One of my favourite pieces of writing on Fischli/Weiss is by Peter Schjeldahl, because he openly refuses to make grand claims for their work. In fact, he does the exact opposite: ‘As professional artists, these guys are pretty jejune. Their ideas are hybrids or retreads of precedents they don’t advance or otherwise alter significantly.’1 It’s true: Fischli/Weiss don’t strive to be the first or best or most spectacular. They even seem to harness mediocrity. As a result, all attempts to stake them a place in art history appear painfully strained, since every aspect of their work actively resists aggrandisement. Stiller Nachmittag ( Quiet Afternoon 1984/5) is completely typical in this respect. It comprises a series of twenty-
seven photographs of sculptures made using everyday objects precariously arranged into understated, pointless and often unmemorably complex neologisms, untitleds and the utterly inexplicable. None of the compositions bear any significant relation to any of the others in the series, which is so disparate that it fails to produce a coherent whole. There could be forty pictures or only five; it wouldn’t make that much difference.
Such slack randomness has an immediately deflationary effect on art ­historical analysis. If anything, Quiet Afternoon is a send-up of traditional sculpture and the language with which we read it. Composition, matter, dynamism, 􀁱re and weight, the language pictoriality: with all these which terms we read fall it. flat in the Composition, face of matter, ropey matenals and bathetic titling. It’s hard to discuss a work as sculpture when the object of your study is a quizzical courgette tentatively gracing a stumpy carrot supported by a slim cheese grater. What follows, then, is a replacement for such potentially excruciating legitimations. It’s a short compendium of art references that come to mind when perusing Quiet Afternoon. What comes to the fore is the recurrent theme of gravity: a split second of provisional balance before the objects
come clattering to the floor. Perhaps those afternoons weren’t so quiet after all.

Am Abgrund (On the Brink)/Das Experiment(The Experiment)/Die Verfeinerung (Refinement)

Raised up, but visually unstable, these table sculptures could be smaller in scale, skeletal, and so present faster, dynamic compositions. Elegant drawings in space, they lead the eyes like swift dancers, seemingly ready to step gracefully free of the table’s boundaries.’

Schlummerschlinge (Slumber Loop)/Ohne Titel (Untitled)/Die Verschworung (The Conspiracy)