Miria Swain
23 November 2001 – 12 January 2002.
www.whitecube.com
A large video projection of a male opera
singer lip-synching to a silent soundtrack provides an unusual opening to an
exhibition by an artist better known for her cacophonous soundtracks. The
piece is called Mute, which is also the title of the show. According to
Adorno, music has lost its power to entertain and has been relegated to the
status of background noise, there simply to fill the gaps of silence
‘brought on by anxiety, work or undemanding docility’. By removing sound and
exposing the gaps of silence, Taylor-Wood’s new work could be seen as a
comment on the loss of communication in society.
In fact, one sound does succeed in puncturing the silence of the exhibition:
the low frequency drone from a discarded amp and guitar. This repetitive hum
is in part a subtle joke on the inane media ‘buzz’ that surrounds
Taylor-Wood’s life and that of her celebrity friends. Rather appropriately,
at the private view the silence of the exhibition was superseded by the very
same media ‘buzz’ of hangers-on and star-spotters.
Another silent film, one half of a two-part installation Breach (Girl and
Eunuch), depicts a contemporary penitent Magdalen. Myth is intertwined with
religious references through the juxtaposition of this film with a large
concrete sculpture of a unicorn. According to myth, the unicorn comes to the
rescue of damsels – particularly virgins – in distress, and yet
Taylor-Wood’s unicorn is paralysed, petrified and sunk in the ground from
the waist down. This sexual beast, like the castrated eunuch who stands
guard for the harem, is no longer equipped with the means to fulfil the
physical nature of his being.
This idea of helplessness is also presented in Taylor-Wood’s video
appropriation of Michelangelo’s Pietà, in which the artist herself struggles
to cradle the strong but helpless body of a dying Christ, the actor Robert
Downey Jnr. The piece is full of irony: plucked out of rehab, Downey Jnr.
may be dying for his own sins, but he is hardly dying for ours.
It is difficult to read Taylor-Wood’s work without recourse to biographical
references, but it would seem as though, in turning down the sound, the
artist has created a deliberate tension, drawing us away from the kind of
celebrity razzmatazz that normally envelops her work: the pervasive hum as a
contemporary mantra.
The possibility of spiritual significance is carried through into a
photograph entitled The Leap, in which a young man is suspended in mid-air,
his hand held up as in an act of blessing. One is tempted to see the
parallel in Taylor-Wood’s life: her blessed survival from cancer, a motif
running through much of the exhibition.
In any case, this exhibition is certainly a refreshing foil to commercially
fuelled work like the Selfridges wrap project. It will be interesting to see
what happens when Taylor-Wood turns the sound back up.
Sam Taylor-Wood: Mute was at White Cube2, London,