Broken Fall: Rise and Fall of Pictures

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English, Italian

The fear of falling is as old as mankind. Falling is the symmetrical opposite of flying, and has been pictured according to different conceptions of weight - of the body wich falls to the ground. Falling is also linked to walking badly, staggering, jumping, getting lost, and also to failing. In modern and contemporary art, falling has become an intentional action. An action that involves the artist's body and often the fate of the image of the work of art. Acrobats, tumblers, clowns, Charlie Chaplin's or Buster Keaton's gags, people clinging onto cornices or windowsills in Alfred Hitchcock's films, Philip Petit the tightrope walker suspended between the Twin Towers in New York, through to the trajectories tried out by Bruce Nauman or Bas Jan Ader: these are all examples of figures of artistic experiences linked to the action of falling. At the same time, falling has also to do with the practice of painting and the processes that were introduced in the twentieth century. Starting with Jackson Pollock's drippings, it moved on to works made by splashing or dropping colour on surface placed on the ground rather than fixed to a wall. Giovanni Iovane and Alessandra Pace's Broken Fall reflects on this condition of falling in works of art, and it does so through a form of writing by images rather tha description. A fall that, ever since the early twentieth century, has proved to be a distressing and yet brilliant strategy for failure.