Sam Taylor-Wood: Crying Men + other works
MARK AMERY responds to the tears of Sam Taylor-Wood’s ‘Crying Men’ series, currently showing at City Gallery Wellington as part of larger survey of the UK artist’s portraiture and self-portraiture.
"Hayden Christensen", 2002
Courtesy of the artist and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London © the artist
YOU USED TO KNOW what you were getting with the male portrait. Something grand and status-elevating. Either full of pomp and circumstance or expressive of pain, it was all rather overtly a projection of position.
Now we’re even beyond the irony of a Tony Soprano as Napoleon. The buffoon is far more prevalent. Currently At Hamish McKay Gallery Ronnie Van Hout gives us carved effigies of himself as a plastic shop-window Santa, with the artist mock-farting along to a cheesy Christmas number on the soundtrack (more a Christmas card for the art world than a work of significance perhaps).
Down on the video screens in the vitrines at the City Gallery entrance Rachael Rakena trains a night light on the details of the body of a snoring, duvet hogging gent. There’s nothing glamorous or erotic about the perspective taken in Rakena’s videowork ‘Goliath’. Rather, in a piece of furtive surveillance that comes in umcomfortably close, the focus is on everything from the veins in the foot to the labial vibrating rub of tongue and lips. Accompanied by an enormous (almost musical in its virbato) snore, it presents the sleeping subject as at once both monstrous oddity and endearingly ordinary guy.
City Gallery have done a nice job this year in their Square2 series in providing contemporary New Zealand video work in these vitrines which provides some kind of reflection on what’s on inside. Here Rakena responds to Sam Taylor-Wood’s ‘David’, a video portrait of a sleeping David Beckham which features in the current survey exhibition of Taylor-Wood’s work.
‘David’ is everything ‘Goliath’ is not. For all protestations that this is Beckham asleep, and therewith utterly natural, he is too beautiful (is he wearing make-up, you wonder) and Caravaggio-lit to be taken as real. He is a Michelangelo ideal of the boy with the slingshot, fitting snugly into a heroic art historical tradition. It’s a smart response to a British National Portrait Gallery commission, but a complex take on portraiture it is not.
The Taylor-Wood exhibition is generally something of a disappointment. Part of the problem is the framing of this Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art touring exhibition around the artist’s recent portraiture. Taylor-Wood produced an exciting range of work in the ‘90s that found operatic and psychologically expressive ways to articulate contemporary well-heeled white urban London society, employing the use of multi-screen video and panoramic photography. It’s work that has impressed me on several visits to London (including Taylor-Wood’s Turner prize nominated work in 1998) and is detailed in a documentary on view as part of the exhibition. None of it appears here.
"Self Portrait as a Tree", 2000
Courtesy of the artist and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London © the artist
This exhibition instead turns on more recent photographic and single-screen video work. Despite some strong singular works, the exhibition’s consideration of Taylor-Wood’s self-portraiture also feels half-hearted. Most other work is less specific and more distanced in its approach, offering too little beyond constant nods to art history. Its trickery with bodies suspended and ascended mid-air is baroque in its cool florishes, yet feel contrived without any spiritual or political framework evident.
The framework for the exhibition is selective yet ultimately unclear in why it has taken its chosen small shape. It’s a poor introduction to an artist with a strong body of work who is little known in Australasia, and leaves a focus on the exhibition’s celebrity factor inevitable.
I had actually come expecting to be more disappointed by Taylor-Wood’s ‘Crying Men’ series, whose high celebrity quota ensured it received most of this exhibition’s media attention on opening. Yet this series of portraits of 27 well known male actors shedding tears feels far more grounded in something that resonates with our lives.
The photographic series’ excess – how many actors does one need? – and play with a myriad of magazine photographic spread styles is overt in its affectation. While it might not have the enduring impact of an Andy Warhol portrait series say, calls that this is some kind of celebrity sell-out are a little short-sighted. The series I think is far more knowing in its interest in the beauty of consumption (think of all that paparazzi imagery we devour) that permeates the mass media.
There are strong tensions in the cat and mouse game of reveal and conceal between artist and subject. The likes of Jude Law and Ben Stiller are artfully difficult to identify, the viewer constantly forced to bend to study the exhibition labels to identify who’s who. With the selection of a group of actors revered as much for their skills as well as their looks (from Hoffman to Downey Jr.), there a more complex game here than with the David Beckham portrait. A game is played between high and popular art; the artist and these masters of disguise and manipulation. We know the tears are those of the crocodile, yet we can’t help but look in their gazes away from camera to some kind of real self-expression.
Elsewhere in this exhibition Taylor-Wood’s attempts to express inner states feels hollow: mere footnotes to historical portraiture in their elevation of the figure as sculpture. The balletic dancing, prancing and tap dancing of it all serves to emphasise how wrung out of meaning the figurative has become (‘Brontosaurus’, a 1995 video work, features almost like a lament in this regard). In ‘Crying Men’ however the very fact that these are men are hollow and manipulative by profession but are asked to make that make up crack – akin to the over-manipulation that saw David Bowie become the ‘cracked actor’ – nicely ups the stakes.
Goliath, Rachael Rakena, until Janaury 14 and Sam Taylor Wood, until January 28, City Gallery Wellington.
