Future historians wanting an insight into the lives of privileged, late-20th-century urbanites will do well to take a look at Sam Taylor-Wood's series Five Revolutionary Seconds. These panoramic, richly detailed, 360-degree photographs - taken over a number of years, mostly in the homes of friends and colleagues - lay bare the inner sanctums of the Wallpaper*-reading classes. Here are Clerkenwell penthouses and Hoxton loft conversions, faux-oriental Notting Hill villas and arty Kensington drawing rooms, interiors whose opulence is further increased by their presentation in a kind of ultra-CinemaScope. They're the antithesis of Richard Billingham's snapshots of his family in their Midlands council flat - whereas Billingham's lot muck along in cramped, high-kitsch squalor ("middle-class porn", one critic called it), the inhabitants of these World of Interiors centrefolds seem isolated, awkward, distracted, self-involved. Their surroundings, so elegant, so highly cultured and so beautifully arranged, are little more than designer crypts.
As a chronicler of a certain type of postmodern, urban, middle-class disaffection, Taylor-Wood has sometimes been condemned for her refusal to criticise or take a stance. In her own comments, she has done little to defend herself, in the manner typical of the passive fatalism of her Young British Artist peers ("why offer hope when in many instances there isn't any hope? I'm showing things how they are"). And yet, there are times in this exhibition when there doesn't seem much distance between Taylor-Wood (who tends to be treated by the critics as something of a lightweight) and Bill Viola (who is treated with the utmost reverence). Both use technology - mostly film for Taylor-Wood, mostly video for Viola - to make works that show people at moments of great pressure or emotional intensity. Both like to operate on a heroic scale, and both have attempted modern versions of specifically Christian themes. Both also sometimes veer into drama workshop territory, and both have an occasional tendency towards slickness or prettiness.
Where they differ is in the general emotional tenor of their work. With Viola, there is always a sense of transcendence, deliverance or transformation (I am thinking specifically of his show last summer at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in London). Taylor-Wood, on the other hand, doesn't get our hopes up. Viola's diving figures appear to be surging from one world to the next, whilst Taylor-Wood's characters, sometimes in their own way no less heroic, seem locked in an exitless limbo.
In one particularly extreme case - Noli Me Tangere (1998) - a two-sided film creates the illusion of a huge man struggling, with groans and muscle strain worthy of Atlas, to hold the gallery ceiling up. Brontosaurus (1995) offers a slightly more ambiguous vision of entrapment, overlaying the balletic gyrations of a naked raver with the incongruously mournful strains of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. He can dance as much as he likes but, unlike Viola's cosmic bathers, his feet remain resolutely on the ground. Similarly effective use of music is made in Killing Time (1994), in which four figures on four different screens mime the words to Richard Strauss's Elektra without the slightest flicker of interest or enthusiasm. One way of reading this would be to see these loafers as typical western decadents, superficially familiar with, yet utterly unmoved by, the glories of their culture. But look at it another way and Killing Time could be seen to be ascribing all the grandiose passions of the opera to, well, just sitting around doing nothing. Viola's transcendence is opposed by Taylor-Wood's immanence, the beautiful entirely embodied in the mundane and everyday.
Another link between the two artists is their use of flat, framed plasma screens to create high-tech versions of traditional artworks. If the portraits in Viola's show at Anthony d'Offay injected new life into Christian Passion paintings, Taylor-Wood does the same for another genre with Still Life (2001). The twist here is that the "painting" has its own in-built obsolescence, the fruit growing a pale halo of mould and then rotting in front of your eyes. There is another still life in Third Party (1999), a kind of virtual booze-up split up on to a number of screens surrounding you on all sides. One screen shows Marianne Faithfull looking rough and partied-out, while on another, Ray Winstone lets his cigarette burn down to a stub as he watches his girlfriend (on yet another screen) flirt with a stranger. More dislocation and alienation, you might think, and yet the screen displaying a magnified close-up of wineglasses, beer cans and ash-flicking fingers strikes an unexpected note of beauty. With this little tableau vivant, Taylor-Wood has made of a genre as seemingly outmoded as the still life something modern, magical and utterly alive.
"Sam Taylor-Wood" is at the Hayward Gallery, South Bank, London SE1 (020 7960 4242) until 21 June
