"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The day after 9/11, Richard Drew's photograph The Falling Man was published in the global media. Drew had photographed a man, his head pointing downward, falling from one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The photograph is a measure of the transient moment and the subject who had existed in that moment, addressing the complexity of the moment of death. Regarding the same event, Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tells the story of nine-year-old Oskar, whose father died in the terrorist attack. His notebook contains a series of photographs showing a man who had jumped from one of the towers. Eventually Oskar tears out the photographs and rearranges them so that the man seems to be soaring. Oskar says: "When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky. And if I'd had more pictures, he would've flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would've poured into the hole that the plane was about to come out of."*

In the artistic discourse, the "fall" is often seen as situated in a transitional space – between movement and silence, between heaven and earth. The concept of "ground" can misplace its meaning. The engagement with movement in a transitional space is discussed in the thought of two Dutch scholars, Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen. According to them, in the second decade of the current century, in the wake of postmodernism, history returns and the concept of "in-between" reappears on the scene – in the form of an ongoing "meta-modern" crisis, in which the contemporary artist is destined to fluctuate between the modern desire for recognition and the postmodern doubt as to what it all means, between hope and melancholy, empathy and apathy, utopianism and pragmatism.

The first examples in which van den Akker and Vermeulen find the signs of this new condition are the works of artist Bas Jan Ader from the 1970s, which present the inexorable, ongoing struggle of movement. As opposed to Yves Klein's Leap into the Void (1960), which recreates a fall as a technologically mediated gesture of drift and release, Ader's photographed falls involve a kind of "choreographies bound to the ground," in which the body's movement is subject to the force of gravity. These falls are essentially existentialist, as an expression of the unstable human condition.

In Bill Viola's The Reflecting Pool (1977-1979) the artist emerges from a forest, standing on the edge of a pool for a long period of time. At the moment of his leap, his body freezes in the air in a fetal position, remaining suspended above the water which continues to move, until his reflection appears in the water, followed by his emergence from the pool and return to the forest.

The photographic performance work by Kerry Skarbakka reinvents a kind of false memory. The tension between the act and its documentation animates the digital manipulation. Skarbakka documented himself recreating 30 different falls from the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005. The audience watching the event saw the cords holding him, unlike the way in which he appears to us in the work.

A number of works in the exhibition investigate the concept of inversion: the jump as a conscious act, compared to the fall as the result of tragedy. In the video work by Mika Rottenberg we see a barefoot girl determined to "walk" on her hands in an upside-down snow-covered landscape, seemingly hanging from the sky beneath a ceiling of snow – a state that requires resistance to the force of gravity. In Galia Gur Zeev's work we see children hung upside-down on play ladders in Tel Aviv's Meir Park – a kind of bat-like inversion that marks the playground as a territory subject to rules different from those of the rational world. Michal Chelbin's video installation was created in collaboration with the Inbal Pinto & Avshalom Pollak Dance Company. The slow-motion video documents the dancers in the act of jumping, in an attempt to capture a fleeting moment poised between self-control and surrender.

* Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 2005.