| Meaning is deduced from presences: the presence of sound, of speech and language, of sight, of touch. Subtract a familiar presence—for example, the element of sound—and you are left with the perplexing space of absence, as it flirts with the urge to interpret. Silence is perhaps the most traumatic signifier of absence, and, when present, tends to eerily suggest what is nowhere to be found: sound. The artist Sam Taylor Wood explores the traumatic peace, which may occur when essential ingredients—sound, identity, time—are subtracted from situations and expressions conventionally, experienced as particularly meaningful, yet ambiguously simple. | 
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Heather Clarke
Sam Taylor-Wood, Jude Law. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube.Meaning is deduced from presences: the presence of sound, of speech and language, of sight, of touch. Subtract a familiar presence—for example, the element of sound—and you are left with the perplexing space of absence, as it flirts with the urge to interpret. Silence is perhaps the most traumatic signifier of absence, and, when present, tends to eerily suggest what is nowhere to be found: sound. The artist Sam Taylor Wood explores the traumatic peace, which may occur when essential ingredients—sound, identity, time—are subtracted from situations and expressions conventionally, experienced as particularly meaningful, yet ambiguously simple.
In Taylor-Wood’s Hysteria, (1999), she films a young woman in the throes of hysterical laughter. Her head bobs back and forth, and her mouth opens wide like an abyss of sorts. Her eyes widen and shut slightly; she is clearly beyond joviality: she is hypnotized by happiness and humor. It doesn’t matter that we didn’t hear the joke; what hurts more is that we are excluded from the sound of her laughter, as the film is eight minutes of pure silence. The effort of the silence is represented in the way in which its presence recommends a new interpretation of emotion. In witnessing the subject laugh without hearing the sound of laughter, there are moments where she appears to be in the hysteria of sadness, or even, perhaps, insanity. She is immersed in the trance of emotion, and without hearing her laughter, it is difficult to generate a relationship to her which is satisfying. She appears absurd and foreign, and her expressions, though recognizable, appear desperate and irrational. Subtract the essential presence of sound, and she becomes a victim of our frustrated projections, fuelled by the absence, or withholding, of the expected.
Crying Men, (2002), a series of photographs in which celebrity actors break down in tears, seems a further exploration of the disruption of both interpretation and the intimacy of emotion. In exposing individuals who often shed tears for the sake of a script, the viewer confronts the absence of a plot in which to situate the actors’ tears. These depicted tears are without a narrative and are falling from the eyes of characters, not humans. Thus we confront our own prejudice regarding the image of emotions: we are comfortable with Benicio Del Toro suffering when he is acting in a role, but remove the role and we are left with a tricky situation. Should we trust his tears, or explore the irony of his identity—an identity exposed for its absurdity when removed from a context, which equates emotional expression with pure role?
This disruption of context exposes the life of emotions as peculiar, and signifies a misrepresentation of their usual raw simplicity. A Little Death (2002), Taylor-Wood’s short, silent film of a dead rabbit in the process of decomposing, is sped up to again draw attention to the life of an occurrence—decomposition—which usually happens without us noticing. Because we have not witnessed it occur in detail, we are again disquieted by a natural process. It becomes absurd, edging towards the meaningless. Instead of subtracting sound from the equation, Taylor-Wood has subtracted minutes from the movement and life of decomposition by speeding it up. A process which usually takes weeks now happens before our eyes in five minutes. Therefore, its time context has changed; a very natural process is misrepresented as alien.
Taylor-Wood’s subtraction of essential elements has a transformative power. What is usually experienced impulsively and without an initial pause of reflection—that is, emotion—becomes comprehended quite violently in its ambiguous meaning; this is the lucky result, the addition, of Taylor-Wood’s subtraction.
