Chapter 2
THE POLITICS OF THE FALL: DEATH, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNTY
It is a frigid March morning on the Mont des Arts, Brussels, and as the tram
screeches to a halt you feel the surge of warm bodies carrying you toward the door.
Riding the wave, you spill out into the Place Royale knowing that when the crowd
disperses you will be left exposed to the cold air and will have to make a dash for the
entrance to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts across the street. You have come, perhaps
unwillingly, to receive your daily dose of ‘culture’ before retreating downhill to pursue
that other aspect of Brussels heritage that demands true connoisseurship, touring
breweries. As the mob lurches to a halt unexpectedly, you look up to see a woman in
pumps clawing her way up an oversized sandwich board to the encouragement of
onlookers. Just before she reaches the viewing platform at the top, she slips, hurtling
backward into the void and crashing onto a pile of old mattresses at the base of the wall.
The crowd waits silently for the woman to show signs of life, and when she begins to
move they applaud, nervously at first, then enthusiastically. The woman melts back into
the bodies of the crowd and you think, “I have to try that.”
For three cold days in March 2007 the residents and tourists of Brussels engaged a
work of public art, commissioned by the city from the Northern Ireland born, Glasgow
trained, French artist, Neal Beggs (figs. 27a-f). Passersby were free to engage the six39
meter tall work, called Dear Prudence (a double entendre referring to the song by John
Lennon and to the words of British mountaineer Edward Whymper) in any way they
desired. Most chose to watch as other attempted to summit the wall, and of the climbers
brave enough to risk injury or humiliation, only a small handful made it to the top,
securing their status among the crowd and affording them a view of the surrounding plaza
and of the city. Dear Prudence parodies the social dynamics of modern alpinism
characterized by the vicissitude between participation and spectatorship. Structuring this
relationship (and acting as the physical structure of the wall) is the ‘architecture’ of
mountaineering narrative, which historically has mediated between the supposedly
activated, adventurous climber and an otherwise sedentary, but eager public.
Within this narrative architecture, Beggs exposes what I shall term the politics of
the fall—or the capacity of the fall and the resulting death of the climber to covey social
meanings about a perceived threat to community that this loss represents. Dear Prudence
capitalizes on the metaphorical link in mountaineering narrative between falling and
death, and presents this moment as a focal point for a constructed conviviality in which
participants may experience the potential ‘loss’ of their fellow climbers. Seen in terms of
loss or death, the fall exposes that which Jean-Luc Nancy describes as a condition of
“being-in-common,” a radically reconfigured view of ‘community’ that rejects the
possibility of a community of atomized, individual beings.67 Rather than drawing a
67 Nancy’s theory of community is considered one of the foundational texts of the growing literature on
participatory and community art practices. In addition to being included in Claire Bishop’s Participation:
Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), several authors have cited Nancy’s work
within the context of public art and community. See George Baker, “Space of the Stain,” Grey Room, No.
5 (Autumn, 2001): 5-37; Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 119;
Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 154-163; Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art
and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); Pamela M. Lee, “On the Holes of History: Gordon
40
hierarchical distinction between climbers and spectators, as active and passive
participants respectively, Dear Prudence repositions the issue of spectatorship as it is
discussed in an art context within a discourse of community, thereby suggesting a more
complex logic than that of the “inoperative community” proposed by Nancy.
The Brussels city center is roughly divided into two districts: the lower district
contains many of the city’s most popular tourist attractions, such as the architecturally
significant Grand Place; the upper district occupies an elevated position within the city
that contains royal and municipal buildings (figs. 28a-b). The upper part of town also
contains the Mont des Arts, home of the nation’s arts institutions, as well as the Belgian
Parliament, which is linked to the 1830 revolution in which Belgium gained
independence from the Netherlands with the political support of England and France.
Situated within this district and positioned on the summit of a hill, the medium-sized
plaza of Place Royale is enclosed by the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium on the
west and the church of St-Jacques-cur-Coudenberg to the east. The plaza, designed by
architect Bernabé Guimard in 1769, sits adjacent the Royal Palace and has direct lines of
site to major features of the city, such as the Brussels Town Hall to the east and the
Palace of Justice to the southwest. In the center of the plaza, standing in a high pedestal
in front of the church, the monumental equestrian statue of crusader Godefroid de
Bouillon by Louis Eugene Simonis (1810-1893) gazes toward the Grand Place to the
Matta-Clark’s Work in Paris,” October, Vol. 85 (Summer, 1998): 65-89; Jessica Morgan, Common Wealth
(London: Tate, 1998); Steve Pile and Michael Keith, Geographies of Resistance (New York: Routledge,
1997). Jean-Luc Nancy’s works on community include Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1991); and “Of Being in Common,” in Community at Loose Ends, ed. The Miami
Theory Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). His works respond to and
participate in a broader discourse represented by George Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne
Boldt (New York: SUNY Press, 1988); Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. P. Jorris
(New York: Stations Hill Press, 1988).
