While thinking about falling, I fell over. I don’t mean tripped or bumped, but properly crashed to the ground, hurting myself. It is still fresh months later, that awful feeling of falling, not just a little off-balance, but really out of control. I have seemed to live through the different stages of that fall many times since then… the excited run before, the trip, that elongated feeling of falling, the crash itself, followed by a pause to check everything was alright, then the feelings of shock and recovery. Quickly it became clear how much falling and failing get mythologised, romanticised as sites of potential, when they can hurt drastically. It also seemed to reveal an awful power in falling, a lure. It exerts a pull, alongside gravity, the question of ‘what if…’, to which we can occasionally be brave enough to respond.
Falling deals in the precariousness of life. More than that, it invites the risk in to our fragile bodies. It presumes a willingness to be vulnerable in the face of others’ uprightness. It is a rehearsal for falling into death. There are many daily rehearsals: falling asleep (“I was just dropping off”…), or letting go of sentences, our meanings dropping out in an unfinished phrase or thought, an abbreviation that can pull us up short. Sometimes we catch ourselves in the very act of falling asleep, feeling the uncanny drop itself, and we can quickly pull back from the edge, aware of its cliff-face. A loss of words can be terrifying: facing the loss of meaning that accompanies the petering out of words, the hopelessness, watching as someone struggles for a handhold of sense in a growing miasma of fogged brainpower, facing their own chasm, an abyss of non-sense. Mind the gap. A gap that appears when we miss a word, or search for a name that doesn’t appear, that is simply… gone. We each have our own rehearsals. Artists and performers risk silence and blank faces every time they face an audience.
This first stage of falling then: contemplating the drop. Preparing your mind and body to accept and allow in the fear, risk and potential for pain (and of pain). In many live falling works, it is this stage of the fall that is the longest phase. See Bas Jan Ader’s Broken Fall (organic), or Nightfall (you could look at many other of his works). For all of these, the lead-in to the title’s fall takes by far the main part of the artworks, could arguably be the main event. The tense moments of waiting, knowing what is coming; watching while the artist approaches the moment of letting go, moves inexorably towards the fate he has set up. You have time to consider what he is waiting for, to feel him approach his ‘right’ moment… good god, what is he waiting for? Look at him in Nightfall in what may be his garage: he seems to be gearing up inside himself for the moment of most feeling, to wrest every ounce of emotion into this act, to forcefully imbue the moment with its crux. He is prizing the act of letting go itself and is present within it wholeheartedly. There is a compelling 3-way relationship between the viewer, Ader and this moment. He is concentrated on his action, facing his crucial moment, but we are the invited witness, and he draws us in just as surely. With Broken Fall (organic) he and we are literally in suspense: we know he cannot hold on for very long, we see his occasionally desperate attempt for a better grip on the tree. We will him to hang on, but we will him to drop: we want to see what happens, too, to answer the ‘what if…’ that he has set up. We are complicit. It is difficult to look, but we cannot look away either. In Chris Burden’s Shoot, the preamble or prologue (and it is mainly words we hear, on a black screen, as only the audio survives for this part) is 2 minutes long, the shot over in a flash of 8 seconds. Burden has contextualised the filmed instant by including the audio recording, complete with voiceover, in which he rehearses for double emphasis the words and actions to come. It is Edgar’s visualisation of the drop to Gloucester (King Lear, Act 4, scene 6), building us up to the emergency. His desire to impress each detail upon us is manifest (“you’ll hear the clicking of the camera… another thing to listen for…”), but it is the sense of space in the audio that feels most telling (coincidentally, the similar space of humanity going about its day that Edgar seeks to build)… the sense of people milling around the moment, dawdling, delaying the calamity even, until “Are you ready?”, and the point of crisis arrives. As with Ader’s films, the moment of the fall takes seconds, and there is little to no aftermath. Burden almost rushes off screen as if he no longer wants to be seen, and as with Nightfall, black engulfs us instantly.
Each falling artwork has to approach this threshold moment. The word threshold seems to include the desire to hold back, to hold on, to not cross over, which recalls Macbeth’s sticking place,
Macbeth:
If we should fail?
Lady Macbeth:
We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking place,
And we’ll not fail.
