“It was about the world of garages and cars and workshops, and on the other hand the farm; or to be more precise, about how these two worlds flow into one another. And the raft is a situation where the person loading this raft must make certain decisions. It’s a context that creates a hierarchy.” -Peter Fischli

One of the most extraordinary sustaining collaborators of the late twentieth century, Peter Fischili and David Weiss have devoted their lauded practice to the “poetics of banality” since 1979. Exploring the context of quotidien objects, the duo have employed mediums such as video art, slides, sculpture, installation and photography in their investigations. With humour and wit, the enigmatic duo embrace their lineage with Dada, Surrealism, Minimalism and Pop, while refusing the allure of artistic affectation. Banality and absurdity abound in Fischli/Weiss’ Floß, 1982. Constructed entirely of polyurthane foam, the present lot exemplifies the artists ongoing fascination with the representation of commoditised objects, inbuing their works with an anthropomorphic quality. Literally translating into the term raft, Floß or Floss depicts a makeshift raft comprised of fake wooden planks loaded with seemingly random artifacts; skulls, traditional wood carvings, a sixteenth century chair, rifle, anvil and perhaps most surprisingly, the large sculpted body of a pig and eight suckling piglets. These objects, among others placed on the raft, appear to harken back to fragmented pasts and fading ways of life- a small colony set adrift with few sustaining parts. This is Noah’s Ark gone awry.

Challenging the boundaries of objecthood, the artists have seemingly plucked artifacts from their respective roles transforming them into a chaotic mess. Adding to this the negotion between the real object and their facsimiles the objects that comprise the raft mingle with each other in an implausible, humorous scenario and yet they are all comprised of the same material. With objects carved out of polyurethane, Fischli/Weiss confront and confound the viewer with the awareness of their surroundings– be it museum or gallery, “[i]n this lofty ceremonial context, their imitations of everyday objects take on the appearance of ‘reverse readymades.’ They are perfect imitations built upon painstakingly mimetic manual labour, of the kind we are familiar with from the annals of art history.” (Press Release, Kunsthaus Zurich, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, 2007). While crediting Duchamp for the readymade object, one need not look further than Jasper Johns’ beer cans, Painted Bronze (Ballantine Ale), 1960, or Claes Oldenburg’s The Store and his soft sculptures to understand the intrigue in the unspectacular.

Fischli/Weiss’ 1981 series Plötztlich diese Übersicht (Suddenly this Overview) sought to ignite a discourse between Modernist sculpture and the kitschy nature of the Christmas crèche. Further inspired by this series, which consisted of small unfired roughly rendered clay objects and figures, the duo began to consider making life-sized everyday objects dubed replicas: “’Suddenly This Overview’ made us realize that, besides anecdotal sculptures, we are also interested in objects: we’d already made models of a rifle, bread, a rucksack. We saw the potential, but with clay we couldn’t get beyond a certain size. This is where polyurethane suggested itself as a material – the kind used by movie set decorators because it is very easy to work with. Easy to cut and paint, very fast. First we made a huge pig with little piglets, and a car engine. They then landed on the raft”, (Peter Fischliand David Weissinterviewed by Jörg Heiser in “The Odd Couple,”Frieze, October 2006).

Freely carved, the early replicas created for the raft were not intentional attempts at simulacra, instead referring once more to the idea of merging and creating dialogue: “[i]t was about the world of garages and cars and workshops, and on the other hand the farm; or to be more precise, about how these two worlds flow into one another. And the raft is a situation where the person loading this raft must make certain decisions. It’s a context that creates a hierarchy. It’s also about indecision: what to take, what to leave behind”, (ibid).

The dialogue around hierarchy was later reintroduced with the artists’ epynomously titled installation Untitled (Tate), 1990-2000, revealing the negotiation of representations and context within a constructed environment. At once artist’s studio and artwork, the installation might misconstrue the viewer should they happen through it, perhaps misinterpreting the work as an installation in-process. Here, brushes, paint cans, tires and other convincing objects made of polyurethane foam sit on work tables next to wooden planks under direct lighting. Thus, a false sense of reality and objecthood is created, subverting expectations and meaning. The referent is simultaneously absent and present. Such actions are best ellucidated by the artists: “We do take steps to show things in their true light. Which is also what makes it interesting: we don’t want to be rid of it altogether, but we don’t want to leave it as it is either. That’s true of many of our works: we want to take things out of the niche where they belong and transport them somewhere else, but without denying their origins. It is about taking but also about giving back”, (ibid).

Appealing in its banal bounty, rife with discovery, Floß, like Untitled (Tate), invites the viewer’s gaze to sift through and identify each element, weighing their contextual meanings. The conceptual nature of Floß encapsulates an attitude towards everyday objects and even rubbish that has manifested itself through Pop Art and more recently, in a sculptural movement that has been described as Unmonumental. With reigning collage aesthetic, amalgams of disparate materials are juxtaposed to elusive narratives. Here, a sense of uncertainty becomes aesthetic, the expression of fragmentation, fragility and plurality as opposed to monumentality; this too sets out to work against hierarchy. (L. Hoptman, Unmonumental: Going to Pieces in the 21st Century, New Museum, London: Phaidon, 2007, p. 134). Composed of familiar items (wood, plastic tubes, vertical blinds, plastic toys, artificial flowers, fabric, bubble wrap, etc.), Isa Genzken’s Elefant, 2006, is a collection of everyday objects that seem to recline precariously on a white plinth. Much like Fischli/Weiss’s reclining pig, Elefant is at once lost and informed by the banality of the everyday, made up of the thingness of the world, cultural artifacts rather than nature. Expanding on this further, Genzken’s totemic sculptures or columns become extensions of the urban landscape, as amalgamations of nature and commodity, landscape and architecture. In the same way, Genzken’s Bouquet, 2004, proposes a monument to maximalism; a plinth adorned with spray paint, wrapped with garlands in dayglo pink, gold and green, as miniature plastic figurines of cowboys and Indians are posed in conflict directly below an explosion of artificial flowers.

When pondering the unified oeuvre of Fischli/Weiss and the painted foam elements that comprise Floß– as both art objects and facsimiles of the everyday– we must consider the desire to believe in the fragmented and fragile truths that index the larger whole. In Fischli/Weiss’ hands the “turn to the friable and the fragmentary is in truth an effort to save art by dismantling the claim that artworks are what they cannot be and what they nevertheless must want to be; the fragment contains both those elements”, (Theodor Adorno in J. Balfour, “‘The Whole is the Untrue’: On the Necessity of the Fragment (After Adorno),” The Fragment: An Incomplete History, ed. W. Tronzo, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2009, p. 86).