Fatal Falls
Beginnings
Sometimes when a body falls, it does not bounce. Sometimes when a body falls, it breaks, shatters, “drop[s] back into the immense design of things” (83), to borrow Willa Cather’s words. Sometimes when you fall, you die. How do we understand, or imagine this kind of fall? Is a fall to death a failure? And what, if not the body, might rebound after the fatal fall?
Following Jacques Derrida, Dominic Johnson argues that death is historically contingent. He writes,
"The modernity of death does not assume a break with a specifically premodern or antiquated death but instead assumes that, in every period and place, death is significantly remodeled and reinvented anew by those whose experience is lost to it. This position assumes the absolute historicity of subjectivity, the particularity of individual experience, and death as the exemplary limit-experience of the subject" (211).
Working alongside Johnson’s theorizing, I suggest that the fatal fall both historically specific, and necessarily delineated by vectors of intentionality, relationality, and uncertainty. Fatal falls rapidly, at a rate of 9.81 meters per second squared, destabilize notions of failure.
Fred Herko jumped out of a window, and fell to his death, in 1964. Ana Mendieta, depending on who or what you believe, jumped, fell, or was thrown by her husband Carl André, out of another window in 1985. These two falls share at least one striking similarity: they both ended the lives and careers of young artists.
Falling and Failure
How do we locate failure in these falls? Suddenly, given the gravity of death, binaries of success and failure feel almost flippantly simple. Falling to death may be the ultimate failure, since we exert so much effort to stay upright and alive. And yet, might we consider Herko’s fall a success in fulfilling his suicidal intention? Johnson notes that "Herko has entered history books on account of his final performance" (212). Again, can we view Herko’s fall as a success, ensuring his place in the archive and memory of postmodern dance, however marginal? And in Mendieta’s fall, where she did not exercise Herko’s choice or agency, notions of success and failure become even more difficult to grasp, even more ill fitting. Perhaps for both Herko and Mendieta the most glaring failure is societal. Their falls were, like Johnson’s notion of death, historically contingent, circumscribed by a social failure to provide these artists with the techniques for bouncing or with soft places to land.
This failure becomes particularly visible after Mendieta’s fall, in André’s murder trial. As B. Ruby Rich describes, "Most of the art world never even set foot inside the courtroom, let alone talked to the D.A. And therein lies, finally, another story. Carl André may have been acquitted in this trial, but it was the art world itself that was decisively convicted" (Rich 114).
Facing the failure of conviction, the failure of the official record, facing so many failures, there remains a sense of resilience. Not, this time, in fallen bodies as discreet entities, but in the collective memories of them, and the actions that emerge. In 1992, protests took place "outside the Guggenheim Museum in Soho…where Andre’s works were on display" (Move 69). As Richard Move recounts “some protestors infiltrated the invitation-only opening and dropped copies of a photograph of Mendieta’s face onto Andre’s floor sculptures” (69).
Thinking with and through such actions, I carried out a personal activity of protest and remembrance, placing printed stills from Mendieta’s Alma Silueta en Fuego on and around the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Mlotek makes reference to this institution's tendency to privilege the work of male artists. Indeed in 1987, only two years after Mendieta's death, the AGO included work by André in a group exhibition. My intervention, then, acts as an ephemeral reminder of gendered dynamics of presence and absence. It also offers a way to experience Mendieta's persistent presence, through a performative engagement with her work.
To see the full series of documentation, please click here.
Scholarship and Eulogy
Our contemporary experiences of both Herko and Mendieta’s work are haunted by their falls. Johnson observes, “Without diminishing or romanticizing the destitution of the last months of Herko’s life, and the staged excess of his passage out of it, it is tempting to read his falls – the fall not just from grace but from a building – as parables of the work he created during his short career” (226). Meanwhile, Leticia Alvarado recalls her interest "in moving away from narratives framed by [Mendieta's] violent death” (105), implying their presence in much previous scholarship.
