How to Work Better

Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better is the catalogue for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's 2016 retrospective of the Swiss artist duo, the first survey of their work in New York. It takes its title from the artists' 1991 text piece of the same name.

Edited by Nancy Spector and Nat Trotman, the 379-page book was published by the Guggenheim Foundation with DelMonico Books and Prestel. It traces Fischli and Weiss's collaboration from 1979 through their final joint project, covering the Sausage Series, the film The Way Things Go, and the slide installation Questions. Essays by Spector, Trotman, Ann Goldstein, John Kelsey, and Isabelle Graw accompany the illustrated survey. The exhibition ran at the Guggenheim from February to April 2016, then traveled to Museo Jumex in Mexico City that summer, and was accompanied by a mural installation of the original How to Work Better text at the corner of Houston and Mott Streets.

Peter Fischli (born 1952) and David Weiss (1946-2012) began collaborating in Zurich in 1979 and worked together until Weiss's death. Their best-known piece, the 1987 film The Way Things Go, follows a chain reaction of ordinary objects -- tires, candles, balloons -- through a studio, and later inspired Honda's "Cog" advertisement. They represented Switzerland at the 1995 Venice Biennale and won the Biennale's Golden Lion in 2003 for Questions, a slide installation of handwritten existential queries.