Since the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss found the artist duo Fischli & Weiss in 1979, this partnership had proven to be beneficial a few times, the two fertilized each other and had already presented several works that were very interested in the audience and just as amusing.
Fischli & Weiss began to get better known when they conquered the documenta in 1987 with their miracle machine immortalized "The Run of Things"
The most important success of Fischli & Weiss
The artistic triumphal march of the artist community Fischli & Weiss then began in 1987 at Documenta 8 in Kassel: "The Lauf of Things", a bizarre and delicious film, was already the absolute audience hit during the documenta, which also wanted to see so many people outside of documenta that he made the artists internationally known in a rather short time.
This “run of things” represents “life” as an art film by continuously setting a continuous process, similar to a Rubold-Goldberg machine.
This similarity was wanted, the inventor of this apparatus, so senselessly revealing the world, Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, and the creator of this ingenious comic figure, the American cartoonist Reuben "Rube" Goldberg , must have seen the world really similar to the two Swiss artists.
A Rubold-Goldberg apparatus is a nonsense machine, completely unnecessarily complicated, which is sure to do a task that is certainly not sensible-as cumbersome as possible, with as many detours as the imagination and can be put together in as many individual steps as particles.
Already Rube Goldberg and his Professor Gorgonzola saw the meaning of their machine only to give an observer pleasure, and that is exactly what the process depicted in the film "The Run of Things" creates:
The viewer sees a construction that generates flames and chemical reactions, all possible movements, foam and explosions and many events over a length of about 25 meters in a chain reaction in which each action sets the next.
The components of this machine are typically not necessarily technically sensible, tires and cans, plastic bottles and balloons, fireworks and many other things are used, really characteristic objects trouvés, found everyday objects that are now becoming a work of art.
This machine searches for her meaning in her activity, freely according to the famous quote from the English philosopher David Hume: "From that that one follows the other, nothing follows."
A great fun, and if you found chemistry and physics so far, you should definitely watch this film about the machine, which cannot and does not do anything as "machines".
Many international exhibition presences of the artists Fischli & Weiss followed
The first solo exhibitions took place in 1985, in the Cologne Art Association and the Kunsthalle Basel, and in 1987 the artists had already made it to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles . After the total audience success on the documenta, it really started: Fischli/Weiss were able to represent Switzerland several times, at the Biennale in Venice and with other important international art festivities.
This was followed by over 300 exhibition presences across the world, and today the artist duo is probably represented in every Museum of Contemporary Art, which is something.
Collections of works by the artist couple have now also gathered in many places: in the Art Collection Deutsche Börse, Frankfurt and in the Center Pompidou, Paris, in the Galleria d´Arte Moderna, Turin and in the state museums in Berlin, in the Kunsthaus Zurich and in the art museum Basel and in the Liechtenstein art museum, Vaduz, Macba Barcelona and in Middlebury College Museum of Art, in the Museum in Progress, Vienna and in the Safn Museum Reykjavík and in the Schaulager Basel, in the Vancouver Art Gallery and in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and over 30 other art sites somewhere in our beautiful world.
At the Venice Biennale, the two artists are almost at home, 1988, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2011 and 2013 they were there. In 1987 and 1997 the documenta in Kassel was the turn, in 1992 they filled the "Swiss Pavilion" at the Expo, the world exhibition in Seville, and the Biennals in São Paulo (1989), in Sydney (1990, 1998, 2008), in Brazilian Porto Alegre (2008) and in Gwangju, South Korea (2010) Fischli & Weiss instead.
What does a work of art by Fischli & Weiss cost?
Not necessarily a lot: the unconditionally worth seeing "run of things" ("The Way Things Go") unfolds in full splendor and nonsense on DVD from 29.90; You can order a DVD of guaranteed good quality at www.artfilm.ch/der-lauf-der- der Dinge-DVD for CHF 47.00 (€ 38.05).
But of course you can also spend a little more: In September 2012, the rubber sculpture "Candle" from 1986 was sold for almost 192,000 dollars, in May 2013 "One Who Left to Learn Fear" , a delicious but quite tiny sculpture from unbroken tone, went away for a good $ 37,000, also in May 2013 the Gelatine Silver printed "The Car of Evil “ $ 57,500.
Or you are lucky and catching a “Fischli & Weiss” at an event like the auction carried out a few years ago in favor of the SOS Children's Villages : The picture of Fischli & Weiss achieved the maximum price, before works by Jörg Immendorff, Jonathan Meese, Thomas Bayrle, Cosima by Bonin and Martin Kippenberger-but this maximum price was just 13,000 euros, the works of all the artists, the works otherwise move significantly outside of such “peanut prices”.
