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, ...
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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.
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Seller's Description:
Very Good jacket. A very good hardcover in a very good dust jacket. Gently perused, if at all. No markings. Dust jacket has light shelf wear/rubbing but is now in a protective mylar wrapper.
Publisher:
Edition Patrick Frey and Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno
Published:
1990
Language:
English
Alibris ID:
13636017560
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Seller's Description:
Near Fine. No dust jacket as issued. First edition, first printing. Hardcover. Gray paper-covered boards with title printed in blue on cover and spine; no dust jacket as issued. Photographs by Fischli and Weiss. Unpaginated (88 pp. ), with 40 four-color plates. 12 x 16-3/4 inches. [Cited in Andrew Roth, ed., The Open Book. (Göteborg, Sweden: Hasselblad Center in association with Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, Germany, 2004), and in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume II. (London and New York: Phaidon, 2006).]. Near Fine (very faint small damp stain and the slightest of sunning to 1-1/2 inches from spine on front and rear cover, else As New). An extremely rare Near Mint copy, with minimal and barely noticeable small band of sunning. This title is rarely found without significant sunning to the covers. This is the very finest example we have ever seen. From Parr and Badger: "In Airports, [Fischli and Weiss] examine the means by which the 'Grand Tour'--once the province of a privileged class--has now become available to the common man....However it is not the social aspect of airports that attracts the artists' attention, but the means of transport itself--those silver birds sitting on the runways, waiting to whisk the global traveller off to another culture. Although airports are the gateways to other countries, they themselves, and the sleek jets, conform to a global, rather than local, model of culture. It is this that Fischli and Weiss take note of, revelling in the sameness of, rather than the differences between, airports--staging posts between cultures, yet, like other aspects of the contemporary culture of consumerism, in themselves largely anonymous and devoid of culture."
