The Guggenheim has a Fischli and Weiss show on at the moment that we’ve been waiting to go to for a while. It naturally includes their masterpiece ‘The Way Things Go’, a 30-minute film shot in their studio involving meticulously arranged junk including stepladders, tires and a flaming bale of hay produce spectacular chain reactions. Beginning at the top we were reminded that there’s more to their partnership than simply indulging in whimsy and irony, though they do plenty of that. The circular relationship between labor and what it creates takes static form in a series of sculptural scenes depicting tools and materials – drills, hammers, screwdrivers, stacks of plywood, plastic containers filled with paint – scattered or piled, as if someone had just left them in a studio. Though they look completely real, they’re made of painted polyurethane resin. Authenticity reaches astonishing levels in a piece from a series of cast-rubber sculptures: a spinning record turntable playing music. Even a close examination can’t reveal the secret to how it was made, which is as good a metaphor as any for why we work in the first place – not just to survive but to compensate for that clichéd, unanswerable question: Why are we here? That mystery is treated as a sublime joke in a series of photographs, in which disparate objects (shoes, utensils, bottles, chairs) are balanced on top of each other like Jenga blocks of nonsense. Each image depicts an implausible equilibrium, in which elements try to create order from random encounters with the ordinary, which is to say life itself, a puzzle absent of rhyme or reason. This might reflect their way of working; if there was only one of them, they might go from black to white and back again, infinitely. But because there are two, they’re forced to meet in the middle in this grey area of combined opposites.
There was a work in the Cooper Hewitt Museum, which made us think back to Susan Collis’ ‘pre-install’ works. It’s wallpaper, which is a photograph of some drywall, all prepped and awaiting its final surface coating. Actual sheets of drywall were digitally photographed and printed allowing the wallpaper to pick up minute details that make it nearly impossible to distinguish from actual drywall. It carries this same suggestion of ‘unfinished-ness’ when in actual fact that’s the entire point of its existence. The museum is filled top to bottom with beautifully made objects, all of which one would love to add to their home-ware collection.
