Peter Fischli / David Weiss Equilibres

The Swiss collaborators Fischli & Weiss have said of this early series of color and black-and-white photographs, "Balance is most beautiful just shortly before it collapses." Indeed their tense arrangements of household miscellany often look on the verge of falling, or are caught in the process. The only texts included with them are associative titles, including Natural Grace, (a spatula on a plate on a wine bottle on an apple on a cup), The Fart (chairs on Coke bottles and aerosol cans), and Invisible Power, (showing one end of a paper construction held aloft by the breeze from a small fan). Many of the constructions appear under several titles, in several styles: Completion, when shot in grainy, starkly lit black-and-white, becomes Honor, Courage, Confidence, and in close-up, Can I , May I, Do Anything? On the page, these often elaborate and expansive objects acquire an incidental quality that makes them both more real and more transient. Ultimately, the only evidence of their existence is these images. While a small selection of these works appeared in the artist's book Quiet Afternoon, most have never before been published in any form. — F.to: 19x24; pagg. 168; COL e BN; rileg. rigida. Editore: Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2006.