Letting go: the fall in contemporary art.

The fall is a displacement of the ordinary, a moment of peril in which the body is given over to gravity. Both the imagined and enacted state of the fall affirm the physicality of existence, while invoking cultural realities and spiritual conditions. The fall speaks to these times and, as a now-prevalent motif, it invites examination.

Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses begins with an unforgettable description of the extended free-fall of two men following a jet explosion. Rushdie's subjects move past fear and resistance to other modes of falling: one maintains steadfast propriety, while the second performs antics "pitting levity against gravity." In passages that render the density of time and the heightened awareness evoked by unfettered descent, Rushdie proposes the fall as a space of unexpected transformation, one that most surely exposes the will to live. It's not without irony that publication of this novel lead to a fall of sorts for the author, in the form of a death sentence issued (and recently renewed) by Islamic leaders.

The opening passages of The Satanic Verses refer to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Johan Grimonprez's videotape Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y likewise uses the springboard of terrorism to conjure up the resonance of the fall. A projected video that was the hot draw at last summer's "Documenta X," the piece is a gripping, delirious account of the history of airline hijacking. Newsreel footage of events and their rendering in mass media is interwoven with voice-over narration that shifts from the facts of each incident to poetic evocation of the fall and our fascination with cataclysmic violence. Breathtaking images of explosions and falling planes, of pushing crowds and arrested terrorists, are set to the throbbing disco-beat of The Hustle (1975). A fast paced montage of grieving mothers, elated survivors and a chilling audio recording of Russian military deciding to shoot down a Korean jetliner is interwoven with hilarious footage of world leaders from Kruschev to Clinton. Grimonprez renders history as enthralling theatre, full of tragic error and mis-directed passion, carried out by singularly unconvincing - but real - actors.

Grimonprez's strategy of lacing together troubling fact and hot exhilaration generates a powerful brew much indebted to American writer Don DeLillo. The conceptual core of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y draws on DeLillo's White Noise and, more explicitly, Mao II. In these, the image of the catastrophic fall is posited as a symbiotic fusion of terrorist will and media appetite that generates a shared experience for the mass audience. A transcendent counterpoint emerges in the mantra-like interjections, in soothing voice-over, of the protagonist's musings from White Noise: "Should not death be a swan dive, graceful, white-winged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed?" This alluring conception of death as a graceful and pleasurable slippage, a lyrical moment of rapture that is entirely at odds with its violent genesis, speaks of and to a yearning for apocalyptic resolution. The fall - as a state that gives in to the forces of descent or to Nietzschean compulsions of the will - becomes a form of obedience that lifts one out of time and in the process makes history. Most of all, it can be seen as a form of rage against the present.

The will to fall is most explicit in those for whom falling is the chosen method of suicide, when rage against the present turns against the self. The Suicide Box is a work by the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), which was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. The thirteen-minute video is a proposal for computer-assisted video surveillance of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, a locale that has offered a tempting, if slightly unreliable, exit from the woes of this world for some 997 documented jumpers. The means of surveillance are disarmingly straightforward: a video camera set below the bridge records when sensors detect a falling object. The Suicide Box presents clips from the camera's 100-day "trial activation," during which seventeen "events" were recorded: the falling bodies of would-be suicides appear as mute, blurry, grey bundles passing through space. In the declarative voice of the corporate infomercial, the piece presents statistics and the technical aspects of the project. It proposes future comparisons of the rate of jumps to the Dow Jones industrial average, in the interest of obtaining a prospective economic "explanation" of the falls, then another dark grey form, almost a speck, tumbles down the screen. Falling bodies are interspersed with the inadvertently poetic false starts of seagull-triggered footage. The attempt to correct this technical problem, to refine the parameters of documentation, becomes a metaphor for misplaced social effort.

As a device that is incapable of more than recorded observation of desperate private acts, The Suicide Box has an eerie neutrality and, for many, a discomfiting element of voyeurism. But BIT's use of the tactics and aesthetics of advanced technology, of what are fast becoming the instruments of social management, in fact highlights the compassion of the piece by bringing an insistent witness to the community's failure to sustain the living. By video-taping self-destruction, BIT uses the means of institutional regulation of public space to press past it by surveillance, not of property or of worker productivity, but the real disorder of human despair. The Suicide Box is not tied to security or profit: the work deliberately moves into a social blind spot. It speaks of the ingenious ways we ask machines to stand in for us when we devise technological solutions - allowing the compilation of data to displace ameliorative action. Good intentions make a soft landing in the "digital sediment" of the data acquisition system. Research for the piece - discussed by Bureau engineer Natalie Jeremijenko at the Banff Centre's "Flesh Eating Technologies" conference in Canada this past December - revealed an unwillingness on the part of public agencies to intervene by, for example, raising the barriers on the bridge or tying the sensor's output to an emergency response system. Such indifference also reflects the extent to which freedom of individual will, including the will to fall, is paramount.

