With the passing of the Swiss artist David Weiss, who died on April 27 at
the age of sixty-six following a battle with cancer, the world has lost one
of the greatest artists of our time. Weiss’s death marks the closing of one of contemporary art’s enduring
partnerships—a prolific collaboration with the Swiss artist Peter Fischli
that began in 1979 and would continue for thirty-three years. Fischli/Weiss
created some of the richest, most memorable, and most profoundly human work
of the past three decades. The American critical theorist Fredric Jameson
famously observed that our postmodern era is marked by a “waning of
affect”—a loss of sincerity and authenticity, and their replacement by
irony. Yet Fischli/Weiss demonstrated that irony and sincerity could not
exist without one another—that, indeed, there is no sincerity like
irony.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
