Lot Essay
Peter Fischli and David Weiss started working with Polyurethane in 1983, four years after their first artistic collaboration on the Sausage Series of 1979. This untitled work of 1983 adopts many of the themes and subjects common to their art of this period and merges them into one bizarre bric-a-brac monument to the contemporary era. Mimicking the grandiose processional structure of historical monuments such as the triumphal column and rendering it in cheap plastic filled with the iconography of the tourist stall or the motorway service station, the two Swiss artists here present a deeply ironic take on the nature of modern society.
The central form of this sculpture mimics the ascending spiralling procession of soldiers on Trajan's Column in Rome, but with its menagerie of rhinoceroses, elephants and cheaply cast ten-a-penny human figures interlacing a spiralling column of tyres, it also humorously prompts associations between the epic nature of Hannibal's epic journey over the Alps and the ease with which today the route is traversed by countless motorists and long-distance lorry drivers.