Sam Taylor-Wood, City Gallery, Wellington
by Sam Gaskin

Here's my impression of the Sam Taylor-Wood exhibition at City Gallery. Sam comes to the door, smiles and invites you in, not to the gallery but her house. She guides you through the entrance hall and into a dim living room where a casket lies. Confused, you look at her for guidance. She nods towards the coffin encouraging you to look closer. You step forward and peer inside. Sam Taylor-Wood's body is lying dead on the plush white cushions inside. That's so sad, you think. She was just here. SNAP. You look up to see Taylor-Wood standing behind the casket, her camera fixed on you.

Sam Taylor-Wood Self Portrait in a Single Breasted Suit with Hare, 2001 Type C print 161 x 113 cm Courtesy of the artist and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London. © the artist

There's a black humour to much of the Taylor-Wood exhibition, but it's often more melancholy - blue humour, I suppose. The first piece you see on entering the exhibition of photos and video installations, Self portrait in a single-breasted suit with hare, immediately sets this tone. The title puns on the artist's successful treatment for bouts of colon and breast cancer in 1997 and 1999. After a mastectomy and chemotherapy her hair had regrown but she was left literally single breasted.

There are two other self-portraits in the exhibition. Poor Cow is an image of a lone cow separated from its herd after being diagnosed with mad cow's disease. Self-portrait as Tree shows a field under a grim, overcast sky; a shaft of yellow light colours nothing but the one tree in shot. By describing them as self-portraits, Taylor-Wood projects her own emotional states - her hope and self pity (you poor cow) - onto the images.

Sam Taylor-Wood Self Portrait as a Tree, 2000 C print 60 x 48 inches © Sam Taylor-Wood / Courtesy White Cube, London

The most overt representations of melancholy are also the most publicised pieces in the exhibition. Men Crying features portraits of famous actors looking glum, often (although not always) in tears. The 'salon' arrangement of the photographs - which are clustered closely together three or four images high - is more intimate than the typical gallery arrangement of images spaced out at eye level; there is a cumulative emotional force to seeing so many desperate, downcast heads at once.

Jude Law sits hunched in a corner, a fist in his eye, pressing himself into the walls. Robert Downey Junior reclines on a bed with a sheet draped over his lower half, staring straight up as if looking longingly for space away from a claustrophobic thought. Philip Seymour Hoffman sits upright wearing an anguished look, his hands together, and his feet turned in. Forest Whitaker's face is wrenched with grief and he raises his arm up to his face protecting himself from, well, nothing. Exasperated critics have bemoaned the artificiality of the sadness in the portraits. Yet Taylor-Wood gave the actors no forewarning of what they would be asked to do, and - despite it being an important skill to their craft - many were reluctant to weep for the camera. In most cases, Taylor-Wood says, the actors had to dredge up genuine sadnesses from their lives for the portraits.

Sam Taylor-Wood Jude Law, from Crying Men, 2002-2004 C print © Amanda P. Brotman

Still, it is eerie to think that these images were taken without any immediate emotional stimulus. Laurence Fishburne's portrait is especially compelling for this reason. He stares straight at the camera, his body composed, his face perfectly relaxed, impassive except for his liquid eyes and the tear tracks running down his face. He doesn't appear to be reacting to anything, but this makes the shot even sadder. If sadness is a condition of people, not an effect of events - which seems to be the growing consensus in contemporary psychological - then what power do we have to avoid it? Or supposing there is some remembered sorrow he is drawing on, it is frightening to think that someone might keep something so brutal so nearly perfectly hidden.

Sam Taylor-Wood Laurence Fishburne, from Crying Men, 2002-2004 type C print, 86.2 x 111.7 Courtesy of the artist and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London. © the artist

As well as criticising the portraits for the actors' 'phoney' emotions, critics have slammed Taylor-Wood's use of celebrities. Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones was even prompted to enter the nonsense 'but is it art' debate: "How long can this art flaunt its fake tan and still be praised as the real thing?" More recently, The Listener's Aaron Kreisler suggested the pictures might be better displayed in a glossy magazine.

However, the use of celebrities extends the photos. Celebrities are people whose gestures, voices and expressions we have shared knowledge of. This knowledge empowers the viewer to animate the subjects in our minds. What will they do next? What are they thinking? Who are they crying for?

In one sense, we know very well who the celebrities are crying for. In her presentation of the photos to the public, Rachel Kent, curator of Taylor-Wood's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, mentioned how the artist differentiated her photos from images of the actors caught on film on any old day on set. Suggesting that the very change of medium and the different context for display were sufficient to generate novelty, Taylor-Wood said, 'I wanted them to cry for me'. She asked the actors to cry for her as a photographer and as a fine artist. But most pressingly, she asked them to cry as attendees at her funeral. She has each actor enter her living room and lay a flower on her coffin. Taylor-Wood, who could so easily have died at the turn of the century, thanks them for their condolences, snaps photos of the self pity she weeps through their eyes and offers the images to us. Saddened by the actors, we, in turn, mourn for her.

The works are wonderful offerings to their audiences, but they are not given without expectation of a kind of reciprocity.

Sam Taylor-Wood will be showing at the City Gallery until 28 January 2007.