A rat and a bear walk into the art world… Here’s what goes down

Peter Fischli and David Weiss made great art. They asked complicated questions about the high-minded art world with humour. They made, for example, The Way Things Go (1987), a film, made seemingly in a single take, that begins with a rotating bin bag and follows a chain of unexpected and unbelievable physical and chemical reactions resulting in… nothing. It took over a year to shoot and it leaves you asking, “what it was all for?” It’s just a shame that you don’t get a sense of this inventiveness and irreverence in their current exhibition at Sprüth Magers, London.

The show focuses on the alter ego characters Fischli and Weiss adopted in the early 1980s: the despised common rat and the adorable panda bear. A pair of human-sized soft toys are suspended, slowly rotating, from the ceiling of the main gallery. As Rat and Bear, they made sculptures, drawings, installations, photographs and films asking: how do we fit into the world? How do we make it in life? And what are we even looking for?

The exhibition leans heavily on the single half-hour film shown upstairs. The Point of Least Resistance (1981) was made shortly after the pair started collaborating. It follows Rat and Bear as they stumble around the art world of Los Angeles, trying to make it as artists. Why? Because then they’ll be rich and can relax “with tennis, friends, travelling, dance, theatre”. After discovering a ‘dead’ mannequin on the floor of a gallery, they get wrapped up in trying to solve a murder case. It’s classic Fischli and Weiss; making work in order to make nothing.

Next door, the pages of Rat and Bear’s book Order and Cleanliness (1981) are framed on the walls. Each page shows a diagram, like you might find in a physics textbook or an architectural studio, exploring the meaning and meaninglessness of the world. These diagrams map splits and opposites (crime and disorder), sexual relationships (Albert ?️ Ursi  ?️ Frederick ⚔️ Susan) and personality types (brain-driven vs. athletes). They aren’t as visually attractive as the film and the toys, but you get the message: nothing comes naturally, it takes real work to understand the world.

Downstairs, a set of 35mm projectors literally spell things out on the gallery walls; intrusive thoughts and questions, the kind that plague us all: “Why am I always right?”, “Should I pay less attention to my worries?”, “What’s in a dog that enjoys lying in the sun?”, “Is the reality of possibility getting smaller and smaller?”.

The exhibition has a tight concept, it has a clear theme, a distinct period, and some, but not all, key works; where is Rat and Bear’s second film, The Right Way (1983)? You get to see Fischli and Weiss at the start of their career, and how they worked out their dual identity, and you can see the first signs of themes that would later define their practice. But that’s the problem; all you’re really seeing is the set-up, and you never see the punchline.