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Works by Sam Taylor-Wood, Craig Lucas on display at MOCA Cleveland
By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art & architecture critic
Published on Monday, May 05, 2008
Some of her images are eerily familiar, such as the dead hare decomposing in time-lapse photography. Others are reminiscent of something we've seen somewhere else, only we can't quite remember where or when.
So it is with the work of Sam Taylor-Wood, the British artist whose work is all the rage in Europe but known in this country only in a few high-end galleries.
Those who haven't already seen Sam Taylor-Wood should try to make it up to MOCA Cleveland before the show closes Sunday. This is the first major U.S. museum exhibition of the artist's work, acclaimed for its imagery that examines a wealth of issues, from deeply felt emotions to unconcerned sleep, from classic artistic tropes to startling new uses of ancient themes.
And while you're there, don't miss Craig Lucas: Surge, a much-needed and brilliant presentation by the Kent artist that takes on U.S. involvement in Iraq with imagery that unmistakably questions our presence there.
Using a red, white and blue palette, as well as the structural theme of the American flag, Lucas superimposes images from the war
with some of his own, all of which are subsumed by the stars and stripes.
Lucas, emeritus professor of art at Kent State, has had a distinguished 40-plus year career as an abstract painter in Northeast Ohio and beyond, on both the national and international stage. That still doesn't prepare us for this unprecedented body of work, curated by Megan Lykins Reich, MOCA Cleveland assistant curator.
We are used to seeing his cool and detached abstract compositions characterized by elegant brushwork and a sharply honed sense of color, which has allowed him to explore the relationships between color and form, mark-making and structure, patterns, systems and networks. These formal interests have in the past shown him to be more concerned with perception than reality.
However, it seems current events have lifted him out of his intellectual pursuits to grapple with the very real and multifaceted issues of war and politics, and like other artists before him, he has turned to figuration as a vehicle for commenting on the devastating effects of both.
Figuration is fraught with emotional undercurrents, as is made even more evident in the Taylor-Wood exhibit.
This outstanding exhibit, organized by MOCA Cleveland, includes 29 works by Taylor-Wood from the mid-1990s to the present, including individual photographs, photographic installations and single and multiple film/video installations.
Organized by Margo Crutchfield, MOCA Cleveland senior curator, the exhibit does an admirable job of displaying Taylor-Wood's thought-provoking portraits and scenarios that explore biological entropy, or the point beyond which relationships, systems, and life itself begin to break down and decay.
With these rich areas of activity, philosophy and attitude to explore, Taylor-Wood falls back on her art-history training, mining the rich imagery of Renaissance and Baroque painting and even grand opera to bring her ideas to fruition.
Many artists do this, but Taylor-Wood goes them one better by using as her models Hollywood celebrities, a strategy that serves her well, as viewers who might otherwise be put off by contemporary art are drawn into the works when they recognize some of their favorite stars.
To demonstrate just how effective this strategy has been, Crutchfield said that one of the most difficult items to obtain for the show is a video of soccer star David Beckham, sleeping.
''People line up in London's National Portrait Gallery just to see this video,'' Crutchfield said. ''They absolutely love everything about Beckham.''
Elsewhere, star power is used to explore human vulnerability in Taylor-Wood's Crying Men series, showing a tearful Benicio Del Toro, Hayden Christensen, Daniel Craig, Laurence Fishburne, Forest Whitaker and Ed Harris.
But these are actors, you say. They can cry on cue. What's the big deal there?
The big deal, so to speak, is an artistic one. There's a tension set up in the mind of the viewer: Are they acting? Is this real? What's real and what's not?
''When you take cinema and photography, you can alter reality,'' Crutchfield pointed out, ''and that's key to our century.''
Moreover, Crutchfield added, Taylor-Wood ''had to work really hard to get [the celebrities] to do this: first, to have their portrait taken by her, and then they didn't know they were going to be asked to cry. A couple of them refused. I think she said it took her the longest to get Forest Whitaker.''
The Crying Men series is neatly juxtaposed with the Hysteria video, which shows a comely young woman literally laughing until she cries.
This juxtaposition calls into question the notion of vulnerability, emotionalism and who is more prone to these so-called ''failings,'' men or women? And does it really matter any more?
Across the gallery from these two displays is perhaps Taylor-Wood's most famous series, Suspended, showing her in her skivvies floating several feet off the floor in an empty white room before a large, arched window.
We never see her face, but we do see her shapely form in various attitudes and poses, all of them in midair. Contrived it is, and Crutchfield reveals just how much:
''She hired a bondage expert to tie her up in knots and trappings, then she digitally removed every trace of the trappings that hold her in place.
''Time is a major issue in these images. These are all taken in one day, from daybreak to dusk, and you can see through the windows the various gradations of light as the day waxes and wanes.
''It makes us think of life and death, heaven and earth — these are the issues that imbue almost all of her work. They are classical issues, and she explores them by harkening back to the old masters.''
There are three works that can be classified as memento mori — reminders of mortality — a theme much beloved of the old masters, and perhaps especially compelling to Taylor-Wood, since she's a cancer survivor. These are the time-lapse DVDs Still Life, A Little Death and That White Rush. Each of these shows a once-vital and living thing decaying and eventually collapsing.
In that sense, these remind us of the remnants of a rather large memento mori sculpture we have in Northeast Ohio, Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), an earth sculpture that's about entropy, dissolution and decay, applying pressure to a system until it cracks, piling on an object until it breaks and begins the long, slow decline toward annihilation.
Then we realize that in a sense, that's what Lucas' series also speaks to: the piling on of images, figures, events, one on top of another until the formal fact of figuration is lost in the overwhelming sense of breakage, loss and destruction, leaving us with feelings of frustration and futility.
Lucas' bombed-out streets and piles of humanity; Taylor-Wood's decaying fruit, collapsing swan and dangling figures caught up in powers and forces beyond their control — these are the images of our age.
Not for us self-determination and mastery of our destiny. The vast majority of us have sat idly — or dangled precariously — as monstrous forces have shoved us this way and that, piled on misdirection and misdeed.
We've seen it all before, and we revolted. As Smithson's widow, the sculptor Nancy Holt, said of the graffito ''May 4 Kent 70,'' anonymously painted on the lintel of Partially Buried Woodshed some time after the Kent State shootings, ''We had a revolution then. Whoever put that there recognized that.''
But we now seem weary and wary of revolution. Just look after me and mine, seems to be the prevailing thought.
What these images are trying to remind us is that it's not those who are doing the piling on who will break, but the piled upon: the system, the way of life, the ability to stand up for not only me and mine, but ours — that will soon go the way of the Woodshed.
In our turn, we look at these images and wonder: Haven't we been idled, dangled and piled upon long enough?
Details
Show: Sam Taylor-Wood and Craig Lucas: Surge
When: Through Sunday. Hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Cleveland, 8501 Carnegie Ave., Cleveland
Information: 216-421-8671 or http://www.mocacleveland.org
Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture for the Akron Beacon Journal. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.
Some of her images are eerily familiar, such as the dead hare decomposing in time-lapse photography. Others are reminiscent of something we've seen somewhere else, only we can't quite remember where or when.
Get the full article here.
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