Gravity, that great leveller, has been invoked by Courtauld curating students as a means to bound between past and present, illusory and physical, production and devastation and other such polarities that might attempt to chart the perimeter of human experience. But ‘Falling Up’ has a metaphysical slant that it does not offset with corresponding levity, its pervading atmosphere of stylish gravitas does not permit the farce of obstinate strivers in thrall to gravity or the joyous hubris of sport.
Spirituality dominates, firstly in watercolour copies of Rubens’s ceiling paintings of the ascendant virtuous and the plummeting corrupt, as well as in his altarpiece sketch, where Christ’s body is taken down from the cross amid dramatic swathes of fabric. This continues in two engravings of the Tower of Babel in various states of construction and evacuation, and in Shirazeh Houshiary’s ‘Cube of Man’, a stacked tower of geometric forms of lead and gold leaf, connoting Sufist ideas of weight and weightlessness.
A chalk drawing, circa 1600, of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus finds a secular response in Clare Strand’s photograph of a woman uncannily suspended in space, while Cornelia Parker’s eroded bricks strung low in the middle of the gallery animate the moment of falling or floating with spooky regularity. So while ‘Falling Up’ pursues grand narratives of transcendence and its failure, it neglects to prod the armpit of Atlas with the schadenfreude of slapstick. It overlooks the fact that, while gravity is indeed a monstrous drag, it can afford some hilarious moments of animal joy.