The Way
Things Go
by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Directors
First Run / Icarus Films, Brooklyn NY,
1987
DVD, 30 mins., col.
Sales, $280.00; rental, $50.00
Distributors Website: http://www.frif.com.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa, USA
ballast@netins.net
This is a reissue of a delightfully curious,
offbeat film that was released originally
in 1987. Seeing it now for the first time,
I find it fresh and instructive, in part
because it reaffirms what I and other
teachers gained in the 1970s from reading
books and essays by Claude Levi-Strauss,
Edmund Leach, and other structural anthropologists.
As were they, we were particularly interested
in the concept of bricolage, the
idea that learning might often result,
not from intractable scientific inquiry,
but from deliberately screwing aroundfrom
improvisation. Among the heroes we unearthed
was an American cartoonist named Rube
Goldberg (1883-1970), who, in the 1920s
and 30s, had published satirical drawings
about a fictional Professor Butts, a hopelessly
blind academic (an absentminded professor)
who made absurdly complex schemes with
which to accomplish the easiest tasks.
When I began teaching in the early 1970s,
we founded a humorous annual event called
the Rube Goldberg Drawing Machine Contest,
in which students of art and design, using
only the most prosaic materials, were
challenged to devise "machines"
that produced some kind of discernible
mark (or "drawing"). The results
were not simply amusingthey
were virtually always amazing
Well, this film is an artists view
of exactly the same process. It was precisely
choreographed and then just as exactly
recorded in a large warehouse, and consists
of the step-by-step evidence of a chain
reaction that was collaboratively devised
by two Swiss artists, Peter Fischli and
David Weiss. Throughout the process, these
two artists (whom we never see, nor is
there any narration) use such common household
trash as balloons, tires, wooden ramps,
and teakettles, combined with an amateurs
knowledge about water, fire, gravity,
gunpowder, and other basic chemical props.
Once triggered, this process continues
for a half hour, and at times it may even
feel longer than that. Having once been
excited by playing around with bricolage,
I myself did not lose interest in the
films eventsbut, in
fairness to others, I should note that
the artist who watched it with me was
all but asleep when it ended.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Vol. 20, No. 2,
Winter 2005.)