(First published in The Liverpudlian Art Collector’s Journal)
When I threw myself from an aircraft at 15,000 feet without a parachute and landed on a BounceHaus trampoline in the Montana desert, the world asked me a single, searing question: Why?
My upcoming book, Plummet: Notes on Gravity, Art, and the Impossibility of Staying Upright, is my attempt at a reply. Not a definitive one,such things are gauche,but a reply nonetheless, stitched together from fragments of memory, diagrams, hospital records, and the faint ringing in my ears that has not left me since the fall.
This is not a memoir in the conventional sense, though there are fragments of autobiography scattered through it like dental records across a crash site. Nor is it an art theory book, though its spine trembles with the weight of footnotes and manifestos. What it is, rather, is a descent in twelve movements: a book that plummets as I did, chapter by chapter, and lands,if we can use such a word,with a juddering grace.
The Shape of the Descent
The book begins in the sky, with Chapter 1: “Airspace as Studio.” Here I argue that the true white cube is not a gallery but the boundless firmament above us. The sky, uncluttered by labels, captions, and curatorial interventions, is the most democratic exhibition space of all. In that space, I place myself,literally,as an object of contemplation. I become the installation. I become the falling text.
By Chapter 4: “The Trampoline as Oracle,” I bring us back to Earth, or rather, to the taut surface of Otto Flöß’s recycled-yoga-mat-and-Saab-spring creation. The trampoline is not simply an object but a metaphorical interlocutor. It speaks. It answers questions we did not know we had. Its bounce is not merely a rebound but a philosophical refusal: Earth saying “Not yet.”
Later, in Chapter 7: “The Bruise as Brushstroke,” I turn to the body as a medium. Bruises are pigment; swelling is sculpture; dislocation is choreography. My ribs became unwilling collaborators in a new kind of mark-making. I argue here, written under mild sedation, that every bruise is a form of site-specific art, etched on flesh instead of canvas.
The descent concludes with Chapter 12: “Falling Forward.” This is my coda, in which I propose that art should not remain on walls, shelves, or pedestals, but leap (sometimes recklessly) into space and risk annihilation. To fall is not to fail,it is simply to collaborate with gravity. The ground is inevitable; the bounce is optional.
Materials and Ephemera
The book is not text alone. It contains diagrams of my trajectory,lines of descent plotted in thick graphite, annotated with phrases from my ground control team’s radio messages like “Not to worry you, but you are slightly to the left of staying alive.” It contains sketches drawn mid-air, completed with a pencil duct-taped to my glove. It contains transcripts of my preparatory conversations with performance artists around the world, people I turned to for advice; sadly they had little.
There are hospital charts too, of course: X-rays of ribs that make a clicking sound when I breathe too deeply, doctor’s notes describing my “art-related injuries,” and a small, blurry Polaroid of me grinning through cactus needles. These ephemera are not additions to the book but part of its gravity,the ballast that keeps the theory from floating away.
Why Only 300 Copies?
The book will be published in a strictly limited edition of 300 copies. This is not to exclude the many, though exclusion does provide a certain frisson of desirability. No: the limitation is practical, tactile, and literal. Each copy will contain a stitched fragment of the original trampoline canvas from my landing. These fragments,creased, scuffed, and faintly redolent of soil,transform each book into a reliquary of the event itself.
In this sense, the edition is finite because the trampoline was finite. Once cut and divided, there will be no more. The material is exhausted, just as I nearly was.
Toward an Answer
What does all this mean? What is the point of hurling oneself at the Earth and then writing a book about it?
The answer, if there is one, is that art is not about safety. It is about elegance in the face of inevitability. It is about collaborating with forces that neither ask nor care for your consent. It is about bruises as signatures, fractures as footnotes, trampolines as editors.
When I climbed from the wreckage of BounceHaus I, cactus needles protruding from my thigh, I said something that has followed me ever since:
“Art is not about surviving. Art is about landing well enough to write the book afterwards.”
This is that book.
