Exhibitions

Born in 1967 in London (UK).
Lives and works in London.
Gallery Website : www.whitecube.com

Sam Taylor-Wood is a major figure in contemporary art photography and video art.  Known for her works as much as for her relationship to the jet set and the world of celebrities, she emerged on the scene in the early 90s at the age of 27 (she found herself on the street at the age of 15 after her mother left her stepfather, then she studied at Goldsmiths College, worked at the Royal Opera House in London and managed a nightclub.) 

Her works fall at the crossroads of multiple themes and issues, among them, the questions of sexual status, with its many ramifications (impotence, emotion, androgyny, etc.), of loneliness and the inability to communicate, and of death also, as a transverse and trans-modern issue. 

Taylor-Wood revisits and strips the character both as a subject and container of stories. The characters in her videos are part of a context and a history of which we know nothing. They emanate for a given time into our reality, their poses and actions often a distant echo of artistic or musical influences, and they act in this interval before withdrawing and leaving us sensibly different. 

In Pieta's case, the reference to Michelangelo's work is only too evident.  "Why Michelangelo?" Taylor-Wood explains. The idea came to her after shooting her music video entitled I Want Love, in which Robert Downey Jr. sings Elton John.  '"Let's make art,'' suggested the actor in the evening after the shoot, reeling from the euphoria of the team work. The formula of reducing art to simple doing was appealing, like child's play. But for what aim? That's when Taylor-Wood evoked Michelangelo, whose Pieta she had seen at the Vatican in Rome.  Hence it was done and redone and forged.  Art, we will say, is but a parody. It feeds like a cannibal on the great works.  But this counterfeit use is only the dubious offspring of postmodernism, in which quotation reigns triumphant. 

Taylor-Wood does not quote.  She misrepresents. And the parody turns into a pamphlet: an undermining task, not a work of copy.  Let's see how she does it.  Seated on steps, she holds in her arms the muscular body of her performer.  But the task is not easy. The man is heavy. His weight tips the group over to the left. There is imbalance. And the actor, who feels it, does what he can to ease the burden on his partner, who braces herself to the stairs, widespread in search of support.  We see in the image a latent tension that borders on rupture. The artist herself has confessed to the violence of the embrace. "I tried," she said, "to seem calm and serene, but my arms were shaking and you could see my breath. It was exhausting.''  The effort left traces (…) of stress, tension, pain.  What the video shows is that art conceals, even that of Michelangelo: the body." 

AFL / the quote is from Régis Michel, L'Oeil-écran ou la nouvelle image. Cent vidéos pour repenser le monde, from the catalogue of the exhibition at the Casino Luxembourg on March 24-June 17, 2007, pp. 38-40).