This is the story of the art world’s most famous snowman. It all started with copper and Peter Fischli and David Weiss, the famed multimedia artist duo from Switzerland.
In 1987, when the Römerbrücke thermal power station in Saarbrücken, Germany, commissioned them to create a never-melting snowman inside a refrigerator, which was powered by excess energy syphoned from the plant. Rather than building the snowman from scratch using actual snow, Fischli and Weiss made a copper skeleton which, once placed inside the refrigerator, would slowly be coated by the machine’s icy ventilation. But this was actually a laborious process. Because this coating was a continual process, someone had to redraw the snowman’s eyes and smile on a daily basis.
Born in the early fifties and mid-forties respectively, Fischli and Weiss met in 1978. Their initial partnership was exclusively musical, playing in a rock band called Migros. Their first work of art, 1979’s Wurstserie or “Sausage series”, is just as playful and humorous as their Snowman statue, featuring cold cuts and processed meats arranged in scenes of ordinary life, including fashion shows and the interior of a rug store.
The duo’s oeuvre is sometimes labelled “post-apocalyptic”, but it perhaps is better described as whimsical and childlike, driven not by a desire to blow up the status quo so much as the sheer joy that comes from taking a dull, ordinary object and turning it into something unusual and extraordinary.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Snowman at the Art Institute of Chicago. Courtesy of Oskar Weiss.
Snowman, like Wurstserie, not only breaks down the distinction between high art and low art, but also walks a fine line between nature and artifice. While Snowman is, by Fischli’s own admission, “a sculpture that almost anyone can make,” the same cannot be said of the technical apparatus that keeps the snowman from melting.
One interpretation of the work the artists have repeatedly rejected is the notion that Snowman is an ecological statement. “It was a commissioned piece,” said Fischli, quoted in the New Yorker. “They were looking for a piece for in front of a power plant. We decided it had to be something that was dependent on the power of the power plant. The snowman may be a metaphor for our climate crisis, but it’s running on electricity, so it’s a contradiction.”
He added that, if the piece is about anything, it’s “taking care of something and protecting it… and being dependent on something. Someone else has to take care of him.”
Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Snowman at the Art Institute of Chicago. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Fischli and Weiss went on to create several other snowmen over the course of their career, each with updates and adjustments to the cooling system. In 2016, for instance, the duo made one for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City that ran not on power borrowed from a nearby plant, but a 4,000 Btu compressor which—according to the museum’s website—consumed the same amount of energy as a residential air conditioning unit.
Bob Eckstein, author of the aforementioned New Yorker piece, praised Snowman for detaching its icy subject from degrading alcohol ads and kitschy Frosty the Snowman movies, harkening back to its “colorful history of sex and violence,” epitomized by the infamous Miracle of 1511 festival, in which the population of Brussels banded together to build over 100 satirical, snowmen, many in bawdy poses. No Frosties here, alright.
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