Peter Fischli and David Weiss: Merry Pranksters

Among the first works that the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss made together, in 1979, was a series of pictures called “The Sausage Photographs,” one of which depicts a family of cornichons examining piles of pancetta and stacked slices of mortadella, while a white radish lingers nearby. Until Weiss’s death, in 2012, Fischli/Weiss, as the duo came to be known, played up this sort of childlike humor, making art from everyday objects. But they were not merely teasing. “Banality is just a first impression,” says Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim Museum’s deputy director, who has organized their first New York retrospective, “Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better” (February 5 through April 20). The two had a way of elevating the ordinary: They turned amateur photography into high art and crafted painstakingly hand-carved sculptures of mundane objects, like pizza boxes. For their 1987 film, The Way Things Go, widely recognized as a masterpiece, they used the detritus in their studio—tires, trash bags, old shoes—to create a long causal chain in which objects burned, dissolved, and slid down ramps. “On one level, they’re tinkerers,” Spector says. “But the work is quite profound.”**