Peter Fischli David Weiss: Part II

II. Roman Holiday
Fischli and Weiss address the transparency of the visible world.


From the series “Airports” (1987- ), C-print photograph, 160 x 225 cm. All images: © Peter Fischli/David Weiss, courtesy the artists; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich; Sprüth Magers Berlin/ London; Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

ART iT: We were just discussing works such as “Airports” and Visible World that in a way embrace the inherent banality of images today. Yet for the viewer of such works it is easy to think that they cannot be as straightforward as they seem, that there must be something else. A personal example for me was seeing the installation, Sun, Moon and Stars (2007/08), with the tables of torn-out pages of magazine advertising. I couldn’t really tell what was going on in the work. Afterwards what stayed with me was not the idea that I had missed something but rather the pleasure of having missed something. I feel that many of your works have this delicate balance between reading too much into them and missing the point entirely.

PF: An experience I often have with art I like is that I miss something. In fact I sometimes critique other artists because I understand only too well what they are doing and what is going on in their work. This is one of the main points in art, this missing thing that makes you wonder what’s really happening.

DW: It brings us back to the question about language. We realized when we made the book Airports (1990) that it’s better if we don’t identify the airports in the photographs. Normally people want to know whether the image is of Heathrow or Kennedy, and then they are satisfied. But I believe that without that information the image becomes fuller in some way. So as an artist you can also work with hiding information. And then in the case of the advertising installation there is too much information, and perhaps viewers don’t know why all these images are assembled together. It’s to punish people perhaps.


All: Installation view of Sun, Moon and Stars (2007/08), 797 facsimile reprints of advertisements, offset prints in color, 38 vitrines of wood, glass and steel, each 78 x 177.5 x 72.5 cm, total 268.2 x 77.0 x 72.2 cm.

PF: We can explain very easily the origins of the advertising project. In 2007 the media corporation Ringier AG commissioned us to do a project for their annual report. We did some research on how they make their money, and found that something like 90 percent of magazine income or more comes from ad revenue, not from sales at the kiosk. We thought, ok, it’s the business report, so let’s talk about the business. We thought if we filled the report up with advertising, then it would make the publishers happy, because every publisher wants to see his magazine full of advertising.
Then we started to collect advertising from different magazines and had an epiphany that the newsstand is essentially an encyclopedia of the present, not so different from what we were attempting with Suddenly this Overview. At the newsstand, you have a magazine for every theme imaginable: mobile phones, coffee, food, fly fishing, weapons, vases, birds, cats – you name it, they have it. We thought, wow.
After cutting out the advertisements from all these different magazines and arranging them side-by-side in different sections, we began to see how they all relate to each other. We thought we could use all these pages of advertising to tell the story of someone’s life, starting with the bride and marriage, the honeymoon at the hotels, pregnancy, babies – and then the baby grows into a teenager who buys pop music and sneakers and so on. I could even talk about your life simply through describing the objects that you consume. Maybe the first thing you consumed was the milk bottle, and so on. It’s not exactly like George Perec’s novel Things, but it’s a similar idea.

DW: Also, if you think about even one section, like cars, it’s a document of how people try to sell cars, all the thinking and conceptualization behind each advertisement, so that Volvo stands for security and family and another car is pictured in front of a skyline with a guy and a girl standing together. There is a lot of work behind each image.
When the advertisements come together in a magazine people barely notice it, but the images can be so surrealistic, and it’s all a composition of imagery being used to sell things. At the same time, on the part of the producers it’s just a hope or theory that people will buy the product based on the advertising.

PF: So just by going back to this missing point, now we have explained to you the story, although there are certainly other things in the work.


All: Detail of Sun, Moon and Stars (2007/08).

ART iT: But the work was not necessarily a so-called media critique?

PF: This we realized immediately. It’s easy to fall into the cliché of the critique because everyone speaks out about consumer objects and so on. We know all the arguments and they are also valid, but we didn’t want to do that.
Or rather, it’s a sideline. It’s there but you could also look at it and say it’s about these dreams, hopes, fears and symbols coming together in this world of advertising.

ART iT: In that sense one thing that I find strangely alienating about your works is that in a way all the information necessary for understanding them is already there. A photograph of an airport is not necessarily a critique of an airport, nor is it necessarily an idealization of an airport. It’s more like it is exactly an image of an airport and you don’t have to go deeper than that if you don’t want to.

DW: I understand a lot of the works as an invitation to get in and then it’s up to you or to anybody else what to make out of it. It’s a temptation perhaps.

PF: I wonder what this “deeper” means, to go deeper into a work. This can mean many things. Obviously there is Susan Sontag’s idea of “against interpretation,” which was a very convincing argument, but there’s also a danger that such an attitude can mystify the artwork. In the end, it’s just the form and it’s the surface of this photograph or the form of these clay figures that is there, and then how deep somebody goes into it intellectually or emotionally remains uncertain.


