Sam Taylor-Wood

Time gentlemen please

‘A man sits in a pub as his cigarette slowly burns. The end.’ This is not an existential joke or indeed a bit of minimalist theatre by the great Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, but a description of one of Sam Taylor-Wood’s newest films, The Last Century, 2005. The scene, while recalling her earlier film works involving numerous characters, is entirely static apart from the involuntary blinking, twitching and barely-visible breathing of four motionless actors, all of whom are arranged around another, central figure as if in a group portrait painted by Rembrandt or Caravaggio.

The contrasting light and shade of this typically gloomy, wood-panelled East London pub matches the tenebrism or chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew of 1599-1600 in which a group of tax collectors, huddled around a table counting their money, are disturbed by the figure of Jesus beckoning one of them to become his apostle. In both works, the strong shafts of light highlight the faces and poses in similar ways, yet the dramatic moment of surprise and uncertainty frozen in Caravaggio’s dynamic composition is at odds with Taylor-Wood’s agonizing continuation of her chosen moment. For the stock-still protagonist of The Last Century, there is no religious epiphany, no reaction, no past, no future – only an excruciating present. Perhaps the action is elsewhere, we think, looking at the open-mouthed woman sharing his table, who patiently waits to finish her laugh. He stares out into nothingness, not noticing what might be titillating this woman, but instead concentrates on his own fug, his inexorable boredom.

Has nothing changed since the last century, as the title and the appearance of an old-fashioned accordion-player in the pub ironically suggests? What has changed in The Last Century is time itself; in a reversal of cinematic norms, filmic time is transformed into photographic time: movement becomes stasis. The familiar notion that photography is a ‘frozen moment’ or a ‘point’ along the time-based ‘line’ of film has only been challenged relatively recently by moving images of motionless subjects in avant-garde films by Andy Warhol or Straub/Huillet and by Chris Marker’s stop-motion movie of photographic stills, La Jetée of 1962. Yet Taylor-Wood’s impulses are just as close to Caravaggio’s desire to subvert his medium’s inherent limitations, in his case by painting dynamic compositions that have the potential to destroy the picture’s stillness with imminent movement. And while you can appreciate Warhol films such as the eight-hour-long Sleep or the twenty-four hours of Empire as you would a painting, they offer no possibility of dramatic denouement.

Seven minutes and twelve seconds into The Last Century, the ash from the central character’s cigarette drops onto the table and the screen darkens. Perhaps we breathe a sigh of relief that it is all over (certainly we imagine the participants in Taylor-Wood’s endurance performance do likewise), or perhaps we chuckle at the comic ending, the finality of time spent watching nothing much in particular.

Beckett, who would have been 100 this year, also employed compositional and comic devices to stretch and fragment time in his work, notably in Waiting for Godot, which contains an intermission before opening act two with “Next day. Same time. Same place,” and the line from Vladimir to Estragon: “You again!” Clearly nothing has happened in between, just as his television plays Quad I, and its sequel, Quad II are separated by 100,000 years, all of which are, apparently, uneventful.

There is a gradual revelation in The Last Century that the distracting shadows and lights reflected onto the pub’s interior are cars or pedestrians moving in real-time outside the windows. This realisation, combined with the quietly climactic demise of the spent cigarette leads to an ontological discovery; a discovery, to quote Milan Kundera on Flaubert’s descriptions of the everyday, “of the structure of the present moment; the discovery of the perpetual coexistence of the banal and the dramatic that underlies our lives”.

