Friends of mine know that I'm just as likely to be found in an art museum as a religious service on any given Sunday afternoon. I often find a few hours of theological contemplation with art to be more spiritually constructive and edifying than attending a conventional religious service. In part, I suppose this is because I understand art and religion to be asking the same questions, and although different texts may at times hint at divergent conclusions, I believe that art and religion are ultimately endeavors toward the same end. This Sunday, Lauf der Dinge served as a point of entry into meditations on theodicy, free will, and modes of being. I suspect this piece may serve to inform my thesis project somehow. I'll need to sit with this one a bit...
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The Way Things Go (German: Der Lauf der Dinge) is a 1987 art film by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. It documents a long causal chain assembled of everyday objects, resembling a Rube Goldberg machine.
The machine is in a warehouse, about 100 feet long, and incorporates materials such as tires, trash bags, ladders, soap, oil drums, and gasoline. Fire and pyrotechnics are used as chemical triggers. The film is nearly 29 minutes, 45 seconds long, but some of that is waiting for something to burn, or slowly slide down a ramp.
The film evolved out of work the artists did on their earlier photography series, "Quiet afternoon," (German: Stiller Nachmittag) of 1984-1985. As the delicately unstable assemblages they constructed for the photos were apt to almost immediately collapse, they decided that they wanted to make use of this energy. The film may also have been inspired by the video work of fellow Swiss artist, Roman Signer. The artists undoubtably saw his video work which was exhibited at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1981. Signer's videos often document objects performing simple actions that are the result of physical phenomena.
Until 27 January, 2009 it was being shown at the Western Australian Museum in Perth as part of the temporary exhibition "Experimenta Playground". - Wikipedia
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