Thursday, June 16, 2005

Chicago "artist" stages fall from museum roof, "inspired" by 9/11

From AP via CBS 2 Chicago:

A performance artist wearing a business suit and safety harnesses jumped repeatedly from a museum roof to create photographs that recall scenes from the World Trade Center attack, but his spectacle was scorned by some onlookers and victims' relatives.

Collaborating photographers snapped away as Kerry Skarbakka fell more than 30 times from the five-story Museum of Contemporary Art on Tuesday. The photographs will be retouched to erase the pulleys and wires that kept Skarbakka from hitting the pavement.

Skarbakka, 34, said he started thinking about falling after watching on television as workers jumped to their deaths from the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

``I was so distraught, I needed some way to find an artistic response,'' he told the Chicago Sun-Times. Now, he says he sees falling as a metaphor for life.


And I see Kerry Skarbakka as a metaphor for bad taste and obnoxiousness. I'm not the only one to agree. From the same article:

In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg called it ``nauseatingly offensive,'' and some who lost family and friends at the trade center agreed.

``What kind of a sick individual is he? Tell him to go jump off the Empire State Building and see how it feels,'' Rosemarie Giallombardo, whose son Paul Salvio died in the terrorist attack, told the (New York) Daily News. ``He's an artist? Go paint a bowl of fruit or something.''

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