Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

Tumbling Woman: Disturbing or Poignant?

17:12 / 20.09.02

When I first read this New York Post article describing a sculpture commemorating the WTC attacks, a sculpture of one of the people who leaped to their deaths to escape the hell of the flames, I thought "That's got to be the most disturbing thing I've ever heard of". I mean, art is meant to touch the viewer but it reeked of just one more person capitalizing on the suffering of those who died. Something news agencies and our illustrious president have no compunction doing. It bothered me immensely.

So I was determined to see this sculpture for itself. And very few articles showed it. So I dug and I dug and when I finally saw a picture of the piece, I was stunned. This wasn't the captured horror that had been described to me. This was... beautiful. Tragic. Heart-breaking. But beautifully done.

So I'm curious to know what others think? Is the sculpture too much? Is it powerful? Does it memorialize those who died in an exploitatively gruesome or a tender way?

18:01 / 20.09.02

No it's not. The best arts supposed to scare you. How else are people gonna come to terms with that terrible event?

19:57 / 20.09.02

At the risk of being labelled a namechecker: Gene Wolfe has written that "Almost any interesting work or art comes close to saying the opposite of what it really says."

Tumbling Woman is an interesting work.

20:19 / 20.09.02

I don't like this at all. I find it too peaceful, I can't see (although the photo is quite small) that it looke desperate or sad or that the woman is dead/about to die. Of course, the artist has every right to do it, I personally don't understand how it could be made to look almost like she's doing a strange dance-like movement and then claim to be a memorial. To me, it feels almost like a Disneyisation of the event. But interesting, none the less - and I'm no art expert, I'm just saying how the piece grabs me.

Of course, Damien Hurst recently said that the planes crashing into the WTC was a 'stunning piece of visual art' and while I understand what I think he was getting at, it seemed to me to be romanticising other people's misery.

01:33 / 21.09.02

I think its great. Its not a memorial to "the spirit of america", to "freedom" to "standing tall in the face of a great evil" or to any of the buzzword/catchphrases that the media and politicans seemed to have embraced. Its basic. Unglamourized. Reality.

SFD: I guess everyone brings something different to the piece. The last thing I would have thought of was dance. Now after reading your comment All I see is LaLaLa Human Steps. ( a local modern dance troupe).

02:25 / 21.09.02

Hrrrrh. I just wish people wouldn't say "that's not art," when they don't like the art.

It's funny, I don't think that it's glamorized... but I don't think it's reality. It has a dream quality to me, it's more like a dream of falling than actually falling. I always dream I'm falling, so I have something particular in my head that I'm relating to.

I like that Gene Wolfe quote, who's that?

Tryphena Absent

10:50 / 21.09.02

Well to throw an idea out there a bit of my brain tells me the WTC falling in bits to the floor didn't really happen. It sounds like this sculpture expresses that perfectly... I keep forgetting stuff about that day and then I get reminded by the press or someone I know and that's just as good an example of a tragedy as anything else. It should be partly eternalized.

14:15 / 21.09.02

Gene Wolfe is a writer, mostly of science fiction and fantasy: he is awesomely learnéd, a rigorous and penetrating thinker, and one of the finest writers-on-the-craft-of-writing that I have ever read.

20:26 / 23.01.03

I dont think its disturbing at all.

22:06 / 23.01.03

It reminds me of (Rodin's?) Burghers of Calais or Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa. Both of those remain powerful even as their original context slips from memory. What's left is humanity, not some call for for revenge or searing indictment of some policy or other. I can't see the woman's expression, so I'll have to imagine it's something like one belonging to one of the figures in the other two works. Take a look and you'll see what I mean. The Burghers (the ruling council) have just left the city to surrender it to the besiegers, and their faces show hunger, despair, fear, defeat etc. The survivors on the raft, having been adrift for weeks, have just seen a ship on the horizon, but it's going the other way.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

13:28 / 25.01.03

I reocgnise it as art but don't particularly like it. I think it's ther angle of the figure, doesn't suggest 'someone falling to their death' to me, more 'someone risking serious injury trying to make their body look like letters of the alphabet'.

I'm curious about the person who complained that it was 'too graphic', as that suggests more that it was successful as a piece of work in getting him to think and make associations in his mind, it's hard to tell but from the photo it doesn't look like it 'displays' anything. Too many people use 'it's not art' to mean 'the implications of thios art disturb me'.

18:22 / 25.01.03

Aren't there quite a few bronze, figurative sculptures dotted around Manhattan? So this certainly fits in with those.

As for the thing itself, I agree with bcjaques (though I can't place the burghers). Disturbing and poignant.

I think maybe it was too soon after the event for it to be publickly shown, fair enough, however, I can't help feeling it would have had its nay-sayers anyway because it's not ideologically/iconologically "correct" ...

16:51 / 08.03.03

Why does she have to be naked? If this sculpture was of a man, I highly doubt he'd be naked. And why is it a woman...not that there's anything inherently wrong w/that, but I think it speaks to the androcentric nature of our culture: A man is just a person, but a woman is a Woman and oh, the Horror of the death of a Woman, and how Beautiful Women are when they Die....blah blah blah yuck.

19:04 / 08.03.03

Because it's basically flawed, a poignant falsehood for ninnies, rather ironically escapist I suppose.
Darkly kitsch, but hey, whatever floats your boat.