Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better

Paying tribute to an artistic partnership of more than 30 years, this richly illustrated book explores Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s acclaimed and influential body of work, known for its sly humor and profound meditations on the everyday. Throughout the course of their collaboration, Peter Fischli and David Weiss celebrated the sheer triviality of everyday existence, observing the world with bemused detachment. As this book shows, their often humorous work offers a sustained reflection on the intertwined strands of leisure, productivity, and playful absurdity that shape our lives. With its deliberately mundane subject matter and quotidian source material, their work explores the poetics of banality in a wide range of mediums, including photography, videos, slide projections, films, books, sculptures, and multimedia installations. This retrospective volume features an in-depth, illustrated survey of the artists’ long history of collaboration, from the early Sausage Series (1979)—staged vignettes created in miniature using deli meats and various household items—to their last work, the large-scale public installation Rock on Top of Another Rock (2009–present), augmented by documentary images, notes on process, and interview excerpts culled from the artists’ Zurich-based archives. A series of probing essays on their practice and thematic concerns rounds out this definitive account of Fischli and Weiss’s vital contribution to contemporary art.

NANCY SPECTOR is Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.