Sam Taylor-Wood: Still Lives
Until September 3; Baltic, Gateshead

A major exhibition is the cerebral equivalent of a lavish banquet. You arrive fresh and hungry, and you hope to be sated with such style and substance that your life will feel the richer for it.

Some people gorge themselves on every single offering, and others will pick carefully at a morsel here and there. I’m the former type, and retrospectives can leave me so stuffed full of art that all I can do is sit down and wait until the mental bloating subsides.

I’m ready for such an experience at Baltic, where the whole third floor is given over to the work of Sam Taylor-Wood. Though not yet 40, the artist is represented in the Tate’s collection, and in the National Portrait Gallery. Starting with 15 monographs, the list of writings about her work extends to 12 whole pages of the exhibition catalogue.

The signs are good, then, that my appetite will be satisfied. But in the end it doesn’t take long to absorb the 21 films, videos and photographs in the show. The impact of Taylor-Wood’s more substantial pieces is compromised by a number of fairly shallow works, and this diet-conscious banquet leaves my hunger intact.

The artist’s best work resonates with echoes of historical paintings. The unassuming little wall-mounted film, Still Life, takes a 17th century Dutch genre and moves it into the cinematic age. A bowl of fruit, bathed in a warm glow, decays before your eyes; nine weeks of rot compressed into four minutes of film.

Though it’s a direct descendent of the once popular memento mori, reminding us that beauty and life are transient, Taylor-Wood’s time-based version brings with it an unexpected twist. Mould bursts vigorously from the fruit, growing and travelling before receding to black; the process of death turns out to be an animated display of life and energy not perceptible in the Dutch paintings.

In contrast with the humble elegance of her still life films, Taylor-Wood also leans towards the erotic extravagance of the Baroque. Strings, a film shown two years ago at Edinburgh Art College, is loaded with Caravaggesque sensuality. The films of Derek Jarman come to mind as you watch a semi-naked young man arch balletically in a lush interior of black, red and gold. A string quartet plays Tchaikovsky below, oblivious to the dancer’s light-kissed body, suspended in his bondage harness like an angel on high.

The artist’s visual inspiration for The Last Century, one of two brand new works, comes from paintings of modern life by the French Impressionists. What first appears to be a still image turns out, on closer inspection, to be a seven minute DVD. Five characters hold their poses in a London pub, and only the curling smoke of a cigarette and the occasional blink or wobble betray the passing of time.

The piece is carefully composed as a painting would be, but where the painter would compress events and lives into a single moment on canvas, here Taylor-Wood extends time. In doing so she begins to unravel the divisions between painting, photography and film, but unfortunately fails to penetrate any deeper into this fertile territory.

One of the earliest works in the show, Atlantic, is still the most potent. The three-screen installation reeks of mid-20th century existentialism, the central, arguing couple distanced from us through various techniques of alienation. Despite its deliberate detachment, Atlantic exudes a natural warmth which is absent in many of Taylor-Wood’s subsequent pieces.

Film-making always carries with it the risk of losing that initial spark of spontaneity, once your investment in time and money has taken you past the point of no return. For Taylor-Wood, some pieces pay off – like Strings, and like her absurdist dream-like holy trinity in Ascension – but others fall flat.

Her second brand new work, Prelude In Air, belongs in the latter category. Taylor-Wood filmed a solo cellist in passionate performance, and spent six months in post-production trying to remove the instrument digitally. The final result was devoid of spirit, so she resorted to filming the whole thing again without the cello.

This final result – played on a big screen at Baltic – seems somewhat pointless now. A man pretends to play an invisible cello; that sense of unreality which Taylor-Wood was initially pursuing is replaced by high-minded silliness.

Where human beings figure in Taylor-Wood’s work, and more often than not they do, they appear in various states of suspension or isolation. In The Last Century, they’re suspended in time. In Strings, the ballet dancer is suspended from the ceiling. In all her recent self-portraits, Taylor-Wood hangs in mid air, the harness air-brushed out after the fact.

It’s only a matter of time before these photographs, shot in a trendy loft apartment space, are re-enacted in the fashion pages of some glossy magazine. Just as Taylor-Wood is adept at borrowing the styles of past artistic eras, she is happy to please the modern eye with the kind of beauty we expect today.

Her celebrity life-style comes in handy too, allowing her to use David Beckham as a model, and to take the gratuitous step of photographing 27 of the world’s most famous male actors for her otherwise uninteresting Crying Men series.

If this media-conscious half of the show had been left out, the overall impact would have been twice as good. Ten year’s worth of Taylor-Wood’s work is not the banquet Baltic would like it to be, but if they’d just removed the copious amounts of garnish, they would have found a perfectly good buffet underneath.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 11.06.06