Peter Fischli David Weiss (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Peter Fischli and David Weiss are Swiss artists who first began working together in the late 1970s. Their sculpture, video and photographic works all generate a unique atmosphere of concentration and relaxed pleasure. The mood of the work ranges from the humorous - a clay figure group of 1981, for example, entitled Mick Jagger and Brian Jones going home satisfied after composing 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction' - to the banal - a photographic series devoted to Airports - and even the apparently invisible - their Untitled installation simulating, through minutely detailed polyurethane sculptures, an unfinished exhibition site.
While Fischli and Weiss occupy the international art world's most prestigious levels - representing Switzerland at the 1995 Venice Biennale and returning eight years later to win the Leone d'Oro prize for their slideshow Will Happiness Find Me? - they remain an unpredictable force at the very cutting edge of new art. This is the first true monograph on this extraordinary pair, who have exhibited worldwide, and whose solo exhibitions include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1992), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988), and Tate Modern, London (2006).
In his Survey, French critic and curator Robert Fleck looks at Fischli and Weiss' ability to resist conventional artistic categories, crossing fluidly between sculpture, installation, photography and the moving image. In the Interview Swiss critic Beate Sontgen discusses with the artists notions of sincerity and illusion, and examines the question of how literally viewers are asked to read their work. Noted art critic and leading authority on Fischli and Weiss Professor Arthur C. Danto examines in the Focus the immensely popular The Way Things Go, offering a new perspective on this well-known film. For Artists' Choice Fischli and Weiss have chosen a text by Robert Walser on the pleasure of walking that mirrors their own meanderings. Artists' Writings include unpublished scripts from early video works and a 1996 interview with the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.