If you’re in New York, you should stop by Matthew Marks Gallery for the Peter Fischli David Weiss exhibition. Most known for the astounding The Way Things Go – a Rude Goldberg-like video full of fire, catapults and slow dissolves – the Swiss artist duo also work with encyclopedic archives of banal tourist photos, and black rubber. Sun, Moon and Stars, one of three shows in the current exhibition, is made up of 800 magazine advertisements arranged under glass on waist-high tables. Originally commissioned for the annual report of a Swiss conglomerate, it blossomed into an index of late capitalist iconography. Like their other image archives, it is a bit overwhelming, and not a little frightening.
And fun. My visit mostly consisted of trying to analyze, in five seconds or less, the organizational principles underlying pairs of images. Above, the assured, assuring faces of big business.
The two other shows are Clay and Rubber and Sleeping Puppets, featuring, well, clay and rubber sculptures and sleeping puppets. All three run until January 16th. Matthew Marks is located on 22nd and 24th Streets, in Chelsea.
And since you’re in the neighborhood, you should pop around the corner to Printed Matter, on 10th Ave and 22nd St, and pick up a copy of our newest issue!
Photography by scg
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[...] of watermelons and cat food cans and took their photo. All that’s left is their index. Fischli Weiss photograph playful assemblages of household objects (old woman’s heels interlaced into a [...]
[...] property theft; she is an archivist, or more generously, an artist who uses photography (see: Fischli Weiss). But the idea of the Internet as a new kind of street is interesting, and it has been picked up on [...]