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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
Distributor’s 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 around——from 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 amusing——they 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 amateur’s 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 film’s events——but, 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.)

 

 

 




Updated 1st February 2005


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