Two earlier films, Still Life of 2001 and A Little Death of 2002, similarly employ the distortion of time – except by speeding it up rather than by stopping it – in order to reveal the extant drama in the banality of the everyday. They also draw on the history of art, specifically from still life painting, long considered the lowliest and most insignificant among subjects for art. The camera records the rotting and putrefaction of, in the first instance, an arrangement of fruit in a bowl, and in the second, a freshly hung hare, both table settings commonly depicted in traditional still life painting. While the 17th-century Dutch or Spanish still life painters captured a peach at its moment of perfect ripeness or a flower in full bloom, Taylor-Wood’s films brings this ordinary genre of foodstuff to life, albeit through the very process of its degeneration. In a further irony, the whole image is magically renewed once the video loops back to the beginning, enacting an “eternal return”, as Nietzsche would have it, denying “Time’s thievish progress to eternity” as Shakespeare would have preferred it.

And the Oscar goes to…

While nature morte, the French translation for still life, may be the most appropriate terminology for the moving images of Still Life or A Little Death, many of Taylor-Wood’s works could easily be discussed as examples of either memento mori – because they remind us of our mortality – or even better, as examples of vanitas – as they speak of the vanity of things (their eventual worthlessness) and especially, of the vanity of people (their aggrandized self-worth). Portraiture should be the diametric opposite of still life in that it challenges the onslaught of time and renders the subject immortal, but the Crying Men series and many of Taylor-Wood’s self portraits function not as images to flatter for posterity, but as aides memoire of the fragility of human existence.

All 25 of the Crying Men are famous British actors or Hollywood movie stars photographed in differing states of emotional distress, but these atypical images of powerlessness are actually carefully constructed and acted to invoke our sympathy or empathy. The idea that these celebrities are really baring their souls is as flawed as the notion that our personal attachment to these people is anything other than misplaced familiarity built up over countless appearances on our screens and in our newspapers. Do we recognise Dustin Hoffman or is it Raymond ‘Rain Man’ Babbit, or perhaps Bernie Focker or Benjamin Braddock from The Graduate? Roland Barthes once stated that, “Every photograph is a certificate of presence” , but these actors are conspicuous by their very absence from these images.

The phenomenon of the movie star emerged in the early 20th century after the public’s amazement with the technical feat of projecting moving images onto a screen wore off, and was consolidated when photographers such as Edward Steichen began depicting actors as emblems of beauty or heroism for magazines such as Vanity Fair. According to one of film and photography’s early polemicists, Walter Benjamin, “Never for a moment does the screen actor cease to be conscious of [the public]… The cult of the movie star preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of personality.’” Certainly, the ‘aura’ of each of the Crying Men is diminished by their numerous on-screen appearances as others – Woody Harrelson as Larry Flynt, Daniel Craig as James Bond, Philip Seymour-Hoffman as Truman Capote and Tim Roth as Mr Orange or even Vincent van Gogh – yet as celebrities, their impact on the collective public is conversely strengthened through repetition: stardom begets more stardom.

If fame is largely based on facial recognition, then all these actors have left to hide is their inner selves, hence the emotions of the Crying Men can be seen as caricatures of a thespian repertoire of diversion tactics; from quiet solace and bewildered rage to slumping, bawling, knee hugging, knuckle clenching and lip biting. Taylor-Wood coaxed many of the actors into crying, some unleashed the waterworks on cue and others physically brought themselves to tears; methodologies that she explored in earlier films such as Method in Madness of 1994 and Breach of 2001. These images also inevitably recall great cinematic weeping scenes by James Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces, Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now and Anthony Hopkins, who shed a single, memorable tear when first confronted by the deformity of The Elephant Man, which was achieved, legend has it, by reciting the Lord’s Prayer over and over to himself.

In the Crying Men series, the actors each play their part in the same self-aware, self-reflective way in which stars such as Bruce Willis and John Cusack appeared in The Player of 1992, Robert Altman’s masterful satire on Hollywood studios, which featured no less than 65 cameos. While we may think we already know all we need to about this predictably macho bunch, seen individually as people who make a living from mimicking emotions, the Crying Men become awkward and alone, reflecting how we too play various roles in our lives and struggle to reveal our true selves.

