In the front section of the November 16th New Yorker, under the heading “Winter Preview” (by Andrea Scott):
Conceptualism takes a comic turn at the Guggenheim with “Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better,” a career survey of the two Swiss artists, who met in Zurich in 1977 and collaborated until Weiss’s death, in 2012. Their first project was a series of irreverent photographs, featuring gherkins and sausages as dramatis personae; their most famous is the live-action film “The Way Things Go,” a spectacular chain reaction of unspectacular objects. For more than three decades, Fischli and Weiss uncovered hilarity, and pathos and mystery, in the workaday world. Don’t miss “Suddenly This Overview,” an installation of scores of small, unfired-clay sculptures whose subjects range from the Biblical to the cultural to the banal: the parting of the Red Sea, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones feeling satisfied after writing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” a wedge of cheese. (Opens Feb. 5.)
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At the Carpet Shop from the 1979 sausage series
Also from the sausage series, the more wurst-y Fashion Show:
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From Wikipedia:
Peter Fischli (born 8 June 1952) and David Weiss (21 June 1946 – 27 April 2012), often shortened to Fischli/Weiss, were an artist duo that had been collaborating since 1979. … Their best-known work is the film Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go, 1987), described by The Guardian as being “post apocalyptic”, as it concerned chain reactions and the ways in which objects flew, crashed and exploded across the studio in which it was shot. Fischli lives and works in Zurich; Weiss died on 27 April 2012.
The Way Things Go (which is somewhere between hilarious and ominous) can be viewed here.
Two later pieces: A Restless Night of 1984 and Flirt, Liebe usw. of 1985:
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And from the “Suddenly This Overview” collection, a closeup of mick jagger and brian jones going home satisfied after composing ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’:
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