Title: Eleven Minus One

Photographer/s: Amir Zaki

Date of publication: 2011

Place of publication: Los Angeles, CA

Dimensions: 9″x9″ closed, 27″x36″ open

Edition size: 500

Type of binding: Soft, Hand smyth sewn

Number of pages: 20

Type of paper: uncoated matte

Number of pictures: 120

Type of printing: 4 color

Printer: Eighth Veil

Publisher: Eighth Veil and LAXART

Designer: Amir Zaki

Language: English

ISBN: 978-0-9826172-3-6

Category: Limited Edition Artist Book

Price: $100

Summary: Eleven Minus One – Project Details
For this project, Amir Zaki carefully reconstructed and reinterpreted, in virtual 3D
space, several photographs from a series made in the mid-1980’s by Swiss artist
duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Their photographs depict precariously balancing
temporary sculptures that they intentionally constructed in a slapdash manner. Their
photographs of these sculptures were casually shot in their studio using
unprofessional lighting and equipment. Through these photographs of temporary
sculptural constructs made of household detritus, Fischli and Weiss subvert the idea
of sculpture as a heroic manifestation of a unique and masterfully constructed
object. Their work privileges the document over the sculpture, which Zaki interprets
as an ironic inverse of the ubiquitous professional photographic documentation of
the ‘serious’ sculpture found in so many art books and journals.
In Zaki’s adaptation of their work, there is a re-inversion at play as he privileges the
sculpture again, but only as a 3D virtual non-object in order to destabilize their
relationship. This has manifested as a series of short photorealistic animation loops
and a foldout book based on the eleven different ways that a cube can be unfolded*.
Working with this methodology allowed Zaki to further interrogate the conventions
and limitations of photography by exploring depictions of ‘real’ space, but without
the restraints of actual physics or forces such as gravity. Zaki is interested in the
perversion of using Fischli and Weiss photographs of quickly made, throw-away
sculptures as a source to create an incredibly laborious photorealistic virtual 3D
scene that can be explored from all angles, both through photographic and
orthographic projections**. In this project Zaki has also fetishized the sculptures by
making them virtual, stylized and idealized. He has resurrected these sculptures and
placed them in a world where they need not ever ‘fall’ (fail). In the animations Zaki
has created, the sculptures simply spin, teeter or gyrate indefinitely. In the
photographs Zaki has rendered for the book, the sculptures hover in a perfect
orthographic projection space, surrounded by a black void.
The book is a very complex foldout design that is quite difficult to describe in text. It
is ten double-sided square pages. Each page spread unfolds into unique
configurations of six squares that represent all sides of a cube. The images on each
unfolded page spread depict 3D digital recreations of photographs from by Swiss
artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. When the series Equilibres fully unfolded,
the book opens up to approximately 27×36 inches. It is an interactive object, and
can be folded and unfolded in multiple ways, creating grids, cubes, and unfolded
boxes, each creating a unique experience and juxtaposition of images.
It is important to recognize the book in terms of a limited edition or a multiple. It is
also more of an object with sculptural qualities and a tactile nature than a ‘book’ in
the traditional sense.
* The idea of the unfolded cube is drawn directly from working within 3D virtual
space, where everything is viewed and understood based on six sides of an object:
front, right, back, left, top and bottom. The eleven iterations idea is derived from
“Unfolding the Tesseract” by Peter Turney, found in the Journal of Recreational
Mathematics, Vol. 17(1), 1984-85. There is also a nod to artist Sol LeWitt’s
conceptual practice in general, but most specifically “Variations of Incomplete Open
Cubes”. Further, the act of unfolding a cube, in essence flattening or deflating it, can
be interpreted in the ironic spirit of privileging a two dimensional representation of a
sculpture over the three dimensional object itself that Fischli and Weiss seemed
interested.
**Orthographic projections are views that have no ‘lens distortion’, and are thus
unlike the way most cameras represent space. They look both photographically
believable but very unusual. The normal use for orthographic projection is in
architectural drawings where everything is drawn as if equidistant from the viewer,
as opposed to things receding back and projecting forward in space. Orthographic
projections can be thought of as ideal or perfect in one sense, but very unusual
and totally unlike human vision.
Amir Zaki – 2010

Date and place of birth of photographer/s: 1974, Beaumont, CA

Website: http://amirzaki.com

Book link: http://amirzaki.artcodeinc.com/pages/2010-emo/

Donated by: Amir Zaki