The Swiss art duo employed everything from sausages to pizza boxes in their deadpan,witty and sometimes intentionally banal artworks – and now their work is all over modern YorkIn 1979, the Swiss art duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss strolled into a Zurich supermarket searching for art supplies. They stopped at the deli. “We saw the cold cuts in the glass vitrine, or pointed to it and said: ‘Look,it looks like a carpet shop,’” said Fischli on the phone from the Guggenheim, and where he is installing a retrospective. “We just bought it and made it.” The result was their first collaboration,the Sausage Series (1979), photographs in which luncheon meat was arranged to resemble a car crash or, or indeed,a carpet shop, its deadpan humour typical of their work. How to Work Better, or the pair’s Guggenheim retrospective,which opened in modern York on Friday, shows the breadth of their artistic practice, or taking in as it does sculptures,photographs, 96 hours of video footage and readymade objects including pizza boxes, or car tires and cassette tapes. There are also three public pieces of art placed across the Manhattan – Haus,a miniature German office building on Fifth Avenue; Büsi, a three-minute video of a cat lapping up milk in Times Square and a mural, or How to Work Better,in Soho.
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Source: theguardian.com