The Way Things Go

The Way Things Go is a 1987 16 mm art film by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. It documents a long causal chain assembled of everyday objects and industrial materials in the manner of a Rube Goldberg machine, though without the trope of accomplishing a relatively mundane task at the end. Description The installation was in the artists' Zürich warehouse studio, about 100 feet long, and incorporated materials such as tires, trash bags, ladders, soap, oil drums, old shoes, water, and gasoline. Fire and pyrotechnics were used as chemical triggers. The film is 29 minutes and 45 seconds long, but some of that is spent waiting for something to burn, dissolve, or slowly slide down a ramp. Long processes with little visible change are skipped with a fade out/fade in. The film is presented as a single sequence of events, but careful observation reveals over two dozen film edits. The film evolved out of work the artists did on their earlier photography series, Quiet Afternoon, 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 likely 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. Copyright dispute with Honda In May 2003, Fischli and Weiss threatened legal action against Honda over similarities between the Cog commercial and The Way Things Go. The artists felt that the ad's creators had "obviously seen" their film and should have consulted them. Fischli and Weiss had refused several requests to use the film for commercial purposes, though Honda claimed that this was irrelevant as their permission was not needed to create new works with some elements similar to their previous works. Honda's advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy eventually admitted to copying a sequence of weighted tires rolling uphill. The controversy was blamed for denying Cog a Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.