Fischli and Weiss
On the exhibition
Large Question Pot
Egg
Animal
Airports
Small Sculptures with titles
Analysis
Fischli and Weiss do an amazing job of defamiliarizing everyday objects. Through puns, size distortion, and putting things into perspective they are able to take cultural objects and make them the unfamiliar. In their piece “The New Spirit of Capitalism” they take the imagery of the phrase ‘the spirit of capitalism’, one that is very familiar to the every day man, and create a structure that mocks and distorts it. Making a divide in the perceived minds-eye image and the resulting sculpture. In their piece titled “Egg”, Fischli and Weiss blow an egg up to insane proportions, bigger than man. This plays upon one seeing eggs as something as small and fragile, and making it large and intimidating. The best part of this piece is, however, the title. Which, simply put, gives it no other description than our own perceived notions of eggs. Another way they defamiliarize us from our knowledge of objects and of culture is in their sculpture of the nativity scene. One very present in most lives, especially around Christmas time. One that you would be very hard-pressed to find a person that has never seen it, and title it simple “Crib”. This puts something that we have so many ties to and puts it in a simplistic perspective, one of just what it is. It is just a crib. The scene to one who has not scene it, is one of just that. All of these were very clever ways t defamiliarize us from our understanding of the world and our preconceived notions of objects.
The process, I believe, was a large part of their work. It was their visible process that highlighted the authenticity of their work. It was the markings, the sloppiness, that gave the miniature sculptures their personality and character. That gave them life. That made them intriguing and drew curiosity from the viewer. It is not an everyday scene to find several small sculptures in the Guggenheim itself that look as though they were made by a child. The exposure to their process drives the need to know more in the viewer.
Their piece ‘Bread’ is a clay sculpture of just a loaf of bread. Bread, as a loaf, serves only one function – to be eaten for nutrition, however by making it out of clay they have made it useless for its function. Rendering it into just art, or a sculpture. Defeating the very function of the loaf. In their piece ‘Big Fire Small Scale’ they have taken the association between the size of the fire and the size of the sculpture and highlighted it in the piece. When one looks at the piece one immediately thinks of a small fire. However, the caption highlights the disparity between reality and the sculpture by saying that it is in fact a large fire, just in small scale. Also undermining its purpose and function.
Photo Poetics
In Lisa Oppenheimer’s work she has taken the familiar sight of clouds in the sky, and portrayed it via photography. Or at least, that is what one thinks when looking at her works. What she is really demonstrating is not clouds, but a smoke grenade that was thrown. She’s taken the all-too-familiar image of the sky and clouds and demonstrated it with a material and subject matter that we do not associate with it. Erica Baum has taken imagery that we would see in a book, a flat image that is entertaining among reading, and changed our perspective on it. Defamiliarized the ways in which we see the image and the book. Giving us an unfamiliar perspective of the familiar. It was great to see these original and creative ways of going about a change of our expectations, and was inspirational to looking at new perspectives and materials for the familiar.