41
northwest (figs. 29a-b). Automobile traffic, public transportation and pedestrian traffic
circulate through the space, entering the Place Royale on the Regent’s Chapstraat from
the southwest, Rue de Namur from the south, and the Coudenberg Hofberg from the
northwest.
Dear Prudence carves out a symbolic space within a plaza (which is already overinvested
with symbolic meaning), positioning the work to comment on that space’s civic
and religious affiliations. Dear Prudence works with established urban meanings of the
space, but as a sort of miniature mountain, the sculpture draws attention to the natural
terrain of the Mont des Art, and the symbolic links between elevation, panopticism,
dominance, and monumentality. Dear Prudence is situated only feet from Simonis’
monument and consists of a wood and steel A-frame tower with two main panels and an
open space in between (fig. 30a-b). Plywood panels mounted with a text cut from
medium density fiberboard (MDF) were then bolted to the frame. The lower register of
the front wall is perforated with small footholds that give way to the letters of the text,
which, due to their varied in depth from 4 - 18mm, form a stratum of handholds that
decreases in difficulty near the top of the sculpture. The front side of the work facing the
museum reads, “CLIMB IF YOU WANT BUT REMEMBER THAT COURAGE AND
STRENGTH ARE NOTHING WITHOUT PRUDENCE.” The reverse side of the work,
which faces the church, reads, “AND PRUDENCE IS NOTHING WITHOUT A LITTLE
COURAGE.” A ladder is mounted to the back of the work, allowing an alternative
means of ascent or descent. The height of the structure makes it visible from the streets
leading into the plaza, and as a result, the work attracts attention from commuters and
tourists unloading from the tram, which runs along the Regent’s Chapstraat and stops in
42
the plaza (figs. 31-33). The visibility of the work and its placement in a well-trafficked
part of town means that it entices viewers who may not otherwise be interested in the arts
or who may be reluctant to enter the Royal Museum of Fine Arts.
The text on the front wall of the sculpture quotes one of the seminal
mountaineering narratives, Scrambles Amongst the Alps (1871), penned by British
mountaineer Edward Whymper (1840-1911) following his controversial first ascent of
the Matterhorn in July 1865 in which four members his team perished on the descent
(figs. 34, 35). The passage, which takes the form of an epitaph, was written as an
admonition against what was perceived as an unbridled hubris that infected British
climbers during the period known as the Golden Age of Mountaineering from 1854-
1865.68 The full citation reads:
Climb if you will but remember, that courage and strength are naught without
prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a
lifetime. Do nothing in haste, look well to each step and from the beginning
think what may be the end.69
When written across the surface of Dear Prudence, and in the absence of any additional
labels or text by the artist that would define the work as a participatory installation,
Whymper’s warning assumes its new meaning as an invitation to the viewer for activated
spectatorship.
In part, Whymper’s original text may be read as an admonition against the
passionate pursuit of the experience of the Sublime, which had, since the mid-eighteenth
century, informed the cultural practices of hill climbing and mountaineering. In his
treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
68 Fergus Fleming, Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 291.
69 Whymper quoted in Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, 97. See also the excerpt from Whymper’s
Scrambles Amongst the Alps printed in Mikel Vause, Peering Over the Edge: The Philosophy of
Mountaineering (La Crescenta, CA: Mountain N’ Air Books, 2005), 58.
43
Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke defined the Sublime as an overwhelming sense of one’s
own mortality in the face of the magnitude and destructive forces of nature, an experience
most readily available in the precipitous terrain of coastal and mountainous regions.
Although this experience was initially predicated on the individual’s relatively safe
distance from the Sublime phenomenon, mountaineering historian Robert Macfarlane
notes, “The proviso that one must, in Rousseau’s words, be ‘safely placed’ in order to
enjoy the frisson of risk became increasingly disregarded,” thus exposing the participant
to mortal danger.70
As an emblem of this historical shift and as a document in a discourse about the
social consequences of mountaineering tragedy, Scrambles Amongst the Alps along with
other literary responses to the Matterhorn accident illustrates several key elements of the
politics of the fall that would be played out in critical reactions by the British public.