Cathy Sisler's brilliant video, Lullaby for the Almost Falling Woman (1996), presents a fictive account of a woman whose efforts to get a job are subverted by a compulsive tendency, or will, to fall. The subject, played by the artist, copes with excruciating self-consciousness and the attendant skinned knees, bloody lip and scattered papers. The viewer is drawn to her vulnerability, her eagerness to appear poised and confident, and her desperate inability to do so. After one especially nasty tumble, the protagonist turns away from a concerned passerby, pretending nothing is wrong in a reflex unwillingness to expose her propensity to fall. Later, the falling nature of the body is emblematised in the gooey extended fall of a fat drop of bloody saliva and the lesson of the bodily fluid is solemnly taken in by the falling woman: resistance is futile.

Sisler presents this material straight-on with an anxiety-driven hyperbole that hovers perfectly in the zone identified by writer Gary Kibbins as not-necessarily-funny humour - a tingly and somewhat uncomfortable confusion of responses Kibbins suggests is characteristic of Canadian artists' eccentric use of video.

The psychic condition evinced in Lullaby for the Almost Falling Woman reflects current material conditions, such as widening social and regional disparities of income distribution or the downward spiral of expectations and profound isolation that accompanies economic displacement. The second almost-falling woman in the tape is metaphorical: Montreal, a city whose badly eroded economy is matched by dangerously under-maintained building facades and half-finished demolition projects. The piece reminds us of a jobless `economic recovery' that has left a generation in free-fall, unable to secure a foothold on financial stability, let alone well-being - not to suggest that the bleak process of perpetual job search is confined to the young.

The solution, as one of Rushdie's lucky pair discovers, is to embrace descent. Sisler's almost-falling woman fixes on the paratrooper as a model who is trained to fall, who falls behind enemy lines and is always prepared to plunge with purpose. The almost-falling woman "wishes she could fall smoothly like that." For the paratrooper, as for the narrator of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, the fall is an act of assertion in the world. What is more, the paratrooper is not alone. In the end, the falling woman joins forces with her body and her personified fluids in a bizarre, imagined pre-emptive strike on an unsuspecting interviewer in response to his classic gambit: "What would you do in the following situation...?"

Like Sisler, Martin Kersels privileges the very awkwardness that commercial culture shuns and suppresses. Kersels is an L.A.-based artist whose work has garnered a flurry of critical and popular interest in recent years. His Stingwray Medley and Tripping Photos feature spectacular falls by the spectacularly physical artist, who weighs more than 350 pounds. In the Tossing a Friend (1996) photo series, Kersels is pictured launching one small friend after another - six friends an average of fifteen times each - into the air. The piece seems to document a quiet but intense bonding ritual: tosser and tossed are solemn though there is something of the backyard, adolescent stunt in these images.

Tossing a Friend offers a variation of the fall that deploys the solace of community. The toss is an exercise of power infused with redemptive playfulness. As an activity it is dangerous and bizarre but the undercurrent of abuse is countered by the obvious submission, the giving over of control, by the subjects. The level of trust is such that these images approach ecstatic embrace even as they depict release. Tossing a Friend offers a mad, invented ritual that breeches the fundamental isolation of the fall by holding open the prospect of acting in concert. Kersel's images point to a resilient capacity for social cohesion that lies in individual acts of mutual risk and sustenance.

The fall is a well-worn motif in western culture: why is it so compelling now? Is its cogency brought on by the end of the millennium or the decline of western hegemony? Or is the falling body a refreshing assertion of physicality in a world increasingly imprinted with the brittle logistics of technology? The currency of the image of the fall speaks of a powerful, widespread sensation of passage to a new condition; it speaks of the not very new belief that rapid, accumulating change is bringing us to an unpredictable and irreversible moment of transformation. Then again, perhaps the most obvious answer is the right one: the fall, as an aesthetic formation, is clean, sheer release. And our appetite for that seems never to have been greater.