Discourse and Sexiness
Fischli & Weiss at the Tate
Modern
They construct cities out
of slices of sausage and pose existential questions such as “Do I suffer
from good taste?” or “Is a bus coming?” Fischli & Weiss create a field of
tension that oscillates between comedy and profundity. Now, the Tate
Modern in London is showing the first retrospective of their work in Great
Britain. Julia Grosse on the absurd, subversive stagings of the
Swiss artist duo.
Untitled,
1991, © Peter Fischli / David Weiss
Deutsche
Bank Collection
It’s a little like with
Bouvard and Pécuchet, the tragicomical heroes from Gustave
Flaubert’s novel of the same name who renounce their professions
to dedicate themselves wholly to acquiring knowledge of as encyclopedic a
scope as possible. From gardening, medicine, and classical studies to
education and politics, they greedily attempt to absorb everything they
can get their hands on. They’re doomed to failure, of course, as their
endeavor to acquire a general idea of each discipline of human knowledge
gradually comes to resemble a slapstick number. They know everything, but
nothing in any real way.
Mick
Jagger and Brian Jones going home satisfied after composing
'I
Can't Get No Satisfaction', from: Suddenly this Overview, 1981,
©the
artists
On the other hand, Peter
Fischli and David Weiss mold instead of read. Their work Suddenly
This Overview (1981) consists of innumerable small-scale scenarios
made of unfired clay in which the artists try to cover all the most
important dates of history. Lopsided and crooked, the work looks like an
amused celebration of universal dilettantism. Now, the Tate
Modern is showing over 50 of these sculptures in a major Fischli &
Weiss retrospective called Flowers
& Questions. The grandiose work’s answer to what constitutes
the true historical canon, however, is highly subjective. It portrays
scenes from the Bible, major sporting events, or moments of popular
culture – Mick Jagger and Brian
Jones, for instance, pleased with themselves after having just
composed their great hit I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. Or, in
the broadest sense, climactic moments of science: the Einsteins in bed
after conceiving their genius.
Airport,
1989/ 2000, © the artists
Yet while
Flaubert’s anti-heroes Bouvard and Pécuchet invest their time and energy
in a futile accumulation of education, Fischli & Weiss, who have been
collaborating since 1979, take this humanist ideal of pleasure in the
acquisition of knowledge and carry it into the comical, without, however,
allowing cynicism to taint their laborious clay encyclopedia. Despite the
naked irony lurking under the duo’s feigned ingenuousness, they never
pretend to know any more than the viewer. They deliberately create a field
of tension in which their works can be misunderstood as superficial,
naïve, or even, for that matter, truly profound. And it’s precisely
because the Swiss artists stick to this ambivalent tactic that their work
subversively calls the roles of both the viewer and the artist into
question.
|
|
Natural Grace 134, from: Quiet
Afternoon, 1984 Courtesy Kunsthaus Zurich, © the artists
|
In the Tate Modern, director Vicente Todoli has now
personally curated the major retrospective. The show will travel to the Kunsthaus
Zurich next summer, and after that to the Deichtorhallen
in Hamburg. Although there will be a core work common to each of these
locations, the exhibitions are not identical. Not all visitors, at least
not in London, will know the classics that Fischli & Weiss became
internationally known for, such as the filmed chain reaction of moving
objects, The
Way Things Go (1987), or the multimedia installation that won an
award in Venice in 2003, with its 100 apparently meaningless questions
such as "Why does nothing never happen?", "Is a bus coming?", or "Have I
never been completely awake?"
Fashion
Show, from: Sausage Photographs, 1979,
Courtesy
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, © the artists
In
Zurich on the other hand, where the two live and work, the show at the
Kunsthaus is a kind of home game. Together with Fischli & Weiss, curator
Bice Curiger is also responsible for the conception of the extensive
catalogue. She was the first to exhibit a work by the two in the 1980
Zurich exhibition Saus und Braus, the legendary Sausage Series
. The photographs marked the beginning of their collaboration and can also
be seen in London. Cities arise out of greasy sausage, slices of bologna,
and chunks of cheese in which pickles and cigarette butts become actors;
there are carpet stores, car accidents, and fashion shows – normal
everyday insanity of the kind Paul
McCarthy lovingly celebrates with the luxuries of our consumerist
society. In the early eighties, art critics found the works of Fischli &
Weiss, who are influenced by popular culture, too humorous; they didn’t
suspect that the very same moment they were condemning them as being
silly, they had also succumbed to them.
Untitled,
1991, © Peter Fischli / David Weiss
Deutsche
Bank Collection
The Swiss artists began
making Super-8 films and, in their wonderful 30-minute piece The
Least Resistance (1981), staged one of the most sharp-witted film
dialogues ever to take place on the subject of art. Dressed as a bear and
a rat, the two artists are standing in a gallery of abstract sculptures,
trying to talk about them intelligently: "Very tasteful… harmonious and
balanced… with a clear forcefulness… purely decorative… do you think we
could do that too? I haven’t gotten around to thinking here yet."
Uninvited, they relax at the pool of the wealthy art scene as the camera
pans over casually placed issues of Flash
Art, porno magazines, and illustrated Mondrian
volumes. Already back then, this setting summed up a kind of astonishingly
precise reflection, a statement one always assumed magazines like Texte
zur Kunst had invented: discourse and sexiness.
[1]
[2]
|