These texts consistently underscore the meaninglessness of the climber’s death, the
perceived threat to community that death signifies, and the anxiety surrounding the
presence or absence of the fallen climber’s body. For example, Whymper’s description
of the fall glosses one of the most important aspects of the tragedy, his personal
responsibility for supplying the team with faulty equipment:
We held; but the rope broke midway between Taugwalder and Lord Francis
Douglas. For a few seconds we saw our unfortunate companions sliding
downwards on their backs, and spreading out their hands, endeavoring to save
themselves. They passed from our sight uninjured, disappeared one by one, and
fell from precipice to precipice on to the Matterhorngletscher below, a distance
70 For the connection between Edmund Burke and the practice of mountaineering see Macfarlane,
Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit (New York: Vintage, 2003), 66-102. For the
quotation see page 85.
44
of nearly 4,000 feet in height. From the moment the rope broke it was
impossible to help them.71
Whymper’s antiseptic description of the breaking of the rope brackets the
potential of the rope to signify the supposedly infrangible social bonds between
climbers; this reads as a deliberate attempt by the author to direct attention away
from the fact that he was indeed responsible for bringing the inferior piece of
equipment to the mountain.72 The official inquest in Zermatt did not overlook this
detail; thus, the fall came to represent a more general threat to the notion of
community in addition to signifying the immanence of death.
The press endowed this threat to community with a somatic dimension by
associating it with the lost reproductive capacities of the social elite. “Why is the
best blood of England to waste itself in scaling hitherto inaccessible peaks, in
staining the eternal snows and reaching the unfathomable abyss never to
return?”73 This account suggests that the blood of the climber is a finite resource
endowed with the appropriate racial or genetic superiority needed to insure a
healthy community. In other accounts this same loss of the “best blood of
England” is rendered in distinctly sexual terms, “It is by no means uncertain that a
member of the Alpine Club will not endeavor to surmount a ‘virgin peak’ of some
wondrous mountain in the year 1875 and render a family heirless and a mother
unhappy for life.”74 Thus, death in the mountains was interpreted quite literally as
the castration of the society’s ability to continue the bloodlines of elite citizens
71 Edward Whymper quoted in Fergus Fleming, Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (New York:
Grove Press, 2000), 275. See also Whymper, Scrambles Amongst the Alps (London: Murray, 1871), 397-
398.
72 Fleming, Killing Dragons, 282.
73 The Times, July 27, 1865, quoted in Fleming, Killing Dragons, 291.
74 London Illustrated News, July 29, 1865, quoted in Fleming, Killing Dragons, 291.
45
and as a threat to the traditional social roles structured by domesticity. In the
British imagination, blood mixes with precious semen, and the breaking of the
rope signifies the interruption of the controlled flow of these fluids between
citizens.
The disappearance or absence of the fallen body presented an additional set of
anxieties that has yet to be explored in critical studies of mountaineering literature.75
Whymper specifically mentions the disappearance of his companions as they fell over the
edge, and the impact this had on the survivors. Unable to see or reach the bodies, the
survivors were beset by visions in which they believed they saw the “spectral forms” of
the dead (fig. 36).76 This anxiety nearly caused the men to loose their sanity, but was
partially assuaged by the discovery of three of the four corpses (the corpse of the
youngest and most distinguished member of the party, Lord Douglas, had disintegrated
during the fall and only articles of clothing were ever found). British responses to the
75 Although scholarship on mountaineering literature is still a relatively new field of inquiry, pioneered by
Peter Bayers and Robert Macfarlane, much work remains to be done on what these texts reveal about
modern conceptions of heroic death and the male body. Bodily presence and the anxiety over bodily
absence occurs repeatedly in mountaineering literature in the accounts of fallen climbers and the often
futile attempts to recover their bodies. Mountaineering ethics demand that the bodies of the deceased
remain in situ when recovery proves too dangerous or when permanent snows will ensure the preservation
of the corpse. (Everest is the prime example of this where the area below the summit has become a
veritable graveyard.) The loss of Toni Kurz on the Eiger in 1936 is the most notorious example of a
surplus of bodily presence in twentieth century European alpinism. Not only did his rescuers watch the
young climber die of exhaustion while dangling on the end of his rope, they were forced to leave his body
suspended over the precipice in full view of the tourists encamped below. Only later that year when the
weather conditions improved were they able to return and retrieve the body. More recently, Joe Simpson’s
stories of near death experiences in his book This Game of Ghosts (1993) express a deep anxiety over
bodily absence, and his accounts tend to endow the phantoms of the body with a surplus of signification.
For example, he describes an area of matted grass, flattened by the tent of a fellow climber, as a reminder
of that climber’s death on Mont Blanc earlier that week (the man’s body was never found). The tent, which
made the impression in the grass, becomes an analogue for the lost body of the deceased. Simpson also
reads this impression in the grass as an omen of future death—a young woman who pitched her tent in the
same flattened-out grass fell to her death the following week. The art of Neal Beggs works within the
conventions of literary representations of death by exposing the viewer’s anxiety over the absent body of
the other.
