Carnegie Ramble

Art in America, March, 2000 by Edward Leffingwell

Sam Taylor-Wood is represented by three photographic tableaux that recall her work in video projection. Five Revolutionary Seconds XIII (1998) is the 25-foot-long result of a five-second exposure of an Arts and Crafts-style interior, moving through a pan of 360 degrees. The cast of characters, scattered through the space, includes a hefty tattooed man in jockey shorts on a stairway, a vaguely sinister younger man glimpsed through French doors, a black man reading a book, another man sprawled on a sofa, a suited man watching him, a girl with an empty glass, a pantry beyond. A barely audible soundtrack, taped during the shoot, features the voices of the participants. Soliloquy I and Soliloquy V (both 1998) each consist of a single large C-type print with a panoramic border along the lower edge that functions as a separately framed predella, reflecting on or vivifying the main image. In Soliloquy V, a stylish young man walks toward the camera, a red car far behind, a red brick wall to his left. The panel below is a panoramic shot of a deserted underground parking structure. In Soliloquy I, an androgynous young man sprawls on a sofa in an late-Victorian orientalist interior, his hand extending through the frame and into the predella, as though reaching into a rogue's gallery of the aristocratically decadent, a benediction to the stylish models posed in naughty abandon.

In a coda to Taylor-Wood's complexity, perhaps as punishment for mocking the posturing and pretense of contemporary art, Swiss artist Roman Signer seems exiled to a small bay most likely to be found only by those in search of the rest rooms. Signer presents moments-long video works documenting three of his "action sculptures." In Stiefel mit Rakete (1995) he attaches a rocket to a boot pinned to a tree. The rocket ignites, the boot pinwheels, the flare sputters and then quickly dies. The radio-controlled toy helicopter in Bert (1997) buzzes annoyingly, like a huge mosquito, around a figure attempting to sleep on a white-sheeted bed. In Signer's Chaplinesque, sweetly absurd Eskmorolle (1995), a solitary figure walks into a rural distance as an attached line plays out from a reel formed by a kayak supported like a tabletop on two thin metal A-frames. The figure recedes, the kayak spins, until the line reaches its limit.

With the exception of Signer's, the cinematic productions included in this International feature alienated or wounded people moving through landscapes. The presentations seem uncannily familiar, beyond their function as metaphor for the viewing experience. They share a resemblance born of the length and production values of MTV videos and novella-length modeling shoots. As filmed experiences, they seem essentially independent of language, and rely on the sensual quality of sound rather than on meaningful articulation. In some cases they could just as easily be in black and white for all the viewer may recall, and they are almost without exception inflected with memorable, sometimes exaggerated effects. Finally, they seem handsomely realized and are often moving.