BARCELONA.- The Way Things Go (1985-87) is a film by the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss that documents a long chain reaction in which objects and substances interact with each other inside a warehouse. It is also one of the most striking and influential works of art to have been produced in the late twentieth century. Highly appreciated by the general public and praised within the art world, the piece was one of the most popular works at Documenta 8, held in Kassel in 1987. Appearing as chaotic but meticulously choreographed, the video constitutes an ironic response to the artistic context and the pictorial practices of the eighties, while also proposing reflections about the dualities of mechanism and art or of determinism and freedom, among others.

To celebrate the film’s thirtieth anniversary, the Fundació Joan Miró revisits this landmark of contemporary visual culture with the exhibition The Way Things Do. Curated by the artist Serafín Álvarez and the Fundació’s programming and projects director Martina Millà, the show includes a continuous screening of the original film, The Way Things Go, and presents new productions by three young artists who provide their reinterpretations of the piece: Serafín Álvarez (1985, Spain), Cécile B. Evans (1983, US/Belgium) and Daniel Jacoby (1985, Peru) & Yu Araki (1985, Japan).

First of all, the exhibition considers The Way Things Go from an objectual perspective. The curators started off by analysing the connections between the different objects used in the film, and especially the independence with which these objects appear to establish those relationships. Without adhering to any particular movement, the theoretical context of the exhibition considers the different approaches to the notion of the object, recently articulated in opposition to the anthropocentric paradigm. Accordingly, The Way Things Do becomes an exhibition where the protagonists are the objects – objects understood in a broad, non-hierarchical sense, according to Serafín Álvarez. These objects are material and immaterial, human and non-human: action figures, jockeys, screens, robots, images, events, emotions, sounds, subtitles. For the curator, ‘examining these objects from the perspective of contemporary art allows us to see how a term as widespread and ordinary as "object" is in fact infinitely complex and inexhaustible.’

This reconsideration of The Way Things Go is articulated in three installations by artists in their thirties, born around the time when Fischli and Weiss produced their legendary film, and belonging to a generation that is marked by rapidly changing technology and the rise of digital culture. According to Martina Millà, The Way Thing Do is implicitly ‘an invitation to wander through the realm of reception as well as a trigger for memories that many visitors may have of the 1980s while also focusing on the relationships that the artists born in that decade may have with eighties’ art.’ With a specific chronological point of departure and a series of works that represent our current times, the exhibition can also be viewed, to quote the curator, as ‘an almost phenomenological itinerary enabling us to reflect on the last few decades and on how we take stock and reconstruct bygone times according to our own biographies.’

Daniel Jacoby and Yu Araki occupy the first exhibition space with Mountain Plain Mountain, a joint project created with support from Arts Council Tokyo, Hangar and the Jan van Eyck Academie, and which stemmed from their interest in a race track located in the city of Obihiro, in northern Japan. This venue is the last in the world where Ban’ei competitions are still held, a kind of traditional Japanese race in which a jockey leads a draft horse pulling an iron sled through an obstacle course. The fact is that, aside from being an emblematic location for this sport, in 2002 the Obihiro race track hosted the Demeter International Art Exhibition, an event that brought together artists from around the world with leading figures in Japanese art, such as Yoko Ono, Shigeaki Iwai and Tadashi Kawamata. Jacoby and Araki researched the network behind the scenes of this sport, in other words, everything that happens behind the races themselves, such as the relationships between the different actors involved (jockeys, horses, trainers, the audience) or an analysis of the resulting statistical data. The outcome is an experimental video produced primarily with the images obtained using TV broadcasting techniques and a system of multiple compact cameras installed in the sleds.

Serafín Álvarez’s installation focuses on material objects related to science fiction and fantasy narratives in contemporary media such as film and video games. Álvarez presents a variety of pieces, some of which were produced with support from Hangar. One of these, placed in the middle of the room, is One Step Closer to the Finest Starry Sky There Is, a work that explores the ways fans relate to their favourite fictional worlds from an explicitly materialistic perspective: collecting, cosplay – a Japanese subculture that involves dressing up like a manga, anime, or video game character – homemade film props and objects, among others. The result is a large-scale sculpture inspired by a video game, Katamari Damacy, with a large number of tangible objects of varying sizes assembled into a composite form.

Next, the work of Cécile B. Evans examines the influence of new technologies in our ways of feeling, relating to one another and managing our emotions. The pieces she produced for this exhibition revolve around one of the artist’s former works, shown at Tate Liverpool in 2016. It consisted of a theatre piece played by three robots, a water fountain and three pole dancers, which reacted to a series of images shown on a system of twenty-seven screens. The artist’s aim is to succeed in playing out a video in a physical space. Now, in Leaks, Evans presents an audiovisual installation that includes a video recording of that theatre piece, a game of mirrors that brings the circle of resonances to a close while delving into the relationship between physical and digital objects in motion.

All three installations lead the visitor to the last room, where the original film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss is screened continuously, with the support of Pro Helvetia. According to Martina Millà, ‘although the piece is the chronological starting point for the show, the exhibition itinerary places the screening at the end, like an encounter with a memory - distant for some and almost ghost-like for others - which acquires new meaning when viewed from the present.’ The Way Things Do is on view to the public in the Fundació Joan Miró’s temporary spaces from 30 June through 1 October 2017.