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette. It takes place between July and September in Arles, a town in Provence, southern France.The festival shows mostly new...

 festival, France. A U.S. retrospective of their work was organised by the Walker Art Center
Walker Art Center
The Walker Art Center is a contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is considered one of the nation's "big five" museums for modern art along with the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn...

 in 1996 and subsequently traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...

, San Francisco; and Museum of Contemporary Art
Museum of Contemporary Art
There are several museums named the Museum of Contemporary Art.They include:-Americas:*Museum of Contemporary Art of Rosario, Argentina*Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil...

, Los Angeles. Another retrospective of their work was held at Tate Modern
Tate Modern
Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group . It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year...

, London in 2006, and traveled to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art dedicated to the arts of the 20th/21st centuries. It is located at 11 Avenue du Président Wilson in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.-Description:...

, Kunsthaus Zürich
Kunsthaus Zürich
The Kunsthaus Zürich houses one of the most important art museums in Switzerland and Europe, collected by the local Kunstverein, called Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, and holdings running from the Middle Ages to contemporary art, with an emphasis on Swiss art.Kunsthaus is also the name of the tram stop...

 and the Deichtorhallen
Deichtorhallen
Deichtorhallen, in Hamburg, is one of Europe's largest art centers for contemporary art and photography. The two historical buildings dating from 1911-13 are iconic in style, with their open steel-and-glass structures. It's architecture creates a backdrop for spectacular major international...

, Hamburg. In 1995 and 2003, they represented Switzerland in the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...

, and also participated in the Swiss Pavilion at the Seville Expo '92
Seville Expo '92
The Universal Exposition of Seville took place from Monday, April 20 to Monday, October 12, 1992 on La Isla de La Cartuja , Seville, Spain. The theme for the Expo was "The Age of Discovery" and over 100 countries were represented...

. Their work also appeared in documenta 8 and 10
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...

 (1987 and 1997). In 2008 the Nicola Trussardi Foundation
Nicola Trussardi Foundation
The Nicola Trussardi Foundation is a non-profit institution for the promotion of contemporary art and culture. Created in 1996, the Nicola Trussardi Foundation is neither a museum nor a collection...

 presented Altri fiori e altre domande, their first retrospective in Italy, installed in the 17th century rooms of Palazzo Litta in Milan.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss are represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery
Matthew Marks Gallery
Matthew Marks is an art gallery located in the New York City neighborhood of Chelsea. Founded in the early 1990s by Matthew Marks, it specializes in modern and contemporary art in a variety of media: including painting, sculpture, photography, installation art, film, and drawings and prints...

, New York and Sprüth Magers Berlin London
Sprüth Magers Berlin London
Sprüth Magers is a commerical art gallery owned by Monika Spüth and Philomene Magers, with spaces in London and Berlin, representing such artists including Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Andreas Gursky, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel...

.

Collections

Their works are held, among others, in the collections of the Tate
Tate
-Places:*Tate, Georgia, a town in the United States*Tate County, Mississippi, a county in the United States*Táté, the Hungarian name for Totoi village, Sântimbru Commune, Alba County, Romania*Tate, Filipino word for States...

, the Guggenheim
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...

, the Walker Art Center
Walker Art Center
The Walker Art Center is a contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is considered one of the nation's "big five" museums for modern art along with the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn...

, Minneapolis, the Kunsthaus Zürich
Kunsthaus Zürich
The Kunsthaus Zürich houses one of the most important art museums in Switzerland and Europe, collected by the local Kunstverein, called Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft, and holdings running from the Middle Ages to contemporary art, with an emphasis on Swiss art.Kunsthaus is also the name of the tram stop...

, and the Hamburger Bahnhof
Hamburger Bahnhof
Hamburger Bahnhof is a former railway station in Berlin, Germany, on Invalidenstraße in the Moabit district opposite the Charité hospital. Today it serves as the Museum für Gegenwart , a contemporary art museum....

, Berlin.

Recognition

Fischli and Weiss won the Golden Lion prize at the 2003 Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...

 for Questions, an installation of over 1,000 photographic slides of handwritten existential questions the artists had collected over many years.

Movies

  • 2003 „Hunde“ (Dogs), DVD, color, 30 minutes
  • 2001 „Büsi“ (Kitty), DVD of a cat eating milk, 6" 30'
  • 1995 „Arbeiten im Dunkeln“ (Works in the dark), 96 hours of video material with everyday scenes from Zurich on multiple monitors simultaneously
  • 1992 „Kanalvideo“ (Sewage video), Video compilation of previously existing recordings of the sewage monitoring service Zurich
  • 1987 „Der Lauf der Dinge“ (The Way Things Go
    The Way Things Go
    The Way Things Go is a 1987 art film by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. It documents a long causal chain assembled of everyday objects, resembling a Rube Goldberg machine....

    ), 16 mm, 30 minutes, color, sound, The camera follows the course of the Rube Goldberg Machine
    Rube Goldberg machine
    A Rube Goldberg machine, contraption, device, or apparatus is a deliberately over-engineered or overdone machine that performs a very simple task in a very complex fashion, usually including a chain reaction...

    with several cuts
  • 1983 „Der rechte Weg“ (The right way), 16 mm, 52 minutes, color, sound, Journey of the artist through Switzerland, as a rat and a bear
  • 1981 „Der geringste Widerstand“ (The Least Resistance), Super 8, 30 minutes, color, sound, The artists walk through Hollywood, as rat and a bear

Contributions

2008 Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International http://blog.cmoa.org/CI08/2008/02/peter-fischli.php

External links

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