The Way Things Go
The Rube Goldberg–ian work by Swiss conceptual artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss elicits basic joy from sophisticated connections. “There’s just something very punk about that movie,” Mike says.
Peter Fischli, David Weiss
- Notes From Mike MillsI studied at the Cooper Union where, if we had nothing to present, my teacher Hans Haacke would just show us stuff. So I learned about Arte Povera, Marxism in art, Fluxus—things that a Californian Santa Barbara public school kid just didn’t get to know about. One day he showed us THE WAY THINGS GO, and it remains one of my favorite, favorite, favorite pieces of art, filmmaking, human-made magic. It’s an exquisite physical dance of objects, all bouncing off each other. There’s no narrative to it, but I feel like it explains what movies can do, what cinema does: time-based art that loves motion and loves connections. There’s just something very punk about it—the whole spirit of it is very irreverent and it’s profoundly beautiful to me.
