An art book, particularly one without text, should demand more than just flapping through handsome pictures. It should slow the process, intrigue, engage the viewer, coax him or her to focus more deeply and wonder. The hook of the marvelous, recent book by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Equilibres, (Verlag der Buchhsndlung Walter König, Köln, 2006) is balance. Our human mind has a hardwired yearning for balance (just as nature often entices with a color and its compliment in floral allure.)

Photograph after photograph record ordinary objects piled, cantilevered, fitted together, even sustained in place with a puff of wind, in perfect equipoise. The structures themselves are ephemeral. But while they last, Fischli and Weiss explore them from various angles, sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white. Shadows too become players in the composition—dancing, amplifying, often adding an additional, lushly sculptural fullness to the vision. So does the nearly always sloping ground.

The ordinariness of components—a bottle, a shoe, a potato, a broom, a piece of rubber tubing—the muted color tones, the quiet suspended time, cast an hypnotic spell. Sometimes the elements feel almost lacey in a large space, sometimes they loom heroic like a Henry Moore. But first there’s the balance that satisfies. One finds oneself looking carefully at how in the world these disparate objects can possibly hold there. Then there’s the fun of recognizing what goofy objects they actually are (there’s a whiff of Rube Goldberg’s inventiveness in them.) Then there’s the leisurely aesthetic delight of watching light illumine the surface of a bending form variously, or the semi- transparency of a bottle, or sharp and dumpy forms together injecting different tones, or the lyricism of a arcing tube or wire, or the counterpoint of a barely visible shape at the periphery of the picture.

I found myself with a friend spending more than an hour just looking at the 140 pictures—contemplating, commenting, flapping among various views and lightings of a piece to see what each added or explored, laughing at the zaniness of some. The last three pictures in the book abandon pile-up all together. In subdued blue tones, simple heavy stones standing firm in textured spaces as in a zen garden, evoke their own deep mental balance.