Air

With its spirit of unbridled curiosity and play, The Way Things Go is a tribute to experimentation, invention and chance, and to the innumerable failed attempts that happen off-stage for that one wondrous moment. 2 The film’s disarming amateurism belies the entire year of trial and error it took the artists to perfect the unravelling chain reaction. 3 The film developed out of Fischli and Weiss’s work on Equilibres 1984–87 — a series of images of everyday objects balanced in precarious assemblages — which first sparked their interest in states of impending collapse. The Way Things Go assumes new resonance in the context of the current climate crisis, when humanity is faced with potentially devastating consequences of our actions. With remarkable insight, Fischli and Weiss suggest how causality might be met with ingenuity to address — and, perhaps, rectify — the way things go. NM 2 On viewing Making Things Go 1985/2006, the film compiled from footage taken by Patrick Frey during rehearsals for The Way Things Go and released for Fischli and Weiss’s retrospective at Tate Modern, London, 20 years later, Thomas Kapielski writes: ‘We see innumerable attempts for that one perfect course of things . . . All the action is eccentric and farcical, but what pleasure, what inventive luck, arises when it succeeds! The men dance with each other and howl.’ Thomas Kapielski, ‘Making Things Go’, in Curiger, p.226. 3 In fact, the sense of an uninterrupted chain is an illusion: the film comprises nearly two dozen separate shots filmed without sound over two years. Fischli and Weiss masked the transitions by fading between images of white foam or bright explosions and added audio effects in post-production. Peter Fischli and David Weiss / The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Linge) (still) 1987 ‘ The Way Things Go assumes new resonance in the context of the current climate crisis, when humanity is faced with potentially devastating consequences of our actions.’ 133 132 Burn Burn