In the mid-1970s, bad art became all the rage. From John Waters’s “bad” B-grade movies to punk rock’s “bad” musicianship to the New Museum’s 1978 show "Bad" Painting, bad was the new good. In 1980, when bad was peaking, Andy Warhol wrote, “I wanted to do a ‘bad book,’ just the way I'd done ‘bad movies’ and ‘bad art,’ because when you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up something.” Enter into this moment the collaborative team of Peter Fischli and David Weiss, two Swiss punk rock musicians who took the “here’s three chords… now start a band” ethos into the art world. Neither Fischli nor Weiss could “play” their instruments (literally or figuratively), yet by not knowing what they were doing, they—and many others of their generation—perfectly rewrote the playbook. Warhol’s proposition hinges on the phrase “exactly wrong,” and Fischli and Weiss got it exactly wrong, over and over again.
The Guggenheim is filled with so much precisely bad, wrong and incorrect art that it flips over into the sublime, ironically becoming “good.” The works have a slow way of winning you over: what initially look like one-off gags in time reveal themselves as highly reverberatory gestures. Much postmodernism of the period bluntly took the piss out of Modernism without offering much in its place. Conversely here, every move refers to previous histories in some way and extends rather than nullifies them: a crummy Ikea armoire cast in black latex is transformed into an awkward, imperfect minimal plinth with handles. Or a hollowed cylindrical primary structure is slightly curved and put on a pedestal at face level, frustrating the natural tendency to communicate with someone at the other end, thereby détourning a sterile modernist gesture into a rich social sculpture.
The ghosts of three seriously playful artists—Bruce Nauman, Douglas Huebler and Philip Guston—haunt this show. Nauman’s A Cast of the Space Under My Chair (1966) lends the formal permissions; Huebler’s absurd propositions—like his attempt to photograph every single person alive—lends the conceptual permissions; and Guston’s complex embrace of the clumsy and perverse lends the political and social permissions. Echoes of contemporary artists ricochet throughout the space: Martin Kippenberger, Mike Kelley, Maurizio Cattelan, Robert Gober, Sophie Calle, Wade Guyton, Katrina Fristch, Jeffery Vallance and Jayson Musson are just a few names that come to mind, reminding us of how prescient and contemporary Fischli and Weiss’s work remains.
Lining the top of the museum and buried in the basement are the two most stunning bodies of work. The top few bays are dedicated to the tour-de-force Polyurethane Installations (1991-), where Fischli and Weiss painstakingly remade every single object in their studio by hand as a critique of artistic production. And in the basement, a little theater screens two early films, The Least Resistance (1980–81) and The Right Way (1983), which show the artists dressed in rat and bear costumes, one shot in Los Angeles and the other in the mountains of Switzerland. Delicate, sincere, romantic and touching, there’s an astonishing depth and conviction in seeing their collaborative interactions, ones which reify and redeem even the thinnest gestures found upstairs on the ramps.
Kenneth Goldsmith is a poet. His latest book, Capital, is out now from Verso.
Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, until 27 April 27