Simon Faithfull
BFI Southbank Gallery, London, UK
Like many other institutions, the British Film Institute on Southbank is currently celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. A series of documentaries and films are being shown, all of which reiterate familiar themes: the bravery of those who took part, the sense of hope that their actions gave and the against-the-odds nature of their success. All these notions are of course also encapsulated in Neil Armstrong’s awkward but still spine-tingling ‘one giant leap’ line, which forms the title of the BFI’s series.
Across the foyer at the BFI Southbank Gallery, however, the leaps that are being made are considerably smaller and, quite literally, more down to earth. Simon Faithfull’s exhibition brings together the complete series of his seven ‘Escape Vehicles’ (1995-2005) for the first time, each one an attempt to outfox earth’s gravitational pull. The experiments are explained via a range of documentation displayed in the BFI space. Some are charmingly absurd, such as Escape Vehicle no. 2 (1996), which comprises a tiny sculptural model of a chair, three dead flies floating above it attached by wires. Others, though more technical, are equally ludicrous: no. 5b (1998) appears only as one of Faithfull’s trademark PalmPilot drawings, displayed on a plasma screen and showing a car floating in geostationary orbit, tethered to the floor of a gallery via an epic extension lead that ‘provides power for car-lights in space’.
On the surface Faithfull’s experiments are attempting a similar quest to Armstrong et al., though they actually have more in common with the work – both comic and heartbreaking – of homespun inventors or amateur stuntmen. Many of the ‘Escape Vehicles’ are glorious in their inadequacy – the first in the series is a film showing a wooden chair attached to a homemade rocket; the rocket fizzes for a time before the chair performs a dramatic backflip and explodes. Yet some experience success: Number 4 (1996) sees a boiler suit disappear into the sky above the Oxfordshire countryside, attached to a balloon created by four dustsheets that are filled with hot air from a blowtorch. Its disappearance was total, leaving only a photograph as proof of its existence. This has been turned into a postcard for the BFI show and given away free to all visitors.
Part of the exhibition’s charm is in this variety of documentation, which is often as low-tech as the experiments themselves. This rawness also serves to reiterate the dangers that testing the earth’s atmosphere may hold, an easy thing to forget at a time of cheap air travel and dreams of tourist flights to the moon. This is poignantly demonstrated in the most successful of the ‘Escape Vehicles’, no. 6 (2004), a film of which reveals an average office chair flying incongruously in the upper atmosphere above the fields of southern England. It is held in this unlikely position by an out-of-sight weather balloon, which emits loud signals that form a general soundtrack to the exhibition. Ultimately the film ends in disaster, with the chair’s disintegration, though, more importantly, we are briefly allowed to experience the exhilaration of Faithfull’s success.
Eliza Williams
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