Failure

Art that stages falling short, from tragic falls to deadpan flops, botched tasks and self-mockery.

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About

Failure became a subject once artists stopped assuming effort leads to triumph. Older art told it as tragedy or moral lesson: Icarus plunging after flying too near the sun, the Tower of Babel left unfinished. Modern and contemporary artists more often stage it as comedy, accident or honest limitation, in the spirit of Samuel Beckett's line ‘Fail again. Fail better’ (1983).

Bruce Nauman photographed himself slumped between two chairs in Failing to Levitate in the Studio (1966), and in 1970 Bas Jan Ader filmed himself rolling off a roof and riding a bicycle into an Amsterdam canal; he was lost at sea in 1975 attempting to cross the Atlantic in a small boat. Martin Kippenberger's Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself (1989) is a life-size figure of the artist standing like a punished schoolboy, and Michael Smith has spent decades playing a hapless everyman called Mike.