Falling for Photography

[bmattock]

I just don't know where to begin with this one...

Photographer Falls for Photography

...On Tuesday, the 34-year-old "performance photographer'' demonstrated his art by repeatedly plunging four stories from the roof of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, his arms and legs flailing....

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks

 

[jorisbens]

I think it's a great, genial artistic project. It might look crazy, but aren't all great artist crazy? Look at Van Gogh, Dali, me,... 😛 Well I'm a small artist, but I'm sure that I'm crazy 😀

Joris Bens 😎

 

[jorisbens]

Having fell from 65' and survived, I don't wish to repeat it for any reason.
But, I imagine the picture would have been a winner. The look on my face was probably worth a million. 🙂

Emotion and creativity, the two most important factors of art, IMHO.
And repaeting it would be stupid for two reasons: 1/You'll probably get hurt and 2/You aint original 😉

Joris Bens

 

[XAos]

Sick puppy. 🙁
__________________
The goal of life is not to arrive at the grave safely and well maintained; but rather to skid in at full throttle coming to a screeching halt shouting "Holy SH*T, WHAT A RIDE!"

Quoting doesn't normally include signatures, so I had to manually quote this one. It did however, strike me kinda funny. After reading the article though... yeah he's a sick puppy.

 

[back alley]

yeah, it ain't the fall what kills ya - it's the sudden stop...

 

[jlw]

I just don't know where to begin with this one...
Photographer Falls for Photography
[/i]

Being a battle-scarred veteran of fine art photography, all I wonder is:

"How big a grant did he get? And from whom?"

As to why someone would do this, the following quote buried at the bottom of the Sun-Times article explains it all:

Skarbakka, whom the influential magazine ArtReview has cited as one of the art world's top 10 young photographers...​

So this is how you get cited as a Big Name Photographer in some toffee-nosed art magazine: put on a safety harness and jump off buildings while somebody else takes pictures of you. (No doubt by next semester he'll be offering workshops on photographically-assisted falling at some New York art institute or other.)


It all brings to mind a crack Elliot Erwitt made in an interview I read several years ago, to the effect that in the art world, "you can be as outrageous as you want within the norm, but you're not allowed to go outside the norm." (..."The norm" being the narrowly-defined spectrum of socio-politico-aesthetic views approved by twits such as the ones who edit the influential magazine ArtReview.) When the norm is so narrow, you have to do more and more outrageous (ridiculous?) things to get noticed.

And it certainly seems to be working for this twerp...

 

[Grumblepunk]

Bungie jumping with a camera. It was really original in oh...'87?