76 Gaston Rébuffat, Men and the Matterhorn (London: Nicholas Vane, 1965), 127.
46
Matterhorn disaster also testify to the community’s need to experience the bodies of the
deceased, either physically by retrieving the remains and bringing them to Zermatt for
burial, or vicariously through grisly newspaper accounts.77
The politics of the fall first revealed in early mountaineering literature informs
several earlier works by Neal Beggs. In 1999 Beggs parodied Yves Klein’s Leap Into the
Void by actually jumping from a ladder outside his gallery onto a pile of old mattresses
(Klein’s work is a photo montage, and the artist actually leaped into the waiting arms of
his fellow judo practitioners), (figs. 37, 38). The resulting photograph, Jump, exposes the
constructedness of the original by displaying the leg of the ladder from which the artist
leaped and the mattresses intended to break his fall. Jump assigns a metaphorical
significance to the theme of the fall, suggesting the capacity of the fall to comment on the
inherent risks of artistic practice and the performative nature of the relationship between
artist and public. In addition, the act of climbing and the formal structure of the ladder
are preserved in the form of the sandwich board of Dear Prudence.
A more sober commentary on the theme of the fall is expressed in a video
collaboration with Dan Shipsides, titled Alphabet Climb (2004), which documents the
artists’ experience of buildering in the popular climbing area of Montserrat, and their
casual encounter with a man making his own film documenting the search for his missing
brother (fig. 39). In the film, Beggs and Shipsides are given a flyer with a description of
the lost man and a portrait showing him posed at the base of a mountain—the word
“desaparacido” appears at the top of the flyer indicating that the individual is assumed
dead. Alphabet Climb exposes the subtle connections between the risks of climbing, the
77 Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, 95-96; and Fleming, Killing Dragons, 278-279.
47
experience of loss, and the importance of narrative in translating that loss into the will
toward community. Alphabet Climb also introduces the theme of the absent body, which
is repeated in a Formica sculpture that capitalizes on the phenomenological potential of
minimalist forms (fig. 40). Tent (2000) reinterprets the form and color of a traditional Aframe
tent, yet it transforms the benign presence into an anxiety-causing scenario. The
observer anticipates the presence of another’s body only to be met with silence
suggesting the absence, death, or psychological distance of the other.
Dear Prudence also relies on the metaphorical connection between sleep and
death to underscore the significance of the mortal danger that the fall represents. The
mattresses placed around the base of the sculpture, which are used in place of the
professionally manufactured “crash pads” typical of sport climbing venues, add a
distinctive formal element to the work and are a signature of Beggs’ climbable
installations. Beggs used old mattresses to break his fall during his action, Jump (1999),
and continued to use mattresses in later participatory installations featuring plywood
climbing walls placed inside a gallery setting. Twin-sized mattresses are used in
installations at such venues as Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (1999), Galerie du Sous-
Sol, Paris (2002), Le Blanc-Mesnil (2002), and Le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire, (2003),
and Transpalette, Bourges (2004), (fig. 41).
The twin mattresses, scaled to the size of an individual body, are situated directly
underneath the inverted wall suspended above them. The clusters of climbing holds
bolted to the surface of the plywood plot a mesmerizing constellation of possible
movements that must be imagined by the climber lying beneath them. Thus, the mattress
defines a heterotopic space of reverie that is grounded on the earth, while the surface of
48
the wall, with its star-like patters occupies the dream space of the heavens. This dialectic
is demonstrated elsewhere in Beggs’ practice, often taking the form of what he calls
“Starmaps,” in which the artist paints over standard topographic maps with black ink,
leaving only the small space of alpine summits exposed (fig. 42). With the rest of the
landforms blotted out, the resulting constellations reveal the potential of the standard map
as a space for the projection of subjective desires and fantasies.
Although the mattress symbolizes the space of sleep and dreams in the climber’s
imagination, once the climber begins the ascent the mattress is re-inscribed within the
politics of the fall. This is expressed phenomenologically by the visual tension between
the full form of the climber’s body and the empty space of the mattress that is scaled to
receive it. Thus, to attain its new significance as a receptacle, the mattress must receive
the climber’s body and complete a chain of signification beginning with the ‘birth’ of the
route’s solution in the climber’s imagination, and the ‘death’ of the climber on the event
of the fall. The placement of the mattresses around the base of Dear Prudence maintains
this dynamic, but the celestial references in Beggs’ earlier installations are substituted for
the sheer height of the work, which seen from below, mediates between the heavens and
the earth (fig. 43). The works placement within the highest elevation in town, Mont des
Arts, and its proximity to a church also speak to the work as a site for the mediation of
transcendence.
