Smooth Surfaces and Flattened Fantasies: Thoughts on Criticality in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Soliloquy III

Abstract

In the last two chapters I have focussed on the work of Hannah Wilke because I think that an understanding of her use of unfaithful repetition and critical mimicry is important if we are to make sense of the various ways in which contemporary female artists work with bodies, photographic surfaces and notions of pleasure. This chapter focuses on the work of Sam Taylor-Johnson, specifically one of a set of works completed between 1998 and 2001 called the Soliloquy series. Although working in different time periods and political contexts the two artists share a propensity to reconfigure the pleasures of popular culture from within its own language. In addition, both artists emphasize artifice and the screen culture through which images of women (and men in Taylor-Johnson’s case) are produced. In the mid-1970s Wilke made an incursion into popular culture, which was viewed with suspicion by some for whom the seductions of pop could hold no genuine critical purpose. By the time Taylor-Johnson became successful, as one of the young British artists of the 1990s, pop was ubiquitous in the contemporary art scene. For her pop is a given part of a cultural landscape in which the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms have been called into question.¹ In this chapter I explore what kinds of feminist criticality are offered from within its terrain. I argue that Taylor-Johnson’s work, and Soliloquy III (1998) in particular, brings into being an elongated present tense rich with possibilities for rethinking what it means to respond critically to contemporaneous cultural conditions. Taylor-Johnson’s work often features bourgeois characters in lavishly ornate surroundings, but where we should find pleasure we encounter something akin to this, but different.