Sam Taylor-Wood Interview
Bar Italia, Frith Street, London, 2nd September 1994
Kingston University Department of Art History 1994
Programming Note: I’d reached out to Sam as part of the work I was researching for my second year dissertation on the theme of A Contemporary Three Graces at Kingston University. Sam had recently graduated from Goldsmiths’ University, and was enjoying some initial success as part of a second wave of Young British Artists. I had particularly enjoyed her work ‘Fuck Suck Spank Wank’ and we talk about it here. I met Sam at Bar Italian in SoHo, a trendy little late night coffee bar which is still in business today. We sat and drank coffee at the counter, and chatted about art, process and what she was working on at the time. It was a fascinating experience, especially given the tremendous amount of success she was to go on and have. I wish I’d done this with more artists around London during my time at University.
Sam Taylor-Wood: So you're doing Sarah and, have you done or are you meeting or have you, because I know she's quite busy, she's just moved house.
Matthew Shadbolt: That’s the thing, I’ve written to her, but I'm not sure if I had the right address.
S.T.W.: Oh right, I don't have it, but I know she's just moved. She moved like two weeks ago and everything's just been so chaotic, what aboutAnya?
M.S.: She's in America at the moment, but yeah, she said that she'd like to come and talk to me, which is quite good. I went through Peter andDuncan at the gallery, and they were like really helpful about it, they explained that she was going away but that they'd forward my letter, and she wrote back by like, return of post saying yeah! let's do it!
S.T.W.: No she's nice, you'll like her. So have you got lots of hard questions or are they quite easy?
M.S.: I haven't got any questions at all.
S.T.W.: Oh good, that's brilliant!
M.S: I just came here to chat to you really. I always feel like, if I prepare questions, I'll never remember them.,
S.T.W.: No that's really good, I hate that situation where you're just fired at with all these questions. I thought that, because Michael said that you'd been to see him and...
M.S.: What did he say about it?
S.T.W.: Well no, it's just that I thought because you'd been to see him and the Lisson said you'd been there...
M.S.: Blimey! It's like you've been given this plan of where I’ve been!
S.T.W.: No it’s nice, I just thought oh my God he's like preparing serious questions and I’m gonna have to spend like...
M.S.: No not at all
S.T.W.: Well I've just been doing it for The Showroom, I mean it's really basic, she just wanted me to describe the piece and basically where the ideas came from, you know, things like that, so I'm beginning to get to be a dab hand at it... but actually I really hate it, because I mean my ideas and where they come from just change so much, so when you're committing yourself to paper like that, it's difficult not to pin yourself down you know.
M.S.: I mean, I felt like that yesterday when I was talking to Michael, I was sort of asking him things and using generalizations to make points about something else, and he wasn't agreeing with the generalizations, and in the end he wouldn't say anything because he didn’t want to have it ‘on tape’ that he'd said it. Well it felt like that anyway. Which is fair enough.
S.T.W.: He's quite cautious. Also his approach is quite, he did an interview with me for the Art Monthly thing, and I met him, and I felt like he was just like this, all the way through, and I was just like Aaaah! You know like talking non-stop all the way through. It was kind of quite good you know because I picked out things from it...
M.S.: Well I s’pose that's what he wants you to do isn't it?
S.T.W.: Afterwards I was exhausted. I felt like I was some kind of animated muppet or something. Like flying all over the place. It sounds interesting what you're doing, could you send me a copy of it after you’ve finished?
M.S.: Yeah sure.
S.T.W.: That'd be great.
M.S.: I’ll explain a bit about what I’m doing, I’m taking the three graces as a starting point, it's just by coincidence that all this furore has erupted. It's like I started on this about two and a half months ago, I thought, ‘Right, that's what I’m gonna do’ and then it was all in the press, so I’m quite lucky in that respect, so I was researching who they were, sort of the mythology kind of thing, and they each relate to the artists that I’m talking about. It's a kind of a happy accident. I thought, who's work am I interested in, who do I want to write about you know, and it ended up as three women artists, young women artists, I’m talking about you in abstract terms when you're right here and it feels really odd!
S.T.W.: No really it’s alright!
M.S.: So it's young and female and quite closely linked, so I thought how can I tie that all in, and the three graces seemed to be a nice way to sort of, you know, because it’s the same thing. So it's just a sort of happy accident that one of them is she who represents flowers... that’s really tied in with Anya's work. One is she who represents mirth, which is closely linked to Sarah's stuff, quite humorous, and then there's one that’s she who...