If the significance of the fall in the work of Neal Beggs points to a reconsideration
of the event of death within the history of climbing narrative, how is this dynamic played
out in the lived experience of the work in public space? Does the work join a theoretical
interest in the impact of death on community to the question of the activation of the
49
spectator in contemporary art? If so, how does Dear Prudence stand in relation to
traditional monumental public sculpture that also celebrates death as the actualization of
community? Several of the documentary photographs taken by the artist during the
installation offer clues to how we may begin to answer these questions.
Among the documentary photographs taken by the artist is an image of a male
climber who has just fallen from the wall and lays sprawled among the mattresses in a
spread-eagle position as if he were dead (fig. 44). Each member of the crowd stands in a
semicircle around the base of the wall and directs his or her body towards the sole body
of the fallen climber. Some appear to contemplate the event of the fall in silence (which
is implied by the apparent motionlessness of certain figures), while others applaud by
laughing and clapping. In describing his work, Beggs supports this conclusion and
suggests that each fall was treated in a similar way, “some managed to pull through to the
top, but the majority fell in spectacular fashion to the applause of the public, landing
safely on the mattresses.”78
In this image, Beggs presents the fall at the precise moment of death, completing
a chain of signification within the politics of the fall that eventually culminates in the
recognition of a threat to the community of the living. The artist captures the fallen
climber in the moment in which his figure most resembles a lifeless corpse, and at the
moment of the crowd’s self-conscious recognition of this fact. In other words, in addition
to seeing the climber as a dead body, the crowd notices itself making this mistaken
identification. Within the context of the Matterhorn disaster established in Dear
Prudence by the text written across its surface, the fallen climber must be read as playing
78 Neal Beggs, “On My Art,” Summit (Summer, 2007).
50
the part of one of the three deceased climbers whose bodies were discovered at the base
of the mountain. The community of participants bears witness to the body by viewing
and applauding it, a dynamics of witnessing that implies the importance of seeing the
body and the presence of a corpse.
These two very different responses (silence and applause) point to two separate
moments in an event of revelation that occurs with the metaphorical death of the other
that results from the fall. The silent witnessing of the lifeless body, shown by several
figures on the left of the composition, implies the instant and momentary recognition of
one’s own mortality reflected in the death of the other; it also implies a knowledge of the
impossibility of a communion with the dead in the form of a transcendent being who
could hear it. Silence is the response to the end of the game. It is a reaction to the notplay
of this game that is also not “earnest” (the seriousness often associated with
‘work’).79 It implies a mourning for the not-really-dead-climber that necessarily implies
a working-through of the survivor’s own recognition of itself as a living entity in the
event of the other’s death, which precedes the celebration of this fact in the form of a
social contract (the obligatory act of mourning) with the memory of the deceased and the
community of survivors. Such mourning can occur only with the living person’s
‘memory’ of the deceased and is not a communication directed towards the decedent; and
part of this mourning is reserved for the ‘loss’ of the possibility of the deceased being
subsumed within the community. In short, this reaction testifies to the initial recognition
of the meaningless of the death as the defining element of the politics of the fall.
79 In his influential text Homo Ludens, Huizinga builds this distinction between the imaginative play aspect
of the game and the reality-based, work aspect of play’s other, earnest. I reference this text here because
Homo Ludens continues to be a significant influence on the work of British artist-mountaineers, who
interpret ascent as a form play; Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
(Boston: Beacon, 1955).
51
Applause celebrates the possibility of communication with the now ‘deceased’
subject who must therefore exist in some form other than a living body (a transcendent
entity still capable of communion with the living); or applause celebrates the survivors’
recognition of their status as living things, a status they hold in common only by virtue of
their not being dead (the fallen climber is excluded from the logic of this thinking
because he is dead). Of course, there is a third option – the one to which we must
eventually arrive – and that is the applause in celebration of the future possibility that the
actual death of the other will bring a recognition of living in common, which the climberplaying-
dead has momentarily sacrificed himself for and in which he may now
participate. This final option points to the ‘game’ as the operating principle of the
politics of the fall in Dear Prudence, a game in which the ‘players’ assume the socially
constructed roles of climber or spectator, living or deceased, in order to act out a scenario
of death that will prepare the participants to recognize the experience of the death of the
other (which they have experienced before and will experience again) as a moment of
revelation, but a revelation of what they will not know until the actual event of death. In
short, the game prepares a perceptual apparatus that will be used to see in death a
moment of revelation. This anticipates a foreknowledge of the recognition of one’s own
mortality in the death of the other, but also suggests the possibility of the forgetting of
this knowledge, or the necessity of such an event being continually relived by the living.
