with alternately generic and specific titles, includ-
ingIn den Bergen(In the Mountains) andTitantic.
The most widely circulated image from the series is
Der Unfall (The Accident), a two-car sausage-
mobile collision against a backdrop of roughly
carved cardboard high-rises, with cigarette butts,
in lieu of human bodies, posed in the scene as both
onlookers and casualties. The image bears a timbre
common to all of the work of Fischli and Weiss: it
is at once ludic, with a childlike sense of inventive-
ness, and bothered, with a trace of agitation.
For the five years followingWurstserie, Fischli
and Weiss abandoned the camera in favor of the
unfired clay ofPlo ̈tzlich diese U ̈bersicht(Suddenly
this Overview), 1981; and the polyurethane, cloth,
and paint of their three subsequent projects. While
many of their collaborations do away with the cam-
era altogether, it seems that the possibilities and
practices associated with photographic technolo-
gies are always at work in the output of Fischli
and Weiss. Like the sausage-animated images of
their debut collaboration, their practices in other
media of the same period show a commitment to the
commonplace, and an exploration of the promise
and thresholds of archival practices and the positi-
vist systems of modernity—every image captured
with a camera begs the viewing subject to wonder
how many other images might have been missed.
With their return to the camera inStiller Nachmit-
tag(Quiet Afternoon), 1984–1985, the pair pro-
duced a series of black-and-white and color
photographs of contraptions devised out of food
and kitchen gadgets. These still images of contri-
vances anticipate the best-known work of Fischli
and Weiss,Der Lauf der Dinge(The Way Things
Go) 1985–1987.
A half hour of color footage shot on 16 milli-
meter film,Der Lauf der Dinge follows a chain
reaction, from a rotating trash bag which sets a
tire in motion through a series of other events, to
the ultimate overflow of a foamy substance and its
subsequent ignition. En route, there are a number
of spills, unravelings, eruptions, explosions, and
rotations. Frequently characterized as a Rube
Goldberg, the events shown inDer Lauf der Dinge
are fundamentally different from the zany contrap-
tions invented by Goldberg, who illustrated them to
amuse his readers. A Rube Goldberg device entails,
per definition, an obsessively elaborate design, ulti-
mately yielding the completion of a very simple
task, such as juicing an orange or shutting a win-
dow. Goldberg’s inventions were a playful critique
of Taylorist fantasies of efficiency, but nothing hap-
pens at the end ofDer Lauf der Dinge; it is utterly
non-teleological. In spite of this apparent aimless-
ness, or perhaps because of it, the footage is abso-
lutely compelling and uneasy. Arthur Danto has
suggested that the uncanny quality of the piece
may be attributed to its visual quality and the mate-
rials used in the contraption, suggestive of an inter-
rogation space and various implements of torture.
2003 saw renewed interest inDer Lauf der Dinge
when Fischli and Weiss publicly considered legal
action against Honda in response to a car commer-
cial which clearly references their work, giving rise
to provocative debates around questions of intellec-
tual property.
In the years devoted to the realization ofDer
Lauf der Dinge, Fischli and Weiss also produced a
number of cast rubber works before returning to the
photographic medium withAirportsin 1988. The
series of cibachrome images taken around the world
show commercial jets of variously relevant global
import on runways, surrounded by cargo, truck-
loads of luggage, and the occasional worker, shot
against a range of landscapes, including mountain
ranges, bleak industrial surroundings, and lush
flora. The images are aggressively generic; one
could easily imagine them on the pages of an in-
flight children’s activity book. The strategically art-
less photographs have an undercurrent of anxiety;
even in a pre-9/11 world, airplanes and all of the
trappings of air travel connote the threat of con-
tamination from afar, and the dangers of hijackers,
mechanical malfunctions, and crashes. IfAirports
evokes the nervousness of departure, then the next
Fischli and Weiss project addresses the anticipation
of arrivals. The 1991Bilder, Ansichten(Pictures,
Opinions) is a series of color photographs including
the most cliche ́d images of Paris, Giza, Stonehenge,
Sydney, and Rome, as well as snow-capped moun-
tains, butterflies and flowers, goldfish, children,
and a kitten. Without question, the artists maintain
their attention to the seemingly banal in still photo-
graphs, and in their video work this inevitably
stands in the foreground of issues of temporality
and duration.
In the early nineties, Fischli and Weiss completed
a number of color videotape projects, explicitly con-
fronting questions of the archive and the limits of
spectatorship. The most epic of these projects is the
untitled video installation mounted at the Swiss Pa-
vilion of the 1995 Venice Biennale, consisting of 30
color videotapes containing 80 hours of footage of
the artists’ journeys, from little local drives to inter-
continental trips. The artists installed the video in
Venice on 12 monitors, making it impossible to
watch everything at once. Throughout the 1990s,FISCHLI, PETER, AND DAVID WEISS