The quote below is from the Arthur Danto essay I linked to. It's bombastic but does a good job of explaining how the Fischli/Weiss differs from Goldberg (and Mousetrap):

As is often observed, the film has the deflected ingenuity of a cracked inventor such as Rube Goldberg, who drew such contraptions for his readers' amusement a generation or so ago. But there is this difference: Goldberg's contrivances were madly complex devices, requiring an improbable assemblage of components for achieving tasks capable of being done by anyone simply and directly - like lighting cigars or rocking a baby or pouring coffee. They were caricatures of so-called Yankee ingenuity, expressing itself in "labor-saving devices" that "no home should be without"; but, rickety and crazy, these devices interposed so much mediating gear between agent and task that one always feared they would not be up to the homely demands made of them. The causal chain in The Way Things Go, on the other hand, has no function and no goal. But in concatenating slides, roils, tumbles, spills, booms, bangs, and spins, it vividly illustrates what Kant offers by way of characterization of the work of art: it seems purposive while lacking any specific purpose. It does nothing, but it seems to embody, for viewers to whom I have shown it, meanings that touch on waste, violence, pollution, exhaustion, and despair, all somehow reinforced by the overwhelming sense of suspense generated by the fact that it is a film: the individual episodes seem to happen one after another smoothly and without interruption - the danger being that something will go wrong and break the chain. It is, for all the triviality of its individual episodes, an epic of some kind, vastly transcending the connotations of play while retaining the spirit of innocent mischief in which boys at play egg one another on to high and higher efforts which, taken collectively, seem to imply the pointless horror of unending war.

Fair enough.
- steve 4-21-2003 8:33 pm [add a comment]