Peter Fischli David Weiss

From 1979 to 2012, Swiss artists Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) collaborated on a body of work that offers a deceptively casual meditation on how we perceive everyday life. Through a witty “misuse” of cultural genres—from low-budget Hollywood movies and picture-postcard views to the art historical notion of the readymade—they transformed the ordinary into something decisively not.

Never ones to issue statements or dictate meaning, Fischli and Weiss pondered questions great and small, sometimes imitating whimsical philosophers. Perhaps in part because they were a team of two, they challenged the idea of dualism, a cornerstone of Western thought. In one way or another, everything the artists produced playfully unravels what they understood to be “popular opposites”—labor versus leisure, fiction versus reality, kitsch versus beauty, and the banal versus the sublime, among others. Fischli and Weiss undid false divisions with the conviction that bewilderment itself might be a desirable state. They aimed to confuse hierarchies and values by creating systems doomed to fail and found beauty in states of imminent collapse.

This retrospective brings together over three hundred sculptures, photographs, videos, and installations to form the most complete overview of the artists’ work to date. The presentation is not organized chronologically—instead, selections from each of Fischli and Weiss’s major series appear alongside works from other points in their career, creating dialogues that span the pair’s history of working together. This arrangement reflects the overlapping structure of their production and underscores the coherence of their diverse oeuvre. In this way, the exhibition encapsulates their collaboration, bringing into focus the incisive conversation the two artists sustained for thirty-three years.

Credit: Exhibition Overview from the The Guggenheim Museum website

Whether you go or not, the exhibition catalog  Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better  pays tribute to an artistic partnership of more than 30 years. Richly illustrated, the book explores Peter Fischli and David Weiss's acclaimed and influential body of work, known for its sly humor and profound meditations on the everyday. Throughout the course of their collaboration, Peter Fischli and David Weiss celebrated the sheer triviality of everyday existence, observing the world with bemused detachment.