Pietà (2001)
By Sam Taylor-Wood
35mm Film/DVD Duration: 1 minute 57 seconds In the large video projection "Pietà," facing the desk at Matthew Marks Gallery, the artist Sam Taylor Wood labors to support the draped body of Robert Downey Jr. Why him, one might ask, and for that matter, why her? Why ask, is the likely reply. Taylor-Wood has appropriated widely in the past-from Atlas to Roman orgy scenes (updated to the present day) to Hollywood movies. Here, as elsewhere in her work, surface registers of emotion and physical distress take the place of narrative. The pietà becomes an icon of exhaustion and distress, in her hands. Or, to put it differently, exhaustion and distress become iconic, if only by association. Elsewhere, a young woman is depicted morphing into distress, frame by frame in slow, slow motion. Taylor-Wood has returned several times in her career to this approach, breaking down highly charged scenarios with a wry slow-mo detachment, like a female Freud liberated by an encounter with Marcel Marceau. A closer analogy might be early photographic studies of the emotions: Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals or Hugh Diamond's studies of the mentally ill in the 1850's. She approa…
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