As I've said before in this blog, reading and writing don't always coincide. Some surprising comments on the previous post. I have to say I wasn't making a connection particularly to the 9/11 man falling from the WTC, even though I called her Falling Girl rather than Boneless. She isn't boneless, exactly, or she wouldn't maintain her shape, I think. What I had in mind, whatever may lurk at the back of it, was a much more interior abyss, and the horror wasn't the end of the fall, but the lack of an end. Despair, and, of course, death is a kind of endless falling - or seems so to us who haven't died yet. That's not irrelevent to the man someone photographed in mid-fall on 9/11, but then it's not irrelevent to anyone else.
Well, the creepiness of the image is that quivery, palpitating state she gets into when she's at 'rest' on or between cloud-bubbles...it reads as sexual and tortured and totally defenseless. Turns the viewer into an inadvertently merciless god of some sort. Bit like torturing an insect or a small animal only the small animal is a mostly unclad woman...and I fear that's the selling point.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | Monday, 08 January 2007 at 12:04 AM
I thought surely you must be exaggerating a bit, as we all do, when it comes to private hells--but no ... I found it quite ghastly, gave me a sick, sinking sensation and I spent all of two minutes there, trying to simply observe. Which didn't go far, but once does notice that the figure is, of course, a shapely young woman in her underwear ... oh dear, which leads to a familiar rabbit-warren of thoughts ... but it's nighttime here in California and I thought I'd just stop by and say hello. Hello!
Posted by: Zo | Saturday, 06 January 2007 at 06:28 AM