Extremes of performance art were increasingly coming on to the art-world menu. It seemed fitting that not long after our lunch he was appointed artist-in-residence at New York’s Cathedral of St John the Divine likewise that he was asked to join the heavyweight Pace Gallery. After the WTC walk, he turned down $1 million to do a beer commercial and has consistently refused all such offers. Petit, meanwhile, went to one of the best art schools in Paris and from the beginning has defined what he does as art. When Nik Wallenda, his great-grandson, wirewalked across the Grand Canyon in June 2013 it was screened on the Discovery Channel and he was promoted as a ‘daredevil’, a stunt man, like Evel Knievel. ![]() Wallenda had been head of the Flying Wallendas, a circus clan. Indeed, when I brought up what I assumed would be a delicate subject - the death of a famous wirewalker, Karl Wallenda, who had recently fallen in Puerto Rico - Petit merely observed that Wallenda ‘didn’t do his own rigging’. Petit was controlled, laid-back, un-showbizzy, a working performer. Just looking down through thick glass was giddying. We lunched appropriately in Windows on the World, a terrific eatery on the top of the WTC’s North Tower. But it had begun to drizzle, so he brought his performance to a close and was at once arrested by the cops who were waiting on both roofs. ![]() He stayed up there for 45 minutes, sauntering, dancing, sitting, lying lengthwise and jumping, his feet leaving the wire. He came to New York, reconnoitred, sneaked in the wire, did the crucial rigging with an assistant and set out 1,350 feet above the ground just after 6am on 7 August 1974. Petit had been plotting his ‘criminal action’ - his phrase - since reading about the towers-to-come in a French magazine. It was some years after his wire-walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center that I first interviewed Philippe Petit, but his wire-walk seemed as fresh as yesterday.
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