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(...) The play at times outgrows
the scale of mere toys, as when Fischli and Weiss balance
tires or even kitchen chairs in precarious arrangements,
giving the latter the interesting title of Outlaws.
Daniel Soutif relates Fischli's account of how the
compositions always collapsed after a few brief moments,
provoking the artists to question how they might utilize
the energy of these breakdowns. This led, via the
intervention of genius, to their masterpiece, The Way
Things Go (which I would prefer to translate as
"The Course of Things"), a film in which tires
and scuffed wooden chairs play a starring role.
The film consists of a number of events linked together in an improbable causal chain: a rotating garbage bag untwists the rope from which it hangs, moving closer and closer toward the floor as it does so until it touches a tire positioned beneath it, which now takes up the action by rolling down an inclined plane and banging into a plank that gives it a further kick, which initiates a stepladder's awkward descent until it trips, which causes a further reaction... until, ultimately, some sort of inflammable foam goes up in smoke as it spills over the lip of a tray. Between start and finish, more tires are set rolling, bottles are overturned, liquids spill, and things ignite, untwist, explode, rotate, and roll on eccentric axes along dinky tracks. As is often observed,
the film has the deflected ingenuity of a cracked
inventor such as Rube Goldberg, who drew such
contraptions for his readers' amusement a generation or
so ago. But there is this difference: Goldberg's
contrivances were madly complex devices, requiring an
improbable assemblage of components for achieving tasks
capable of being done by anyone simply and directly -
like lighting cigars or rocking a baby or pouring coffee.
They were caricatures of so-called Yankee ingenuity,
expressing itself in "labor-saving devices"
that "no home should be without"; but, rickety
and crazy, these devices interposed so much mediating
gear between agent and task that one always feared they
would not be up to the homely demands made of them. The
causal chain in The Way Things Go, on the other
hand, has no function and no goal. But in concatenating
slides, roils, tumbles, spills, booms, bangs, and spins,
it vividly illustrates what Kant offers by way of
characterization of the work of art: it seems purposive
while lacking any specific purpose. It does nothing, but
it seems to embody, for viewers to whom I have shown it,
meanings that touch on waste, violence, pollution,
exhaustion, and despair, all somehow reinforced by the
overwhelming sense of suspense generated by the fact that
it is a film: the individual episodes seem to happen one
after another smoothly and without interruption - the
danger being that something will go wrong and break the
chain. It is, for all the triviality of its individual
episodes, an epic of some kind, vastly transcending the
connotations of play while retaining the spirit of
innocent mischief in which boys at play egg one another
on to high and higher efforts which, taken collectively,
seem to imply the pointless horror of unending war.
Beginning with a Katzenjammer Kids mentality, Fischli and
Weiss take their mischief to a distance so great that the
resulting work becomes a postmodern classic, with a rich
art-historical pedigree ranging from Jean Tinguely, the
fabricator of self-destroying machines, to Joseph Beuys,
who made art of soap, old newspapers, and whatever was,
to echo Heidegger once again, "at hand." |
In A Restless World postmedia |
