“Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better”

Curated by Nancy Spector and Nat Trotman

Los Angeles, 1981. Rat and Bear walk into a gallery speaking Schweizerdeutsch, looking for fame, money, purpose. Stumbling upon a dead body, they empty its pockets and walk off with the corpse. An unexpected opportunity arises, and they run with it. Robbing the dead and snatching bodies? It would be stupid of me to find a summation of more than thirty years’ work in this scene from Peter Fischli and the late David Weiss’s first film, The Point of Least Resistance. But the two artists have always seemed sympathetic to the uncreative thought—deploying it to brilliant effect, using forms others might have pronounced inert or worse: carved trompe l’oeil studio clutter, photos of gardens, a sculpture of a rock atop another rock. Often mistaken for being funny, their poker-faced works and laconic titles—Equilibres, Suddenly This Overview, Rock on Top of Another Rock—could be the answers to the universe or just a passing shrug. The Guggenheim’s spiraling ramp seems to have been waiting for the makers of The Way Things Go. Finally, this overview.