"PETER FISCHLI, DAVID WEISS: Visible World, Suddenly this Overview, Big Questions – Small Questions"
2000-10-07 until 2001-02-04
Museum of Contemporary Art
Basel, , CH Switzerland

The objects and situations, the big and small issues, which Peter Fischli (b.1952, Zurich) and David Weiss (b.1946, Zurich) choose to address in their art, belong to the everyday concerns familiar to all of us. But the artists' perspective on these objects and situations subjects them to a transformation that is unexpected and unfathomable, and yet also full of humour and irony. The transformation has very little to do with the objects and situations themselves but a great deal to do with our ideas about them.

In the three room-sized installations in this exhibition, Fischli and Weiss direct their attention to the important themes in life, namely the entire world and reality. Suddenly this Overview (1981) with its 150 clay sculptures, Visible World (2000), a 22 meter long light frame with 2800 small-format photographs and the new slide-installation Big Questions – Small Questions created for this exhibition all present different panoramas of the world in which we are living. The variety of the three overviews is bewildering as a totality, they pose an unsuspected philosophical dilemma: an overview of reality is impossible. It is equally impossible to make a representative selection precisely because we can never have an overview. In consequence the choice of subject matter made by Fischli and Weiss is logically arbitrary and logically reveals the arbitrariness of any system of ordering things.

IMAGE:
Mick Jagger and Brian Jones going
home satisfied after composing
I Cant Get No Satisfaction,
from: Suddenly This Overview. 1981
unfired clay

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