A few more things to say about The Fall. Axiomatic things. Like, for instance, that Mary Evelyn Harju’s representation of me as David is just that, and precisely that. The similarity is there, and unmistakable. Mary’s fascination with the Renaissance is already well-documented. As is her sense of erotic fascination with ideal male nudes. Also notable that who I am in The Fall, as someone being represented, is someone true to life. I really am 5’9, slightly over 5’9, actually, with a pronounced tendency to lankiness. I’m not secretly 5’6, and chunky. Or 5’8 and a half. Those who might see me will not be surprised. These tokens of complete aesthetic legitimacy have to be established, in a country where carnival-rules have made show biz standards the norm. The Fall has a number of ways of being for real that are striking ones. No show biz.
The other thing I wanted to discuss is more interesting. The Fall was modeled for and painted in a co-op studio in the Spring Garden section of North Philadelphia in 2007-2008. On a narrative level, the painting suggests Mary and I in the garden of Eden, and locates a portion of its narrative in the Bible. Mary coming out of a Christian Right family is significant, as is the outre Aughts-Philly peccadillo of her Renaissance obsession and eroticism. The sense of Philadelphia as an Eden, or as Edenic, is an intriguing one. If there is one facet of Philadelphia as a city which establishes that it can manifest as an Eden, or as Edenic, it is the sublime nature of Philadelphia’s architecture. What a city is, primordially, is a collection of buildings. Because Philadelphia, from City Hall on out, was constructed, at its best, of buildings meant to endure over decades and centuries, and to fulfill rigorous aesthetic criteria, it creates a physiology, in Philadelphia, of levitation, transcendentalism over the mundane, and of an atmosphere in which history moves forward, lives and breathes. Because Philadelphia is built, at its best, of living, breathing history, it offers a sense of shelter and amnesty to those who wish to pursue living, breathing history itself. Thus, it could be an Eden, or Edenic, for those of us in the Aughts, who wished to create to do something other than degrade, or reenact show biz. Philadelphia, in short, is built past swinishness. It’s a real city, by world standards. The Fall could not have been painted, I would tend to say, anywhere else, nor could David manifest as David, or Mary and I as Mary and I. Even the inbuilt sense of doubleness in The Fall falls into place with the idea of history which subsists as history, but also lives and breathes. Is, thus, double. And tolerates the phenomenology of doubleness.
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