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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Rachel Wells
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This essay considers Fischli and Weiss’s Equilibre/Quiet Afternoon (1984) in the light of Baudrillard’s theorisation of the ‘clever object’. In this photographic series, as well as in their wider oeuvre, Fischli and Weiss present objects that are supposedly independent of an acting subject, a theme which appears in line with Baudrillard’s ‘Fatal Strategy’ of the clever object that has triumphed over the subject. However, the artists’ awarding of agency to objects is always presented within a careful dialectical balance between subject and object, with the subject absent but subtly and humorously referenced. It is argued that this delicate equilibrium, figured in the improbable balance of the photographed household objects of Quiet Afternoon, permeates Fischli and Weiss’s work, and counters a Baudrillardian view of the evil and ironic cunning of the object and its avoidance of the ‘dialectic of meaning’. For while both Baudrillard’s theory and Fischli and Weiss’s artwork are considered within a postmodern interest in comparability and the collapse of binary oppositions, Baudrillard’s diagnosis of ‘the principle of equivalence’ coupled with his theorisation of ‘the impossible exchange barrier’ presents an essential asymmetry which ‘tips the world into uncertainty’, while Fischli and Weiss present an improbable balance that is both precarious and permanent: an equilibrium that exists without an internal equivalence. It is argued that while Baudrillard suggests that all objective value has been lost in hyperreality, with even use-value left subject to the logic of exchange, Fischli and Weiss’s subversion of objects’ traditional function results in an equilibrium that is not dependent on exchangeability. Contrary to Baudrillard’s conception of photography, Fischli and Weiss do not use the medium as a reassuring method of disguising the cleverness of objects, but rather as a means through which to present a balance that is not reliant upon the transubstantiation of commodity fetishism, but rather upon a pre-Fall cleverness overseen by an absent but implied creative force.
Author(s): Wells R
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Art History
Year: 2013
Volume: 36
Issue: 3
Pages: 626-639
Print publication date: 16/05/2013
ISSN (print): 0141-6790
ISSN (electronic): 1467-8365
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12020
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.12020
Notes: This article will form part of a special edition of the journal 'Art History' on 'The Clever Object' to be published in June 2013. The edition will also be published as a stand alone book.
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