In the early ’20s, Marcel Duchamp developed his rotation machines to call attention to the dependence of artistic meaning on fixed vantage points. Based on phenomena of visual physiology, these objects assign the observer a precise “viewpoint.” Similarly, Felice Varini designates a specific vantage point for viewing. In his recent installation entitled Six Carrés Libres Noirs (Six free black squares, 1990)—a series of perspectively distorted squares applied to the walls and the ceiling—it is only by approaching a mirror leaning against a column in the center of the exhibition space that the

Employing disparate mediums, Christoph Rütimann creates situations that put physical laws and familiar semantic relations to the acid test. Gravity is often the springboard of his considerations. In Le rideau à trois (The three-way curtain; all works 1990) Rütimann built a curtain out of so-called “pocket balances”—the small, suspendible scales one finds in grocery stores. In the current piece, a variant of another work, which he showed at the Mai 36 Galerie in Lucerne, the balances are suspended in columns between the floor and the ceiling. The three strings of 12 scales each create a curtainlike