Such a repetition, which may imply a process of forgetting, may also be read as fulfilling
a process of recognition that must be completed in stages, or one that may not take root
after the singular event. To argue, also, that the ‘roles’ of this game are socially
constructed is not the same as to argue that they are roles imposed by society, for the
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roles of society, which define relationships between individuals such as ‘mother’ and
‘son,’ may not be transcended except by the recognition of other alternative relationships.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings on community help secure this interpretation by
emphasizing the significance of the event of death as a destabilizing force. In his book,
Inoperative Community, Nancy argues against the model of community in humanist
thought which is composed of atomized individuals who believe the dead are subsumed
back within the community as transcendent beings (Nancy calls this process
“immanence” or “communal fusion”).80 In such formulations community is given an
eternal essence (as a collective subjectivity) that exists beyond human reality and that
actually works to undermine the supposedly autonomous individual.81 Instead, Nancy
proposes a model of community that is “unworked”, meaning that community cannot be
‘produced’ by the conscious efforts, or labor, of ‘individuals’. He argues for a notion of
community as an event, or the experience of “being-in-common” that only occurs upon
witnessing the death of the other (the body must be present for this to happen).82 This
inoperative community is defined by the extension of the self toward the other through
communication in the form of language, gesture, and writing.83 By substituting a new
concept of community for an outmoded and historical one, Nancy implies the possibility
80 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 13. For Nancy, the communal aspects of Christian civilization
epitomize the notion of humanist community: “The fully realized person of individualistic or communistic
humanism is the dead person…it is death itself consigned to immanence; it is in the end that resorption of
death that Christian civilization, as though devouring its own transcendence, has come to minister to itself
in the guise of a supreme work.” Nancy defines “immanence” as “communal fusion” – the moment of
being subsumed within a total order. For the humanist community this means the passage of the deceased
subject into a system of institutions, ritual and symbols that promise the possibility of communion with the
deceased in the form of a holy communion.
81 Ibid., 4, 15, 19.
82 Ibid., 4. Nancy describes the experience of “being-in-common” as the continual sharing of boundaries
between territorial subjects, whose limits are defined only in relation to the other. Nancy suggests the
importance of immediate visual experience of death when he quotes Bataille, “If it sees its fellow-being
die…” Ibid., 15
83 Ibid., 40-1.
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of transitioning from the old notion toward the new, and therefore, the parallel occurrence
of the two models within the same temporal frame—such is the case in Dear Prudence,
where the two responses to the fall of the climber derive from very different notions of
death informed by the humanist and inoperative forms of community.
To return to the previous image, the theory of the inoperative community
illuminates the social dynamics at work within the picture and helps to account for certain
aspects of the politics of the fall. First, what has been identified as two separate
responses to the metaphorical death of the fallen climber, applause and silence,
correspond to the two models of community outlined in the Inoperative Community.
Silence becomes, therefore, the response to the recognition of the inoperative community
where the death of the other is meaningless and cuts off the possibility of communion.
Silence acknowledges the termination of subjectivity upon death and the recognition of
immanence in the form of decomposition and return to natural cycles. Silence also
corresponds to the end of the game that involved the role-playing between climbers and
spectators where the fall, as the unexpected and shocking phenomenon of death, signals
what I referred to as the “not-play” of this game (that is to say, the recognition of the ungame-
like quality of the installation that the metaphorical death has just spoiled by
bringing the real violently into play).
Second, one reading of the response identified as applause corresponds to the
historical notion of a community of individual humanist subject in which the dead is
subsumed by the community through transcendence into immanence. The spectators,
therefore, necessarily expect that the dead, as a transcendent being, can hear the applause
and revel in communion. It is also possible to read the applause within the logic of the
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inoperative community in which the audience, bypassing a stage of mourning for the
deceased, celebrates their possibility of communion as living mortal “beings-incommon”.
The final possibility is applause that celebrates the honing of the perceptual
apparatus that will intervene in the event of an actual death to stimulate the knowledge of
community. The logic of this process operates between what Nancy argues are the fixed
moments of death that define the recognition of the “inoperative” form of community.
This thinking satisfies a desire for community by making its future attainment knowable
or predictable. The space between these points also happens to be the space of
‘communication’ and ‘writing,’ a practice that is fundamental to community and allows
the dead to speak beyond death. Thus, the politics of the fall opens the possibility of the
game acting on par with the practice of communication, or more precisely, as a form of
communication, which in the case of Dear Prudence, is structured as much on literature
as it is on play.
To suggest that a notion of play may work in concert with Nancy’s notion of
communication is to move beyond the scope of his theory but to still operate within its
logic. Play, as the opposite of “earnest” allows for the possibility that singularities may
play at community without actually ‘producing’ it as ‘work’, or as Nancy says,
“producing its essence as its work.” What this play produces, if anything, is an image or
representation of community that may or may not resemble the real thing. Dear
Prudence plays with several dimension of community, but its emphasis on death frames
the image of community around that precise moment of death, or what Nancy terms the
“interruption of singularities.”
