by Beate Soentgen, Robert Fleck,
Fischli and Weiss are highly prestigious, bluechip contemporary artists who work with sculpture, photography and video, positioned at the very cutting edges of new art. They represented Switzerland in the Venice Biennales of 1995 and 2003, and won the Leone d’Oro prize in the latter for their slideshow Will Happiness Find Me?
The style of the work is extremely varied; what remains consistent throughout is an air of quiet unpredictability. The mood of the work ranges from the humorous (a clay figure group of 1981, for example, entitled Mick Jagger and Brian Jones Going Home Satisfied after Composing ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’); to the banal (a photographic series devoted to Airports); and even the apparently invisible (their Untitled installation, simulating through minutely detailed polyurethane sculptures an unfinished exhibition site).
Fischli & Weiss’ work can be immune to the rules of gravity, for example in the Quiet Afternoon series, photographs of miraculously balanced objects. The pair’s work also seems able to overcome the constraints of time and space, for example in their apparently endless journeys, resulting in the innumerable Visible World picture-postcard photographs of cities all over the world. With a truly unique body of work which is sometimes childishly thrown together, sometimes a virtuoso triumph of sculpture and moving image, this is the first book to draw together the mystery and contradiction of Fischli & Weiss.
Fischli & Weiss have exhibited extensively worldwide. Their solo exhibitions include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1992), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988) and the Tate Modern, London (2005).
Robert Fleck (Survey) is the Director of the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. He has been working as an art critic and curator since 1981. From 1991–93 he was the Federal Curator for Austrian contemporary art, and in 1998 he co-curated Manifesta 2. From 2000–03 he was Director of ERBAN Fine Art School in Nantes. His books include Die Mühl-Kommune (2003) and Yves Klein (2004).
Arthur C. Danto (Focus) is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York, and the art critic for The Nation. His books include Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post Historical Perspective and Encounters (1992), and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (1992), which won the Book Critics Circle Award.
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Interview – Swiss critic Beate Söntgen discusses with the artists notions of sincerity and illusion, and examines the question of how literally viewers are asked to read their work.
Survey – French critic and curator Robert Fleck looks at Fischli and Weiss’ ability to resist conventional artistic categories, crossing fluidly between sculpture, installation, photography and the moving image.
Focus – Noted art critic and leading authority on Fischli and Weiss, Professor Arthur C. Danto examines the immensely popular The Way Things Go (1987), offering a new perspective on this well-known film.
Artists` Choice – The artists have chosen a text by Swiss novelist Robert Walser on the pleasure of walking, which mirrors their own meanderings.
Artists` Writings – include unpublished scripts from early video works and an interview from 1996 with Rirkrit Tiravanija, one of the many contemporary artists who admire Fischli and Weiss’ understated, unmonumental style.
Chronology and Bibliography.
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