Untitled (Tate), by Fischli & Weiss was commissioned to form part of the opening displays of Tate Modern when it opened in 2000. Its collection of everyday objects, resembling a workshop, were each individually handmade and in part designed to mimic the working environment of the Tate Modern gallery prior to it’s opening.
The idea of the ‘Peter’ sculpture installation was that all of these sculptures would be clustered together as you see them here in a way that they’re getting into eachother’s space and they make looking at any one sculpture impossible without the interference of all the others. The sculptures are not made by Kippenberger himself, they’re made for him by his assistant Michael Krebber, an artist in his own right.
‘Peter’ was a word that Kippenberger liked to use a lot in a very general way, almost like we now would say ‘whatever’. But it also had a punning aspect in which St. Petersburg was where the Hermitage museum was, and where one could find displayed hundreds of works of art in closed configurations on the walls as opposed to the isolation that we think of in modern western museums.
In this performance/video/game Mckay wrote a program and built custom hardware that allowed him to mix the sunset live. He then projected with a video projector, from his computer onto a garage in a field behind his studio. As the sun set behind the building he attempted to match the color of the sunset with the projector.
Timm Ulrichs
Timm Ulrichs, ‘Selbstausstellung’ (‘Exhibition of the self’) (1961)