Macbeth, Act 1, scene 7
Lady Macbeth charges him to screw his courage to the sticking place – but he cannot stick there. Unable to look only at the deed itself, Macbeth fixes on the consequences. His focus vaults over and lies entangled in the untrammelled horrors of the possibilities of his act. Ader and Burden are focused on the moment, staring down the barrel of a gun, looking at the drop and letting go. There is an inversion to follow here: ‘if we should fall?’ seems to be the question posed by each falling artwork, while we are now their accomplice urging them on – ‘screw your courage up and we will fall’ – gather ourselves and our courage together, let’s fall and see what happens.
But with each letting go we have to face the fear that we may fall to pieces, that something will be broken and unrecoverable from… and if the worst happens, what then happens?
The step into the unknown, then, which may be the edge of a cliff. On October 14 2012, Felix Baumgartner made the highest fall ever (what a surprise that this was a record the Americans had been chasing since before 1960. It seems a little post-modern for that era’s sensibilities). After the long wait to get up there, he has to stand on the threshold of the cabin door with his feet sticking out, and then fall forward. Stuntmen talk of falling as the art of landing safely; artists’ practices seem to have entirely different emphases. Baumgartner frames his fall as a freefall, which seems to insist on retaining an element of control (the inference being that he can come out of this free fall when he chooses). But what is free about falling? The investment is huge. Newton’s definition of freefall is a fall with only the force of gravity acting on an object. But the lure of falling seems to have its own, separate force, from inside us. There is something appalling about watching Baumgartner fall forward out of the cabin, as if it goes against the nature of things, transgressing a deep need to keep ourselves safe. What if the fall had not finished as planned, with a safe landing? How would we feel, being invited as witness to a man dropping to his death, which was a real possibility a minute later, as he spun out of control.
Watching Buster Keaton falling is joyful when young, but the same feats are uncomfortable to watch when performed at 55 and 65 years of age. The luxury of seeing someone else fall, from our position of relative stability, is undermined by worry, shaking our equilibrium, perhaps setting boundaries to our complicity. Is falling the preserve of youth? Is it just too dangerous when we are older – is there too much to lose? Are there falls that are just unbearable?
Orchestrated, planned falling as live art can be very different to the unexpected, shocking event of a fall in daily life. How, then, to approach and explore real falls, to provoke an accident, but not as some pared-down trip or jump? How to offer a level of real personal risk that seems a very necessary factor in an interesting artwork about falling, but not break something or die? To open oneself up to possible disaster, to court catastrophe even, but not to be obliterated. Each constructed fall seems to need some kind of emergency within it.
I made an early 8mm film, Pulling the rug out, in which I stand on a carpet and fall repeatedly as my friend tries to wrong-foot me. My friend is there as an outside agent to force the falls, in order to bypass my instinct for self-preservation. The work explores the accident, the shock and horror of real falls, the risk of pain. Unable to hurt myself, I wanted the decision to keep myself safe taken out of my hands. I had to be out of control. I didn’t anticipate how much my friend would feel challenged to up-end me. The film shows how much the falls hurt, and after the second fall there is a little stocktaking from both of us, I put my hand up to catch my breath. I look uncertain; I (fleetingly) consider stopping the piece. Then a competitive streak comes out in both of us. The pain focuses my mind. The film hazards the possibility of outwitting these rug-pulling hands of fate, and by the end, there is some kind of facility learnt, the power shifts, movements can be anticipated.
My young daughter saw my fall a while back. She saw the fear in my eyes, the dreadful gurn I made trying to avoid the floor coming at my chin. I saw her see me. I felt vulnerable, fragile, old, and took another step off my pedestal, showing her I am not always sure-footed, but can falter, and fall. It felt shameful, to fall in view of others. Yet in live artworks, the very vulnerability of the fall, the willingness to dive into that shameful moment, un-shames it and us. Kira O’Reilly’s Stair Falling – with her bony body pressing into the marble stairs, red marks appearing – echoes many other (women’s) falls. The slow motion reveals a mundanity to the drama, giving it resonances of the domestic, the repetition forcing some kind of routine to this extraordinary event, but also creates the riveting tension, and repositions the power. The vulnerability and bravery of this insistent continued falling, the personal nature of the moment, the openly offered views of her body, all conspire to turn the audience to voyeur, the repeated camera clicks an invasion. But this is already a mythology for me… I wasn’t there…
Lucille Power’s Woman Falling: hitting the deck again and again. The wooden floor wired for sound to accentuate the boards pounding as her body and head clunk over and over, the crowded audience gathering tightly round. Her men’s underwear, slightly ill-fitting, serving only to accentuate a fragility in this world. Repetition as a process and tool to explore the act, to open it up for questioning, to face its fear, stare it down just as surely as Burden looks down the gun barrel. In SWIM, 50 people swam across London, diving and falling lemming-like into pools across the capital. The process of stepping off dry land offers a chance to wriggle out of gravity for a minute, unshackle our bonds. SWIM exposed the bravery of daring to change one’s day completely, to attempt a new journey, to throw off one’s usual uniform and routine and to run out into the capital in only a swimsuit, to swallow one’s pride, loose one’s shame, put our usually covered-up pasty rolls of British flesh on show. It drew on the lure of the fall as surely as the lure of water to pull us in. Someone afterwards remarked on the ‘cosmic oddness’ of the piece, as if it threatened the ‘nature’ of things. Water offers relief from the relentless pull of gravity; we in turn looked at the landlubbers with sudden incomprehension, as if throwing oneself off dry land again and again all day was the only way to live. Bas Jan Ader’s many falls: this tall, almost unbearably thin man, falling again and again, continually putting himself in jeopardy… until he falls into the sea and never recovers dry land. Perhaps art falls so that others don’t have to.
