Peter Fischli et David Weiss

Interview Beate Söntgen is Professor of Art History at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany. From 2003-04 she was Laurenz-Professor of Contemporary Art at Basel University, Switzerland, and from 1998-2002 Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Braunschweig, Germany. She has published several books and contributed to many catalogues and publications, including Texte zur Kunst and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Her post-doctorate focuses on `Representation, Rhetoric, Knowledge'. Survey Robert Fleck is the Director of the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. He has been working as an art critic and curator since 1981. From 1991-93 he was the Federal Curator for Austrian contemporary art, and in 1998 he co-curated Manifesta 2. From 2000-03 he was Director of ERBAN Fine Art School in Nantes. His books include Die Mühl-Kommune (2003) and Yves Klein (2004). Focus Arthur C. Danto is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York, and the art critic for The Nation. His books include Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life (2005), The Madonna of the Future (2000), which won Le Prix Philosophie in 2003, and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (1992), which won the Book Critics Circle Award. Artists' Choice Robert Walser (1878-1956) was a Swiss writer of short stories, essays and four novels, incuding The Tanner Children (1906), The Factotum (1908) and Jakob von Gunten (1909), for which he is best known. Largely self-taught and indifferent to worldly success, he led a wandering, precarious existence. In 1925 he wrote another major work, The Robber, which remained unpublished until 1972. He entered an insane asylum in 1933, where he remained for the rest of his life. Artists' Writings Peter Fischli and David Weiss' work has been seen at such key international exhibitions as documenta 8 (1987) and X (1997), the Biennales of Sydney (1990, 1998) and São Paulo (1989) and the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1988), among many others. Included here is an interview from 1996 with Rirkrit Tiravanija, one of the many noted contemporary artists who admire Fischli and Weiss' understated, unmonumental style.