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It is here that Beggs’ use of narrative works to nuance the idea of death as a
transformative event for the observer. By presenting the narrative of the Matterhorn
disaster as the tale of mountaineering death par excellence, Beggs exposes the dissolution
of individual social roles, such as ‘mother’ and ‘son’, through the act of writing about
loss. For example, when Whymper describes the event in Scrambles, he resigns his role
as an autonomous individual author/climber by answering British society’s need to
understand the loss of its elite and the desires that drove them to the mountains in the first
place. Whymper’s narrative becomes a common object for interpretation by the wider
public, which through their interpretations and fantasies, exchange subject positions with
the writer. In the responses to the Matterhorn disaster, we have already seen how the
death of the climber threatened social roles imposed by humanist society, but in the
narrative of the event such roles are automatically destabilized through the process of
sharing the territorial limits of subjectivity.84 Dear Prudence reiterates the same
narrative structure witnessed in the responses to the Matterhorn disaster by presenting
itself as an object of collective interpretation across the lines of difference created by the
supposedly hierarchical relationship between ‘active’ climbers and ‘passive’ observers.
By engaging Whymper’s narrative and sharing their own narratives of the experience of
Dear Prudence, participants become active players in a provisional inoperative
community.
Dear Prudence, therefore, is an authorless text inviting its spectators to become
authors through the simple invitation to participate, “Climb if you will…,” which in an
image showing several participants on the viewing platform, acts as a caption to the event
84 Nancy proposes the idea that writing is a communication always directed toward the other and thus it
constitutes “community itself.” Nancy, Inoperative Community, 41.
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of celebration and documentation (fig. 45). The woman in the foreground motions to the
camera, implicating the viewer in a reflexive recognition of the other. The man behind
her shifts his role from climber to spectator as he gazes down to the crowd below. The
furthest figure holding a camera, which he uses to document the event, assumes the role
of author-as-documentarian that would traditionally be reserved for the artist. This would
suggest an alternative role for narrative within the work as well: narrative as a means to
share the experience of the work after the fact.
As such, the roles of the author and reader are drawn into the complexities of the
spectator/participant relationship. The avant-garde concern for the activation of the
spectator was founded on an assumption of the passivity of the spectator position that is
currently being reconsidered by such thinkers as Jacques Rancière.85 His essay, “The
Emancipated Spectator” (2004), is a major contribution to the idea of the spectator (or
reader, as the case may be in Rancière’s example) as an active interpreter of a text.86 In
Rancière’s model, as the reader/pupil takes control of the interpretation of a book, the text
shifts from a didactic object to an inert form available for collective appropriation
through interpretation.
Two images, one depicting a view of Dear Prudence through the windows of the
tram and the other showing passengers on the tram as viewers of the spectacle going on
outside, illustrate the extent to which the roles of actor and spectator are blurred in the
work (figs. 46, 47). In the first image the artwork is subsumed within the space of the
tram through the frame of the window aperture, implying a collapsed distance between
85 Bishop, Participation, 11.
86 Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator” (lecture, International Summer Academy, Frankfurt,
2004).
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looking and acting. The bodies of the climbers seem to emerge from the body of the
seated passenger who is turned away from the action going on outside. Similarly, the
space of sculpture is projected into the surrounding environment by its visibility and the
fragmentation of the work in the form of window reflections, photography, and personal
narratives. According to the logic of the emancipated spectator, even the passenger
watching the event from the enclosed space of the tram participates in a social dynamic
constructed by the artists and other spectators.
This brings us back to the previous image of the participants on the viewing
platform who assume the potentially dominating gaze of the elevated perspective. The
elevated perspective afforded by hilltops and towers has historically been associated with
systems of power and patriarchal authority. Likewise, cultural practices that attempted to
attain similar perspectives, such as survey, mapping and surveillance, and of course,
mountaineering, are implicated in the same logic of the colonization of space.
Dear Prudence works within this paradigm by affording its participants a view
that is similar in height to the adjacent equestrian bronze in the center of the plaza, which
appears in the background of the photograph. Although Dear Prudence makes room in
its model of community for the “emancipated” spectator, any democratic equality
between climbers and non-climbers is undermined by the potential of the work to
promote hierarchies based on the very qualities that invite participation in the first place:
risk taking, “courage”, and “strength”. The quality of prudence, though an important
personal attribute, is seen as a feminine impediment to masculine adventure – for as
Beggs declares on the reverse of the sculpture, “prudence is nothing without a little
courage,” a statement that reinforces the inherently hierarchical cultural practice of
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mountaineering. Yet, these hierarchies have rarely corresponded to those imposed by
society according to race, gender, class, education, or economics; and as a result, the
history of British and European climbing is defined by the practice’s ability to transcend
social boundaries by appealing to the working and middle classes living in urban centers
like Sheffield, Manchester and Glasgow. Dear Prudence, therefore, provides the
opportunity to participate in a potentially competitive group environment, but one in
which pre-existing social roles may be momentarily substituted for new roles based on
criteria not deemed essential to success in the social, political, or economic arenas.
