ABOVE: detail from Kerry Skarbakka’s Interstate (2003), part of the artist’s “The Struggle to Right Oneself” series. Skarbakka was jumping from the roof of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art yesterday for a photo shoot.

In what he has termed an instance of “performance photography,” Kerry Skarbakka was leaping from the roof of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art yesterday and invited the public to come and watch him do it. Skarbakka, who has been working on a series of photographs called “The Struggle to Right Oneself” since shortly after September 11, 2001, says the project is a response to images of office workers at the World Trade Center leaping from windows as the buildings fell. “I was so distraught, I needed some way to find an artistic response,” Skarbakka told the Chicago Sun-Times in a story today. The photos depict Skarbakka falling or leaping from train bridges, windows, overpasses, beds, flights of stairs, and other precipices (precipi?); usually his fall is controlled with harnesses and cables. Assistants take the photos, but Skarbakka later touches them up digitally, photoshopping out the safety gear.

The most interesting thing about the Sun-Times article on the performance is the responses of the people on the street, many of whom just happened to be ambling past. Their responses to the work run a surprisingly wide range, from the guy with the dog who thinks the true artwork would be Skarbakka’s bloodied corpse on the sidewalk, to Joan W. Herring, a “retired housewife” on vacation from Marietta, Georgia, who seemed truly fascinated with what Skarbakka was doing: “For artists today, everything two-dimensional has been done,'’ she told the Sun-Times with an authority (we’re sorry to say) we don’t often expect from retired housewives from Henrietta, GA. “The contemporary artist has to find a new way to express himself.'’ Amen, sister.

LINK: Chicago Sun-Times > Photographer falls for his art