Audio Guide Transcript Tate Britain curator Chris Stephens on Taste by Joe Tilson, from 1967:
"This work is one of a series of five similar large transparencies - each one looking at the 5 senses, and each one shows a close-up
of part of the human body.
This one, Taste, looks at a woman's mouth.
As you can see it's partly open, richly coloured with lipstick, but what one sees beyond the teeth is a sort of starry sky.
It's a highly realistic photograph that he's reproducing but he's adding this slightly mysterious, fanciful element as well.
It's one of a number of works Tilson made that took the form of a 35mm slide, and he plays with the form of the slide, putting his name
on the mount, sometimes copying exactly the design of certain brands of slides.
And I think what he's doing there is partly commenting on the very conspicuous presence of reproduction in 60s culture.
Like a lot of artists he was very interested in the way photography disseminated images, which with the growth of colour magazines in
the 60s was very much a powerful presence.
And he deliberately draws attention to that here by including the edges of the preceding and following frame of the film, so you know
this is one of a sequence of shots of this mouth, so he sort of emphasises the repetition of it.
So it draws out the sense that a kind of sexy presence can be suggested by very little, just the slightly open, conspicuously made-up
woman's mouth.
I suppose they're also part of a tradition of lips standing for something sexual - often a celebrity, I'm thinking of Salvador Dali's
Mae West sofa, or Willem de Kooning cut out I think Marilyn Monroe's lips and sort of collaged them into his paintings of women at
the beginning of the 1950s."
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