Sam Taylor Wood: Art and the Public

Marcelo Spinelli: Would your idea of capturing the moment be related as well to that series of photographs you showed at..

Sam Taylor Wood: Galleri Andreas Brandstrom. I haven't quite resolved them yet; they are a series of photographs which I wanted to look like you'd just wandered into a situation without really knowing the background history at all, and just seeing two people having what looks like an intimate conversation. And that's it, the photograph. And then another photograph of somebody hanging upside down off their bed, and you don't quite know whether they are dead and it's really dramatic, or whether they're just bored and hanging upside down off their bed and it's not at all dramatic. It's the same sort of idea really which comes out in the films. But I'm trying to work on them as quite a big series because I think if there are twenty of them they will make more sense together, rather than just five or something like that.

MS: And they are like film stills. And in fact some of them are; one of them is a scene from Taxi Driver which you almost faithfully reproduce. And some of them are not.

STW: Yes, exactly. So like having that one in there it sparks a recognition in some people; it's like 'I've seen that I don't know where I've seen it before': it looks really familiar. Again, it's playing a little bit with peoples' perception of things. So, for instance, when I showed the Taxi Driver one (it's two people; one person looks a little like Robert de Niro, and one person looks a bit like Harvey Keitel), I just set them up in a sort of very familiar pose which is very much a Taxi Driver image. And it does play on your memory a bit - people when I showed it said, 'that's Taxi Driver - no, it's not; that's de N..no it's not'. And so then they look at the other photographs slightly differently: is that from something or re-staged. So the whole series of photographs becomes a bit confusing. But the thing that links them is that confusion, [the fact] that nothing is really given away or told; and they are not really staged events because nothing really happens, they're not really anything really, but just in the way they are photographed they are made to look a bit more dramatic.

MS: But they are also interesting in that, like you were saying, people can recognise the possible drama that might be played out there, because you are using given compositions which you know can work in that way because we are all visual people. To a certain extent, it's something that all people share; you don't have to be an artist to recognise that. But a lot of people, when walking into galleries, don't have any points of reference, in that they may not be familiar with contemporary art and the discussions going on around it, which very much informs the work. Whereas those images are something that they can recognise immediately.

STW: Exactly. They do spark off something which then almost entices people to have an interest, I think.

MS: And it's something that I find really interesting: the way that people are really familiar with things like film language and television language, or even football, which are very complex languages, but not so much with contemporary art which is sometimes very simple, very accessible. But the moment they walk into the gallery something happens.

STW: It's the intimidation of it not being popular culture, or not so much being integrated into popular culture.

MS: Why do you think that happens? Do you think it is to do with familiarity?

STW: Yes. Obviously with video and film work people have, as you say, such a knowledge of that language that it is very easy to be able to read it in a certain ways. You know we're not so much educated as much as...

MS: Self-educated?

STW: Well, we're just so familiar with that language that we know what to expect and what those symbols mean - we have televisions in our houses and we go to the cinema. And also with photography, because we have magazines and advertising and those things are much more accessible. So I just think it's quite a simple way of looking at it.

MS: But a lot of the artists of your generation are doing work now which really deals with shared experience and everyday life, but it seems somehow to become even more obscure for a lot of people because it does not conform to all those ideas of what an artist is supposed to be.

STW: And also using something so familiar which isn't art. Normally it's not seen as art, it's sit-com language and documentary and news. And when you get some guy dancing naked in slow motion, there's no narrative for starters, so it would throw people off the mark.