While travelling through Thailand, the Swiss artist duo Fischli/Weiss visited a ceramic factory where they stumbled upon a bulletin board with a list of motivational phrases. It was this list which eventually led up to the creation of their readymade artwork How to work better, a ten-point list of simple statements on “working better.”
The artwork was first installed in 1991 on the outside façade of an office building on Binzmühlestrasse 14 in Zurich, Oerlikon. 20 meters high and 10 meters wide, it is visible to passengers who travel between Zurich Oerlikon and Zurich Airport by train.
The work began to circulate quickly and it became an influential ethos for artists as well as curators. It can be encountered in different forms and sizes: from postcards to screen prints to book covers. An exact replica of the work was hand-painted on a building on Houston Street in Lower Manhattan, New York, in 2016 – the year in which the Guggenheim Museum hosted a retrospective on Fischli/Weiss titled ‘How to Work Better.’