ART-PRESENTATION: Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean, Antigone (Film still), 2018, 2 synchronised 35 mm colour anamorphic films, optical sound, with a running time of exactly 60 min, continuous loop synced to start on the hour, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris, and Frith Street Gallery, LondonTacita Dean is one of the most important artists working today. Her subject matter is often historical, touching on memory and empathy, the forces of nature and the traces left behind by humanity. Her works, from her early chalk on blackboard drawings to her four or more leaf clover collection, round stones, and found postcard interventions become ardent witnesses to a lost past, and the desire to capture, in imagery, the incomprehensible. Dean’s works in film also demonstrate her insistence on a medium’s materiality reinforcing her stance against a work’s arbitrary and careless exhibition.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunsthaus Bregenz Archive

The extensive Tacita Dean’s exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz include three of her most significant film works” “FILM” (2011), her six film installation “Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS…” (2008), “Antigone” (2018).  On the ground floor of Kunsthaus Bregenz visitors encounter two monumental chalk drawings. Using white chalk on a blackboard surface, Dean has drawn a mountain landscape as sublime and impressive as the story that gave the work its title. In the 17th century, an avalanche fell in the mountain valley of Montafon, south of Vorarlberg. Legend has it that a priest, while blessing the dead was himself then buried by a second avalanche only to be miraculously uncovered by a third. Dean has just completed a second, similarly monumental drawing especially for Kunsthaus Bregenz called “Chalk Fall” (2018), which depicts the collapse of a chalk cliff, while at the same time mirroring the fall of white on white in “The Montafon Letter”.  Whilst the sky and mountain ridges, forces and fissures, and the vast expanses and subsuming gloom of these works might recall the tradition of great English landscape painters like Constable and Turner, Dean’s works are also very human in that the images are covered with Dean’s handwritten notes that maybe read as both scars on nature, as well as instructions for viewing. The extensive exhibition a include three of her most significant film works, screened across three floors. “Antigone” (2018), is Tacita Dean’s most recent and most elaborate film project, which premiered in the spring of 2018 in the new Burlington Garden spaces at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, “Antigone” is an hour-long dual synchronised 35 mm film projection. Based on the mythical figure Antigone, which is also the name of the artist’s sister, the film addresses time, transience and the mythological, as well as the materiality of film itself. Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, led her blind and lame father out of Thebes through the wilderness to Colonus. Celebrating natural phenomena such as light and the sky, Tacita Dean transports viewers from Bodmin Moor in England to Yellowstone Park and the rangelands of Wyoming where she filmed a rare solar eclipse on 21/8/2017. Using her own aperture gate masking system that mimics the movement of the moon by partially obscuring each frame, Dean exposed the same frame of negative multiple times, combining different places and times within a single picture, similar to how images from one’s own memories and experiences can merge together with mythologies and present events to become one. In “Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS…” six screens glimmer within the darkened space of the second floor. They all display Merce Cunningham. The dancer, a master of movement, sits motionless in a mirrored dance studio, his fingertips touching in a posture reminiscent of the earliest days of photography when long exposure times were necessary. Cunningham performs 4’33”, his partner John Cage’s most famous work, a piece of music without sound that celebrates silence. Cunningham shifts his pose for each movement of the three-part piece. Tacita Dean’s homage is part of a series of film portraits of artists, including David Hockney, Julie Mehretu, Claes Oldenburg and Cy Twombly. It is the advanced age of the dancer’s body that we are aware of: his thoughtful concentration and serene calm. Merce Cunningham died aged 90 in 2009. “FILM” 2011, on the third floor, as its self-referential title suggests is a portrait of the medium of film. Made for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2011, as part of the Unilever Series of commissions, at a time when photochemical film was in danger of disappearing, the work is a celebration of the materiality and the specific atmospheric qualities of film. Dean constructed this silent portrait-format film using various early film techniques that included masking in the gate, glass matte painting, backdrops and hand-colouring. Also referencing the east wall of the Turbine Hall itself, the images are like frames of film with sprockets and are intensely illuminated, their colours glowing like the strata of rock. The film has the quality of the iris of an eye, dilating with light to become a brilliant animated surface.

Info: Kunsthaus Bregenz, Karl-Tizian-Platz, Bregenz, Duration: 20/10/18-6/1/19, Tue-Wed & Fri-sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at

Tacita Dean, Antigone (Film still), 2018, 2 synchronised 35 mm colour anamorphic films, optical sound, with a running time of exactly 60 min, continuous loop synced to start on the hour, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris, and Frith Street Gallery, London
Tacita Dean, Antigone (Film still), 2018, 2 synchronised 35 mm colour anamorphic films, optical sound, with a running time of exactly 60 min, continuous loop synced to start on the hour, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, and Frith Street Gallery-London

 

 

Tacita Dean, Antigone (Film still), 2018, 2 synchronised 35 mm colour anamorphic films, optical sound, with a running time of exactly 60 min, continuous loop synced to start on the hour, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris, and Frith Street Gallery, London
Tacita Dean, Antigone (Film still), 2018, 2 synchronised 35 mm colour anamorphic films, optical sound, with a running time of exactly 60 min, continuous loop synced to start on the hour, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, and Frith Street Gallery-London

 

 

Tacita Dean, Chalk Fall, 2018 , Chalk on blackboard; 9 panels, 366 x 732 cm; each panel 121.9 x 243.8 cm, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, and Frith Street Gallery-London
Tacita Dean, Chalk Fall, 2018 , Chalk on blackboard; 9 panels, 366 x 732 cm; each panel 121.9 x 243.8 cm, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, and Frith Street Gallery-London

 

 

Left & Right: Tacita Dean, FILM, 2011, 35 mm colour and black & white portrait format anamorphic film with hand tinted sequences, silent, continuous loop, 11 min, Installation view Tate Modern-London, Photo: Marcus Leith & Andrew Dunkley, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, and Frith Street Gallery-London
Left & Right: Tacita Dean, FILM, 2011, 35 mm colour and black & white portrait format anamorphic film with hand tinted sequences, silent, continuous loop, 11 min, Installation view Tate Modern-London, Photo: Marcus Leith & Andrew Dunkley, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, and Frith Street Gallery-London

 

 

Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS … (six performances, six films), 2008, 6 x 16 mm colour films, optical sound, approx. 5 min. each, Installation view National Portrait Gallery-London, Photo: Ben Westoby, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, and Frith Street Gallery-London
Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS … (six performances, six films), 2008, 6 x 16 mm colour films, optical sound, approx. 5 min. each, Installation view National Portrait Gallery-London, Photo: Ben Westoby, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, and Frith Street Gallery-London

 

 

Tacita Dean, The Montafon Letter, 2017, Chalk on blackboard, 9 panels, 366 x 732 cm, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, and Frith Street Gallery-London
Tacita Dean, The Montafon Letter, 2017, Chalk on blackboard, 9 panels, 366 x 732 cm, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio, © Tacita Dean, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, and Frith Street Gallery-London