Traveling through an endless tunnel of changing light and color. A rat and bear go out on the town and through art and philosophy offer insights into the absurdities of the human condition. Everyday items teeter, precariously balanced. Energy passes by a whisker from one piece of junk to another, in a series of seemingly impromptu chain reactions. Airport scenes from across the globe float alongside a panoramic selection of this world's doings, big and small, rendered in ninety or so pieces of clay. Questions about life and the world that might occur to anyone appear and disappear, drifting ceaselessly through the air. In tiny black and white photos fairytale-like scenes have soft black contours. The tranquil, mundane everyday is suffused with wonder and chaos, tragedy and comedy, melancholy and nothingness.
Wielding a formidable armory of media from photography to sculpture to video and more with extraordinary flexibility, Peter Fischli and David Weiss focus intensely on familiar scenes and things, presenting divergent meanings and diversity of interpretation via a combination of meticulous planning and coincidence, throwing into relief the essence of the human condition in works shot through with irony and humor. We hope viewers will enjoy the strange wonder of Fischli/Weiss art, and their encyclopedic worlds suffused with an original, unconventional aesthetic.

Image：The Least Resistance 1980-81 film still　camera: Jürg V. Walther　

■Peter Fischli David Weiss "Ask the artists" – Q&A session
Date/time: Saturday 18 September, 15:00 – 16:00
Venue: Lecture Hall, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Admission: No charge (with same-day ticket to the exhibition*)
Capacity: 70
Note: Numbered tickets will be distributed from 10:00 am that day before the Lecture Hall.
*please view exhibition in advance

■Gallery talks with the curator
Date/time:
Friday 22 October, 18:30 – 19:30
Saturday 27 November, 16:00 – 17:00
Thursday 23 December, 14:00 – 15:00
Meet at Lecture Hall, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Admission: No charge (with same-day ticket to the exhibition*)
Language: Japanese

A ten-point manifesto aimed at improving attitudes to work, posted at an anonymous company. Liberated from their limited place and purpose, laid out on paper and pasted up, words such as ‘Learn to listen’ and ‘Smile’ take on a more universal feel and resonate with all who see them.

An endless tunnel seems to lead the viewer into the realm of the unconsciousness. A mysterious world with occasional flashes of red and yellow, and bathed in white light, this is in fact part of Zurich's sewer system.

A kitten eagerly laps milk from a saucer. Suddenly it lifts its head and stares straight ahead, but after a while returns to the saucer, and is absorbed once again in the act of drinking the milk. An everyday scene is thus isolated and reproduced on a TV monitor placed on a stand.

The ‘rat’ and ‘bear’ have been a feature of Fischli and Weiss's practice since the early days. In the first video, The Least Resistance (1980-81) they plot to make a profit out of art but become enmeshed in a murder case. Through various trials and tribulations, they begin to develop their own take on how society really works. In the followup, The Right Way (1982-83), armed with intellect and ambition the pair explore ways to survive in the natural world. The large rat and bear featured in these two works are now displayed in glass cases. A small rat and bear meanwhile tour the likes of Baroque palaces and Japanese gardens. A rat and bear hanging from the ceiling, floating in mid-air, vanish into the depths of smoke and technicolor lights. In the videos of the early 1980s Fischli dressed as the rat, Weiss as the bear (or rather, panda). This rat and bear, also the artists' alter egos, appear in the booklet, and as sculptures. A mini rat and bear appearing in recent works seem to have come from another dimension to explore this world. The characters of Rat and Bear gain added complexity with each work.

“Grey Sculptures” are sculptures made out of polyurethane. Furnished Apartment, Tube and Equilibrium Organ are all conceived with inner spaces in mind. Animal is a creature of indeterminate species, an abstract concept of an animal. The holes in the body, for the eyes, ears etc., are windows on its inner space.

Tires, chairs, shoes, brushes, forks, kitchenware etc teeter precariously in a variety of poses. Capturing in photographs forms incapable of remaining stationary, this series gives them a permanence as “momentary sculpture.” The sight of these arrangements held together unsteadily by gravity and balance plays unexpectedly on the viewer's emotions. A rich narrative vein runs through the works, each of which has a title such as The Secret of the Pyramids or Outlaws.

A video work inspired by the making of the “Equilibres” series. Rubbish bags, tires, ladders, plastic bottles and other empty containers, balloons, chairs, a mop, simple wheeled contraptions: foam, smoke, fire etc. triggered by gravity, centrifugal force, hydraulic force and chemical reactions pass energy from one item to the next in falling-domino fashion. Any hint of human involvement has been excised from this narrative woven solely by phenomena, in a film where individual pieces of junk seem to actively head in one direction to pass on energy. Making Things Go is a documentary capturing the meticulous and time-consuming process by which Fischli and Weiss created each of the energy connections required for The Way Things Go.

