Nosedive Through Time with Sarah Charleworth's 'Stills'
- by Elida Silvey -
Everything that comes up must, at one point or another, come down. Some universal truths remain. A life can only follow a predetermined sequence of events. We are born, we live, we die. That’s it. This progression of events often occurs with a sudden slip, an instant of change. While this cycle of living and dying is entirely natural to our condition on this planet, we still form rituals around it. We hold out hope. When my ex died in 2014, having had too much of life despite just graduating highschool that summer, I stood at the base of the coffin and stared into his pale face feeling an immense weight engulf me. Even the idea of death can stun someone silent and spur on the simmering urge to seek answers. We want to know how, why and, most importantly when, it will happen to us. The gravity and apparent finality creates a centre point through which our interiority splits off, outlining different times and places--or rather timeplaces--that feel entirely related to and distinct from that present moment. For months after, anytime I drove past a Subaru or heard Bon Iver’s For Emma come up, I would be transported back to his passenger seat watching him fiddle with his broken stereo until he’d turn it off out of frustration from all the fuzz. I’d have to stop the car then and there, and cry into my steering wheel at the memory.
Sarah Charlesworth is an artist who understood this dimensionality and the power of emotional gravity and used it to her advantage.
Standing at the shop of the Fotografiska museum in Stockholm, holding a copy of her series Stills in book bound form, I felt that gravitational pull. Time slid backwards.
All the would-be’s and could-have’s came flooding forward.
Charlesworth was a part of NYC’s infamous The Pictures Generation (1974 – 1984), a group of American artists working with photography, film and performance art that were drawn to conceptual and critical analysis of the media that adopted and recontextualized it as a form of critique. In 1980 she produced 7 photographic prints titled Stills, a series that on the surface was critical of the violent imagery that news sources proliferated but at its core captured a sectional sketch of our relationship with time. Standing in the New York Public Library sometime in the 1970s she began to collect newspaper clippings of people falling off buildings. Perhaps my morbid fascination with these bodies suspended in endless animation, of those lives bookended by a series of clues and their static imprint, was a result of my own proximity to and understanding of endings. Familiar with my own fascination, I wondered who was the first person that made her stop and stare at their printed body bordered by 8-point type? Who was the second? In true appropriationist fashion, Charlesworth combed through the library archives and collected a total of 70 images. 70 people whose lives were forever caught mid-air by the flash of a light and a chance encounter. From those images, she chose seven as a basis for her work, to exhibit in 1980 and an additional seven in 2009 when her collection was acquired by a French museum. Hypnotized in her studio, Charlesworth ripped the images from the newspapers, leaving a frayed edge as a marker of her presence and blew them up to massive proportions. Her ‘actual sized’ prints did not refer to the size of the original image or the size as it related to media’s expectation, as was common with her contemporaries, but rather the size of the people those images captured. This enlargement distorted the people to grainy figures in arduous limbo and by removing all contextual clues—the floor beneath them and the rooftops above—these life-sized figurines invite the viewer in.
Freefall can be experienced by us all.
The universe, as scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock explains in his book Novacene, seeks to understand itself through us(1). When man looked up at the stars to chart our planet’s rotation around the sun, we became aware that for some planets (Mercury) their rotation did not abide by the seemingly cylindrical rules of planetary rotation. Albert Einstein explained the cause of this planet’s rebellious tendencies through papers published in 1905 and 1915. This eventually came to be known as the theory of relativity. By collating information from scientists that specialised in various fields, he was able to explain how sometimes bodies (planets) move differently when large amounts of gravity are present. When two bodies have mass, and they move in close proximity, they can create a bend in the fabric of spacetime which allows them to act irregularly. Spacetime is when the three dimensions of space—i.e. height, width and depth—and the freer fourth dimension of time come together to establish where and when a certain body is. Under the power of massive bodies, time itself can bend around their gravitational pull causing it to curve. This curve allows time to react differently based on the body’s gravitational centre point, making the past feel present and the present feel slow and meticulous, as if an hour could stretch on and on and on. On my way back from the museum to my hotel that night, my journey was impacted by the pull of those photographs. I could not walk back fast enough. A passing car’s horn, alerting me to my distracted footsteps, warped as he got further away. Its sound, a doppler effect, reminded me that I was experiencing its warning relative to my position away from the car, which had sped off into the distance. As if sound could travel in space, I imagined Mercury dopplering around the sun. I only realised the culmination of these strange sensations, after I laid my purse over freshly pressed hotel linens and watched as it indented around the weight of the book.
