- Venue
- Afterall, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
- Location
- United Kingdom
‘Fischli and Weiss: The Way Things Go’ by Jeremy Millar (London, Afterall: 2007) is part of the Afterall ‘One Work’ series, in which a writer particularly taken with the featured work of art argues its significance for the making and meaning of other artworks. ‘The Way Things Go’ (1987) is a thirty-minute film which Millar describes as a ‘seemingly chaotic, obviously choreographed sequence of everyday objects crashing, falling, tipping, rolling one into, onto over another, and this then, in turn, taking its turn in the seemingly never-ending sequence of controlled catastrophe.’
Millar explores alternatively mechanisation, boredom, humour and wonder as the key to the work’s greatness and origins, situating it in a wider historical context than simply that of art history. His enthusiasm for the piece is evident, at times verging on geeky, as he sympathises with the misunderstood pioneers of mechanised society.
For hardcore fans the book is full of insights, which isn’t to say that a reader unfamiliar with the work would be out of their depth, but with a piece whose greatest and most immediate point of interest is its sensuality, a book would be hard-pressed to do it justice even without the studiousness of this research. Curiously, one would expect no less attention to detail from a hardcore Fischli and Weiss fan, as study seems to go hand-in-hand with play in the art itself. It’s just that, owing to the limitations of a book’s format, emphasis is taken away from the physical experience of the work and it seems especially true of this film that a still does not act as a picture but only as a fragment – perhaps unsurprisingly, given it’s a chain reaction. Millar notes that even the discrete photographs of the ‘Equilibres’ series (1984-86), which proceeded the film’s conception, ‘can be seen to be no more than a point along an ongoing process of metamorphosis, a development of the construction’ of a larger work, quoting an apt remark of French art historian Henri Focillon that such work ‘does not occur on the spur of the moment, but results from a long series of experiments. To speak of the life of forms is inevitably to invoke the idea of succession.’
Millar concludes by arguing that the work is timeless, both pre-historic and post-apocalyptic, because it is about itself (without, I gather, being consciously self-reflexive). That it is an historic work is convincing, although the work itself is surely more so. Millar certainly succeeds in making the reader want to experience it first-hand, however, as the book, at times, is wont to make explicit its own limitations.
