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With the passing of the Swiss artist David Weiss, who died on April 27
at the age of sixty-six following a battle with cancer, the world has lost
one of the greatest artists of our time.
Weiss's death marks the
closing of one of contemporary art's enduring partnerships—a prolific
collaboration with the Swiss artist Peter Fischli that began in 1979 and
would continue for thirty-three years. Fischli/Weiss created some of the
richest, most memorable, and most profoundly human work of the past three
decades. The American critical theorist Fredric Jameson famously observed
that our postmodern era is marked by a "waning of affect"—a loss of
sincerity and authenticity, and their replacement by irony. Yet
Fischli/Weiss demonstrated that irony and sincerity could not exist without
one another—that, indeed, there is no sincerity like irony.
I first learned of the work of Fischli/Weiss on the occasion of their
large exhibition Ein Ruheloses Universum at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1985. I
met them the following year, while still a student in 1986, on the eve of
the production of their celebrated thirty-minute film The Way Things
Go in 1987. It was the first of many visits I made to their studio
in Zurich, and they would become the most formative, life-changing
experiences in my own development as a curator. I am not alone in this, for
innumerable artists across the world cite Fischli/Weiss as their
heroes—Rirkrit Tiravanija, for instance, has described his
indebtedness to the unique understanding and sense of time found their
work.
Fischli/Weiss are perhaps best known for The Way Things
Go, in which a series of everyday objects and machine parts roll,
topple, burn, spill, or otherwise propel themselves forward to create an
extended chain reaction of miraculous cause and effect. Allegorizing
contingency and entropy while simultaneously conveying Fischli/Weiss's
mischievous humor and amazing experimentalism, these chemical and physical
sequences create the illusion that the objects have mysteriously become
independent from human control. In The Way Things Go, we can see the
pleasure the artists take in the process of art's production, in the
taking-apart and putting-together of things. We find them relishing the
precision of poise as much as the release of collapse—the breakdown
of precarious balancing acts also captured in the artists' series of
photographs from 1985 entitled Equilibrium. Restless, endlessly
surprising, and never seeking the limelight (they rarely grant interviews),
Fischli/Weiss are the serial inventors of the art world.
While
The Way Things Go enjoyed widespread recognition beyond the art
scene, their less well-known long-term archival project Visible
World, created between 1987 and 2001, is regarded by many as being
among the most significant artworks of the late twentieth century.
Visible World comprises 3,000 small-format photographs arranged and
uniformly displayed on a specially constructed 90 foot-long table. Drawing
from the four corners of the world, the images portray the manifold natural
and built environments within which contemporary life is played out,
ranging from jungles, gardens, deserts, mountains and beaches to cities,
offices, apartments, airports, famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and
Golden Gate Bridge, and everything in between. In the correspondences and
contrasts between the sacred and the profane, the mundane and the iconic,
the artists draw together a sense of the totality of our modern visual
world by observing the sublime and ridiculous details of everyday life and
consumer culture. It is a perfect example of how, throughout their long
collaboration together, Fischli/Weiss have deployed, more than any other
artist, the dual activities of collecting and organizing disparate
materials to recognize the overlooked fragments of everyday life as the
stuff of art.
***
Born in 1946 in Zurich, David Weiss grew up as the son of a parish
priest and a schoolteacher. Alongside drawing, and an early love of
collecting, his childhood passions included geography and history. With the
help of his mother's school atlas, he spent much of his youth dreaming of
exploring remote corners of the world. After discovering a passion for jazz
at the age of sixteen, he enrolled in a foundation course at the arts and
crafts school in Zurich, where in his first year of study he befriended
fellow artist Urs Lüthi. Having rejected careers in decorating,
graphic design, or photography, he soon came to view a career as an artist
as a tangible prospect.
