Fischli and Weiss at Matthew Marks - Peter Fischli and David Weiss

Art in America, Oct, 2002 by Gregory Volk

The centerpiece of this exhibition by the Swiss collaborative team of Peter Fischli and David Weiss was Visible World (1986-2001), an elongated light table measuring 92 feet positioned just inside the gallery's front glass wall and jutting at a slight angle all the way to the back wall. It displayed 3,000 small-format photographs taken by the artists over the past 15 years during their various jaunts around the world.

Fischli and Weiss are known for their use of humble stuff that is in headlong flight from rareness and highness, and these photos were no exception. Many resembled standard tourist shots--famous sites like the Manhattan skyline, the Roman Coliseum, the Pyramids and crowded street scenes in Asian cities. Others--notably of sleek horses, cute lambs, elephants and a hippopotamus--could be auditioning for kitschy animal calendars. Nature shots of glowing sunsets and sunrises, desert rock formations, palm trees, billowing clouds, steamy jungles and snow-covered alpine peaks seemed like the stock, romantically tinged images available from photo agencies. Meanwhile, many images, including those of scrubby fields and apartment buildings, are so unremarkable that normally you would hardly give them a second thought, while others are frankly exotic, such as those documenting a suite of Buddhist statues. What's remarkable is how this reeling mix of images yielded an installation that was both bedazzling and psychologically transporting. It functioned a bit like a latter-day cabinet of curiosities, thoroughly scrambling distinctions between the highly unusual and the inarguably banal.

From any one point in the gallery, you could only see clearly the few photos right before you, while the rest spread out into the distance with a refulgence worthy of stained glass in cathedrals. Clusters of images played off one another, more associatively than narratively--for instance, urban skylines leading to airplanes, then airports and tarmacs and on into cities, harbors and ships, before eventually segueing into rural fields and villages. The result was a kind of Mobius strip moving between sky and ground, city and country, human and animal, motion and stasis, embarkation and arrival.

For an eminently practical structure perfect for displaying a vast archive of images, Visible World was also complex and evocative, an ultra-mediated variation on Minimalist sculpture, a visual history of where the artists have been and what they've seen, a highway of images angling off into the distance, a film strip, even a kind of beacon projecting distant places and past events into the gallery. In the midst of its wonderment, it also suggested a cheesy attraction at a theme park--not inappropriately, given the overall tourist theme.

Also included in the show was a neighboring installation consisting of a mini-bed near one wall and dreamlike projected text sliding across other walls, but the artists' light table in extremis was by far the more riveting work.