Sensual Seduction: That White Rush

Sam Taylor-Wood, That White Rush, 2007.

One image that's stayed with me since the art fairs last December? Sam Taylor-Wood's That White Rush.

Taylor-Wood, who is known for her photography, gives her medium a gentle tweak and winds up with one of the best video artworks I've seen in a fortnight. Taylor-Wood pictures the tryst between Leda and the Swan through a grainy video loop that plays at only a few frames per second.

Her take is both comic and earnest, acknowledging the absurdity of the visual: the nude woman reclines, propped up by her hands, and receives the ministrations of the taxidermied waterfowl, its wings fanned wide. Enhancing a comic effect is the low-fi porn production, which signals to the viewer that the perversion of the gods is best understood through the lens of the celebrity sex-tape. Taylor-Wood diminishes the deception of Zeus and the corruption of Leda as two very distinct effects within the myth. Instead, she focuses on the sex and how it acts as an equalizer—it just looks silly, silly in the way that only sex can, even sex between a mortal and a god.

Yet the scene and setting offer a stark contradiction to the porny production: no hotel mattress illuminated by lime-light night-vision, but instead stark wood floors bathed in wan sunlight. The set is ascetic, signifying revelation or ecstasy or their possibility. It's the same wood paneling favored by Anselm Keifer, who also investigates the divine, visitation, and the supernatural manifested in the real world. In Parsifal III, for example, Keifer depicts a wooden attic—a space invested with significance after the Holocaust and one that appears frequently in his work about heaven and earth. [For more Kiefer, click-click.]

Anselm Keifer, Quaternity, 1973.

Taylor-Wood's video painting takes its name from Yeats's 1922–23 poem, one of the myth's greatest depictions (and one of the poet's greatest poems):

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Copy after Michaelangelo, Leda and the Swan, 1530s.

Cy Twombly, Leda and the Swan, 1962.

Click to enlarge.

As in Yeats's characterization, Taylor-Wood has captured Leda in consensual contradiction: receptive, cautious, stimulated, curious. Yeats described Leda as resisting the swan with mere "terrified vague fingers", casting doubt as to whether she even put forth that much effort. Taylor-Wood has simulated that doubt in stilted frame captures—the breast caught heaving, the thigh caught shifting.

Yeats's poem breaks neatly into two halves, with action initiating the octave and climax resolving into sestet. In Taylor-Wood's piece we witness the moment suspended between "a sudden blow" and "a shuddering in the loins"; she has elected to promote perspective as the narrative insight. And in so doing she keys into Yeats's great, telescopic bound from myth to history: A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead.

Although the work is video, That White Rush doesn't capture the sort of context needed to assess what's happening between Leda and the swan. That ambiguity has always driven both the myth and its depictions. Photography and especially video are supposed to dispel ambiguity, and Taylor-Wood is certainly attentive to this idea. Her work is a religious painting caught on security camera. The momentary glimpse of sex (the nip-slip, the up-skirt cam) is a totem for sex, sexuality, and consent.

Art history provides two great precedents for Taylor-Wood's version. Michaelangelo's 1530-ish composition features important Mannerist tendencies. Leda's elongated, curling fingers, for example, give lie to the notion that she is asleep, suggesting permission. Michaelangelo could be a rather dirty old man, and he's reduced the act of penetration into two ambiguous details: the swan's tail meeting with a conspicuous fold of red drapery underneath Leda's bottom, and the swan's beak entering Leda's mouth rather than trained on her nape. And here for the first time (I believe), Leda is depicted in (welcome?) supine repose.

Cy Twombly's far more recent abstraction obviously involves a great degree of ambiguity as far as figure is concerned. The square window form is the anchor to the real, granting the architectural space of this mythical moment unexpected prominence. Taylor-Wood's piece reverses the configuration: the action is unexpectedly graphic, but the space is mysterious.

Leda and the swan as a motif? A welcome throwback. Not only is it one of art history's favorite myths, but confident dialog between contemporary art and a long art history is simply a relief in comparison to often confrontational appropriation tactics favored by would-be dragonslayers and debutantes. Taylor-Wood is not only pinging the canon but, doubly boldly, saluting Bill Viola, her contemporary, so well known for capturing the ecstatic in slow-to-unfold video works. To do so with a nod to Yeats and others? An unexpected achievement.