Mirror, mirror on the wall

In Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ill-fated painter Basil Hallward shows the masterpiece of the book’s title to a rich patron and friend, Lord Henry Wotton, lamenting that he cannot exhibit the painting because it contains too much of himself. Besides, the artist insists, any amount of fame, wealth, talent or beauty attained in this world will ultimately be punished: “we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly”, he says. Lord Henry urges him to unveil the great likeness to the public with the addendum that “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, that is not being talked about.”

Much is made of Taylor-Wood’s own celebrity status in the British media (the same arena in which it was partially created) although she follows a long line of artists, including Joshua Reynolds, John Singer Sargent and Andy Warhol, who have enjoyed partying with those they have painted or portrayed. However, her own view of her success and subsequent fame, as told through the rich autobiographical streak in her work, is less ebullient than the gossip columns and glossy profiles, instead echoing the pessimistic sentiments of Basil Hallward. Taylor-Wood’s life and career is played out in self-portraits from the early, confrontational images of a precocious, up-and-coming artist in Slut of 1993, or Fuck, Suck, Spank, Wank of 1997 to the starkly personal Self Portrait in a Single Breasted Suit with Hare of 2001, which refers to her long battles with cancer. There are also revealing self-portraits hidden or veiled within the depersonalized images of Bound Ram, Poor Cow, and the enigmatic Self Portrait as a Tree.

For example, the first of these images is a reincarnation of Francisco de Zurbaran’s famous metaphor of Jesus as Bound Lamb, left on the altar to be sacrificed, as well as Holman Hunt’s Scapegoat that carried man’s sins, tied on its body as a scarlet cloth, into the wild landscape of the Dead Sea. The religious significance need not be overstated, not least because both Zurbaran and Hunt created images that could be interpreted as criticisms of the Christian faith – prone to isolation and weakened to the point of extinction. Any residual spirituality in Taylor-Wood’s Bound Ram speaks only of its impotence and hopelessness.

While Basil Hallward, and Oscar Wilde himself, are none-too-subtly secreted in the character of Dorian Gray, Taylor-Wood’s three allegorical stand-ins – the ram, the cow and the tree – effectuate an interesting form of suppressed self-portraiture through non-figurative association. This in turn offers a deconstruction of the mechanism of fame, a means to escape the scrutiny of the public eye and the allure of celebrity.

The most recent series of self-portraits – Self Portrait Suspended and Bram Stoker’s Chair of 2004-2005 – are also conscious acts of self-iconoclasm in which the artist’s face (and fame) is obliterated, either by being draped with her hair or else masked by a trailing arm. These mark a departure from the tribulations of her emotional self towards physical trials of the body.

Time me up, tie me down

“...[T]here, on our favourite seat, the silver light of the moon struck a half-reclining figure, snowy white... [S]omething dark stood behind the seat where the white figure shone, and bent over it. What it was, whether man or beast, I could not tell.” After the silhouette of Dracula flees this scene in Bram Stoker’s novel, Lucy, the barely-clothed girl, is discovered slumped on the seat with her head back, lips parted, breathing in large gasps. The post-coital imagery attached to the vampire’s victim is hard to miss and was fuel for the rampant Victorian male imagination, previously accustomed to representations of women either as pure, untouched virgins or good wives and mothers. After the bite wound transforms this previously chaste English rose into a vampiric vixen, Lucy is dutifully hunted down and decapitated for her wayward and wanton ways.

Taylor-Wood’s series Bram Stoker’s Chair is so-called because the chair in question, which magically supports her contortions in each photograph, casts no shadow, like Dracula himself. However, the idea of female sexuality liberated from the constraints of Victorian society is relevant when we consider how these images have been constructed and choreographed. For both the Bram Stoker’s Chair and Self Portrait Suspended series, Taylor-Wood was trussed up by a bondage expert in constrictive harnesses and hung from wires attached to the ceiling for hours on end while performing her poses. The final images of seemingly effortless acrobatics were heavily doctored using computer manipulation, releasing her body from the bondage and supporting cables to float freely in mid-air. The female artist then, is claiming full control over her self-image, counteracting the traditionally male gaze of the camera as well as more perverse experimentations by artists such as Hans Bellmer, who constructed his own life-size doll with limbs that he could manipulate at will, declaring: “I shall construct an artificial girl whose anatomy will make it possible to recreate physically the dizzy heights of passion...”

