Providing an introduction to Fischli / Weiss’s surprising universe is a selection of black rubber sculptures, cast directly from the original objects. The objects themselves reflect the artist’s interest in the everyday, whether the domestic environment or the natural world. The choice of black rubber, however, adds a disconcerting twist, bringing associations of industry, mass production and sexual fetishism, and making the familiar seem strange.
Fischli / Weiss are often concerned with the hidden and the overlooked. Sewer Workers 1987, which shows a pair of maintenance workers cleaning out sewage pipes, could be seen as a self-portrait. Their careful processing of society’s waste suggests a parallel to the artists’ own investigations, which frequently hint that beneath the surface things are not always what they seem.
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/fischli-weiss/fischli-weiss-room-guide-room-1
◇ Fischli & Weiss: exhibition room guide, room 8 | Tate
Tunnels and hollow spaces provide an underlying theme for this room. The hour-long Kanalvideo 1992 was put together by the artists using footage taken by an electric probe as it travels through the Zürich sewer system. Fischli / Weiss have discussed the sense of claustrophobia induced by the probe’s strangely hypnotic journey through an intricate network of tunnels. The film reflects the artists’ fascination with the hidden and the overlooked, and echoes their identification with the rubber Sewer Workers in Room 1.
◇ Collection FRAC Lorraine | Peter Fischli & David Weiss:Kanalvideo
Kanalvideo is a found material, a kind of cinematographic ready-made. Supplied by the Zurich highways department at the request of Peter Fischli & David Weiss, the video is made up of an hour of forward travelling shots by a remote-controlled camera inside a sewer, checking its salubrity.
Since then Fischli & Weiss have made more videos: Cleaning the Sewage System and Construction Workers in the Vereina Tunnel. For this pair of Swiss artists, such a marked interest in underground spaces, in the concealed, suppressed underside of the city and its human community, goes hand in hand with its inscription as part of the local mythology – their country’s reputation for cleanliness is here mockingly taken over the top. One of the main threads of Fischli & Weiss’s manifold work could be about seeking to create wonderment at the heart of what at first sight is completely insignificant, through a twofold movement of faith in some metaphysical transcendence of everyday life, and of sending up that belief by taking the mundane and grotesque to new extremes. Once they had laid their hands on this subterranean sequence shot, Fischli & Weiss worked on the tape in postproduction, adding intermittently to the picture, coloured rasters that appear to come from the gallery itself; the light passes from a milky white to a deep red, to almost complete darkness … Only the joins in the pipework punctuate this uninterrupted advance, with time passing by so monotonously as to tend hypnotically towards the point of inertia.
By manipulating the tape in this way, its inept banality is transfigured into a hallucinogenic, almost supernatural image, a cosmic aspiration up into the vastness of space, where spatial and temporal landmarks, up and down, from the infinitely small and the infinitely large, are all the same: an experience of antigravity, of weightlessness.
Some passages have not been reworked and they reveal details that bring the viewer back down to earth – mould on the walls, water trickling down. We soon realize that nothing is going to happen to disturb this imperturbable exploration of the urban intestine. When after twenty minutes a greasy piece of litter crosses the picture, or worse, when two rats appear and scurry off into the darkness, they become perfectly incongruous if not completely absurd events.
With Kanalvideo, Fischli & Weiss build up a movement taking reality off towards a dream world, the recognizable towards the unknown: a metaphor of the journey of initiation, of the labyrinth as a continuous advance towards possible enlightenment. They question our processes of seeing and knowing, the fascination pictures have on the viewer, who has to abandon any speculative thoughts and become hypnotised by reality.
François Piron
http://collection.fraclorraine.org/collection/print/572?lang=en
◇ Carnegie Museum of Art
The Swiss artistic duo Fischli and Weiss practices in a wide range of media—including photography, sculpture, video, film and installation—in an attempt to unearth the beauty and meaning in ordinary things. Using humble means and materials, their humorous and endearing work attempts to infuse a childlike sense of wonder into our everyday lives. For this work, the artists spliced together pre-existing video footage from a survey of underground sewer pipes in their hometown, Zürich. Transported into the space of the gallery and significantly enlarged in proportion to the viewer, this banal footage becomes a visual spectacle. A key aspect of the work hinges on the transformation of its mundane origins into the sublime and universal. The video's "real-time" progression is intended to encourage the viewer to experience the ordinary things we habitually take for granted in a new light; in this case, transfiguring a common sewage drain into a painterly, abstracted psychedelic journey.
◇ 『ペーター・フィッシュリ ダヴィッド・ヴァイス』金沢21世紀美術館で開催 - ARTiT
チューリヒの下水管の調査映像とカラフルな壁紙画像を重ね合わせた幻想的な《パラッツォ・リッタでのカナルヴィデオ》(1992/2008)
http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_news/XMUbjxhDeq45dkPWYVBl
◇ ペーター・フィッシュリ ダヴィッド・ヴァイス - 金沢21世紀美術館 | 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.
《パラッツォ・リッタでのカナルヴィデオ》
観る者を無意識の領域に導くかのように延々と映し出されるトンネル。時に赤や黄色、そして白光に包まれる幻想的世界。実際は、チューリヒの下水管。
http://www.kanazawa21.jp/data_list.php?g=45&d=854
◇ Fischli and Weiss: Visible World | Tate
Fischli and Weiss work across a wide range of media and this exhibition presents their sculpture, installation, moving image and photography. Underlying all of their work is a childlike spirit of discovery which encourages the viewer to look afresh at their surroundings. In Fischli and Weiss’s world everyday objects take on an unexpectedly lifelike quality; they balance on each other, play off each other and collide into one another with a witty intelligence infused by the artists.
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/fischli-and-weiss-visible-world
