Arild Tveito
Le fou de peur ou le désespéré (På kanten av stupet)
C-print
1998
Our sense of balance results from our faculty to overcome gravity. The emergence of modern abstract art is somehow related to the disturbance of this faculty around the mid-nineteenth century. It is at about this time that images of matter as a whirlpool appear, together with the reports of cases of vertigo. Both are symptoms of a disturbed order at the core of perceptual experience. In Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the character Roderick is able to produce one of the earliest abstract paintings as a result of sensory deprivation while underground. Other Poe stories such as “MS Found in a Bottle” and “A Descent into the Maelstrom” also explore this new type of experience. Floating states where gravity seems to have been overcome become depicted frequently in paintings-as in Courbet’s Le Desespere, ou le Fou de Peur, or Seurat’s Le Cirque (1891), with its repercussions in Kafka’s story “On the Gallery.” One could also mention Degas’s La au Cirque Fernando (1867) and, later, Magritte’s Le Chateau des Pyrenees (1959). Manet was probably the first to concentrate, from 1862 onwards, on circus acrobats.
