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.

Joseph Kittinger

In 1960 the pilot Joseph Kittinger carried out what must surely be the ultimate fall. He travelled in a balloon to 102,800 feet (31,330 m) - the outer edge of the earth's atmosphpere - and then threw himself out into space. Eventually, at 18,000 feet (5,500 m) he opened a parachute, but most of the journey he spent in free fall.

It is said that, as he jumped, he was sure he would die; and that for him the most testing part was not the thought of death, or the physical pain, but the extreme loneliness at what is really the edge of the world. Even if I didn't know about the background to this image, I would guess that it portrays someone who is risking his life - survival does look unlikely.

In my opinion, the most stunning part is that he came down largely unscathed, took part in a number of similar adventures and is apparently still alive to date. Sometimes life really does tell the best stories - Münchhausen, eat your heart out.

Sam Taylor - Wood

Just like Paddy Jolley's mattress photograph, this image offers a lot more questions than answers. How was this photograph made? Is it a real-time shot or was it staged, Jackie-Chan - like, with wires? On another level, why did the woman stand on the chair? Will she break a leg? On yet another level, what and who does she stand for? Immortality?

Of course the answers are well-known, but I find it so much more pleasurable to pretend ignorance and to speculate.

Ordinary People

From The Times front page earlier this year, during the season of extremely high winds. What is it about falling, flying, being in mid-air that fascinates us so much?

There is a link between falling and mortality: angels and gods can fly and hover, but us mortals are slowly falling to our deaths. The hope is that somehow we will never hit the ground. Photography freezes a moment in time and creates an image of immortality. We all can hover.


Even worse than falling is being thrown, even if it is for the best.
(Metro front page, 5th of Feb this year.)

Denis Darzacq

Denis Darzacq's series La Chute (The Fall) depicts young people falling in urban environments. He persuaded street dancers to pose, asking them to look expressionless. Apart from being a series of stunning, stirring, poetic images, it is a political comment about a generation in freefall.

His comment is: 'I like the fact that you can read into these photos whatever you want. Will we let them hit the ground? Will anyone rush out to scoop them up?'

Catherine Yass/ The Human Cannon Ball

Catherine Yass's photographs taken out of a lift are well known. The blurred buildings, zooming past the camera, are also an image of falling - our falling.

This still from Yass's film 'High Wire' depicts a funambulist, a high wire walker. High wire walking is the last circus discipline left where performers still risk life and limb with no safety net, so we don't have to. The funambulist here is Didier Pasquette, one of the very few left in the world. During filming, he had to turn back after a few steps. Apparently it was too windy, but no explanation is given in the film or notes. Strangely, way this work encompasses failure as much as audacity.

I saw the human cannon ball perform his act at the Cornwall Show last year. Four counties clubbed together to bring him over from the States. I was very touched by his act. There is something strangely life-affirming about someone who will get himself shot 80 feet up, until he becomes literally a dot in the air - a truly pointless and heroic act.

I like the multi-exposure element of the photograph - it reminds me of Muybridge's horse shots - but it doesn't sufficiently convey the outrageousness and loneliness of the endeavour. Yass's image shows that element much better.

Pascual Sisto

Pascual Sisto's Video works are hilarious. 'No strings attached' features a miraculously animated, kicked-around plastic chair that hardly touches the ground, '28 Years in the Implicate Order' an unsettling car-park video quote. Viewing his work, even in small streaming size, has an strangely physical effect. There is a lot of slapstick.

I was unable to embed video pieces here, but they can be viewed at www.pascualsisto.com.

Johanna Billing

This woman has obviously lost her bottle. Looking at this image, a video still, I can almost feel the height myself, and also the fear, which I remember as a kind of numb, pumped sensation - a metallic taste in the mouth and cold feeling on the skin.

The question is - which way down will she take? The fast or the slow? Even climbing down would be a way of falling.

Bas Jan Ader 2

Bas Jan Ader let himself fall out of trees, off roofs, and into this canal. He also made himself cry in front of the camera. In his films the discomfort is very apparent. I like the tragic, melodramatic element in his deliberately hurting himself and not enjoying it, and somehow managing to make it look like an accident. He reminds me of a sad clown or a fallen aerialist. He eventually perished in a small boat on the ocean - only the boat was found - the final and ultimate misadventure.


A re-enactment of Bas Jan Ader's canal piece. It's a shame that the Serpentine is not as deep as the Amsterdam canals, but in a way this makes it almost funnier.

Paddy Jolley

This image really intrigues me. Who dropped the mattress, and from what height? The ceiling can't be that high so where is the person or machine that suspended the object before the fall? I like the irony too - we would normally expect something else to fall onto a mattress or mat.

Ian Davenport

Ian Davenport's drip paintings could be described as traces of gravity on a small scale. It is apparent a lot of skill and effort goes into making them just so. I would love to see some examples that are not just so - that have gone wrong.

Bas Jan Ader 1

Tears and snot are falling. They remind me of Ian Davenport's paintings. Or should that be vice versa?

Susan Derges

Drops, tears, falling, rising, suspense.

I love the way in which every drop contains a tiny representation of this woman's face. Susan Derges used a machine utilising the properties of light, sound and gravity to create these drops, making visible he laws of physics.