In 1964, Weiss moved to Basel, where he
spent a year and a half at art school before starting to work as an
assistant to the sculptor Alfred Gruder. On a six-month stay in London in
1966, he relished the euphoria of the Swinging Sixties scene, listening to
the Beatles' Rubber Soul and Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling
Stone. After returning to Switzerland to undertake military service, he
embarked upon what he would later describe to me as his extensive Grand
Tour, a formative period that began in Canada, working for the 1967 World's
Fair in Montreal, followed by traveling to New York, where he first
encountered the minimalist art of the time. Weiss's Grand Tour ignited his
lifelong love of travel, which would surface repeatedly as a theme in
Fischli/Weiss's work over the years. The duo would often home in on the
banalities and tribulations of travel, as in Airports (1990), an
outstanding collection of postcard photos of airports published as an
oversized coffee table book, which the film director John Waters
brilliantly described as "a shockingly tedious, fair-to-middling,
nothing-to-write-home-about, new kind of masterpiece."
Weiss's
Tour of the late 1960s continued to San Francisco and Berkeley, where he
immersed himself in the psychedelia of the hippie scene, encountering
astrology, numerology, and other occultisms. He then journeyed aboard a
cargo ship from Veracruz to Cuba before eventually heading back across the
Atlantic to Tangier, Algiers, Tunis, Italy, Berlin, and finally home to
Switzerland once again. Here, in Ticino, in southern Switzerland, he placed
himself in the house of Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim while she herself
traveled. For most of the period 1975 to 1978, he spent a great deal of
time drawing in black ink, amassing an immense body of graphic work that
included three artist books. Among these was an outstanding book of
drawings of rain, which revealed an enormous power of observation and
feeling.
Ever restless, Weiss opened the macrobiotic shop Mr
Natural in Zurich around this time, and became a member of the legendary
Commune H, mixing with the hippies, anarchists, and artists of Zurich's
bohemian underground of the late 1970s. It was in this milieu, in 1978,
amid the city's vibrant art scene centering around the Kontiki Bar, that
Weiss met Peter Fischli.
Their relationship as close friends and
colleagues stemmed from the deepest mutual respect, and manifested itself
in their work as a unique form of synergy. Both Fischli and Weiss had
thrived on the collaborative DIY ethos of the late 1970s Zurich punk scene,
and their collaboration evolved like a flânerie more than a
masterplan. It simply worked, with one project flowing intuitively into the
next. Weiss had been keen to move away from the black drawings that had
become his signature works, and so, while planning a trip to Los Angeles in
1979, he and Fischli began work on the Wurstserie, or Sausage
Series, a group of ten color photographs of quotidian situations
ranging from a fashion show to a traffic accident, all depicted using
sausages and cucumbers, as well as cigarette butts, cardboard, and other
detritus. Both poignant and absurd, the Sausage Series was shown for
the first time in 1980, as part of the legendary exhibition Saus und
Braus (Revel and Riot), mounted at the Städtische Galerie
zum Strauhof by curator Bice Curiger. This was the first truly public
manifestation of Zurich's underground art scene, and a major showcase of
the work of a new generation of young Swiss artists in the 1980s.
That same year Weiss moved to Los Angeles, where he fell ill after a
visit to Mexico and was forced to stay in bed for some time, reading and
watching reruns on television. This experience taught him a nuanced and
idiomatic form of English, as well as an appreciation of American popular
culture. Afterwards, he could speak as easily about the I Love Lucy
show he could about the Swiss writer Robert Walser, whom he had admired
since his youth. He was an inveterate and passionate reader of literature,
though he never flaunted his erudition.
As soon as Peter Fischli
came to visit Weiss in LA, they began work on 1981's Der geringste
Widerstand (The Least Resistance), without money or actors but
with the help of a Swiss friend who operated the camera. The Least
Resistance sees Fischli/Weiss disguised as their alter egos "Rat" and
"Bear," a new version of Bouvard and Pécuchet embarking on an
episodic tour of Hollywood in what is both a satire on the art world and a
spirited Dadaist road movie. An accompanying book, Ordnung und
Reinlichkeit (Order and Cleanliness), accompanied the film.
