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How to work better

Initially planned during David Weiss’s lifetime, the exhibition at the Guggenheim is a comprehensive survey of the 33-year artistic partnership between Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

“Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better”, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, is the first comprehensive survey in a New York museum of the remarkable 33-year artistic partnership between Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012).

Fischli Weiss — **Top**: Peter Fischli David Weiss, *The Way Things Go*, 1987. Color video, transferred from 16 mm color film, with sound, 30 min. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Matthew Marks. © Peter Fischli and David Weiss. **Above**: Peter Fischli David Weiss, Image from Airports, 1987–2012. Digital slide projection of 469 color images. Glenstone. © Peter Fischli and David Weiss

Gathering more than three hundred sculptures, photographs, slide projections, and videos, the presentation encapsulates and culminates the dynamic collaboration between the Swiss artists, bringing into focus the generative and incisive dialogue they sustained over the course of their joint career. Through its simultaneously witty and profound appropriation of cultural genres—from low-budget Hollywood flicks and picture-postcard views to the art historical trope of the readymade and the kind of amateur philosophy found in self-help books—the work continues to probe our grasp of reality and offer a deceptively casual meditation on how we perceive everyday life. As contemporary alchemists, Fischli and Weiss transformed the ordinary into something decisively not.

Initially planned during David Weiss’s lifetime, “Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better” is organized by Nancy Spector, Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator and Deputy Director, and Nat Trotman, Curator, Performance and Media, in close collaboration with Peter Fischli.

Unfolding along the museum’s spiraling ramps and into one Tower gallery, the exhibition departs from a traditional retrospective’s chronological format. Instead, select bodies of work appear in dialogues that span the breadth of Fischli and Weiss’s collaboration. In this way, the presentation highlights compelling connections among different series and underscores the conceptual coherence of the artists’ multiform practice. The exhibition also focuses on the centrality of film and video to Fischli and Weiss’s practice, with photographs, sculptures, and installations placed alongside moving-image works in order to represent the full scope of their oeuvre.

Peter Fischli David Weiss, *The Least Resistance*, 1980–81. Color video, transferred from Super 8 film, with sound, 29 min. Courtesy the artists. © Peter Fischli and David Weiss

To coincide with the Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition, two public projects in New York bring Fischli and Weiss’s work to a wider audience. As part of the “Midnight Moment program”, Times Square Arts and Times Square Advertising Coalition show Büsi (Kitty) (2001) every night at 11:57 pm throughout the month of February 2016; the artists’ video of a cat drinking milk was first shown in Times Square in 2001.

The Public Art Fund presents How to Work Better (1991), the artists’ text-based monument to labor, as a wall mural in Lower Manhattan, marking the first time it has been shown outside its original installation as a mural in Zürich. On view from February 5 through May 1, 2016, at Houston and Mott Streets.

5 February 2016 – 27 April 2016
Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better
Guggenheim Museum, New York

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