David Weiss, who together with Peter Fischli formed the Swiss artist duo that for more than three decades walked the line between irony and sincerity, physical comedy and conceptual rigor, died of cancer on Friday 26 April 2012 in Zurich.
‘You Killed Me First: The Cinema of Transgression’ at the Kunst-Werke in Berlin, is a first-time museum presentation devoted to a group of New York underground filmmakers of the 1980s. To this end the institution has painstakingly converted its exhibition spaces into a kind of über-gritty dungeon, vying, it seems, to deliver as authentic a backdrop as curatorially feasible to present 18 films for a strictly 18+ audience. The theme park-like recreation of the once sketchy, run-down Lower East Side featured touching details like professionally executed out-of-control smudges of black paint covering all windows, minutely stopped short from spilling over to the walls.
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The French composer's purpose was to find a breach in the fortress of musical tradition, open up ‘fissures of randomness for the poetic adventure to slip through’