It begins in the suburbs of Cairo and Zurich and ends in the Scottish Highlands. In between we see glamorous skylines, religious monuments, humdrum hotel rooms, blossoming meadows, kittens, children in Rio, a rice paddy in Bali, brass bands, catacombs, Disneyland, vegetable gardens, jungles, the ruins of Stonehenge and Pompeii, majestic mountains and other images epitomizing a very specific, spectacularly tourist world view.
Bilder, Ansichten, a salient outline of all of Fischli/Weiss’ later key motifs, is a first-hand photographic expedition, a typological excursion to those (usually “beautiful”) views and vistas of the visible world that seem beyond the autonomous artist’s grasp as they have become merely functional, over-used, and over-determined popular icons.