The Way Things Go
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, 1987
Hirshhorn Museum
I went by the Hirshhorn a few weeks ago, and this was my favorite piece: a film depicting a slow-moving, low-budget Rube Goldberg apparatus built by artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss out of tires, candles, fuses, ramps, ladders, and random objects. I mean, what's not to like about a flaming tetherball?
The purpose of the apparatus? Nothing, really, except to spin itself out. It's pointlessly meditative. And I liked that - you could start watching the film at any point and stop at any point, as if you were watching waves on a beach, or crawling insects.
You can see the whole thing at the Hirshhorn, or if you're really enamored of it, you can buy a copy here.
More like this
Most people are at a loss to be able to identify any useful connections between arts and
sciences. This ignorance is appalling. Arts provide innovations through analogies, models, skills,
The latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine has four excellent and thought-
That was great! It must have been so much fun to contrive that sequence! Great ending, too.
My eight year old absolutely loved this . . .
I loved it and then hated myself for loving it. They must have a carbon footprint the size of a large third-world village.