- main
- forum
- criticaldance
- features
- reviews
- interviews
- links
- gallery
- whoweare
- search
Subscribe to the monthly for free!
|
![]() |
Sam Taylor-Wood - 'New Work'
Art exhibition at White Cube
by Ramsay Burt
November 2004
-- White Cube, London
In Sam Taylor-Wood's
recent film installation, "Strings", a ballet-trained dancer, Ivan Putrov,
dances in mid air, suspended by two almost invisible strings attached
to a harness around his pelvis while below him four formally dressed musicians
play the andante movement from Tchaikovsky's Second String Quartet. The
piece presents a strong, simple visual idea that is very immediate and
quickly taken in. The film lasts nine and a half minutes. What I suggest
kept me watching it was the way it resonated with a wide and rich range
of cultural and emotional experience.
"Strings" was filmed in a dark, claustrophobic, classical interior whose
high ceiling, Corinthian columns, burgundy carpet, gilt and crystal chandeliers,
and gilded stucco mirrors suggests a stately home or gentlemen's club
- it is in fact the Crush Bar of the Royal Opera House in Covent Gardens
where Putrov is a principal dancer. It was shot with 35mm film in a single
take and there is no editing; apart from a zoom at the beginning, the
camera remained fixed throughout. The four musicians, in dinner jackets
and black bow ties, seemed oblivious of the dancer above them, naked but
for black trunks, whose movements seemed to skim over the tops of their
heads. Lit strongly from both sides, Putrov's skin was revealed in seductive
relief like a saint or Christ figure in a painting by Caravaggio or El
Greco while the black-suited musicians merged into the shadows below.
Compositionally the
dancer mediated between earth-bound and higher planes, bringing to mind
iconic imagery from the European tradition of visual art - angels, the
winged god Mercury, Christ ascending or descending, Michelangelo's slaves.
This was inevitable given the fact that for a couple of centuries classical
ballet shared with painting and sculpture a set of rhetorical gestures
and poses which were themselves derived from Greek and Roman sources.
At the start, Putrov pointed in an elegant way towards the first violinist
and then slowly turned from (our) left to right to extend a benignly cupped
palm over the cellist's head. A little later he ceremoniously scooped
some seemingly etheric substance rising from the musicians to bathe his
face. In this way, classical dance and classical music might have worked
together in transcendent accord, but this was not the case. Putrov sometimes
gestured towards the musicians individually or as a group. His movements,
which sometimes expressed a balletic sense of line and sometimes resembled
swimming under water, lacked the kinds of conventional linkages between
dancing and music that audiences for ballet and contemporary dance take
for granted. The musicians for their part seemed far away, lost in their
music, and thus unaware of the dancer above them.
In some ways the dancer's movements exemplified a slow, steady seriousness
that was in keeping with the music's sombre mood, although this was in
fact an illusion. Suspended in the harness, Putrov had not been able to
make slow controlled movements. Therefore, Taylor-Wood adopted a complex
strategy in which the musicians played the music at double speed and the
resulting film was screened at half speed with the music at the correct
tempo dubbed back on. The effect smoothed out any jerks and wobbles and
gave both the dancer's and musicians' movements their ponderous, underwater
qualities.
Rather than dancing to the beat of the music or being sensitive to the
musical phrasing in the way he performatively phrased his movements, the
dancer as he appeared in the final installation seemed as free from the
music's structure as he was disconnected from the real time in which the
musicians had been playing beneath him. Within the virtual time space
of the installation, Putrov was physically and conceptually suspended
between dance and music, time and space, giving the piece an uncanny,
unworldly quality.
The idea of suspension occurred in another section of Taylor-Wood's exhibition
at the White Cube which consisted of five pieces from a series called
"Self Portrait Suspended". In these works, Taylor-Wood, dressed only in
underwear, was photographed in recumbent poses as if she were floating
or levitating in front of a window in a large, empty, white-painted warehouse
room (her studio, a short walk from the White Cube). To do this she was
suspended by ropes but these were subsequently removed from the photographs
using a computer graphics programme. Unlike Putrov who actively moved
around in his harness, the poses Taylor-Wood took up seemed relaxed, except
in some photographs where tell-tale signs of a certain involuntary strain
betray a muscular reaction to discomfort from the now missing bonds that
held her.
Even when one relaxes
one's voluntary muscles, one's reflexes carry on regardless. If the artist
had actually been falling, these reflexes would have been in operation
preparing for her landing. This is why one striking photograph, in which
she is upside down hanging invisibly from her ankles, does not resemble
a diver about to plunge into a pool. The absence of muscular activity
was uncanny because it meant that her body functions lacked any sign of
habitual interactions with her locatedness. She thus appeared literally
detached, other worldly. But the apparent precariousness of this situation
stopped this other worldliness from separating her from the spectator,
just as her grey singlet, tugged down by gravity in some of the photographs
to uncover her stomach made her seem touchingly vulnerable.
Another room in the exhibition showed "Crying Men", twenty-eight photographs
of celebrities, mostly performers, expressing that part of the emotional
spectrum that tends towards grief, melancholia, sadness, many of them
with tears either in their eyes or dribbling down cheeks. In some of these
I merely recognized a familiar face and then moved on; in others a hard-faced
man seemed to me to have been isolated by his grief. Where the images
worked for me, I felt that the emotional experience had rendered Taylor-Wood's
subjects vulnerably open so that, through the lens of her camera, they
spoke to me and I found myself responding to their performance. The elegiac
music from "Strings", installed in an adjacent space, seeped into this
gallery, enhancing the mood which the photographs were generating.
One thing the subjects of "Crying Men" have in common with the dancer
in "Strings" is celebrity. They are all 'worth' seeing. The names Laurence
Fishburne, Woody Harleson, Paul Newman, or Robin Williams have all been
used by film producers at some time to raise money for a film project
while their pictures have been used by editors of publications like Hello
to sell magazines. "Crying Men" would not have had the same resonance
if Taylor-Wood had photographed her friends and family, or even complete
strangers. In either case a personal element would have been introduced
into the work. The celebrity of the "Crying Men", in comparison, gave
the work a certain normality and neutrality. Similarly Ivan Putrov is
'worth' looking at, even if like me you never go to see the Royal Ballet
or hadn't heard of him before.
What made "Strings" worth seeing was the way that its relatively simple
presentation of a man dancing above a string quartet could be taken in
at a glance but resonated on so many different levels. To use the work's
central trope, the experience of watching " Strings" was curiously touching
because of the uncanny way it suspended the viewer between such rich veins
of cultural, emotional, and physical experience. The subjects in all these
works were suspended both physically and emotionally. Thus in "Self Portrait
Suspended", Taylor-Wood was vulnerably and revealingly suspended because
her body did not respond to its physical location. The "Crying Men" were
suspended between detachment and vulnerable defencelessness by the invisible
ropes of the performers' unknown emotional triggers. In "Strings", the
dancer was literally suspended from almost imperceptible strings while
another type of string resonated musically to triggers affective experience.
Furthermore the dancer and musicians were suspended between the actual
time of their physical performance and the virtual time of the film's
faster projection. By cleverly harnessing the contemporary value of celebrity
with the cultural capital of traditional high art, "Strings" created a
space in which an intimacy that touched on the singular and the emotional
was unexpectedly but convincingly validated.
To visit White Cube's website, click here.
Exhibition dates for 'New Work' are 10/29/04 to 12/4/04. White
Cube is located at 48 Hoxton Square , London N1 6PB and is open 10am-6pm
Tuesday-Saturday.
Edited by Holly Messitt.
Read related
stories in the press and see what others are saying. Click here.
|
