Light Heavyweights

Now for something vertiginously charming: sculptures, drawings, photographs, and films, filling the ramp of the Guggenheim Museum, by the droll Swiss duo of Peter Fischli and David Weiss. The pair met in the punk-music scene in Zurich, in 1978, and proceeded to amuse and befuddle the international art world until 2012, when Weiss died, of cancer, at the age of sixty-five. Fischli and Weiss specialized in taking dumb-sounding ideas to rather profound extremes. Their work would seem philosophical were it not so blithe, resting feather-light on the mind. Take Rat and Bear, their costumed roles as fame-hungry artists turned murder detectives in the very funny Super-8 film “The Least Resistance” (1980-81), which they made in L.A. on a budget not far north of nothing, despite a triumphant finale involving a helicopter. Fischli and Weiss’s true audience may have been one another. But we get to attend their process and even, in a way, to collaborate in it, joining quests for meanings that never arrive.