Even without the visual trace of fetish or pain, Taylor-Wood’s poses evoke sexual abandonment, both in the sense that she is surrendering herself to ecstasy and in the sense that she is renouncing her fantasy through the digital removal of the bondage implements. The ambiguity of the postures, which alternate between vigorous and languorous, recall either 1960s photographs of liberated female bodies such as those taken by John Cowan of model and actress Jill Kennington leaping and flying through the air, or Caravaggio’s Deposition of Christ of 1602-04, in which a pendulous Jesus is being gently lowered into a tomb, configuring a horizontal line between life above and death below. The paradoxical coexistence of sexuality and its denial, of agony and ecstasy, as well as of life and death in the suspended self-portraits, allows for another possibility entirely; that Taylor-Wood is asleep or dreaming, perhaps unconscious while being spun around by unseen forces, like a sinister drawing by Goya.

Flight of sorrow

Taylor-Wood is not afraid to appropriate, remake and refresh the themes of Old Master painting. The flying motif crops up again in the classically framed Strings of 2003, this time the performer hovers above a quartet of musicians, much as angels hover above the action in innumerable religious paintings. The film’s triangular composition brings to mind the relationships between figures in El Greco’s horizontally layered pictures; with the upper section usually inhabited by a choir of angels, the middle section by the Virgin Mary or Jesus, and the lower part filled with rows of human heads and faces. In Strings a tale of alienation is told by the balletic moves of the floating figure as he reaches out to the players below in a bid to make contact or descend from his lonely, ethereal eyrie. His frustration, that builds and recedes in time with Tschaikovsky’s melodies and with each faltering attempt to lower himself, is evident at the end of the piece when he is left hanging as the music fades.

Ascension, of 2003, could almost be a companion piece, except the protagonist of this film is surreally rooted to the ground by the dead body on top of which he is nonchalantly tap-dancing. The imagery is again consistent with historical painting compositions and religious iconography; the white dove perched on his head refers to the Holy Spirit or the mark of God, seen hovering above the head of Jesus in Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ and in the final scene of Wagner’s opera, Parsifal, which ends with the chorus “Highest wonder of salvation! Redemption to the redeemer!” Yet, Taylor-Wood’s solemn dancer seems non-plussed when the dove eventually takes flight, as though this metaphorical passing from life to death was expected but not anticipated with any glee. The artist thrives on the depiction of such hapless anti-heros, adrift in a dark, cold world without clear meaning, whose only solace is in the present and in the certainty of his eventual death. “Living is a perpetual heavy effort not to lose sight of ourselves, to stay solidly present in ourselves, in our stasis. Step outside ourselves for a mere instant, and we verge on death’s dominion.” According to Kundera, we should be careful where we tread then; perhaps it is better that we stay in our Beckettian pub for that never-ending drinking session where there is no such thing as last orders.

Notes

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Grove Press, 1987, pp.61, 63
Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, Faber and Faber, 1995, p.131
William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, Cambridge University Press, 1996, Sonnet 77, p.71
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Vintage, 1982, p.87
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, Collins/Fontana, 1973, p.233
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Courier Dover, 1993, pp.2, 3
Bram Stoker, Dracula, Penguin Classics, 2003, p.101
Hans Bellmer, quoted in Peter Webb and Robert Short, Hans Bellmer, Quartet Books, 1985, p.29
Richard Wagner, in Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner, Parsifal, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p.58
Milan Kundera, op.cit., p.87

Ossian Ward is a writer and editor based in London

First published in Sam Taylor Wood / Still Lives, Steidl / Baltic, 2006

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