After the fall and the crash, we need to be careful not to rush the recovery.
Feeling other eyes on us, we often hasten over this part, but it has much to offer, including a chance to question where this sense of shame resides. What do we know when we are prone on the ground instead of upright? ‘Anyway, I think with my knee’, said Beuys, suggesting this change of viewpoint. Why is it framed as childish to fall, and becoming adult (growing up) as a stage of more sure-footedness? Perhaps we are ashamed to act as children, but are we sure we should know better? In the Western Christian framework our entire human existence is framed as a fall, so to reject our fallibility is to reject the very nature of our humanness. Can we not forgive ourselves for being fallible? As with the joy of divesting clothes (we are back in that garden), perhaps we can rejoice in a freedom from uprightness.
In a live one-to-one artwork drift, I floated a boat on a swimming pool, and invited people to step off dry land and drift with me. Leaving the relative safety of their (upright, grounded) position, drifters were cradled in a post-fall state, ‘berçant notre infini sur le fini des mers’ 1 (a sense of rehearsal in the very ripples of the water). There was no script, and the conversation followed wherever the drifters led, whatever we noticed in that moment. One of the definitions of a drift is the difference between the size of a bolt and the hole into which it is driven, and these drifts offered a time between being fixed and formulated by others (with all the attendant horrors of that as outlined in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, ‘And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin/When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall’). The drifts offered time to re-balance ourselves and re-manage our weight in the world. The only rule was that we could not push off from the side, so were unable to go at a chosen pace. We had to bear this change of pace, our loss of agency, which could charge the time with tension, instead an envisioned calm. At the very last moment Baumgartner gives a tiny push off from the cabin, as if he needs to go under his own impetus, be the agent of his drop, a last resistance to the passivity inherent in falling: it’s not easy to let go. In Graeme Miller’s Track, people are slowly pushed along a railway track, lying down, on their back. Horizontalizing people offers a different viewpoint – rest, recuperate, recover, reflect – suddenly you become aware of how much effort it takes to stay upright, to carry on… going on. Someone once burst into tears having only just got settled on my boat, saying, “It’s just, you run and you run… around all day, and then you get here, and you think, ‘what was it all for?’” drift offered time in between, celebrating time out from our usual roles, gravity, time itself, allowing ourselves to go off-course, in unintended meanders. Track and drift both seem to offer a safe space to move together before the taking up again of our particular, chosen positions in the world. With drift I offered a romance, not always a drama. I was a poor woman’s Ellen MacArthur, never leaving the confines of a pool, never alone in my boat. Falling offers this same re-negotiation of our place in the world, but can be a shipwreck, with all attendant risks and adventure.
Falling is the jarring, difficult blow that links shame and daring to the nature of adulthood. It goes to the heart of our definition of humanity, insisting on our vulnerability, exposing the nature and complicity of an act of witness. Doris Humphrey talks of the upright as stability and safety, and the fall as adventure and progress: the whole of life a balancing act, the one just as necessary as the other. Exploring any pain in the fall helps question what and how we learn. It is in the nature of things to fall: by Newton’s definition, the moon is also in freefall.
