Johan Grimonprez - Inflight Magazine

Inflight Magazine puts a subversive twist on airline safety, safety pamphlets and magazines. Almost everyone who ever sat in an airplane has looked at them once - the safety instructions or high-gloss magazine of the airline. To calm the nerves, perhaps, or to pass some time, Inflight Magazine offers both distraction and entertainment. Formally disguised as a magazine, it functions as an artistic manual for hijackers, equipped with such essentials as a safety instruction card and a sick bag. What may be taken for a shrill, pointed joke, for the Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez serves as an illumination of the "value of the spectacular in our culture of catastrophe". The magazine denounces the media event through "attempts to reveal the influence of pictures on our feelings, perception and memory." Viewers and readers are taken onto a flight which leads them jarringly through their own experiences, memories and emotions, allowing them to gain critical distance to the media.

— Hatje Cantz

author: Johan Grimonprez
publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag
year: 2000
book: 21,4 x 27,7 cm, 128 pages, English
ISBN: 3775709932
price: €100