Falling for Gravity: Invisible Forces in Contemporary Art

This book begins with the observation that contemporary artists have embraced and employed gravity as an immaterial readymade. Necessarily focusing on material practices, namely sculpture, performance and film, this discussion takes account of how and why artists have used gravity and explores similarities between their work and the popular cultural forms of circus, vaudeville, burlesque and film. Works by Rodney Graham, Stan Douglas, and Robert Smithson are mediated through ideas of Gnostic doubt, and new materialism. This account of contemporary art and performance read the through the invisible membrane of gravity, exposes new and distinctive approaches to agency reduction, authorial doubt and redemptive failure.

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