S.T.W.: Drops her trousers.
M.S.: Yeah, she who’s a complete slut. No it's she who represents splendor, and 1 thought that was quite nicely tied in with the way that ‘Fuck Suck Spank Wank’ was kind of a splendor, ‘come on then’ kind of thing. And then there's lots of other things that come out of it as well, like they were the daughters of Zeus, and, and... somebody else, you can find someone who is like the Zeus and someone who's the wife.
Fuck Suck Spank Wank, Sam Taylor-Wood (1993)
S.T.W: That's really interesting, I mean with me I'm also interested in like the thing I did for the show at The Showroom, which you saw right? I mean just that whole mythology, the opera that I used, did you know such about it, I mean I didn't...
M.S.: I’ve been trying to find out what opera it was, I've got the thing, which says it's a one act opera, I’ve tried to phone The Showroom but there’s no-one there... ever.
Killing Time is a four-screen video installation, commissioned in 1994 by The Showroom, London. It was produced in an edition of three; Tate owns the second in the edition. The work is usually displayed in a room with one projection on each of the four walls so that the images surround the viewer. When it was first installed at The Showroom, because of the unusual dimensions of the space, two projections were installed in each of the gallery’s two rooms.
Each video is a long, unbroken shot of a young man or woman, seated alone in a minimally furnished modern domestic interior. The installation is accompanied by a soundtrack of Richard Strauss’s one-act opera Elektra, 1909, based on the ancient Greek tragedy of the same name by Euripides (c.480-406 BC). The figures, dressed casually in t-shirts and jeans or trousers, lip-synch along with the recording, each taking a different character’s part. The eponymous heroine of Strauss’s opera is a young woman driven by an obsessive desire to avenge the death of her father, murdered by her mother Clytemnestra and her mother’s lover, Aegisth. The opera consists of a series of emotionally fraught encounters between Elektra and the other principle characters leading to a bloody denouement in which her brother Orestes kills Clytemnestra and Aegisth. Her wish fulfilled, Elektra begins a frenzied dance before collapsing and dying, overcome with her own ecstatic rage.
As its plot suggests, Elektra expresses grand passions, its characters at the mercy of intense emotional and psychological states: it is operatic in the commonplace sense of the word. By contrast, the men and women in Taylor-Wood’s videos are bored, sitting around in unremarkable rooms, occasionally smoking, stretching, looking at their watches or staring at the ceiling while waiting for their next cue. They make no attempt to replicate the passion of the singers on the soundtrack.
After completing a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London in 1990, Taylor-Wood worked for a year in the wardrobe department at the Royal Opera House, and she has talked about how that experience affected her practice (Ferguson, pp.47-48). Operatic music was piped throughout the backstage areas of the House constantly, giving the most banal tasks a dramatic soundtrack. Killing Time replicates the sense of disjunction Taylor-Wood felt listening to the music of composers such as Richard Wagner (1813-83) as she went about her various tasks. She has used classical music in other video works, including Brontosaurus, 1995 (Tate T07545) which also plays on the contrast between music, Samuel Barber’s solemn Adagio for Strings, 1936, and image, the awkward yet graceful slow motion footage of a naked man dancing to techno music.
Killing Time sets up a similar disjunction between the banality of the everyday and the searing passion of music. The juxtaposition of visual and aural elements suggests that the music is a kind of soundtrack of the unconscious; that beneath the calm, ordinary surface, primal desires are raging. Taylor-Wood describes this dichotomy as ‘the collision of high and low culture; my friends lolling about at home shot on cheap video matched with this operatic music, something that is so elite and fantastic, set so high up in our cultural stratosphere’ (quoted in Carolin, ‘Interview with Sam Taylor-Wood,’ in Sam Taylor-Wood, n.p.). The double meaning extends to the title: Killing Time refers both to Taylor-Wood’s characters passing time and to the murderous acts of the opera whose libretto they mouth.
Rachel Taylor
September 2003
S.T.W: I've instructed her not to tell anyone. She won't tell you. I meanI don’t mind you knowing, I'll tell you which one it is. What I didn’t want was for people to read too much into it, it’s become like an Oedipal complex, it's ‘Electra’ which is by Strauss and so really what I wanted was the main character as a woman, and she was quite murderous, and she was avenging the death of her father, you know. that kind of thing, but I didn’t want it to be too narrative heavy because then you're reading into everything, so I really just wanted it to be the main character being a woman, and my kind of silent joke would be that no-one would know that this was a seriously murderous woman unless you understood German and you could hear what she was saying.