Music talks a lot about falling: falling in love, falling to pieces, free falling, its rhythms reassuring us of a return, or at least company along the way. Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit sings of a freedom at the death of logic (‘logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead’), which offers the marvels of Alice’s fall into Wonderland. Killing proportion and logic (scale, standing & position, reasoning, comparative and proper relation) offers a re-orientation. But their fall is drug-fuelled, urging ‘Feed your head’, a twist on the opening lines of Rudyard Kipling’s If… (that paean to being in control of yourself): ‘If you can keep your head while all about you/Are losing theirs’. So too, in his long manifesto poem, What I believe, JG Ballard states – ‘I believe in the murderous intent of logic’ – and to fall seems a battle cry against this lethal tyranny, an exhortation to a new life: the power of imagination free from adult reasoning. Ballard understood about the creative energy of falling and crashing. To fall becomes to fly, if only for a little while, and takes on infinite potential: ‘I believe in flight, in the beauty of the wing, in everything that has ever flown.’ Un-shamed, we can enjoy our glorious fallibility… as we step off into the unpremeditated and unknown. The flight is precious, and so is the painful return to gravity, the face in the dirt.
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock pulls back from the edge of falling time and again, deflecting from the crisis, retreats into somnambulence and ritual, refuses to bite and squeeze the moment, finds the question overwhelming, stymied by the possible consequences. He doesn’t presume and doesn’t dare. It is this daring that live artists do for all of us. We presume – we lay claim – almost an assumption of responsibility (‘nous voulons/…Plonger au fond du gouffre’ cries Baudelaire 2). We suppose and take liberties. We are presumptuous. Falling unsettles all of our worlds. It disturbs the universe. We need to have the strength to force the moment to its crisis. And how should we begin? With a crash.
In November 2012 I organised a Study Room Gathering On Falling at the Live Art Development Agency (LADA). I would like to thank LADA and everyone who came for their input and contributions to the evening, which fed into this writing: Francis Alexander, Katy Baird, Emilyn Claid, Alice Colquhoun, Rosa Farber, Dorota Halina Gaweda, Lois Keidan, Debbie Kent, Dafne Louzioti, Claire Mander, Aicha Mehrez, Kerstin Moller, Mary Osborn, Helen Savage, Clare Thornton.
In 2012 Amy Sharrocks won the Royal British Society of Sculptors’ Sculpture Shock award, and spent her residency there making work about falling.
Bas Jan Ader, (1971)
Broken Fall (organic),
Nightfall
Viewable online at http://www.basjanader.com/
Chris Burden, SHOOT (19 November 1971) F Space
http://www.tofu-magazine.net/newVersion/pages/ChrisBurden.html
William Shakespeare (1603-7)
Macbeth, Act 1, scene 7
King Lear, Act 4, scene 6
Buster Keaton through the years, a compilation of his falls by Cliff Cronan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwH8jkv2Hq0
Kira O’Reilly stair falling (2009)
Lucille Power, Woman Falling (2004)
Felix Baumgartner
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9608084/Felix-Baumgartner-breaks-speed-of-sound.html
‘Lulling our infinite on the finite of the seas’
Other translations have ‘rocking’, ‘balancing’, even ‘swinging’.
Baudelaire (1857) Le Voyage, in Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
Beuys, J. (1987), quoted in The Connected Body?: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Body and Performance. Edited by Ric Allsopp and Scott deLaHunta. Amsterdam School of the Arts.
Amy Sharrocks
Pulling the rug out (2003)
SWIM (2007) photographer Ruth Corney, copyright Amy Sharrocks drift (2009), photographer Ruth Corney, copyright Amy Sharrocks
Graeme Miller, Track (2010)
http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/track
TS Eliot, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, 1920
http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
Ed Caesar, An Even Bigger Splash, originally published in The Independent (16 July 2007), collected in The Live Art Almanac, published by the Live Art Development Agency, assisted by the University of Leeds (2008)
Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit (1967)
Rudyard Kipling, If… (1895)
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm
J. G. Ballard, What I Believe: Interzone, #8, Summer 1984. A prose poem, originally published in French in Science Fiction #1 (ed. Daniel Riche) in January 1984.
Available online in original format at
http://www.jgballard.ca/uncollected_work/what_i_believe.html
‘we wish to plunge/
To the abyss’ depths’, also variously translated as ‘plunge into the void’, and ‘Dive to the depths of the gulf’,
Baudelaire (1857) Le Voyage, in Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
‘Anatomy of Falling’ was originally written by Amy Sharrocks and published in Performance Research, 18.4 (2013), 48-55, reprinted by permission of the publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd.