Peter Fischli & David Weiss

Born in 1952 in Zurich (CH) where he lives and works/Born in 1946, dead in 2012 in Zurich (CH)

Kanalvideo

1992
Video, colour, silent
Durée : 60'
Year of Purchase: 1996

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}