Exhibitions / Altri fiori e altre domande / Selected writings

SELECTED WRITINGS ABOUT THE ARTISTS

In Fischli & Weiss’ oeuvre […] impish inquiry, disarming understatement, dexterous improvisation and makeshift materials again and again serve as the means by which big questions are writ small, as the miniature becomes the vehicle for the metaphysical.
(Lynne Cooke)

Beginning with a kids mentality, Fischli & Weiss take their mischief to a distant so great that their works become postmodern classics with a rich art-historical pedigree ranging from Jean Tinguely, the fabricator of self-destroying machines, to Joseph Beuys, who made art of soap, old newspapers and whatever was, to echo Heidegger, ‘at hand’.
(Arthur C. Danto)

The modest, Lilliputian quality of Fischli & Weiss’ [work] gives us a purview that is indeed divine but also childlike. They compel us not to look away, but to concentrate on that humble piece of ground that lies here, right beneath our feet.
(Iwona Blazwick)

[In Fischli & Weiss’s work] the threshold between art and reality is given a purely spiritual interpretation. It is defined by the individual’s inner, purely mental decision to see things differently: it acquires mythical dimensions. Crossing it begins to resemble a religious conversion, an inner enlightenment that allows us to see the familiar from a new angle and to contemplate what is hidden below surfaces.
(Boris Groys)

Fischli & Weiss’s films are informed with that serene sense of wonder that Sunday children never lose when they go out in the world in unabashed, diligent and stubborn search of their rightful vein of gold. We workaday people with our foregone conclusions, our lowly wishes and compulsions have no choice but to grin and bear the unbearable lightness of their sunny affirmation.
(Bice Curiger)

Bouvard et Pécuchet, Flaubert’s last, unfinished novel, tells the tale of two Parisian copy clerks who retire together to the country when one of them comes into an inheritance. […] They assemble an encyclopaedia of world knowledge, but its content remains ineffable. […] Flaubert planned a second volume to Bouvard et Pécuchet, which would presumably have been filled with what the characters obsessively copy and diagram – they’re own map of the world, as it were. It is tempting to imagine that with Suddenly This Overview Fischli & Weiss have completed the volume for him.
(Nancy Spector)

SELECTED WRITINGS BY THE ARTISTS

We do try to look at things from different angles at the same time. I’d see it more in terms of irony: saying something and meaning something else. […] irony is about unclearness – talking on different levels at once.

We want to take things out of the niche where they belong and transport them somewhere else, but without denying their origins. It is about taking but also about giving back.

It is a matter of going through life with the question of what is important and what is unimportant. We are constantly making judgements on this. And when things go slightly awry, it is something amusing, sometimes sobering.

There is a reason why the Pyramids are famous. When you go there, no matter how many photographs you’ve seen of them before, you realize that the Pyramids are unique, and that you don’t understand them. There is a reason why the waves of in the sea are emotionally attractive, and we wanted to explore these images, knowing they were in some ways forbidden fruits.

One method of avoiding the decision for or against beauty is certainly our approach of making groups of works with many parts. […] So instead of saying this is the most beautiful airport, and there is only one, what you get is simultaneity and a selection. Slightly switching off the aspect of naming or creating hierarchy.

We are interested in showing how reality always offers its visible side, the surface of things.

We believe there’s something right about clichés, so there is always this corner but you have to find out for yourself eventually.

We look at the visible world. We like to know what we are doing. When we carve the polyurethane objects, they are mostly from our studio or from everyday life. We understand them and we can transform them.