Visible World

An encyclopedic artist's book by the Zurich duo Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012), Visible World compresses 2,848 color photographs taken over fifteen years of travel into 260 flexibound pages. The world is rendered as a deadpan, seemingly total inventory.

Conceived and designed by the artists and co-published by Matthew Marks Gallery and Buchhandlung Walther König in 2000, the book is the printed form of their long-running Sichtbare Welt project, which the duo also presented as photographs on light tables. Airports, beaches, gardens, mountains, and cities pass in tight grids without hierarchy or commentary, extending the taxonomic impulse of their 1982 publication Suddenly this Overview. The pictures court the generic (sunsets and tourist views done straight) so that the book reads at once as archive, travelogue, and gentle parody of both.

Working together from 1979 until Weiss's death in 2012, Fischli and Weiss built one of contemporary art's most influential collaborative bodies of work, spanning the film The Way Things Go (1987), the clay Suddenly this Overview sculptures, and the retrospective How to Work Better at the Guggenheim (2016). The library holds several of their other titles, including 800 Views of Airports and How to Work Better.