Also in 1981, Fischli/Weiss produced 200 hand-modeled, unfired clay
sculptures, Plötzlich diese Übersicht (Suddenly this
Overview) a series of vignettes depicting both the auspicious and
deeply inauspicious moments of human history, all in the same irreverent
style. In its impulse to explore and map human scenarios, in its
combination of great scope and miniature scale, and in its playful sense of
comedy, this group of works extends the inquiry that began with Sausage
Series while also anticipating later projects such as Visible
World. The clay sculptures were followed by a large number of carved
and painted polyurethane works, including the Fever and
Metaphysical sculptures, as well as a large sculptural ensemble
entitled Raft from 1982.
Fischli/Weiss's rough-hewn works
of this period would lead to their more illusionistic sculptures in the
1990s—precisely rendered polyurethane copies of ordinary objects.
Philosopher and art historian Boris Groys has called these works "simulated
readymades," arguing that they are simulations of readymades rather than
simulations of objects, for they are twice removed from their source
material. He also referred to them as "replicants," after the simulated
human beings of Ridley Scott's film, Blade Runner.
Their
next major film The Right Way (1983) found Rat and Bear on a journey
through the alpine landscapes of Switzerland. By this time, Fischli/Weiss
were beginning to earn considerable respect in the international art world,
though their major breakthrough was yet to come, when The Way Things
Go was exhibited at Documenta VIII in Kassel in 1987. 1987 was also the
year of their first major public commission, the Münster
Building, a reduced-scale modernist office block produced for the
Skulptur Projekte Münster. This "scaled-down example of middle-class
self-representation," as their proposal described it, was followed by other
public engagements, including their unrealized Ice Landscape of
1989, and their 1990 Snowman, housed in a freezer powered by a
thermal power station in Saarbrücken. In 1997, Fischli/Weiss would
return to Münster to install a flower and vegetable garden on the
outskirts of the city for the Skulptur Projekte that year.
The
1980s also marks the beginning of Fischli/Weiss's time in London following
their participation in the Serpentine Gallery's group show Crosscurrents in
Swiss Art, where London audiences were introduced to their question pots.
Following their show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1988,
Fischli/Weiss continued to show regularly in London throughout the 1990s,
presenting a a solo exhibition at the Serpentine in 1996, and a
comprehensive career retrospective at the Tate in 2006/2007 entitled
Flowers and Questions.
Language in all its forms, from poetry to
cliché, was a continual source of intrigue for Fischli/Weiss. 1991's
How to Work Better is a manifesto comprising ten persuasive but
empty sentences, each aiming to improve workplace productivity and morale:
"know the problem"; "accept change as inevitable." After originally
encountering the stock phrases in a on a sign in a pottery factory in
Thailand, Fischli/Weiss painted them in large stenciled letters to cover
the exterior of an office block in Oerlikon, Zurich, visible to those
entering the city center by train from Zurich Airport. Several of their
other text works show the artists' love of unanswerable questions, from
Order and Cleanliness (1981) to Questions (2000), a projected
work displaying more than one thousand existentially-themed, handwritten
questions, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2003. The 2003 book, Will
Happiness Find Me?, a global bestseller translated into many languages,
features small and big questions of all kinds, oscillating continuously
between banality and wisdom.
Fischli/Weiss have had major
exhibitions in leading art museums all over the world, from Centre Georges
Pompidou and the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, as well
as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Kunsthaus Zürich, the Ludwig
Museum in Cologne, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Vienna Secession,
and many others. They were the recipients of many of the art world's most
prestigious prizes, including the Prix Caran d'Ache Beaux-Arts in 1989, the
Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2003 (for Questions), and the
Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis in Cologne in 2010.
Beyond his work as an
artist, David Weiss was also an avid connoisseur and collector of Chinese
landscape painting and scholar's rocks, which appealed to his sensibility
in visual art and poetry. Despite his immense knowledge, he always
displayed a sincere modesty and was thoroughly unpretentious. He was
spontaneous, free-spirited, and generous with his time and attention.
David Weiss was born in Zurich on June 8, 1946, and died in Zurich
on April 27, 2012. He is survived by his children, Oskar Weiss and
Charlotte Weiss.
–Hans Ulrich Obrist
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