Photo by Catherine Yass

Exhibition Review - HIGH WIRE by Catherine Yass at The German Gymnasium, Pancras Road, London NW1 2TB until October 26 2008. Open Tuesday – Sunday 11.00 – 19.00. Closed Mondays. Free admission.

In July 2007, high-wire walker Didier Pasquette was commissioned to walk between the three colossal tower blocks forming one of Glasgow’s most infamous urban landscapes –Red Road.

The event was conceived and filmed by Turner-prize nominee Catherine Yass and the resulting footage forms her multi-screen and video installation HIGH WIRE at The German Gymnasium in London’s King’s Cross.

Glasgow’s Red Road development built in the mid-1960s was, at the time of its construction, the highest in Europe, with some of the towers reaching a dizzying 31 storeys.

The relationship between architecture, height and scale is a dominant theme in Yass’s work and her fascination with vertiginous spaces certainly reaches a high point with this film of Pasquette’s treacherous perambulation.

Yass’s film is relayed on a seven-minute loop displayed on four screens mounted in front of the high walls of the former gymnasium. The authentic soundscape of a relentless wind lends an extra dimension of grimness to the black and white footage, which depicts Pasquette as a solitary silhouette against the grey Scottish sky.

Photo by Angie Catlin

Each of the screens shows a different vantage point of Pasquette’s journey. One is from a camera strapped to the front of his hard hat (a rather gratuitous piece of equipment I would have thought, when you’re walking unharnessed across a piece of wire 100 metres above the ground) whilst two others document the event from increased distances.

A fourth shows a blanket view of the estate – grey, unyielding slab-blocks showing no sign of life or colour apart from a busy motorway in the background: a man might be walking in the clouds, but life still goes on – like W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Musee de Beaux Arts’ translated to the here and now.

As Pasquette approaches the tip of his rope, he does a short bow and a finger wiggle, which seems more a concession to balance than presentation. I confess to wanting the camera to make a cartoon peep over the top of the building in order to show us the ants below, but this, I suspect, is the last thing a high-wire walker should do.

With his large Gallic moustache and helmet, Pasquette looks more like a magnificent man about to climb into a flying machine than a world-class funambulist embarking upon his latest dice with a very dramatic and messy death. Frustratingly, none of the camera shots go close enough to show his face – or more specifically his fear (or lack of it) - so the emotional content remains invisible, which ultimately detracts from the obvious drama.

As a result, Pasquette’s viewpoint, however compelling, doesn’t convey a complete sense of just how miraculous his feat may be. Rather than a vicarious experience, the sensation of sitting in the middle of this installation feels strangely detached and emotionless.

When Pasquette reaches the middle of his rope, he swops feet, and starts a retreat back to the safety of the tower. There seems no obvious reason to abort his project, and I wonder if this is a ‘try-out’. But no: the film starts again, and Pasquette resumes with his little bend. The wind keeps whirring, and I’m left none the wiser until I read some notes before leaving the exhibition.

© Catherine Yass

I discover that the weather, which looks merely drab and miserable on film, was actually more dramatic than the footage suggests. The combination of heavy rain and howling winds rendered the walk far too dangerous to complete. Yass, who was on top of a neighbouring tower says: “I heard him shouting, so I knew he was worried. It was an awful moment.”

Sadly, this monumental challenge to Pasquette is lost on celluloid, and the true extent of his bravery confined to the real live experience of his spectators. His voice is never audible above the relentless and muffled wind – though the mind boggles as to what he was actually shouting.

This is a shame, for the artist’s concept makes a remarkable statement. Yass’s goal of ‘bringing together personal dreams of walking in the air with modernist dreams of a utopian ideal’ is certainly reached in terms of the event itself.

In this sense Pasquette is much more than a man with an extraordinary skill: he becomes a trope of human potential, a testament to the imagination and the freedom it can bring us, even in the face of death. The juxtaposition of a death-defying human walk above an urban landscape of lost dreams and social failure makes for supreme bathos.

In a smaller room next door to the installation, three light-boxes of photographic negatives feature the same three high-rise blocks. The wire is etched between them like a jagged silver thread, an umbilical chord of light.

These negatives transform the bleak urban landscape. In one, a field of white wheat seems to surround the foot of the towers; in another, a bird’s eye view of the sprawling estate appears to be fringed with a vast landscape of ice and snow.

The final image shows the dazzling blocks towering ominously above an empty playground. The generic slide and roundabout – with no children to play on them –emphasises the facelessness of these failed dreams of social rejuvenation.

Yass’s HIGH WIRE may be short on emotional wattage, but her comment on the human need to dream in order to survive remains as true as ever. As for Red Road, the estate itself is at the end of its life: the blocks are earmarked for demolition in the next decade, to make way for low-rise flats and houses.

Monsieur Pasquette may not have reached the end of his rope - but failure, as I’m sure Yass would agree, is as much a beginning, as an end, to any journey.

HIGH WIRE was commissioned by Artangel and Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Art 2008.

The installation of HIGH WIRE has been conceived for the vaulted space of The German Gymnasium, next to the new St. Pancras Station.