David Weiss attended art school in Zurich from 1963 to 1964, and then in Basle from 1964 to 1965. He began a career devoted to painting, punctuated by personal exhibitions from 1976 to 1979, and took part in collective exhibitions such as Bilder [Les Images] in 1981 at the Kunsthalle in Winterthur, where he presented his last personal work, Planetarium. He also published books, in collaboration with Urs Lüthi, for the Zurich publishers Stähli in 1970 and 1979.
In 1979, David Weiss grouped up with another Zurich artist, Peter Fischli. They adopted a joint signature, F / W, so their works cannot be attributed to one any more than to the other. Each artist's point of view simultaneously created an unstable equilibrium and the dynamic of their collaboration. As soon as they began creating together, their work was heterogeneous, combining films, photographs, artistic books and sculptures on media as diverse as clay, resin and polyurethane.
In 1979, the first of their joint works was entitled Wurstseries [Sausage Series]. This series of photographs showed cooked meat products and all sorts of refuse in scenes from day-to-day life (for example, a car accident represented by sausage-cars and cigarette-end-pedestrians).
In 1980, they made their first film, Der Gerinste Widerstand [The Least Resistance], shot using Super 8 in Hollywood. The subject of this dialog between a rat and a bear, played by Fischli and Weiss themselves, is a discussion on the quest for success and knowledge. In the same year, they published Ordnung und Reinlichkeit [Order and Cleanliness], a veritable bible for understanding their work, in which, by means of a mass of diagrams, graphics and essential ques tions ("Should I change the sheets on the bed?", "Where is the galaxy going?"), they define derision as the ultimate product of wisdom and also as the key element for comprehending their works.
In 1981, their first personal exhibition Plötzlich diese Ubersicht [Suddenly this Overview], held at the Stähli gallery in Zurich, brought together a series of 250 soft-clay objects placed on plinths of different heights or hung on the wall. Despite the sober presentation, the overall impression for the spectator was one of profusion because of the impossibility of taking everything in at a single glance.
Their second film, in 1982, Der Rechte Weg [The Straight and Narrow], shot in Switzerland using 16 mm film and lasting 60 minutes, took the same form as their first film, a dialogue between a bear and a rat. In 1984-1985, at the Monika Sprüth gallery in Cologne, they exhibited Stiller Nachmittag [Quiet Afternoon], a series of photographs showing kitchen utensils and vegetables in unstable equilibrium.
In 1986-1987, with their third film, Der Lauf der Dinge [The Way Things go], they achieved an international reputation. This video tape, originally shot on 16 mm film, retraces in 30 minutes a series of chain reactions involving the most improbable combinations of movements. F / W use all sorts of physical and mechanical forces and chemical principles to materialize the energy that pervades a microcosm in what is simultaneously a creation by their imagination and a paradigm of the universe. They show how any system, defined by its possibilities and limits, moves towards its own entropy.
After months working in a confined space to make this film, they went travelling, and in 1990 published a book, Airports, a collection of photos of transit areas. Peter Fischli and David Weiss show spectators their day-to-day life, se eking to create a form of simple wonderment. They index forms of prosaic reality, developing a poetry of the commonplace, both geographical (places that everyone knows) and linguistic (the simple truths that everyone makes their own).
After the quest for the spectacular (Der Lauf der Dinge) and the attraction of film making, their work went off in a new direction: the taste for the supposed mediocrity of the day-to-day and provocation by evoking the banal with B ilder, Ansichten [Images, Views], in 1991, a series of shots identical to those in the postcards for tourists.
In 1992, they made Kanalvideo, a sort of video readymade based on existing images shot by the department responsible for the surveillance of the Zurich sewer system. Their interest in waste, produced and rejected by the same society, involved as much its material aspect (reproduction of refuse) as its immaterial aspect (the surveillance pictures).
The same year, Der Tisch [The Table] brought together a series of polyurethane sculptures representing copies of objects from their studio, arranged on a large table. In 1993, at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt-am-Main, the installation Der Raum unter der Treppe [The Room under the Stairs] used the same principle of exhibiting tools made of painted polyurethane, stored under a staircase in the museum, like in a craftsman's workshop. The spectator could not decide alone whether it was "art or not" and whether it was an "exhibition or a simple storage area".
At the Venice Biennale, in 1995, F / W presented Ohne Titel [Untitled], a 96-hour video-tape installation shown on several televisions, some side by side and some facing one another. They combined a non-epic subject - scenes from day-to-day life - and a presentation which was genuinely epic as a result of the multiple screens. They developed the idea of "misusing time", time used for activities without interest but with application. They criticized a culture which insists on the ethical aspect of work, in which the artist has to prove his social commitment and constructive use of time. These tapes were shown without any precise beginning or end, like a challenge to the spectator who cannot see everything or who must use "misusing time" to take in the whole work.
Since 1996, a retrospective exhibition entitled In a Restless World or Arbeiten im Dunkeln has been shown in various museums throughout the world, beginning at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
"Everyone knows that the artist is both a scholar and a handyman: with the means to hand, he makes a material object which is also a piece of knowledge." 1

Laetitia Rouiller

1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage, Paris, Plon, 1962, p. 33.