Peter Fischli - David Weiss
Suddenly This Overview (1981) is a collection of around 200 small, unfired clay sculptures, the uniformity of material, scale, and somewhat awkward handling of which provides a unity for an extraordinary broad range of subjects, from everyday objects to historical events. In one piece, a life-size loaf of bread sits plain and crusty upon a plinth, while another in which two figures walk along a street, one with a guitar case under his arm, is called Mick Jagger and Brian Jones going home satisfied after composing "I Can't Get No Satisfaction".
If the sculptures were rather clumsily modelled, then the artists' handling of both the banal and the grand was becoming increasingly sophisticated, and was soon to find its greatest expression in The Way Things Go. The film developed from a series of photographs made by the duo. Entitled, variously, Equilibres, or Quiet Afternoon, the photographs show teetering accumulations of household objects and studio debris. As Weiss described it: "We were sitting in a bar somewhere and playing around with the things on the table, and we thought to ourselves, this energy of never-ending collapse – because our construction stood for a moment and then collapsed before we built it up again – should be harnessed and channelled in a particular direction."
Many of the objects – or rather, the types of objects – featured in the film are familiar from the photographs, although the medium of film has allowed the artists to use movement and its effects. And so, rather than trying to show a unified presence to the camera as they did in the photographs – as if they were standing still, holding their breath, trying not to blink – the objects are now able to follow their own inclinations, reacting to the situations in which they find themselves. Each is held in anticipation, waiting its turn, and then they go, one after the other: bags spin, tyres roll, ladders stagger, carpet rolls, chairs fall, fuses catch, fireworks blow, froth bubbles and bubbles froth. Everywhere things are transformed into actions, and nouns become verbs: things spark, things flame, things balloon, and things roll.
In his important, yet seldom funny, essay "Laughter" (1900), the French philosopher Henri Bergson remarked: "We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing," and the same might also be said of its converse. In The Way Things Go there are moments when, instead of acting automatically and with immediacy, the objects seem to hesitate, as if reflecting on what it is they are about to do: the tyre resting among the burning newspapers before moving on; the can being filled with water before sliding down the orange slope; the lazy unfolding of the inflatable bed, like an arm stretching during a yawn.
The humour occurs, then, when we fail to see these as nothing more than the playing out of physical forces – the overcoming of inertia, for example – and instead attribute human characteristics to them. Although this might seem little more than simple anthropomorphism, by sensing even a degree of self-awareness from within the debris of objects, we become aware of an incongruity, and in that moment, it makes us laugh. The objects possess timing.
Indeed, if The Way Things Go could be considered a compendium of comic techniques – anticipation, timing, slapstick, punchline – then it is of a particularly dark humour. For much as we might laugh when lofty significance stumbles and is brought low, we seek out meaning where we can. We might never have thought to find it among bin-bags and old shoes, but there it is, revealed in quick catastrophes and slow dissolves. A short film of things becomes a film about everything, how things come into being, and how, at a dim point somewhere between light and dark, they stop being that, too. And in the laughter that follows is a hollow where there comes to rest the recognition that we are one of these things also.
Was a spilled bucket ever this articulate? Was a toppled chair? With a certain calm insistence, Fischli and Weiss have, over the space of 30 years, activated the shushed magic of the everyday, and everywhere it is found changed. The world looks the same after considering their work, but in a different way, which is the simple test of great art.
See also
See also