I’ve just arrived in sweaty Brisbane from windy Wellington, and my internal thermostat can’t cope with the heat and humidity. Staggering through the sculpture garden at Queensland Art Gallery, I encounter a work that speaks to my situation—perhaps ridicules it. A glass-fronted freezer contains a bulbous snowman with a quizzical expression. 

Snowman (1987–2019)—by Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss—is a deft gesture that can be endlessly unpacked, this way and that. I can confront it as alien or identify. Is it dead or alive—or, like Schrödinger’s cat, both at once? Is it in cryogenic suspension? Is it wise and kind, like Buddha (a Bodhi tree is planted nearby), or moronic and demonic? 

The Snowman may occupy its own insulated realm, a world apart, and yet Queensland Art Gallery, just metres away, is also a big glazed refrigerator, chilled for the comfort and preservation of people and things. Is the work thumbing its nose at climate change or reminding us that the gallery—indeed, the entire city—is an expensive airconditioner. 

Queensland’s Snowman is one of three. The first is installed outside Germany’s Römerbrücke power plant, whose heat keeps it cool. Another belongs to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Queensland’s was acquired for the exhibition Water in 2019, where it was installed inside. But I find it more poignant, more funny, outside in the sculpture garden. In a place designed to view sculptures in the round under changing climate conditions, it’s a picture frozen in a frame. 

In the wretched heat, I fantasise about trading places with the snowman—watching people and seasons pass, chilling out, with a self-satisfied grin.

[IMAGE: Fischli and Weiss Snowman 1987–2019]
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