Uncertain States

http://www.uncertainstates.com

My upside down moment

Man on Wire

I was moved by what Philippe Petit says about the moment he stepped on the wire between the Twin Towers: while he was aware of the extreme danger, it was impossible not to take the step. The statement says much about the spirit of his endeavour: there is hubris, perhaps, but also a sense of humility; a knowledge of his own vulnerability and a willingness to put it on the line to create a moment of size, of poetry. It is the smallness of his figure against the skyscrapers that makes the event so remarkable.

9/11, though never explicitly mentioned, has an underpinning presence in this film: we see the Twin Towers in the process of construction, the great structural ribs - later so painfully exposed - erected with such optimism. I was reminded of the images of the 9/11 'jumpers'. Philippe Petit, of course, succeeds. I found this a strangely healing film.

There is a scene in the documentary where Petit carries his then girlfriend, Annie Allix, piggy-back across the practice wire. I was reminded of the day when a young funambule student called Jade did the same for me and thereby cured me of my fear of height. I was studying corde lisse, vertical rope, at the French national circus school, a place that took Circus more seriously than anywhere else I had been to. The heights at which I had to work were, accordingly, 'proper', but to me, mind-boggling. I developed crippling vertigo; the fear itself became fearful, for an aspiring aerialist like me it was akin to sickness.

One day Jade volunteered to carry me across his high-wire. I trusted his undeniable skill and confidence, and some of it must have rubbed off on me. That night I dreamt that I was piloting a small plane into an azure sky; the day after, I was able to put aside my fear. Incidentally, Jade himself was an obsessive admirer of Philippe Petit.

Visit my degree show

Annette Habel, Falling Bodies, 2009
C-type prints on aluminium (4 panels)
Installation size: 244 x 548 cm

The Cass Summer Show

Private View:
Tue 09 June 2009 6-8pm

Wed 10 June 11-8
Thu 11 June 11-8
Fri 12 June 11-8
Sat 13 June 10-5
Sun 14 June 11-5

59-63 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7PF
Nearest Tube: Aldgate East

My space will be in Unit 2 Gallery,
next to main entrance, ground floor, street frontage,
opposite Whitechapel Gallery.

'Falling Bird' by Ori Gersht in:'The Hidden Land' at Nettie Horn

Ori Gersht: Falling Bird series
Untitled No.5, 2008

Ori Gersht (of the exploding vase) is again deconstructing still life. Part of the current group show 'The Hidden Land' at Nettie Horn, Gersht's series 'Falling Bird' shows a pheasant falling head first into a dark, mirror-like liquid. We see the bird partly submerged: the head is already below the surface. We cannot see the world into which the bird is plunging; to our eye, the animal is duplicated at the point of transition, travelling, crashing, toward itself.

The notes mention the work's reference to a Chardin still life; we may assume that Chardin's painting shows a dead pheasant, customarily hung upside down. Gersht's bird is also upside down, but has come loose, though its new-found freedom - in this world at least - lasts only for the blink of an eye. We may speculate on whether it is already dead; what seems clear is that we are witnessing its journey into the next world.

The show's title 'The Hidden World' is referenced not only in the unknown space below the mirrored surface, but also in the 'unseeable' moment as revealed by high-speed camera: the moment of transition, of death. The link between photographs and mortality - 'frozen' moments, always in the past, always forever - is well documented. A still life, or nature mort, as the French call it, points to the universe via modest objects, everyday scenes. Other images in the series show the surface disturbed by the plunge, and the calm before (or after), from a wider angle: it may be the sea, or a 'metaphysical space'.

It is as if Gersht wants to show us this metaphysical space, or its juncture point, with the camera as his forensic instrument. I find this work profound and very satisfying.

The Hidden Land continues at Nettie Horn until the 21st of June and also features work by Gwenal Belanger, Daniel Firman and Lori Hersberger.

Falling Bodies

My own work for a change - this one is in progress. For a year I have been obsessively photographing people in freefall, in the studio. For most of that year, everyone seemed to think I was mad, but it never seemed impossible, just difficult - I used to worked in a circus where we would get up to much worse.

I don't want to explain in detail how it was done, just that the falls were 'proper' (some from more than 5 metre height); it was important to me that they were 'real' in the sense that real height had to be involved. I took the images on large-format film, never more then one per fall. This introduced a necessary element of chance into an otherwise very controlled situation.

It took some time to get it right: some of the images of 'normal' people (see the woman in orange) don't read so much as a fall - more like a hover. In the end I collaborated with a group of acrobats. I explained to them that I wanted their bodies to flail, explode with movement, to look crushed by gravity; so they improvised moves for the camera, some of them very challenging. The images yielded from that session look much more like falling.

I feel that this throws up some interesting questions about the real and the fake. I feel that, through a series of elaborations, I have arrived at a different kind of ‘real’.

Please come and see this work at my degree show on 9-14 June 09 at LondonMet in Whitechapel, for further details please go my website at http://www.annettehabel.com

Kleine Leapers

From http://kleineleapers.blogspot.com - a bunch of Klein re-enactments in Sweden. I would like to know more about it. Why water?

Yves Klein

Perhaps the best-known image of a fall, at least in the artworld, Yves Klein's 'Leap into the Void' from 1960. Although Klein fell into a tarpaulin, it must have been scary as hell, falling forward like that, and tarpaulin or not, the fall was real, crystallising a set of ideas in a physical act.

According to the write-up on the Centre Pompidou website, Klein was 'impregnating himself with the immaterial qualities of the void, so that he could transmit them to his artworks.' There is something so quixotic about this, in this sense similar to Kittinger, Bas Jan Ader, even Chaplin or Keaton. Everytime I see the image I oscillate between a sense of awe and wanting to laugh.