HIGH WIRE: Press coverage

The Herald, 12 April 2008

Times Culture, 21 September 2008:
“For High Wire, [Catherine Yass] persuaded the French stunt climber Didier Pasquette to try walk between two spectacularly tall 1960s tower blocks in Glasgow with a camera strapped to his head.

“Pasquette is another demented thrill-seeker, who has walked a tightrope across the Thames and recently traversed the Stade de France, in Paris. His teacher, Philippe Petit, was that famous loony who walked between the Twin Towers in 1974. But Glasgow, it seems, is made of sterner aerial stuff than the Big Apple, and cannot be conquered that easily. Yass’s video installation actually records a strangely unspectacular failure by Pasquette to complete his crossing.” (Waldemar Januszcak)

The Guardian Guide, 13 October 2008:
“Anyone who has seen the recent documentary Man on Wire, about Philippe Petit, will be well versed in the speculated psyche of a wire walker. What possessed someone to step out over the parapet of the twin towers and dance on a thin piece of metal is certainly a source of fascination. It was for Catherine Yass, who followed Didier Pasquette, a protégé of Petit’s, as he traversed three high-rises in North Glasgow’s Red Road last summer. The resulting film is a multiscreen installation that attempts to offer some answers to this question. Pasquette is seen transcending the grey landscape and revelling in the isolation above. It is a beautiful parable of man’s attempted flight from reality.” (Jessica Lack)

The Independent, 21 September 2008:
“Approaching the old German Gym, once a venue for the Victorians’ version of the Olympics, I marvel at a slender metal crane swinging high over the building site behind King’s Cross. I try, for a moment, to imagine what it might be like to surge alone through space. But nothing prepares me for the vertiginous experience offered by Catherine Yass. Once I follow the signs for High Wire, her new video installation, its epic scale becomes clear.”

“[…]Yass, showing the flair for multi-vantage exploration which earned her a Turner Prize nomination in 2002, encourages us to see this journey from an intoxicating array of angles. Your eyes dart from one projection to the next, struggling to compare close and distant views of Pasquette with images of his helmet camera. All this visual information, so much more complex than that of gazing up at a circus act, makes you identify with this lonely figure. Pitched against the void, he seems so vulnerable. What drives him to attempt such a wild and unlikely feat? How does his defiant urge connect with the utopian dreams that impelled architects, planners and politicians to create such dwellings in the sky?” (Richard Cork)

Time Out London, 16-22 October 2008:
“Catherine Yass’s film High Wire, commissioned by Artangel and shot among the tower blocks of the Red Road estate of Glasgow, is all the more fascinating for he fact that her tightrope artist, the famed Didier Pasquette, doesn’t make it across. A third of the way over, he stalls, shouting at himself, and the head-cam wobbles wildly. And for an excruciating minute Pasquette retraces his steps, without looking back, his skill focused suddenly on the emergency of aborting his crossing.

“Yass’s work often presents the ordinary and objective architectural world as something charged with psychological tension and anxiety; with High Wire, that intensity is a product of Pasquette’s failure to ‘perform’, and the peculiar stress that one experiences as one witnesses his personal difficulty close-up, contrasted with the blank indifference of the landscape of tower blocks seen at a distance. The banal spectacle of breathtaking entertainment turns into a mixture of the sadistic and the sacrificial – in accompanying back-lit negative photographs of the towers, Yass has scratched over the tightrope, so that it looks like a burning line of fire. Such modern spectacles as tightrope walkers remind us of our fascination with threat and disaster, and the perverse pleasure we extract from a sense of control – and the loss of it.” (JJ Charlesworth)

Aesthetica (The Cultural Arts Magazine), August/September 2008:
“Following on from her 2002 piece Descent, whereby a video camera was gradually lowered from Canary Wharf’s skyscrapers, High Wire continues Yass’s preoccupation with alitude, flight and unachievable dreams of sky walking. ‘I was interested not only in the dream of walking in the air, but also sort of broader, wider social dreams. I was thinking about utopias or dreams of better societies, which are higher in the air.’ Social housing experiments are a prominent feature of the Glaswegian landscape and the constructions aspired to improve the quality of life of all, with indoor bathrooms, central heating, and rejuvenated community spirit. Tower blocks such as Red Road soon became associated, however, with worse issues of social unrest and poverty than those which they sought to resolve; eradicating inter-family links, and reducing neighbours to faceless co-habitants of equally unremarkable corridors. High Wire seeks to address the ongoing ‘controversy over whether the buildings have been a success of a failure, because when they were built they were seen to be really adventurous and fantastic’. “ (Pauline Bache)