This film installation captured the artist jumping, or falling, from various bridges in Amsterdam, using a high-speed film camera that is normally used in scientific research or car-crash testing.

The premise was to scientifically document an event that could not be quantified in scientific terms, and to investigate a mythology associated with 'heroic' male performance artists such as Bas Yan Ader, Yves Klein, and others. Each film is shot at different speeds, in different locations, to give a contradictory notion of jumping, or falling.

One film seems to document an abortive suicide attempt, another a stunt from a Hollywood movie, and the third seems to present jumping as an absurd Olympic event. In this way, a metaphorical reading is given to the idea of a jump, or fall.

Our experience of performance art history from the 1960s and 1970s is mostly confined to grainy, still images taken from films or videos, in art history books. This format is echoed in that of the high-speed films, which seem to reduce every event to a series of grainy photographic stills that only change incrementally, and that make this connection between film, and still images seen in art history books, more explicit. Thus, 'The Jump Films' also make comment on the way in which early performance art films and photographs existed only as a perfunctory document of an action that was itself the intended artwork.


The jump Films in situ ( a panorama) at old Street Level premises - Gallery 2.


Still from The Jump Films.


Mark Neville gave a gallery Tour and talk on Sat 22nd April.