The Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester (MAG) is pleased to announce Peter Fischli & David Weiss: The Way Things Go. The exhibition is on view at MAG from October 26, 2018 – March 17, 2019. This is the latest acquisition and exhibition in its three-year Media Arts Watch program. Jonathan Binstock, MAG’s Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director, stated that, “we are proud to present this iconic film and video installation, and we are extremely grateful to our longtime Board member Peter O. Brown and his wife, Nancy, for their generosity in making this acquisition possible.”
From 1979 to 2012, the Swiss duo of Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) created a distinctly humorous body of multimedia work that employed humble materials and referenced ordinary subjects. Their film The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge), 1987, features a seemingly endless chain reaction of everyday objects with the expected human intervention needed to incite their movement curiously absent.
At a warehouse in Zurich, the duo assembled objects in scenarios in which the momentum generated from simple machines, like levers, pulleys, or chemical reactions propelled the objects forward. The artists carefully sequenced these interactions, so the force of one object’s movement would impact the next, and so on, evoking Rube Goldberg’s humorous illustrations of complex mechanical contraptions that performed simple tasks. Using film, they recorded the resulting interplay in long takes, making cuts when the pace of reaction was particularly slow.
In The Way Things Go, objects take on personalities, becoming nonhuman actors cast in a slapstick comedy. As Peter Fischli noted in 2006, “The film created the impression that the things move on their own, without human help, that they become spirited, living beings.”
About the Artists
The Swiss duo of Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) began to collaborate in 1979 and had their first solo exhibition together in 1981 at the Galerie Balkon in Geneva. Blending ideas from Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art, and Conceptual art, they created a distinctly humorous body of multimedia work that rely on observation and a distinctive and refreshing wit. Solo exhibitions of Fischli and Weiss’s work have been organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1992); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1996); Museu d’art contemporani de Barcelona (2000); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2003–04); Museo Tamayo arte contemporáneo, Mexico City (2005); and Tate Modern, London (2006–07). In 1995 and 2003, they represented Switzerland in the Venice Biennale, receiving the Leone d’Oro award for their 2003 submission. Their work also appeared in Documenta, Kassel, West Germany (1987, 1997), and in Moving Pictures at the Guggenheim Museum (2002–03) and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2003–04). Weiss died in 2012 in Zurich, where Fischli continues to live and work.
About “Media Arts Watch”
“Media Arts Watch” is a three-year initiative to introduce the art of the moving image into the curatorial program and permanent collection of MAG. Media art is art that explores the technologies and aesthetics of film and video as well as the emerging tools and practices of computers, virtual reality, the internet, software, and mobile devices.
About John G. Hanhardt
John G. Hanhardt is MAG’s consulting senior curator of media arts. Hanhardt began his museum career in the department of film and video at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and from there went to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to establish its film program and film study collection. From 1974 to 1996 he was curator and head of the film and video department at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was the senior curator of film and media arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from 1996 to 2006. He joined the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s staff in 2006, and was a consulting senior curator of film and media arts there until 2016. As a native of Rochester and University of Rochester alum, Hanhardt was inspired by photography, film, and media arts during frequent visits to the George Eastman Museum and by the programming of the Visual Studies Workshop.