- Venue
- Tate Modern
- Location
- London
Last year David Weiss, of the Swiss duo Fischli/Weiss, passed away. I was taken aback, feeling we had lost a great artist and so began searching through notes on exhibitions of theirs I had visited. I found, amongst others, notes and photocopies collected about Fischli & Weiss, Flowers & Questions, A Retrospective, Tate Modern, 2007. This exhibition covered an extensive range of their works from the very famous video work The Way Things Go and their characters of Rat and Bear’s film The Right Way, to rubber casts of random objects and workshops carved from foam.
Vividly, I remember strolling into the exhibition room of Suddenly an Overview and wandering around in smiling wonder with my brain whirring. It was like the scene in the original film of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where the boat trip goes supersonic down a tunnel with all the horrors of modernism whizzing by, except this was the events, non-events and too-early-to-call-events of modernism as unfired clay vignettes. Bob Dylan was stepping off the bus with his guitar like a complete unknown into New York City, there was a section of Scandinavian motorway, Mr & Mrs Einstein were tucked up in bed having just conceived Albert, Mr Spock was looking out of a very chunky window and, although not famously big on emotions was feeling a little sad about his planet Vulcan.
This was no ordinary exhibition for it seemed like you could be in there all day. It made you proud to be part of the great modern adventure; it made you feel good and hopeful about all the accidental beginnings and all the incidental passages too. I laughed out loud and felt happy.
In one room some workmen had left a mess; perhaps they had been setting up an exhibition and gone home for the day without tidying up. On walking further into the room I realised that it was an exhibition and started checking out each object, and whilst smiling my way around the child’s wellies, paint tins, video cassette, goofy monster toy, take-away coffee cups, pots, rollers, I became aware that these were not readymades but copies. Indeed the stack of pallets, the bench and the off cuts of wood were all facsimile too. Copies in carved and painted polyurethane, an illusion carefully crafted, indistinguishable from the originals, like a 3D version of a trompe l’oeil still-life painting. The room was titled Untitled (Tate) 1992-2000, Untitled (Pallets) 2000-4, Untitled (Rotterdam) 2000-4, so they were not giving much away there.
From my notes: ″These objects operate like readymades; they are stripped of their practicality, their ‘equipmental character of equipment’[i], and like readymades they have transformed practical objects into ones that can only be viewed. Fischli/Weiss have confiscated the workshop and rendered it useless; all of what a workshop can be has now become dead and impossible.″ ‘Duchamp’s objects could revert back to everyday life at any point in time, these simulated readymades can’t, they’re only to be contemplated.’ [ii]
The work recalled Johns’ Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), as it too comes direct from the artist’s workshop. It is significant that the materials chosen are so absolute and singular, unflinching bronze for Johns, parodic polyurethane foam for Fischli/Weiss. Materials that in spite, and because, of their position at extreme ends of the spectrum, in terms of density, speak of a lack of an original and therefore the original. They are dead and laid bare so we can contemplate the real.
Contemplate the real? Simulated readymades that can’t return to functionality? Where and when is this potentially a real workshop? Was I looking into the workshop of Fischli/Weiss in the nineties and noughties? Perhaps therefore it was allegorical of the partnership and collaboration of these Swiss men; together in ‘concentrated daydreaming’. Taking time in quite a traditional way to produce these tableaus or as Weiss put it ‘there’s certainly a subversive pleasure in occupying yourself with something for an unreasonable length of time’. [iii]
Fischli/Weiss broke through the world of cynicism, navel gazing and self important posturing and reconnected us with the creative side of our culture. To have fun, be intrigued and feel inspired go see their latest work: Fischli/Weiss, Rock on Top of Another Rock, Serpentine Gallery, 7 March 2013 – 6 March 2014.
[i] Heidegger, Martin, Poetry, Language, Thought, (trans.) Albert Hofstadter, New York, Harper and Row Publishers, 1971, p. 31.
[ii] Bingham, Fischli & Weiss, Flowers and Questions, A Retrospective, p. 12
[iii] Bingham, Fischli & Weiss, Flowers and Questions, A Retrospective, p. 2.
