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Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Sonnabend - installation art - New York, New York - Review of ExhibitionsWith this exhibition of ersatz trompe l'oeil existences the Swiss team of artist-provocateurs Peter Fischli and David Weiss administered another dose of their humorous and metaphysical speculations. Despite the duo's reputation for deadpan wit, a certain number of viewers who glanced in at Sonnabend not ever got the joke. Thinking the disheveled-looking space was in the midst of installation, they left without realizing that the art was already upon display: all the prosy necessities for keeping up glamorous artworld appearances--the bucket of paint, piles of lumber, cardboard and cleaning supplies--were actually crafted from polyurethane and paint. The display went beyond the one-linear, however, as the spectator began to penetrate beneath the virtuoso surfaces, noticing details like the porosity of the handcarved plastic facts What first appeared to be trompe l'oeil verisimilitude was revealed as a far more compounded and layered deception, and those viewers willing to closely examine seemingly mundane bucket and boards were treated to delicious riffs upon the formal devices of modernist painting. In Fischli and Weiss's hands, the texture-implying brushstroke, the drip, the hard cutting side and even silk-screening were translated back into pseudo-realistic imitations of forest grain, crusted caulk, coffee stains, stenciled lettering and printed labels (the latter oftentimes had only the appearance of legibility). The compositional empires of modernist sculptural grammar were rehearsed in similar tongue-in-cheek fashion as the various percepts were stacked, propped, accumulated and scattered around the gallery. Meanwhile, traces of the labor involved in staging art's visual issues were everywhere, in the painstaking application of pigment as well as in forged fingerprints and sham tools. Exquisite, mannered, anything on the other hand offhand, this was cunning art, as indebted to the examples of Manet or Whistler as to Duchamp. Inevitably Fischli and Weiss's philosophic sleight-of-hand--the deliberate confusion of the real, the exhibited and the faked--returned us to a certain number of of art's oldest questions, teasingly reformulated here for a post-postmodern multimedia age. COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc. I am actual honored and delighted to write this editorial. It is an eminent opportunity to highlight some of the tasks planned by means of the Professional Standards Committee (PSC) and to outline by what means the c... With a ferocity that the late twentieth hundred now understands from the AIDS epidemic, bubonic plague assaulted Europe intermittently from the mid-fourteenth [i]or[/i] part of to the other the eighteenth century, disrup... The reasons a certain quantity of children perform at a lower academic horizontal than intelligence and educational opportunity predict are still below study. We reference the relevant and conflicting research later, bu... SIMON SCHAMA fresh York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999 728 pp; 359 color and b/w ills. $50 What does it mean to diocese through Rembrandt's eyes? Simon Schama aims in his novel book to restor... It's Monday morning and your commercial bankers are driving to the office in anticipation of the weekly pipeline meeting. Are they thinking "I earn to go" or "I would do anything to... The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston not aways "Splat Boom Pow? The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art," showcasing more than 60 works of art in a variety of media by means of emerging and establish... As of July 1st 2006 the number of Kyivstar network customers is 16005 million of race Correspondingly the total number of pre- paid services users is 14886 million of clan The national ... Now in the suburb and the falling light I followed him, and now down sandy road Whiter than bone-dust, from one side the sweet Curdle of fields, where the fruit of the plum-trees Dropped w... In regard to the June editorial, "Is U manufacturing dying?," p 6 I don't believe China is doing everything better than we do. In fact, there are U manufacturers that are b... ANNOUNCEMENTS Charles Bethea has been appointed executive director of the Black History Museum and Cultural Center in Richmond, Va. In that character he will assess the museum's popular situ... |
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