Bed It Like Beckham
Exactly as one would hope from the last Spice Girl left standing, Victoria has told us what we want (what we really really want) to know about David Beckham: "He's got more personality than people think...he's very deep and spiritual." Rather more curiously, this image is also presented by 1997 Turner-Prize nominee, Sam Taylor-Wood, in her video-portrait of the footballer unveiled this week at the National Portrait Gallery.
The instalment is a 107-minute close-up film of Beckham sleeping. Actually, it is not of Beckham - it is of his snoozing alter-ego, David. Whereas the block letters "B-E-C-K-H-A-M" leap off shirts everywhere from Manchester to Mombassa, the "first name terms" title of the piece encapsulates pretty much everything Taylor-Wood is attempting to convey, from the intimacy of watching another sleep to the muscular beauty of Michaelangelo's sculpture.
It is, she suggests, a "reverential and vulnerable image". Vulnerable, because the portrait isolates Beckham as an individual from the source of his fame (ball-bending free-kicks, or the man who introduced the sarong to England, depending on your perspective). In so doing, it subverts the connection on which the entire concept of celebrity status hinges. Instead, we are presented with a passive Beckham. Like a song you just can't get enough of, or speculation on Beckham's marital difficulties, we watch him sleep on continuous loop.
There is a blindingly obvious, though nevertheless particularly juicy irony in the topicality of the piece. The portrait is displayed just as its beleagured subject's sleeping habits force him to confront the dark side of life as an icon. Celebrity status is fraught with the perpetual risk of toppling from the pedestal of national deity and into the abyss, to serve only as a "Scandalous Example of Immorality" in the Daily Mail.
The media, having built up a celebrity, have an unshakeable moral conviction in their right to hack them back down to size. In some sense, Taylor Wood's film is only another media re-invention of Beckham.
Along with Michaelangelo's statue of Night , Taylor-Wood claims Andy Warhol's 1963 film Sleep as one of the major influences on the piece. In this, Warhol ran eight hours of video-footage of the poet John Giorno unconscious. An LA cinema manager, Mike Getz, recorded the reaction to its screening: "'Sleep' started at 6.45...People start to walk out at 7, some complaining. People getting more and more restless. Shot finally changes to close up of man's head. Someone runs up to the screen and shouts in the sleeping man's ear, 'Wake Up'. Audience getting bitter..."
In a vivid passage in Nausea, Sartre describes standing in an art gallery, characters in portraits staring out at him, their eyes challenging his very right to exist. Conversely, Taylor-Wood, like Warhol, presents a subject entirely oblivious to our presence. By letting us observe Beckham asleep - and separating the real him from the self-fashioned shell of celebrity - one critic claimed Taylor-Wood presents an almost "transgressive intimacy".
It is, as Jonathan Jones criticised, a very cosy "shrine to Beckham." But it is not intimacy: Beckham's dream world remains tantalisingly unreachable. Ignoring all those oh-so-raunchy text messages in favour of watching David sleep merely allows us a chance to massage our own egos, slip on the designer lingere, and pretend to be Victoria... (Or another of Beckham's alleged bedfellows).
The illusion of sleeping beauty remains unshattered by any sign of life, let alone a reminder of Beckham's cockney chirp. This is precisely because, like everything in the celebrity world, it is exactly that - an illusion. By using the same medium (film) through which the potential celebrity filters into popular consciousness, the work raises interesting questions of how we attribute celebrity-status and of the interplay between art, entertainment, and the popular con.
All this lies at the heart of the Britart movement. Art is often regarded as inaccessible, and portraiture was historically an elitist form, dependent on networks of patronage.
The modern sports icon, in contrast, has his image disseminated world wide, in newspapers, on the screen, in posters and on billboards. It is exactly this gap between fine art and mass art which Warhol fused by reproducing in his silkscreens "all the great modern things" - objects of mass consumption, ranging from Campbell soup to the face of Marilyn Monroe.
The National Portrait Gallery commissioned the portrait of Beckham, precisely because he is an icon of popular culture, and "Cool Britannia". Yet the portrait produced by Taylor-Wood deliberately abandons any sense of celebrity, instead celebrating the subject's naturalness and aesthetic beauty. It explores the boundaries between media representation, and 'art'.
Is it this which makes sleeping Beckham worthy of a place in the National Portrait Gallery, but not a video of him performing his own 'art' playing for Real Madrid?
Portraiture weighs the status of the subject against the skill of the artist. Looking at Taylor Wood's, Beckham video portrait, celebrity can simply be whatever or whomever we choose to celebrate.
6th May 2004