Exhibition : October 1- November 9, 1997
Fischli, Weiss
«Ohne Titel»
 | The piece is composed of about 90 video sequencies of a length from 20 minutes to 2 hours, which makes an archived document of more than 80 hours shown on several monitors. Fragments or excursions through daily life, without staging nor comments. Shown before at the Venice Biennial. Collection of the Kunsthaus in Zurich. |  |
About the work
Fischli / Weiss always produce works that have to do with life, with the livesof us all. At home, we all tend to store the vacuum cleaner and various other cleaningdevices away in a cupboard. What are visible are books, pictures, pieces of furniture...Imagine a family that was just as proud of its cleaning and household appliancesas it was of the other fittings in its apartment and put these on display for theguests along side everything else. What else could be a greater surprise and promptgreater displeasure. Yet these appliances are part of our everyday lives and, whatis more, they represent work day-in, day-out, and we may have to struggle with ourselvesto do the work. The result: both artists are genuinely interested in achieving anexemplary form of dehierarchization (as a metaphor).
We are all governed by the generative principle of order and disorder. Whoeverspeaks of disorder must have a notion of order and vice versa. Our subjective experienceensures that some sort of bearable balance is maintained. This balance is both differentand similar from case to case. Dehierarchization as practiced by Fischli and Weissfor a good 12 years now creates the greatest possible disorder, in which, by virtueof their actions and work, they embed a conscious order.
Fischli and Weiss are simultaneously dreamers and pragmatists. The US painterNeil Jenney once said: «There are two sides to the artist's nature: he is abookkeeper who ignores the details and a dreamer who spend days checking the figures».Thisis also true of Fischli and Weiss. Whoever lays claim to totality becomes eithertotalitarian or a poet. Fischli and Weiss are poets «par excellence».Their irony is never malicious or cynical, but rather a result of their activity:both distanced and so close to home.
Fischli and Weiss do not expose anything. They only put questions in the formof assertions. These are penetrating questions: quiet, subversive, general questionsput with such precision that a fine balance is struck between our comfort and discomfortas observers.
Fischli and Weiss have succeded in transforming the generative principle of orderand disorder into one of agreement and disagreement. They have succeded in puttingthe sham of the «taste of the big wide world» solidly back to earth byusing precisely the means of that world of pretense. Yet they do so in such a waythat we are not able to distance ourselves from it while recognizing it for the shamit is. Fischli and Weiss proceed from the point where distanciation is no longerpossible because I - the observer - am bound up every day of the week in what itis describe: part of a dialectic, which expresses the simultaneity and equivalenceof affirmation, questioning and rejection as the dilemma of our times.
| Peter Fischli Born - June 8th 1952 in Zürich Born - June 21st 1946 in Zürich |
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Text by Jean-Christophe Ammann. Extract - Full printed versionavailable in the MMk - Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.
