Anarchy At The Guggenheim
The New York Times reports: ‘In the art of the 20th century, comedy was tough to come by. Marcel Duchamp and his urinal were the original stand-up act, and Magritte was good for some laughs. But a long, dry stretch followed, through Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, lightened up in the 1960s only by oddball wits like Ray Johnson and Lee Lozano. The Swiss duo of Peter Fischli (pictured) and David Weiss, who began at the end of the 20th century, have been the Nichols and May of contemporary art, using humor to pry into some very serious aspects of the human condition, in a deeply admired body of work in film, photography and sculpture that, as Mr. Fischli describes it, “was never afraid of the stupid joke, the joke that’s so bad it’s embarrassing.‒