M.S.: I suppose if you give away the title of the opera then it just becomes a sort of representation just of that, in another format, or gets read like that.
S.T.W.: Yeah. exactly. And also I titled the piece ‘Killing Time’ so it's a kind of double thing you know where you’ve got four bored, fairly despondent looking people looking like they're killing time, and at the same time, killing time is contained in the narrative, the whole thing is about murdering your parents sort of thing, I mean it's not because it's really, I mean there’s lots of levels in the opera and I don't really want that to become too much of an issue really. What I really wanted was so that when you walked into the space, you're really hit with a lot of kind of really powerful passionate, you know, really kind of overwhelming passion, and then the images of these people are kind of flat and look as if they have absolutely no link at all. Until there's a meeting point in the middle where they're kind of, it’s meant to be like they were, like their subconscious in their singing, and entering aspiration or wishful thinking or because they're in this, that's talking about it very basically but you know looking like they’re very bored and kind of wanting something greater to happen, and then this sort of meeting of their lives, you know, that kind of idea.
M.S.: So were you consciously thinking about things like that before you made the piece or, I mean...
S.T.W.: Not particularly...
M.S.: Sort of, how did the piece come about? Did you have this set of ideas first and then decide that you were going to do it through an opera or was it something else?
S.T.W.: I did have the idea where I wanted to use opera, I wanted to make a piece which was where I could make something which was extremely passionate, and you know, had all those elements, within it where it was theatrical and passionate but at the same time, it was really contradicted. And you know, I was trying to work out a way of doing it, for quite a while before I came up with that idea, and so it was really just working along a set of ideas of just something being passionate, despondent, you know, aspiration, boredom, anxiety, all those kinds of things, and trying also to depict people as like thinking aloud as well, and things like that.
M.S.: That seems to be like when you talk about dealing with things like passion and appearing to be bored, the sort of artificial construction of the whole thing, that seems to sort of relate back to 'Fuck Suck Spank Wank’ where you were sort of stood there in this ‘Oh alright then’ kind of pose, and that it’s obviously constructed, that seems to be a thing that you're dealing with, quite consciously.
S.T.W.: Yeah definitely, and also, did you see the piece at Anthony Reynolds?
M.S.: Yeah
Sam Taylor-Wood, Spanker's Hill (1994)
S.T.W.: Yeah. it was a similar sort of thing where it was sort of overly constructed, and it kind of implies something about things being really over enforced, that there would be sort of an element of sort of danger and death, a bit humorous and a bit, you know not a kind of fearful terror image.
M.S.: Yeah, I thought that piece was really interesting because when I decided that I was seriously going to study your work, like with that piece in particular, OK, it's the rabbit in the headlights sort of thing, and there's the whole thing of like you say of danger and it's not a cliche but it's a well used phrase. I was trying to kind of separate everything and then put it all back together at the end, and trying to find the metaphors for each thing, and I found like an almost direct correlation with the Bobbitt case, do you know about that?
S.T.W.: Yeah!
M.S.: Has anyone ever said that to you?
S.T.W.: No! That's excellent!
M.S.: Because there's elements in the Bobbitt case, and in that piece, you’ve got the car, and it's night-time, you’ve got the streak of red, this sort of rectangular streak of red, I don't know if she's just thrown it out of the window, and that whole idea of being like trapped in the headlights and being completely. .. impotent, in a way, and the whole thing of cars and phallic objects.
S.T.W.: Yeah that was obviously something to do with it. The other thing that was quite important was just my expression of looking into the headlights and not looking too shocked or despondent but just looking back at your aggressor, and in a literal sense that's what I was trying just for, you know, how I was looking, which is kind of like the things with the 'Slut' piece as well, was just having also you're just witnessing an act which has already happened, you know it's been staged for the photograph, so it's not like a documentation of a performance but it's, you know that it's been set up in a similar way.
M.S.: Yeah. like a record of an event.
S.T.W.: Yeah, so that's quite important. I'm also doing another piece which I should be doing it next week, and there's going to be an Omnibus program, do you know anything about this Omnibus program? That's at the end of October, I don't know if it's going to be that interesting, it’s going to be called 'Face to Face' I think, and it's about people who use themselves in their work. So that’ll be quite good to see...
M.S.: Was that a result of the Karsten Schubert thing?
