Eric Fischl's Tumbling Woman. (Rick Gentilo/Associated Press)
New York-born artist Eric Fischl had already gotten into some trouble with a four-metre nude statue of tennis great Arthur Ashe, which was unveiled at the Queens stadium that bears Ashe’s name in the summer of 2000. Fischl was referencing classical Greek sculpture, which viewed the nude male athlete as the zenith of human possibility. The allusion was lost on many tennis fans. “Where’s the racket?” people asked. “Who plays tennis nude?”
The tricky relationship between contemporary art and audience became even more fraught with Tumbling Woman, a large-scale bronze sculpture of a nude woman that Fischl created in response to 9/11. Physically immediate and emotionally charged, the image commemorates those people who leapt or fell to their deaths as the World Trade Center burned.
Fischl asked his New York dealer, Mary Boone, to place the work publicly. In the fall of 2002, authorities at Rockefeller Center agreed to display Tumbling Woman for a two-week period that coincided with the first anniversary of 9/11. It had been displayed for just over a week when it was covered with a screen on Sept. 18, after public complaints and an inflammatory attack by New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser. The work was removed entirely later that day.
In her column, Peyser described the work as “a naked woman, limbs flailing, face contorted, at the exact moment her head smacks pavement.” The work is upsetting, but the head-smack reference seems misleading. Fischl has invested the solidity of metal with a curious weightlessness: the body is clearly in freefall, calling up that dreamtime moment when one plummets into sudden wakefulness.
At New York City's Rockefeller Center, people walk past a screen blocking Eric Fischl's sculpture Tumbling Woman. The art was later removed from the site in response to public complaints. (Keith Bedford/Getty Images)
Peyser also suggested that Fischl had no right to represent the tragedy of the Twin Towers because he was in the Hamptons, not in Manhattan, on Sept. 11. The argument that eyewitness reportage is somehow necessary for artistic response is irrelevant, and the Hamptons reference comes off as a snide personal attack, making it seem as if Fischl had somehow planned ahead to enjoy a swanky retreat while his city was suffering.
But Peyser might have inadvertently stumbled towards something important. Perhaps it was because Fischl experienced 9/11 through television footage — as almost all of us did — that he felt compelled to make Tumbling Woman. Those flickering video images, so flattened out and repetitive, can so easily be emptied of meaning. Somehow the heft and permanence of bronze help to embody the tragedy, restoring physicality to a communal expression of suffering and grief.
Fischl’s use of nudity was another flashpoint. The woman’s nakedness was seen as puzzling at best, confrontational and deliberately shocking at worst. Ironically, Tumbling Woman is a profoundly traditional work, falling squarely into the line of Western art that goes from Michelangelo to Rodin and finds the fullest expression of emotion in the unadorned human body.
Fischl quietly accepted the removal of Tumbling Woman from Rockefeller Center because he had no wish to be drawn into controversy. But he defended his artwork — and his artistic intentions — in a written statement: “It was a sincere expression of deepest sympathy for the vulnerability of the human condition — both specifically toward the victims of Sept. 11 and toward humanity in general.”
The misunderstanding between Fischl and his intended audience doesn’t bode well for the future of public art. Post-9/11, people seemed to want consolation and confirmation from art, not the more complicated and uncomfortable experience of catharsis. In defence of her position, Peyser quoted a Rockefeller Center security guard: “To see a statue of people falling to the ground. It’s nothing to be happy about.” This leads to the question, why would anyone expect artwork about 9/11 to be happy?
Alison Gillmor is a writer based in Winnipeg.
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