Installation view of Visible World (1986-2001), set of 15 light tables with 3000 photographic slides, 83 x 2805 x 69 cm.

ART iT: Maybe another way to look at it is in terms of transparency, like a windowpane. You can see your reflection in the surface of the window, you can see something through the window and you can see the window as an object itself. So with “Airports” you can see a reflection of your own experience of an airport, you can see somebody else’s experience of an airport and you can see a simple representation of an airport.

PF: We are actually now working on a new book of the “Airports” archive, which will ultimately have photos of about 800 airports from the last 12 or 15 years, and by looking at the images we suddenly realized, “Oh, this book will be a book about the weather!” When you start editing the images then you see there’s one with rain, another with snow and so on, and you could completely build it up around this idea of it actually being a book about the weather.
But it could also be a book about modern heraldry, logos and signs, because on airplanes the flag and the logo are always mixed together, and I love it that, for example, with Alitalia the Italian colors no longer represent a state and there’s this overlapping of a brand and the state. I find this overlapping super interesting, but again it’s just one aspect of the work that you can build upon.


From Suddenly this Overview (1981/2006), “Brick,” unfired clay, as displayed at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2010. Photo ART iT.

ART iT: This kind of “transparency” – and the earlier discussion of schadenfreude – also brings to mind a work that interests me, the garden you made for Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1997. The garden in some ways seems to be the antithesis to your works dealing with mimesis and replication like the polyurethane object installations. Can you explain more about the context behind this work?

DW: Gardens interested us because we found this particular region between Germany and France where there are all these fantastic gardens, and we took many pictures there. What is similar to the polyurethane object installations is that we built a shack that could have been seen as somebody’s workplace, and the garden itself was completely constructed. Originally there was no garden on the plot we used. There was a lawn and a couple trees but it was otherwise completely empty. We wanted to change this plot into a family garden, enough for a family of five, with an imaginary private owner who just does his vegetables and fruits.
So the work was about illusion, but at the same time we did have a proper garden growing there. We had to plant plants and salads, which we first raised in greenhouses and then transferred to the site with the help of a gardener who worked with us on the project. We had to decide where to put the potatoes, and the onions, and the tomatoes and so on. There was nothing before that.

PF: But one thing that was interesting about the Münster project was that the show is of course one of the first that went out of the museum and placed artworks everywhere in the city, taking art outside of the white cube context. As it has been pointed out many times, works like the Readymades need that institutional context to be realized, otherwise it’s just a bicycle wheel. We found this situation to be very interesting, and we wanted to do something that might be right on the edge of being recognizable as an artwork.
When visitors go around Münster looking for this or that artwork, maybe they find a sculpture they can identify with art or something they could imagine to be art, but we had many people coming to our garden and then asking, “Where is the Fischli/Weiss piece?” And they were standing right in the middle of it. But maybe they enjoyed simply being in the garden. Maybe they looked at the flowers. Maybe they were frustrated they couldn’t find our artwork, but they had a nice time and then when they would meet us later they would say, “Yeah, I went to the garden, but I didn’t see your piece.”
It was a work that was thinking about art in public, as well as questions of what is public and what is private. I think the garden is one of the oldest things that could be considered to be privately owned, considering humanity’s development from hunter-gatherer societies to settled communities with land cultivation. That’s when you have people beginning to say things like, “This is my land and what I plant on it is mine.”

DW: And you could say this mentality is still very much alive. Many people might still hesitate to enter a garden, even if they don’t know exactly why. They may have this underlying sense that it belongs to someone, someone works there, and the plants and vegetables belong to that person.

PF: I know it from my youth – can I take this apple from this tree? In Switzerland most of the trees belong to farmers but then in the open countryside, for example, in the mountains, you see the berries and you can pick them, it’s public. So the garden speaks about all of this. It was interesting for us, and still is.


From Suddenly this Overview (1981), “Popular opposites: funny and silly,” unfired clay.

ART iT: What interested me was exactly this idea that it’s an artwork that doesn’t look like an artwork.

DW: Perhaps it’s more like theatre, you show it only once or for one season.

PF: Yet it’s clear that establishing Skulptur Projekte with the curator and people going around creates an invisible white cube around the exhibition. Our work was still a little more indeterminate, there’s still a moment where you have to make it up in your mind.

DW: In our case the owner of the plot demolished the whole garden once the exhibition was over.

PF: He used the land for golf training and before the exhibition we begged him to let us use it for the garden. He agreed to lend us the land for a half-year only. I thought it was a beautiful garden but the moment the show was over he came with a bulldozer and flattened everything. So it’s like the garden pops up and pops back down again, it was nice.

The exhibition “Peter Fischli David Weiss” continues at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, through December 25.

Part I. Gentlemen don’t work with their hands
Fischli and Weiss on the schadenfreude of copying in the age of mechanical reproduction.

The Techne of Schadenfreude

Copyrighted Image