Reception and appreciation of Fischli & Weiss
At the latest since the first documenta appearance, critics have largely agreed that the artist community Fischli & Weiss are among the best known and most successful protagonists in contemporary Swiss art.
In the artist list of the largest artist database artfacts.net, Fischli & Weiss will be in 19th place in 2012, and in the art compass of the "Manager Magazine", the two took 26th place among the 100 world best artists.
In addition, Fischli & Weiss were of course one of the favorites of art didacts-whether photography or sculpture, installation and/or film, you have to search for a while to find art that is closer to everyday life and at the same time so surprising and amusing.
This art is also fun for people who do completely without art knowledge, and it also allows these people without effort.
Artistic “colleagues” by Fischli & Weiss
Art critics see parallels to the unforgettable dadaist, surrealist and concept artist Marcel Duchamp and of course a kinetics artist Jean Tinguely , but also the Swiss poet and intermedial artist Karl-Dietrich Roth (Diter or Dieter Roth).
If it is specifically and the topic of the Ruboldberg apparatus or "what-passed-it-out", some artists are to mention that this gimmick is (fortunately) everything else than new: In the baroque period , they were happy to delight in artistically conceived and built mechanical devices and water features, which very often have already built a good bit of prank.
In modernity, these beginnings became "kinetic art" and really popular in the 50s and 1960s of the last century. Man Ray and Marcel Duchamps built kinetic movement and light objects, from the artists Naum Gabo and László Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Rodtschenko and Vladimir Tatlin are known.
More or less possible or impossible world machines in the suggestion of Goldberg's stimulus also appear at the American artist Tim Hawkinson, complex devices that "produce" music or abstract art. In 2008, the artist Christoph Korn designed a whole series of digital "non machines" with the simplest programming that confront the viewer with slowdown and decline, deprivation of knowledge or non-functionality.
The influence of Fischli & Weiss on subsequent artists
Especially in Switzerland, there are of course some young artists who are based on the famous duo. Which was unfortunately torn apart at the end of April 2012 when David Weiss in Zurich succumbed to his cancer .
Peter Fischli continues to work, initially on work that he had started together with his partner: In March 2013, the Serpentine Gallery in London's Kensington Gardens was unveiled the sculpture "Rock on Top of Another Rock" , which was created in four years of work.
Location: Kensington Gardens (London)
by Alan Stanton [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
As the name suggests, this sculpture consists of "one stone on another", huge boulders, one of whom is so precisely sitting on the other that looks like it has landed on it in this second. The mixture of ston hedge remines and everyday orientation for tourists stays in the Kensington Gardens for a year and then walks to Doha, Qatar, where all stone becomes sand.
The continuation of the kinetic art à la "Running of things" is already in development - it is called "cybernetic art" , and here the work of art reacts to external influences, e.g. B. on human influence or electronic impulses.
As early as the 1960s, the father of cybernetic art, the Hungarian artist Nicolas Schöffer , invented his cybernetic and spatodynamic towers. In the meantime, many artists include exciting technical constructions into their works of art, which are moved by natural forces or engines, clockworks or manually, these artists are absolutely up to date with the latest art, and computer -controlled art objects are also anything but a rarity today.
What do Fischli & Weiss say about themselves and life?
Both artists have always said little about the interpretations of their work brought about them. Of course, this is also interpreted, the art magazine wrote "Art" about "subversive nonsense messages" of the artist duo, and critics were only too happy to put the two in the tradition of the Dadaists.
The artists themselves also silent about it, looked into the world with amused children's eyes, converted this world a little with their children's hands, and then made adults laugh.
Fischli & Weiss preferred to show their more than ironic attitudes towards life in their works: the artificial arts that have been detached from work, especially in the form of the “ready Made” entrance, are already taking a lot on their shovels if they seem to arrange everyday studies in the corners of a museum area, which they carefully work out in the finest craftsmanship Carve up polyurethane foam, then paint lifelike and thus lead the increasing contempt for artistic and craftsmanship to an absurdity internally.
Such a work of art is also absolutely in the old tradition of the trompe-l'oeil , the masterfully carried out eye deception, and actually Fischli & knows exactly what is expected from an artist after the traditional concept of "art", namely to imitate nature as natural as possible ...
Peter Fischli has not yet announced anything about how his work should continue after the loss of his colleague and friend David Weiss, he would like to end all the projects that have started together, in order to then gradually approach how his art should look without the previous partner.