A mechanical sculpture made by combining found objects: a turntable, a disposable plastic cup, and a flashlight. Light shines on the cup on the turntable, the rotation of which engenders moving light images that change in unpredictable ways.

One of the artists' explorations of ‘how to represent landscapes.’ By receiving rain and light this ‘landscape’ molded from concrete and modified by hand becomes in itself a landscape directly reflecting natural phenomena.

Photos of airports taken on Fischli and Weiss's travels around the world since 1987, Airports is an ongoing project reflecting the uniformity of airports thanks to their common function even in different cultures, tantalizing glimpses of national identity gained from onboard aircraft, light at night, raindrops, and the splendid spectacle of the airport through the window.

Fairytales, technology, modernization, sport, movies, The Bible, nature, entertainment, scenes from the artists' private lives – Suddenly this Overview is a collection of clay sculptures recreating various events in human history, and the history of the planet. The around ninety figures range from those rendered in meticulous detail, to coarse, sketch-like pieces. As is implied by “The World We Live In” – the title originally envisaged for the work – this panorama of interwoven happenings in the world arising out of the artists' subjective viewpoint, with its assembly of events both large and small, questions what it means to be alive. First unveiled in 1981 as an installation consisting of around 200 objects, a new version comprising about 90 was presented in 2006. This new version will be on show in Kanazawa.

Fischli and Weiss have been making objects from polyurethane since the early 1980s, fabricating and coloring by hand precise copies of the sort of items found in workshops and artists' studios to recreate the original. The resulting installations composed of objects such as tools, tires and household goods evoke the presence of those who live in that place, or use those items. And while physically they do project a powerful presence, their material qualities and untidy state also speak of fragility and ephemerality.

Fiscli and Weiss's first collaborative effort. Using sausages and slices of various deli meats, cigarette butts etc. in settings such as inside a refrigerator, a washbasin, a bed and bathtub, they constructed various scenes: a fire, a mountain vista, a car accident, and historical events. The juxtaposition of the narrative quality of this recreated world and the utilitarian nature of the materials employed says much about the artists' eagerness to explore different modes of expression.

Postcard size images depict flowers, waves, locomotives, clowns, women, food, landscapes, cities, villages, space, pirates of the South Seas, animals. By zooming in, changing to black and white, or altering the exposure, these images that at first glance appear to be paintings are found to be photographs reflecting a different world to that of conventional images. Herein one can identify the artists' attempt to encompass everything in the world via the technique of focusing on a single object, and to project, from visible phenomena, hidden depths or the social psyche.

‘Who runs the city?’ ‘Where is the galaxy heading?’ ‘Must we live with our own opinions?’ These and other questions from the trivial and familiar to the philosophical drift ceaselessly in the air. This interrogative torrent, generated by a phalanx of slide projectors vanishes and is replaced simultaneously by new questions before the viewer/reader has time to offer an answer. These ‘questions’ on subjects such as the world and the human psyche appear in Order and Cleanliness (1981), a work actually presented as a booklet setting out the new world order drawn up in diagram form by Rat and Bear in the final scene of the 1981 film The Least Resistance. In the later Question Pot (Big) (1986), a large container molded from polyurethane, questions were written all over the inside of the pot in spiral formation. In 2002 this was in turn became the book Will Happiness Find Me? And still the questions come, more and more and more...

All descriptions by: Chieko Kitade
Translation from Japanese: Pamela Miki


All images: © The artists. Courtesy The artists; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich; Sprüth Magers Berlin/ London; Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Peter FISCHLI (1952-)
David WEISS (1946-)
Both born in Zurich and currently residing there.
Fischli and Weiss got to know each other in the late 1970s through the artist Urs Luthi, and the Kontiki bar then the nexus of Zurich's art scene. In 1979 they produced Sausage Photographs, a series using sausage, ham and sundry other small goods to reproduce everyday scenarios, presenting the photos at the exhibition “Saus und Braus” in 1980. In 1981 they produced the video The Least Resistance and booklet Order and Cleanliness, for which they dressed as a rat and a bear to expose the contradictions of the social system, and attempt to construct their own world order. Since then the artists have demonstrated an extraordinarily flexible command of various media in works focusing on the 'ordinary'. Their work, in which vast amounts of time are spent on each series or motif, mix the massive and the minute, the ordinary and extraordinary, reason and irrationality, order and disorder to offer new visions of the world. Untitled (Questions) presented at Venice in 2003 earned them a Golden Lion.