S.T.W.: Yeah, they're also making it quite a historical thing, they're going right back to Rembrandt, right up to now, and I think they're doing Matt Collishaw, Gillian Wearing and also Mark Wallinger. And then there is gonna be another thing that 'The Late Show' are doing, in which they’re going to film me, I'm not actually going to be in it, but I'm going to be filming someone crawling on all fours through Kennington Park. Kennington Park is like this really scuzzy little...
M.S.: Yeah I know Kennington Park.
S.T.W.: Well, the next piece I'm doing is gonna be photographed there, and I've hired a model from ‘Storm’ agency, like a real glamorous looking type woman, and anyway, she's crawling on all fours, something like that basically. She's like a ‘Vogue’ cover model. So I've got her crawling on all fours, puking in Kennington Park.
M.S.: Literally puking?
S.T.W.: Well I don't know because she’s a bit disturbed about having to do it, obviously, I mean I don't know if she'll sort of be able to do it.
M.S.: Vomit on cue?
S.T.W.: Yeah, like 'Now! Oh sorry I didn't wind on...' I mean it doesn't matter that she doesn't do it. but that she looks like she’s going to you know, I didn't really want to use myself in that piece because, something like that would just be too literal, disgusted at something,I didn't want it to be like that, I'm trying to work more on ideas of abjection and beauty, horror you know, that kind of thing...
M.S.: Plus as soon as you use a model and vomit, it sort of becomes anorexia, Kate Moss kind of thing, waif like...
S.T.W.: It’s going to be a bit like that, but also having her sort of crawling through something like a park, in an urban...
M.S.: And as soon as you use yourself I suppose it becomes about something else anyway.
Sam Taylor-Wood, Slut (1994)
S.T.W.: When I've used myself in pieces it's been really for specific ideas, like ‘The Face’ project, in fact it's going to be quite similar to that project in that it's kind of like glamour and then happiness and then haying something which you normally wouldn't find connected with a glamour model or magazine. So it'll be quite similar to that one. But it won't be me because that's only for really specific pieces. I mean I don't like to use myself in everything. I wanted to break away from that idea of being in my work. So I’m not a complete narcissist!
M.S.: There's nothing wrong with that!
S.T.W.: No! Absolutely, not at all. Can I just say that with that you can easily be labelled as something which isn’t necessarily there. I mean, what I'm trying to say is those pieces were specifically me, you know. because I was trying to talk about something there.
M.S.: Sorry but I’ve got to ask you, were the love bites real?
S.T.W.: Yeah, absolutely! They were real and they were really specifically done for the photograph, and believe me the trouble I had, the troubleI had! Because I knew that I wanted it, I spoke to the make-up artist, and she didn’t think I could make them look real, without them being real.
M.S.: Isn’t there a credit in there saying 'make-up by...' I wasn't quite sure, you know I was thinking, they look pretty real...
S.T.W.: I wanted that to make it a bit more ambiguous, but it was just my face that they did. I really needed my face to be overly overly made-up so it looked as if I'd been a bit glamourized. So from here up it was just like a mask and from here down it was seriously raw, and not something you're really accustomed to seeing in a magazine.
M.S.: And you dyed your hair specially as well.
S.T.W.: No that was just grease. But yeah they were real! I asked someone to do them and they just couldn't do them! Were you never a teenager, you know just suck will you! Get your teeth in! But it is funny because it’s such a, because obviously I had to walk around with them, it took two weeks to go, until they like faded a bit.
M.S.: You didn't wear polonecks or something.
S.T.W.: I did for a while but you know people do look at you in a way that’s really with disgust, but it was obviously part of the piece, you know.
M.S.: To actually live it.
S.T.W.: Well you know that piece in the back of ‘The Face’, you know, for the record I didn’t say that, it always sounds so trashy what I said! I never said all that, really!
M.S.: They just made it up did they?
S.T.W.: Yeah I mean I talked to this guy. like for a solid twenty minutes. and there were bits that they obviously edited out. It's just like trash journalism. Where was I, yeah, it’s just amazing the reactions you get from something like that, which is what I was interested in, and I even, I went to this sort of dinner one night, with other artists and I had a poloneck jumper on and I sort of forgot about it, and it was hot, and I just took my jumper off, and like everybody was staring, and I had to be like ‘This? Oh it’s art’ you know, it's funny how people who are supposedly like minded or even in that sense it's still really almost universally treated as this kind of weird, disgusting and you know I just wanted to kind of like look at that idea of something which could come from, I mean it was a completely cold act when I had them done, but it implied a kind of an act of passion. So therefore why is it so much of a... taboo really.
