Exhibitions of the Week: The Art of Amusement with Fischli and Weiss at the Guggenheim, Marcel Broodthaers at MoMA

Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better (Until April 27 at the Guggenheim Museum)

Patience! If you're a habitual museumgoer, it's a quality you probably have in abundance anyway; if you're going to enjoy the work of Peter Fischli and David Weiss, it's a quality that you'd better cultivate. These two Swiss artists are not above gimmickry, but can anyone think of an artist duo that is? Komar and Melamid? Laurel and Hardy? Conrad and Ford Madox Ford? Nope to all of them, amazingly even that last one. Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better can of course feel like a three-hundred-item pet project or in-joke -- until it doesn't. Given time, these two oddballs will start to endear themselves to you, whether you're a newcomer to their work or whether (as I am) you're finally seeing this much of it in one place.

The Guggenheim's escalating ramps have been put to some radically different uses over the years, but this is perhaps the first time that the museum's architecture has hosted a show that so clearly breaks down your defenses and escalates in quality level upon level. As curated by Nancy Spector and Nat Trotman, How to Work Better begins just outside the Guggenheim with Haus, a scaled-down rendition of an office building; inside, the show kicks off with video displays and with yet more architectural riffs -- the recent series Walls, Corners, Tubes planted in the first gallery. Are Fischli and Weiss poking fun at structural minimalism, or giving in to it? Whatever they are doing, they are establishing the aura of whimsy that surrounds the rest of the show, from its tiresome stretches (monochrome statues of cars and hostesses) to its amusing ones (Fischli and Weiss in Rat and Bear costumes, organ meat arranged in dramatic scenes) to its amazing ones. The greatest of the last of these appears in the show's upper reaches: titled The Way Things Go, it is a thirty-minute film recording what must be the world's slowest, grungiest Rube-Goldberg machine. And it's absolutely riveting.

Weirdly enough, I might have preferred Fischli and Weiss in other settings, fine though the presentation here is. After The Way Things Go, the show loses some of its humor but gains a certain madcap poetry -- and might have gained more of an edge in a less conventional museum. The final level of How to Work Better is an onslaught of polyurethane replicas of everyday objects from the artists' studio: had these spilled over into a floor of the Met, they would have been truly anarchic. But in Wright's Guggenheim, they create a marriage of untraditional art and untraditional museum that works, and probably works too well. Keep going, though, because the last galleries will make you forget you're in a museum to begin with. The show ends in darkness, or almost, with one room of slide-projected philosophical questions and another devoted to a bizarre polyurethane sculpture called The Raft, a composition complete with crocodiles and a mother sow and the kind of junk you'd expect to find floating around once human civilization is gone. These could be portentous themes, but then these are not portentous artists. Better to think, and laugh, and let the process repeat itself, and let Fischli and Weiss charm you for a while.

Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective (Until May 15 at the Museum of Modern Art)

This is what happens when Existentialist chic takes over the top floor of a museum. Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective (no other subtitle necessary, though that last name is pronounced "BROT-hairs") is the first New York survey of a wondrously cerebral Belgian artist, though it also unfolds like an oddball seminar in poster design and interior decoration. Stencil-style images. Slide projections. Books of poetry. Palm fronds everywhere. Though this busy showcase renders it difficult to delve into some aspects of Broodthaers's creativity (for example, the actual poetry), much of Broodthaers's personality and something of his larger project both emerge. At any rate, he's a certain kind of find for a certain kind of connoisseur, the type of Old World late modernist you should get acquainted with if you're beginning to tire of the household names.

Organized by Christophe Cherix and Manuel Borja-Villel, the show is resonant in art history: you might not know Broodthaers, but you may get the impression that you've seen, watched, or felt something like him before. Magritte, Broodthaers's fellow Belgian, doesn't so much influence the work on display as loom over it: the same uneasy marriage of rudimentary text and fine art is present, as are more Magritte allusions than anyone (save the people behind the catalog, which harkens back to Magritte's Not to Be Reproduced right on its cover) probably cares to count. Also, if you care to remember, MoMA staged a Magritte exhibition right across the hall in 2013. But Magritte had no space for abstraction: Broodthaers, on the evidence of several large canvases overwhelmed with mussel shells, certainly does. And Magritte stayed mostly out of politics: Broodthaers, on the evidence of his Nineteenth Century Room (cannons and a giant taxidermy snake) and Twentieth Century Room (deck furniture and a bunch of guns), felt no need to abstain so completely.

So yes, Broodthaers is pretty cool. The way Warhol, or Basquiat, or a café with cane chairs and a lot of mirrors is cool -- he is detached, until you get to know him and realize that his cool is complemented, activated by reserves of wonder and pathos. The most obvious demonstration of this nature is The White Room (1975): in fact constructed of light wood, it is garnished with simple French words in neat cursive. Magritte, perhaps, at a new order of innocence. It reminded me, though, of the many beyond-their-prime hostels and apartments I inhabited, on and off, in my early twenties -- just as those accretions of mussels will always remind me of Northern France and, yes, Belgium as I first encountered them. Like Warhol, like Basquiat, Broodthaers may not be as deep as you had hoped, but that is a virtue. Because of that, he can take you back, perhaps, to a time when your intellect was still young.