ABOVE: Phillippe Petit
Wild Man
Philippe Petit has always been a rebel. Even as a child, growing up in Nemours just south of Paris, the man considered the world’s greatest high wire artist liked to swim upstream.
“I started being rebellious at the age of four,” Petit says with a chuckle. “I remember how displeasing it was playing in the sandbox with other little kids. While they were building sandcastles I wanted to make a pyramid or something. I’ve always done things a bit differently.”
It was this nonconformist streak that drove Petit, at the age of 24, to pull off what has become known as ‘the artistic crime of the century’. On 7 August, 1974 the Frenchman stepped on to a wire suspended 1,350 feet above the ground between the two towers of the World Trade Center. As police gathered to stop the illegal performance, Petit crossed eight times, at one point lying flat on his back in the middle of the wire between the two structures. The extraordinary achievement, as well as the planning that went into it and the aftermath, has been captured in a gripping new documentary, Man On Wire.
Featuring some incredible behind-the-scenes footage, the film is a tribute to a man who will stop at nothing to produce spectacular pieces of performance art. “I think an artist should have little regard for the rules that be,” Petit, who turns 59 in August, points out. “And if you have to go against the system, lie and cheat, to impose your art then so be it. In a way I guess I have a criminal mind. I break into a place, not to do any harm, but to leave a work of art so people will see something beautiful and be inspired.”
Breathless splendour
Petit’s greatest crime had its beginning in a dentist office in Paris in 1968. A teenage Petit, then a street performer who had fallen foul of the law on many occasions, was nervously waiting his turn in the reception area when a picture in a magazine caught his eye. There, in all its splendour, was a model of the yet-to-be-built World Trade Center. It left him breathless.
“I liked how the towers would pierce the clouds and the fact that they would be the highest in the world,” he recalls. “I thought about the stir it would cause if I put a wire there by surprise. What theatre. I realised that, as a wire walker, this was an opportunity to create a masterpiece.”
Transfixed, Petit tore the page out of the magazine and left the dentist office. His sore tooth would have to wait.
Over the next few years Petit honed his skills as a wire walker. In 1971 he put in his first truly high-profile performance when he tiptoed on a wire illegally suspended between the two spires of Notre Dame Cathedral. Ordinary Parisians applauded his efforts. The authorities were less enthralled.
Read the full article on pages 50-52 of this months issue.
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