Living With Video: The Way Things Go at the Kramlich Collection

The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) is an art film by the artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss that premiered in 1987 at Documenta 8. The work depicts a nearly half-hour long series of sustained chain reactions involving non-glamorous every-day objects such as kettles, chairs, mattresses, balloons, tires, ladders, and trash bags. These ordinary objects perform a kinetic display of cause and effect as they crash, burn, melt, explode, ignite, dissolve, rotate, slide, and bang, exhausting the energy released from the breakdown of one another. The film documents a constant battle between predetermined precision and probabilistic implausibility; and the artists ensure a seemingly miraculous continuity in scene after scene where disorder and failure would have been the more likely outcome. Carefully choreographed by Fischli/Weiss, the objects in this 100 feet-long installation on stage in a large warehouse seem to have been given performing roles by the artists, and meticulously trained for their act. As Jeremy Millar describes in his book on this particular work, the film embodies many of the qualities of Fischli/Weiss’s oeuvre: “slapstick humor and profound insight, a forensic attention to detail, a sense of illusion and transformation, and a dynamic exchange between states of order and chaos.”

collectorspace is very pleased to present the Kramlich Collection with this iconic example of video art that happened to be one of the first pieces that entered the collection. Based in San Francisco, Pamela and Richard Kramlich have been collecting video, film, and time-based art for over two decades. In 1997, they established The New Art Trust along with Tate Modern, The Museum of Modern Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to support research and preservation of time-based media art.

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Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) worked as an artist duo between 1987–2012. Fischli/Weiss won the Golden Lion Prize at the 2003 Venice Biennale. A retrospective of their work was exhibited at Tate Modern, London in 2006, and traveled to Kunsthaus Zurich and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

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With special thanks to VIP Art Fair for allowing the screening of the collection visit video as part of the presentation of the Kramlich Collection at collectorspace. 

Video produced by Philip Dolin & Molly Bernstein of Particle Productions, New York.