In August 1974, a highwire was secretly ridged between the Trade Center Towers in New York, bridging a 200-feet traverse that was 1350 feet high. The French performance artist Philippe Petit spent 45 minutes on the highwire, during which time he walked, danced, and even lay down. When Petit first envisaged his daring dream to perform a seminal highwire walk, the buildings had not yet been constructed. The idea was sparked in 1968 when he saw a printed image of the future buildings in a newspaper, on which he drew a line connecting the rooftops. That image highlights the potential of a print to inspire, fold time, and make the imagined more tangible. 

Petit often compared his aerial performances to a process of carrying of life from one side to another. This view subverts the traditional affiliation of the tightrope with a Danse Macabre, or ‘Dance of Death’, as depicted in Johann Rudolph Schellenberg’s Der Equilibrist [The Tightrope Walker] (1785). The balancing act between life or death signified through the highwire is a duality that I reflect upon in this exhibition through the work titled Held in Place (2019). It is also a tribute to Petit and other tightrope walkers. The print contains an infinity of sky in miniature as a liminal space between opposite sides, such as life and death, the material and immaterial, or fear and serenity.

(Ali Bezer Aug. 2019)

TIGHTROPES