Paru le 20/10/2005 | Broché sous jaquette 160 pages
Tout public
Interview Beate Söntgen is Professor of Art History at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany. From 2003-04 she was Laurenz-Professor of Contemporary Art at Basel University, Switzerland, and from 1998-2002 Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Braunschweig, Germany. She has published several books and contributed to many catalogues and publications, including Texte zur Kunst and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Her post-doctorate focuses on `Representation, Rhetoric, Knowledge'. Survey Robert Fleck is the Director of the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. He has been working as an art critic and curator since 1981. From 1991-93 he was the Federal Curator for Austrian contemporary art, and in 1998 he co-curated Manifesta 2. From 2000-03 he was Director of ERBAN Fine Art School in Nantes. His books include Die Mühl-Kommune (2003) and Yves Klein (2004). Focus Arthur C. Danto is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York, and the art critic for The Nation. His books include Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life (2005), The Madonna of the Future (2000), which won Le Prix Philosophie in 2003, and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (1992), which won the Book Critics Circle Award. Artists' Choice Robert Walser (1878-1956) was a Swiss writer of short stories, essays and four novels, incuding The Tanner Children (1906), The Factotum (1908) and Jakob von Gunten (1909), for which he is best known. Largely self-taught and indifferent to worldly success, he led a wandering, precarious existence. In 1925 he wrote another major work, The Robber, which remained unpublished until 1972. He entered an insane asylum in 1933, where he remained for the rest of his life. Artists' Writings Peter Fischli and David Weiss' work has been seen at such key international exhibitions as documenta 8 (1987) and X (1997), the Biennales of Sydney (1990, 1998) and São Paulo (1989) and the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1988), among many others. Included here is an interview from 1996 with Rirkrit Tiravanija, one of the many noted contemporary artists who admire Fischli and Weiss' understated, unmonumental style.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss are Swiss artists who first began working together in the late 1970s. Their sculpture, video and photographic works all generate a unique atmosphere of concentration and relaxed pleasure. The mood of the work ranges from the humorous - a clay figure group of 1981, for example, entitled Mick Jagger and Brian Jones going home satisfied after composing `I Can't Get No Satisfaction' - to the banal - a photographic series devoted to Airports - and even the apparently invisible - their Untitled installation simulating, through minutely detailed polyurethane sculptures, an unfinished exhibition site.
While Fischli and Weiss occupy the international art world's most prestigious levels - representing Switzerland at the 1995 Venice Biennale and returning eight years later to win the Leone d'Oro prize for their slideshow Will Happiness Find Me? - they remain an unpredictable force at the very cutting edge of new art. This is the first true monograph on this extraordinary pair, who have exhibited worldwide, and whose solo exhibitions include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1992), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988), and Tate Modern, London (2006).
In his Survey, French critic and curator Robert Fleck looks at Fischli and Weiss' ability to resist conventional artistic categories, crossing fluidly between sculpture, installation, photography and the moving image. In the Interview Swiss critic Beate Söntgen discusses with the artists notions of sincerity and illusion, and examines the question of how literally viewers are asked to read their work. Noted art critic and leading authority on Fischli and Weiss Professor Arthur C. Danto examines in the Focus the immensely popular The Way Things Go, offering a new perspective on this well-known film. For Artists' Choice Fischli and Weiss have chosen a text by Robert Walser on the pleasure of walking that mirrors their own meanderings. Artists' Writings include unpublished scripts from early video works and a 1996 interview with the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.
