About the Work
The lifespan of a housefly is just a few days - even shorter if it flies into a sticky flypaper at a speed of about two metres per second. For Lois Weinberger, the short life of a fly is a symbol of the cycle of life, and not least of our own transience. Using ordinary drawing pins, he fixes the fly strip dotted with their tiny dead bodies onto paper in the form of a cross; the pins and the cross both recall the Passion of Christ. This crude memento mori is then surrounded by a plain black wooden frame. Weinberger's work displays the characteristics typical of the fieldworkers who have been active since the 1970s, when artists began applying scientific methods to art in an ironic manner. The resulting work is, in the best sense of the word, 'povere' - raw, both in terms of form and content, and located somewhere between blasphemy and irony, and between Conceptual Art and the physicality of Viennese Actionism.