"Hayden Christensen", 2002
Courtesy of the artist and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London © the artist
YOU USED TO KNOW what you were getting with the male portrait. Something grand and status-elevating. Either full of pomp and circumstance or expressive of pain, it was all rather overtly a projection of position.
Now we’re even beyond the irony of a Tony Soprano as Napoleon. The buffoon is far more prevalent. Currently At Hamish McKay Gallery Ronnie Van Hout gives us carved effigies of himself as a plastic shop-window Santa, with the artist mock-farting along to a cheesy Christmas number on the soundtrack (more a Christmas card for the art world than a work of significance perhaps).
Down on the video screens in the vitrines at the City Gallery entrance Rachael Rakena trains a night light on the details of the body of a snoring, duvet hogging gent. There’s nothing glamorous or erotic about the perspective taken in Rakena’s videowork ‘Goliath’. Rather, in a piece of furtive surveillance that comes in umcomfortably close, the focus is on everything from the veins in the foot to the labial vibrating rub of tongue and lips. Accompanied by an enormous (almost musical in its virbato) snore, it presents the sleeping subject as at once both monstrous oddity and endearingly ordinary guy.
City Gallery have done a nice job this year in their Square2 series in providing contemporary New Zealand video work in these vitrines which provides some kind of reflection on what’s on inside. Here Rakena responds to Sam Taylor-Wood’s ‘David’, a video portrait of a sleeping David Beckham which features in the current survey exhibition of Taylor-Wood’s work.
‘David’ is everything ‘Goliath’ is not. For all protestations that this is Beckham asleep, and therewith utterly natural, he is too beautiful (is he wearing make-up, you wonder) and Caravaggio-lit to be taken as real. He is a Michelangelo ideal of the boy with the slingshot, fitting snugly into a heroic art historical tradition. It’s a smart response to a British National Portrait Gallery commission, but a complex take on portraiture it is not.
The Taylor-Wood exhibition is generally something of a disappointment. Part of the problem is the framing of this Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art touring exhibition around the artist’s recent portraiture. Taylor-Wood produced an exciting range of work in the ‘90s that found operatic and psychologically expressive ways to articulate contemporary well-heeled white urban London society, employing the use of multi-screen video and panoramic photography. It’s work that has impressed me on several visits to London (including Taylor-Wood’s Turner prize nominated work in 1998) and is detailed in a documentary on view as part of the exhibition. None of it appears here.
"Self Portrait as a Tree", 2000
Courtesy of the artist and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London © the artist
This exhibition instead turns on more recent photographic and single-screen video work. Despite some strong singular works, the exhibition’s consideration of Taylor-Wood’s self-portraiture also feels half-hearted. Most other work is less specific and more distanced in its approach, offering too little beyond constant nods to art history. Its trickery with bodies suspended and ascended mid-air is baroque in its cool florishes, yet feel contrived without any spiritual or political framework evident.
The framework for the exhibition is selective yet ultimately unclear in why it has taken its chosen small shape. It’s a poor introduction to an artist with a strong body of work who is little known in Australasia, and leaves a focus on the exhibition’s celebrity factor inevitable.
I had actually come expecting to be more disappointed by Taylor-Wood’s ‘Crying Men’ series, whose high celebrity quota ensured it received most of this exhibition’s media attention on opening. Yet this series of portraits of 27 well known male actors shedding tears feels far more grounded in something that resonates with our lives.
The photographic series’ excess – how many actors does one need? – and play with a myriad of magazine photographic spread styles is overt in its affectation. While it might not have the enduring impact of an Andy Warhol portrait series say, calls that this is some kind of celebrity sell-out are a little short-sighted. The series I think is far more knowing in its interest in the beauty of consumption (think of all that paparazzi imagery we devour) that permeates the mass media.
There are strong tensions in the cat and mouse game of reveal and conceal between artist and subject. The likes of Jude Law and Ben Stiller are artfully difficult to identify, the viewer constantly forced to bend to study the exhibition labels to identify who’s who. With the selection of a group of actors revered as much for their skills as well as their looks (from Hoffman to Downey Jr.), there a more complex game here than with the David Beckham portrait. A game is played between high and popular art; the artist and these masters of disguise and manipulation. We know the tears are those of the crocodile, yet we can’t help but look in their gazes away from camera to some kind of real self-expression.
Elsewhere in this exhibition Taylor-Wood’s attempts to express inner states feels hollow: mere footnotes to historical portraiture in their elevation of the figure as sculpture. The balletic dancing, prancing and tap dancing of it all serves to emphasise how wrung out of meaning the figurative has become (‘Brontosaurus’, a 1995 video work, features almost like a lament in this regard). In ‘Crying Men’ however the very fact that these are men are hollow and manipulative by profession but are asked to make that make up crack – akin to the over-manipulation that saw David Bowie become the ‘cracked actor’ – nicely ups the stakes.
Goliath, Rachael Rakena, until Janaury 14 and Sam Taylor Wood, until January 28, City Gallery Wellington.
Mark Amery's visual arts column courtesy of the Dominion Post, Friday December 22, 2006.
WIN! Courtesy of City Gallery Wellington, The Lumière Reader has three double passes to Sam Taylor Wood to giveaway. To enter, simply subscribe to our mailing list by emailing your name and address to lumiere@lumiere.net.nz under the subject heading "SUBSCRIBE + STW". Current subscribers can also enter. New Zealand/Wellington residents only. One entry per person. Entries close January 7, 2006. Standard terms and conditions apply.
