Rock on Top of Other Rock
As this piece was installed in the Serpentine, London (2012), Peter Fischli, David Weiss sadly passed away last April, gave a short address to the assembled crowd during which he spoke about the enjoyment he had travelling around the British countryside to find the rocks for the project and it was important that "they were seen as just rocks", not sourced from anywhere special or "exotic".
The monumental sculpture is formed of two glacial igneous granite boulders and stands approximately 5.5 meters high on a concrete base. The rocks echo come of the earliest monuments found around the world, connecting the ancient human mark-making (art-making) of the past to the present. "In Norway and here," Fischli said, "to put one rock on top of another rock in the wilderness is the first thing you do if you want to make a mark. When you walk and you want to find your way back... you make this mark. It is a very archaic, simple thing, but it is referencing the [Robert] Venturi duck. We wanted to make something that forces you to stop your car and get out to take a photograph."
Here is the the [Robert] Venturi duck for reference:
Fischli spoke about the importance of parks as "a kind of man made wilderness". The London rocks would reside near the Serpentine Gallery for a year and become, as curator Hans Ulrich Obrist said, "a meeting place for Londoners." “Rock on Top of Another Rock” relates to the artists' 1984 series of photographs, “Equilibres/Quiet Afternoon”, which show precariously balanced sculptures moments before their collapse. Although cemented together, the rocks' massive presence also appears to teeter between stability and instability. The artist duo have continuously demonstrated that irony and sincerity could not exist without each other and that, in fact, there is no sincerity like irony.