The proximity of Dear Prudence to the equestrian monument of Godefroid de
Bouillon inscribes the spatial and symbolic function of the bronze within the politics of
the fall. The modern fabrication of this statue, commemorating a Christian crusader,
speaks to the nostalgia in the modern period for the supposedly ‘lost’ community
modeled on Christian communion with the body of Christ. “The modern conception of
community centered on a notion of the community as a lost artifact, such as the natural
family, the Athenian city, the Roman Republic, the first Christian community,
corporations and brotherhoods, in which its members were bound by infrangible ‘bonds,’
the image of which was played back to the living through symbols, institutions, and
rituals.”87 The monument, therefore, functions within the humanist community to
symbolize the fictive bonds between the living inhabitants of the city through a static
image of transcendent death. The monument projects this homogenized image of social
relationships onto the surrounding space for the passive consumption by a dominated
87 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 9.
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population.88 The equestrian monument does this in a particularly violent way by placing
the public in a subservient relationship to the statue, for as Judith Baca notes, “from the
triumphant bronze general on horseback—the public’s view of which is the underside of
galloping hooves—we find examples of public art in the service of dominance.”89
Community, in the humanist paradigm, therefore, takes place only through communion
with a common ancestor and under the authoritative gaze of the monument. Other
theorists nuance this reading of the monuments by acknowledging its role in bringing
people together under the aegis of a shared identity, however fictive that may be.90
Herein lies the potential of the monument, or its contemporary inversion, to
interrogate the illusory social bonds symbolized by traditional monuments and
monumental architecture. Dear Prudence offers alternative models of sociality based in
the immediate present, and therefore, it operates as an “anti-monument,” a form of public
sculpture with the capacity to “subvert the conventions of the monument” through the
performance of an inversion of traditional monuments or by celebrating the powerless
civilian.91 The emphasis on lived social relationships, regardless of their potential to
establish hierarchies, act as a foil to the fictive image of social bonds presented in the
work by Louis-Eugene Simonis. Simonis’s monument presents a static image of
‘official’ history, whereas Dear Prudence introduces the possibility of personal narratives
and histories by expanding the role of authorship to the participants. In addition, the
model of the inoperative community at work in Dear Prudence, in which death is seen as
the impossibility of communion, opposes the humanist model of transcendent Christian
88 For the reference to the “passive” contemplation of the monument see Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, 21.
89 Baca, “Whose Monument Where?: Public Art in a Many-Cultured Society,” in Mapping the Terrain,
132.
90 Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, 21.
91 Malcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures (London: Routledge, 1997), 58.
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death where the deceased person is subsumed back into the community though rituals and
institutions. Finally, Dear Prudence offers the participant the opportunity to appropriate
the dominating perspective of Godefroid, thereby usurping his authority, and by
implication the authority of the state, over the space of the plaza and the lower district of
the Brussels city center.
In conclusion, Dear Prudence exposes a politics of the fall pervading modern
mountaineering narrative that conveys social meanings about a perceived threat to
community that death represents. The Matterhorn disaster exposed the considerable
valence between the socially constructed roles of citizens and the potential for climbing
narrative to transcend those roles by establishing communion between territorial
singularities as opposed to autonomous humanist individuals. By placing his sculpture
within a space already dominated by civil and religious monuments and architecture,
Neal Beggs proposes the potential of play to affect the subtle shifts in subjectivity toward
a territorial model that will ultimately result in the recognition of the “unworked”
character of community in the event of an actual death.
The politics of the fall is already etched in the collective memories of the
inhabitants of Brussels as a result of the death of the popular leader, King Albert of
Brussels, after his own fatal fall while climbing in 1936 (Neal Beggs, pers. comm.)
Whatever effect Albert’s death had on Brussels’ sense of community is relived in the fall
of each participant from the walls of Dear Prudence. Beggs underscores the logic of the
inoperative community by proposing the absolute necessity of the presence of the dead
body (which must be witnessed visually) and the potential of the experience of death to
be communicated through narrative. According to these conclusions, Dear Prudence
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operates between the interventionist and ameliorative models of participatory art practice,
but well within the tradition of de-authored works