M.S.: It's a taboo object, it's like a record of sone really taboo, private performance.
S.T.W.: I know.
M.S.: It seems specifically teenage as well. Maybe that's why it seemed odd because you never see someone who isn't a teenager with them!
S.T.W.: Well that's the thing, the other thing I saw it as was you know, as a display of like, I've just had the most amazing sex last night, look! It was like that as well and also that sort of thing can also be seen as someone marking you as their territory, it's like all of that but then, by having my face kind of smiling, I was quite happy, so that it wasn’t an exploitation.
M.S.: I was saying to Michael yesterday that there’s a real arrogance with it if you know what I mean. both in that one and in ‘Fuck Suck Spank Wank’ you know, the expressions on those two, is really like a ‘Come on then’ kind of thing, and they're both obviously related strongly to their titles, those are important, I thought it was really interesting the idea that it's not just about the love bites, either, you know, that's just the core of it, it's also very important that there's all these layers and layers of make-up, and that you're really smiling about it, and a strong sense of concealment…
S.T.W.: Well it's concealment and revealing at the same time. That was one of the things with ‘Fuck Suck’ that I felt, being in a photographer's studio like that you’ve dropped your trousers, you know, it’s literally like saying, looking at first glance like being quite vulnerable, like expressing vulnerability, but then literally having those words across you and I thought that by displaying that look of, yeah I mean arrogance, but also with having the sunglasses on it also like protected you with like a shield, so that people couldn't see directly into your eyes.
M.S.: And you're not sure if you're looking back at the audience.
S.T.W.: Yeah, so with that piece I wanted it again to be questionable about who's exploiting who, and if somebody had asked me to drop my trousers, and I’m letting you see me as something which is available.
M.S.: I read it much more in that kind of way. Sort of ‘I've dropped my trousers, here I am’. When I talked to Michael about that piece, I was suggesting to him that the classical pose of it related to the fact that it was concerned with homosexuality, and having that whole history of people like Leonardo being a homosexual and then your pose being one that he might draw or something. And then also being a female artist and then using that, it's quite sort of curious how it works in terms of it being turned on its head. And then I asked him about the cabbage, because I think I can tie everything else in, sort of, I've got my little theory, and then there's the cabbage! I sort of said to him, 'So what do you make of this cabbage then?' and he said, ‘She just put it in’.
S.T.W.: I mean I kind of did that deliberately just for that final, so that people might think that they've got it sewn up, and then there’s the 'What about the cabbage?' I mean it was just like that, I was standing next to a fridge, and I was looking inside and there was this great big cabbage there, and I just thought brilliant, really just because I knew that in the image there’d be so many layers, that you could be looking at, and just to sort of throw in one, I like that, I understand everything but the cabbage!
M.S.: But that in itself is really interesting because with a piece like that it seems so obviously constructed, that you think, the cabbage has got to mean something, I'd been racking my brain you know, cabbage, you can refer to someone as a cabbage, you know, maybe it's concerned also with this discourse on mental retardation or something... Umm... no it can't be that!
S.T.W.: It's just to throw you off the scent really.
M.S.: But knowing that changes everything. You think right, she's doing that, then you start to see all the rest of it in a different light, which gives it another layer.
S.T.W.: Yeah it works quite well in that way I think. In other pieces that I've made I've sort of tried to, I was trying to work out other things that I could do you know, but I think you can make things like that a bit of a signature, but just in that piece I love the way it works. But I might do something similar for the, because what I’m actually worried about with this one with the model being sick was that it might refer too much to bulimia and anorexia, I really want to move it away from that, because what I was more interested in was just more the idea of mixing something which is something like putting people in that situation, not as obvious as putting someone in a situation where they wouldn’t normally be seen but with the model puking up it's a really kind of ungraceful…
M.S.: And in Kennington Park.
S.T.W.: Yeah and it’s also then dodgy ground because I didn’t want it to be like a ‘Face’ kind of fashion spread you know?
(Interview cassette ends)
In 1997 a group of Young British Artists dubbed the YBA's solidified their careers in an exhibit which created a "Sensation" in the world of art. One of the talented artists who exhibited in that landmark exhibit was photographer and filmmaker - Sam Taylor-Wood, and the first major museum exhibit of her works in the U.S has just arrived with at its first stop...