I was experiencing time differently as a result of the photographs and it excited me. It was as if I had cheated time itself.
In quantum physics the theory of relativistic time is a concept that explores the idea that time is linked to the location of an observer and that it can be experienced differently by observers in different locations, or in different timeplaces. With Charlesworth’s Stills, the original newsprint photographer is an observer, the artist is an observer, I’m an observer and anyone who lays eyes on the photographs hereafter are observers. Each witness tells a different story from the same point. Tell me what day it is? Today, it is the cliff edge of November 2024 but then I know by the time you are reading this that it won’t be 2024 anymore. It’s all relative to each other.
Perhaps that’s why these images feel so difficult to pin down, the reality of each one is present only as traces, hints of a time we cannot access.
When I was a kid I watched this show about a boy with magic chalk, called ChalkZone. The boy, Rudy Tabootie, could draw himself into the world of chalk and access their two dimensional plane through the transmutation of his writing implement. While he could visit them, they could not visit him, unable to access his third dimensional world in their two dimensional bodies. The contrast between the second and third space being too complex for their constitution. They could only lie flat, aware but incapable of taking action within his complex space. It made for an interesting friendship. This is our relationship with time. We can see it existing, taking hold of our space and yet we cannot manipulate it. Photographs are the closest thing we have to accessing the fourth plane, reaching into the traces of other times pulling them to the surface to collide one moment into another.
Charlesworth’s work is “the frozen image of someone dying, an image of death as a verb.” (Jerry Saltz) Their finality is evident. These people could not be saved, their bodies plummeting through the expansive verticality below them in varying positions of distress. Depicting that which we hope to forget; the linearity of our lives. Whatever they were running to or away from is of no importance, the only detail that remains in our minds is the expected end to a sequence of events that we will never see but know have already happened. While her photographic prints do not have the mass or gravitational pull of Mercury, they do have enormous emotional gravity. Even in book form, where the sheer size of these images is not present, the suggestion of death pulls us in like the Earth does the moon.
Sarah’s images continue to take on meaning as the years go by, becoming time-stamped with traces that did not exist, nor could have been predicted, when she first collected the photographs in the 1970s or when she finally printed them in 1980. Images do not exist outside language. They are a form of language that can only be understood after it enters the body. Sarah’s initial intention with Stills is taken in through the eyes, where it mixes with the contexts of its host, the viewer, and is understood as a profound revelation of interconnectivity. The universe winking at itself. When I first saw the photographs in the summer of 2024, they initiated a sequence of events that my body stored from September 11, 2001. This sequence is made up partially from my memory of news footage of the burning twins and partially by the conscious desire to complete the loop through my own imagination. When drafting this article and re-visiting these images in the winter of 2024, they also produced a mental Zoetrope of Liam Payne’s final moments in Argentina, his trauma still fresh in the timeplace my physical body exists within. This too triggered the memory of my ex’s funeral where time seemed to have taken someone else prematurely. For the falling bodies of Untitled Man, Untitled Location (#2) or of Unidentified Woman, Genessee Hotel time is linear, it has a beginning, a middle and an inescapable end. For me, it traveled from 2024 to 2001, 2009, 2014 to 1980 to before the 1970s and back again, causing me to wonder when it was exactly that these people finally hit the ground.
(1) “For all but a brief moment of its existence the cosmos knew nothing of itself. Only when humanity developed the tools and the ideas to observe and analyse the bewildering spectacle of the clear night sky did the cosmos begin to awaken from its long sleep of ignorance.” Lovelock, James, Novacene Pg 3
Elida Silvey is a self taught Mexican-American writer, editor and artist living in London. She is the assistant editor for Montez Press. Read more of her work on www.elidasilvey.com or on her Substack Through The Eye Of A Needle.
