Sam Taylor-Wood, The Last Century
This is another work which caught my attention in SFMOMA. This video toys with my perceptions of performance and video art, as recently I have drawn on the assumption that video editing and digital effects do all the hard work to perfect the performance. This work, after viewing intimately, plays with those initial perceptions. The performers in the work stay completely still, as if frozen, with only the subtle movement their blinking eyelids and the wafting trail of smoke in the air to tell the video from a still frame.
