I rarely insert videos but since George Carlin up and croaked the other day and posting anything about him without a video would be just wrong, here I am with yet another: what was all lined up before the great funnyman passed on.

Do you have 10 minutes?

So much of YouTube is 30-second brain candy, clicked away if it fails to load in under four seconds, but here I’m asking you for 10 minutes. I know – 10 minutes! In this age of continuous partial attention, who has the patience to watch the same thing for 10 minutes?

Especially if you might have seen it before. It is, after all, their best-known work. But if you haven’t, maybe watching it here will give you an idea of the brilliance behind the work of Peter Fischli and David Weiss, two of Switzerland’s best-known artists. And if you’re anywhere near Hamburg this summer, you now have a reason to go see it in person.

Because instead of the 10 minutes on a small screen on your computer, at the exhibition you’ll see a full half-hour of astounding ingenuity on a screen five metres square: chain reactions combining the forces of gravity, air and water pressure, fire and chemical reactions into a mind-bending thread of child-like playfulness. Set up and shot in stages, The Way Things Go took more than three months of trial and error before they finally got it right.

The film is of course only a small part of their work on display. Photos of impossibly balanced objects, sculpture in unbaked clay or polyurethane as well as a video showing how they put The Way Things Go together, it’s a look back at three decades of collaboration between the two artists. It’s on at the Deichtorhallen near Hamburg’s central train station until the end of August.

For more information – in English (!) – visit deichtorhallen.de

UPDATE:

Thanks to Jennifer who pointed out in her comment the similarities to the artists’ work and a Honda Accord commercial.  According to ace bullshit-sniffers snopes.com, the pair attempted to sue Honda over the advertisement.

If you follow the link to the commercial – much better quality video than youtube, by the way – you’ll have to agree the similarities are pretty obvious.