Indeed, as Haley Mlotek observes, "Writings about [Mendieta] are often deeply felt, beautiful, moving, reading like letters to a forever-lost lover. But if every letter is a love letter, every essay becomes a eulogy, and Mendieta moves further away from our mortal realm. I don’t think her death is the end of her story." In Mlotek's assertion, there is the echo of a rebound, a bounce that isn't defined by a single body.
Indeed, in academic and artistic treatments of Mendieta's work, bodies multiply. Mlotek discusses the video piece Variations by Elise Rasmussen, in which actors recreate disparate versions of the altercation that lead to Mendieta's fall. This moment reverberates through their multiple bodies and multiple re-stagings. Richard Move also enacts a corporeal repetition of Mendieta's oeuvre, through the re-enactments of her work that comprise his film BloodWork. Even after the fall that proved fatal for Mendieta, her work shows resilience, somehow bouncing among, through, and with the bodies that engage it.
Falling and Sublimity
If a fall is fatal, it is sublimely so. In his Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Edmund Burke notes, “Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime” (148). He goes on to consider “in what ways greatness of dimension, vastness of extent or quantity, has the most striking effect” (148). It is worthwhile, here, to quote his theorizing at some length,
"Extension is either in length, height, or depth. Of these the length strikes least; a hundred yards of even ground will never work such an effect as a tower a hundred yards high, or a rock or mountain of that altitude. I am apt to imagine, likewise, that height is less grand than depth; and that we are more struck at looking down from a precipice, than looking up at an object of equal height… A perpendicular has more force in forming the sublime, than an inclined plane" (148).
There is something particularly terrifying, then, particularly sublime, in falling down, straight down.
Of course, Burke was writing a very long time ago, and if, as Johnson has described, death is historically defined, we must ask if falling remains sublime. Indeed, I suggest that throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, global experiences of conflict and mediatized images of violence have rendered the fatal fall an especially sublime image. We can begin reading this in modern experiences of trauma. As Eleanor Kaufman explains, “[Cathy] Caruth emphasizes the essential belatedness of trauma, how it is by definition not experienced at the moment of the traumatic event” (46). Kaufman draws a convincing relationship between trauma and falling, writing, "It is not surprising to find a link between trauma and falling in an entire strain of postwar literature” (45). She describes how “a new and more aerial form of spatial perception came into prominence, one in which something or someone might reasonably be expected to fall out of the sky” (45).
In his essay “9/11 as Avant-Garde Art?,” Richard Schechner cites a related notion from Antonin Artaud: “We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theatre has been created to teach us that first of all” (1828). I would suggest, however, that in the contemporary imaginary, we are taught that we can fall out of the sky as easily as it can “fall on our heads” (quoted in Schechner 1828).
Schechner observes that "insofar as the 9/11 attack was a successful assault on the imagination, it was sublime" (1824). And falling is an essential image in this sublimity. Consider Alejandro González Iñárritu’s contribution to the film Eleven Minutes, Nine Seconds, One Image: September 11, which features a black screen and soundscape from the New York attacks, punctuated by jarring footage of bodies falling from the World Trade Center towers.
Endings
The sublimity of the fall as we experience it may be particularly contemporary, and Herko and Mendieta’s deaths resonate with us through a complex and sublime matrix of fatal falls. Here we return to the notion of collective memory, both sublime and coursed through with affect. José Esteban Muñoz has described Herko’s incandescence, locating the dancer’s body as “a lost object that provides an anticipatory illumination of another world” (153). Similarly, Alvarado turns to Mendieta with "the Blochian notion of a tenuous hope – a hope that is 'the opposite of naïve optimism,' is 'not confidence,' is aware of potential disappointments " (47). While our inability to locate the fallen artists amidst “the immense design of things” (Cather 83) retains a sense of the sublime, our experiences with and through their work – of tenuous hope and illumination – persist past the fatal falls.
Works Cited
[Return to Introduction]
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