Simon Faithfull - Gravity Sucks

Simon Faithfull - Gravity Sucks

21 July, 2009
by: SUSIE

Does gravity suck? If you've ever dropped your toast jam-side-down; ever been knocked off your bike; ever struggled to wrench your heavy head from the pillow then you might have some 'anti-gravity' inclinations. But Simon Faithfull takes these sentiments much further than the occasional utterance of a therapeutic four-letter word - indeed, it seems he is trying to escape. Faithfull feels hard done by, and it all started when he was 'unfairly' born without the power of flight.
 
This exhibition at the BFI gallery unites the entire series of Simon Faithfull's Escape Vehicles, made between 1995 and 2005. An anticlimactic rocket-powered chair fails even to leave the ground; a 'Prisoner'-esque floating ball only manages to tease its trailing boiler suit inches above the ground; a characteristic palm pilot sketch of a flying car remains a never-attempted fantasy (or rather an extrapolation, as it is subtitled). A tiny matchstick chair tied by threads to three flies is by far the most pleasingly absurd object; delightfully presented on suitably tiny pedestal with suitably tiny spot-light creating three suitably tiny fly-shadows. If only there was a Borrower around to give it a test drive.


Simon Faithfull, 'Escape Vehicle No.6'
 
The largest screen is devoted to Escape Vehicle no.6, which traces the convincing 25-minute ascent of an office chair to dizzying heights over the fields of southeast England, attached to a weather balloon. The empty chair is an invitation - as are the empty boiler suits elsewhere - an invitation to imagine your own escape. But as the show's curator Elisabetta Fabrizi points out to me, nobody could survive the extreme cold at that altitude and eventually the chair and camera explode. It is this futility that is engaging.
 
Simon Faithfull's work is not about technological or scientific advancement; he uses materials available to all of us, from our own small, trivial, known world, to try to show how we might escape from it. But I start to worry that I might have one single, lonely metaphor on my hands, desperate to please but painfully limited. It can be wonderful when art provides clarity and insight into something so fundamental to daily life - that creates a shift in the way you look at the world, maybe for a moment, maybe forever. Though lacking real resonance and power, there is truth here, and valuable physicality. It fails to make the spirit soar, but perhaps that is its sad, quiet magic. The disappointment of our physical limitations, our frail bodies, our human condition. Even the low lighting and the gallery's electrical hum seem like a sigh, a shrug of inevitable failure.
 
This isn't a giant leap for mankind, but rather some small steps for a man.

Simon Faithfull - Gravity Sucks is at the BFI Southbank until 20th September 2009.

Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Click here to see all London art exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in Southbank.

SUSIE