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Sam Taylor-Wood Ed Harris 2002
C-Print mounted on aluminum, 30 c 40 inches
Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

It seems gymnastics are the in thing with British women artists. While the Wilsons' New Zealanders play gracefully among the high ropes, Sam Taylor-Wood, showing at Matthew Marks, floats, without visible support, in a series of acrobatic self-portrait photographs. To achieve this feat, she apparently had a bondage expert tie her up, then proceeded to Photoshop his equipment out of the picture. This left her artfully and effortlessly suspended in her sparse London loft.

Ms. Taylor-Wood is one of the original YBAs, as the British neoconceptual artists are called (her art-dealer husband represents Damien Hirst) and her aesthetics share a generational penchant for kinky coolness - big existential themes explored with knowing absence of affect and references to recent avantgarde art. In an effort to emotionally up the ante, however, she embarked three years ago on a project to photograph Hollywood male actors crying.

The 28 thespians who have wept at her command attest to her persuasiveness: Ed Harris, Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, Dustin Hoffman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Jude Law are among a star-studded cast of sobbers. For all that the project seems a pretentious artworld antic - celebrity as offshoot of literalism - it must be said that this relentless emotional artifice does elicit a strange, subdued, Bill Viola-like mild melancholia. It is like canned laughter that nonetheless puts you in the mood.