‘An object is guilty when it stops moving, and guilty, too, when it doesn’t stop moving.’ (Fischli & Weiss, 1987)
Since they started to work together in 1979, these two artists have been forever exploring the codes of everyday life, appropriating and hijacking them, and manipulating them to get them to be part of the phantasmagorical world of games, parody, and wit, while at the same time keeping their quality as signs.
With a preference for traditional presentation devices (display-case, table, stand…), recording techniques (film, book, photograph…), directorial modes, and exploration of material, Fischli & Weiss introduce objects and images of the familiar world within the artistic vocabulary, questioning, in their own way, the tradition of the object in modern and contemporary sculpture since Duchamp’s famous gesture in 1913 – a bicycle wheel fixed to a stool – followed by Cubist, Surrealist, and Dadaist works, Pop Art, and so on… These objects are used in incongruous situations, subjects and ‘souls’ of another history, according to a listing based on allegory, metaphor, signals, clichés and linguistic formulae, as well as assemblages and collages, depending on the place in point.
In their film productions (Der geringste Widerstand – The Least Resistance –, 1980, Der rechte Weg – The Right Way –, 1982, Der Lauf der Dinge – The Course of Things –, 1987, etc.) and photographic work (Wurstserie – Sausage Series –, 1979…), the protagonists are objects and figurines moving about in a world where they are lords of their fates, and their own state of being. In 1980, they embarked upon an encyclopaedic series of clay objects (Plötzlich diese Ubersicht – Suddenly this Overview -, 1981), listed in physical and metaphysical categories, introducing an interplay between order and disorder, and the known and the unknown into the exhibition.
Carrying on with their production of matter series (polyurethane, 1983, plaster, 1988…), in 1987 they produced a set made of ‘black rubber’, which the ‘drawer’ is part of. Inspired by the work of sewer workers who make the black gold of cities rise, the rubbery matter conjures up, unaided, a metaphor of journeys and links (tyres, joints, etc.), in which the blackness of night and underground places appears. Like something shifted from its stand, the drawer – the containing part – contradicts its functional use and thus proceeds to the dignity of sculpture. As a place where other things are hidden, the drawer here loses its envelope-like property and turns into an autonomous object.
Fischli & Weiss work in the fault separating order from disorder, the identical from the dissimilar, and object from subject… They thus bring subjectivity to the fore within the insignificant, by using the expressive power of the object turned into artwork.
Maïté Vissault
