OPINIONATED with Tristan Petsola

This is a series coordinated by Saman Mimohammadi Tehrani of insightful exhibition reviews from Sotheby’s Institute's MA Contemporary Art. The series, 'Opinionated’, engages with contemporary art debates and practices. Saman is a former event planner and part of the creative team for MADE IN BED. He currently resides in London, England.

The exhibition review below was written by Tristan Petsola.

© Sprüth Magers Gallery

SHOULD I PAINT A PIRATE SHIP ON MY CAR WITH AN ARMED FIGURE ON IT HOLDING A DECAPITATED HEAD BY THE HAIR? — Sprüth Magers Gallery

The ePeter Fischli and David Weiss’s exhibition SHOULD I PAINT A PIRATE SHIP ON MY CAR WITH AN ARMED FIGURE ON IT HOLDING A DECAPITATED HEAD BY THE HAIR? at Sprüth Magers gallery in London is a foray into the forthcoming and the banal. The exhibition’s three distinct artworks all approach the forthcoming with different techniques; leading the artworks to serve as tools in understanding our present as volatile and at a cusp. The subject matter of the banal is consistent throughout the three artworks in the exhibition as it has been for the artists’ whole career.   

Peter Fischli and David Weiss worked together since the 1970’s up until Weiss’s death in 2012. Their collaborative effort saw them representing Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1995, later winning the prestigious Golden Lion prize in 2003. Apart from the Venice biennial, Fischli & Weiss have had their artworks featured at documenta, Gwangju Biennale, as well as retrospectives at Tate Modern, Guggenheim Museum in New York and many others. The artists are known for highlighting the banal not only in daily life but also finding it within grander thematic or contextual spaces.  

The centrepiece of the exhibition is The Raft, which is situated on the ground floor of the gallery. The work consists of a plethora of polyurethane objects on dark wooden beams also made of polyurethane. Underneath the raft, the gallery floor is covered with creaking wooden floorboards—setting both an audible and visual tone to the work. Around the raft, half-submerged into the floor, crocodiles are ominously positioned towards the raft; as if closing in on it. The next room is empty save for some more crocodiles and hippos, signalling that the impending threat is still there even if you move away from the raft itself. 

In accordance with Fischli & Weiss’s preoccupation with the changing nature of objects in different contexts, the title of The Raft is worth extrapolating on. The work’s original title was “Mad Max,” titled thus after the 1981 apocalyptic sci-fi film of the same name. The earlier title is then a conspicuous nod to desolation and the apocalypse. The aesthetics of the film are widely different than those of the artwork, creating a disjoint between the title and the work. Referring to the film in the title situates the apocalyptic in the spatio-temporal future. Now the reworked title The Raft does away this dislocation by generalising the idea of desolation, moving it away from a fixed point in the imaginary. The new contextualisation (or de-contextualisation from the specific) is timely and necessary given the climate crisis that is moving towards an all-encompassing material reality.  

The work is successful in creating a sense of uncanniness from the ubiquity of polyurethane in the piece. There is a stark contrast between the creaky wooden floorboards and the mock wooden raft. Among the objects on the raft there is an accordion, a cannon, a bar of soap, a pig with eight piglets sucking its teats, and a skull on top of what looks like a treasure chest. Zeroing in on the objects and trying to find a commonality between them is a futile endeavour and ipso facto what creates the sense of uncanniness in the work. The parts of the artwork is greater than the whole as looking at the individual objects is an active process that creates the feeling of confusion rather than considering the array of objects as a heap of randomness not worth investigating.  

 There are ostensible nods to staples in art history like Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa or depictions of Noah’s Ark but getting hung up on such references defies the banality of The Raft. 

The first floor of the gallery houses 12 tables each with 45 black and white photographs. The photographs titled Fotografias depict mundane objects and settings rendered even more mundane by the quality of the photographs, which is usually purposefully poor or made poor by the colour and texture. Fotografias is emblematic of Fischli & Weiss’s grander production as they are known for investigating what pictures of the banal does as in their collection of anti-aesthetic photographs of airports. The photographs depict, among other subjects, cats and playgrounds that are made lifeless and boring. These images are often close ups or cropped such that the usual symbolism of the subject matter as joyful or exuberant is negated. Again, the banality of the photographs serves a productive function in thinking about the power of the quality of images as well as their juxtaposition. 

© Sprüth Magers Gallery

The third work in the exhibition is titled Kanalvideo. As the title suggests, the 62:30 min video features a continuous movement through an underground passage or sewer. Kanal means both channel and sewer in German and as such the work is questioning the mode of consumption of entertainment by likening a TV-channel to a sewer and showing its endless stream. The piece, featuring no sound, is hypnotic in its ceaseless forward motion. It is a very timely piece to display in 2020 when ideas surrounding the saturation of entertainment and what place slow-affect visual culture occupies in the zeitgeist. A guess, based on the number of gallery visitors I saw who did not last more than a couple of minutes, is that not many Sunday gallery-hoppers watched the piece in its entirety and consequently missed some of the vivid color changes and saturations. This poses the question of whether a work like Kanalvideo in 2020 functions as a resistance to the current mode of consumption or it is a work that does not adequately address it. In an art historical context, that dichotomy is perhaps commensurable.  

The strength of the exhibition lies in precisely the anachronism of viewership that can serve as a tool to investigate viewing habits and cultural consumption. The boredom generated by, and banality of, the artworks are effective in their prima facie ineffectiveness.  

 Tristan Petsola

Contributor, MADE IN BED