[Doyi's Blog] Between Life and Death...and Art.

 
 Obviously, I started this blog with images first. 
 I didn't write an opening statement. I couldn't. 

 
Just looking at them, even thinking about them, forced me to shove the words back into my mouth, and my thoughts, into my brain. So much ambivalence and emotion. Unable to write an introductory expression of any kind at the moment, I figured it would be far more efficient if you see for yourself what I have seen. Take a closer look.

 
What do you see? How do you feel? 

 
We all know they're photographs of people falling. Large ones, too--probably bigger than my own height. Some people fall vertically, heads pointing down, while others fall more on their back, heads facing the sky. One picture shows two figures, most likely friends, couples, or some sort of close acquaintances, holding hands as they dive past buildings. Everything's black and white. Images are framed in the same size and aligned in a long, straight path. 

   
Now, I don't know about you, but the first thing I thought was, 'Are they real?' 
Are they, the possibly desperate, dying subjects of each piece, real? And are they--the descending, the capturing, the entire scenario of each photo--real, and not some cruelly staged hoax? Then again, asking these questions would suggest my concern or value over the degree of authenticity and humanity in art. What does that mean? What if they were real-life people in a real-life situation? Or what if they were fake? Why would that matter? 

 
For some reason, the fact that something is/was living and alive automatically attaches us to it. We identify with it, connect with it, and ultimately feel for it. It's even truer when the subject is human. Because we, too, are of the same species breathing and dwelling in the same space they had had, their experiences--comic or tragic--affect us in one way or another. Even the strangest, most unfamiliar people could move us. Ingrained in our first nature, this theory seems like a no-brainer, yet it's a fascinatingly universal one that's often under acknowledged. 


Maybe that's why these images of potentially real people jumping off of life-threatening heights bother me a bit. That actual people, no different than I, were captured in such a moment I'd never want to see myself in, makes me feel more than uncomfortable. What's even crazier is that no one knows what happened next. Did they all die? Did anyone survive? The ending is an unanswerable mystery, but we all know that the immediate effect after the falling--the landing--had to be horrific. 


Now, this is all under the assumption they're real. If I told you these photographs were a painting, a charcoal sketch, or a Photoshopped masterpiece, would you think or feel the same? I bet not. At least, definitely not for me. I would maybe think, 'WTF, why would you paint that?' or even  'Hmm, I wonder what those figures represent,' but never 'Oh my gosh, I hope no one's hurt.'  

 

Well, it turned out that, yes, they are real. 
Both the people and the situation are real--were real. 

According to the statement printed on the wall, artist Sarah Charlesworth had built an archive of these photos, originally newspaper prints, for over a decade and then "[blowed] up the prints to a size larger than life." Her first show exhibited in February 1980, thirty years before 9/11. Like my emotionally ambivalent self, Charlesworth took her own art and its process personally. She was not interested in the politics, the objective stance of the artist, the social interpretations. "If you know me," the statement reads, "there is always a personal biographical reading you could do as well: why I chose that particular image, why am I concerned with these issues." 

 

However, you can never escape the politics. I understand her perspective, her intentions, and her desired reading, but you can never escape the politics of art. Of course, she doesn't deny the viewer's potential interpretation of the exhibition as a socially directed statement, or that the work itself isn't at all a socially directed statement. But collecting images of private people, placing it in a public space, and showing their transitional moments between life and death, by definition, is social and political. But that's a whole different story.



 Another slightly disturbing thought came to me, while I was pondering the fact that this was art. That these collection of dying and now-dead people, their images manipulated and aesthetically curated, was presented in the Chicago Art Institute as art. Most important, that someone has benefited from showing this art. Now, I'm not trying to discount the artist's good intentions or declaim against the whole exhibition for being evil. In fact, I really appreciate the artist and her photographs for giving me the chance to think deeper about the human experience. Still, profiting from others' death (strongly worded, not as extreme in this case) in any extent could be a troubling issue, even for art. 





Now I'm not quite sure how to end this blog. I think I talked about the surface of everything but delve deeper into nothing. Nonetheless, writing helped me organize my initially muddled, clumped up thoughts into communicable paragraphs (but got me stuck in concluding them). Meh, I'll think of a better line next time.

Until then,

Doyi