Lights off. Projector on. A whirring sound that precedes the first frame. This cinematic experience is something that few of us meet with nowadays, but one which the British artist Tacita Dean still thrives on.In this, she cuts a singular figure.Dean’s work calls for contemplation and demands aninvestment of time on the part of the viewer. In the same waythat her camera observes her subjects — which are often people, interiors, landscapes, details of objects — in alanguorous fashion, so it invites us to slow down, an uneasy feat in this age of instant gratification. So it is both surprising and fitting that she is now the de facto star of“Tacita Dean: LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT, STILL LIFE” —not one but three exhibitions, two of which are being heldconcurrently at London’s National Portrait Gallery andNational Gallery, on view from March 15 to May 28, with the Royal Academy of Arts to follow from May 19 to August 12. Anew collaboration between all three institutions, the exhibitions are an open invitation for Dean — who appears both as artist and curator — to respond to these classical genres through the prism of her own practice and that of her cont emporaries.Born in Canterbury in 1965, educated at Falmouth and London’s Slade School of Art (where she studied painting before committing herself to film), Dean first started gaining traction as an artist in the early 1990s.This was the period of the YBAs — of Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, Damien Hirst’s animals floating in tanks of formal dehyde. The art — and artists — of the moment were loud, brash, attention-grabbing. Not so Dean. Her work, which consists mainly of 16mm and 35mm film but also spans to photograph vures, blackboard and chalk-spray drawings, is known for its simplicity, silence and formal elegance. There is a tenderness to it. And her mediumof choice — film — which has been teetering on the brink of extinction for the past decade, sets her in a different temporal zone to her contemporaries.It’s been a while since Dean, who is based in Berlin, hashad a show in her home country. Her last big project was the Turbine Hall commission at London’s Tate Modern in 2011,for which she developed “FILM” (2011). The simplicity of itsname belied its status as a virtuo so feat of editing that read like an open love letter to the aesthetic, formal and philosophical potential of film. Presented in the cavernous space of the Turbine Hall, “FILM” was both an homage to analogue filmmaking and a mourning of a form whose existence is increasingly threatened by digital technologies.It is probably Dean’s most spectacular work to date, in the most literal sense of the word, and the one in which we are made most aware of the medium’s physical properties.Projected on to a large, vertical screen, the 11-minute silent“film” was deliberately framed by sprocket holes and Dean made use of the whole plethora of old-fashioned techniques— from glass matte painting to masking and multiple exposures — to achieve its ever-changing series of images gleaned from nature and the architecture of the Turbine Hall itself.“If film is a medium that seemingly lacks a physical presence or substance, and is instead one which flickers and fades phant as magorically before us and then persists largely in the memory, then this immateriality is echoed in Dean’s films, capturing that which is fugitive or fleeting — light changing, places or people before they vanish, time passing,”said Dr. Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery. Having previously worked with Tacita Dean on“FILM,” he was one of the initiators of the tripartite collaboration.Indeed, Dean’s work invariably hints at mortality, age and the passage of time. In “Michael Hamburger” (2007), whichhad been commissioned partly as a response to WG Sebald’s novel “The Rings of Saturn,” she filmed the poet in his Suffolk home a year before his death. An earlier work,“Mario Merz” (2002), is a study of the normally taciturn Italian artist sitting beneath a tree’s shadow in the summer heat and contemplating his own mortality.And her sixscreen2008 installation “Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS…”, as its name suggests, is a performance of quiet force as the octogenarian choreographer holds his posein “tune” with his long-term partner and collaborator JohnCage’s silent composition “4’ 33”, ” slightly shifting position tomark each of its three movements. So much of what Dean captures on film is the minutiae that surrounds her subjects— the texture of old walls, close-ups of hands, half-open doorways — but the sum of them results in intimate portraits where you can feel the artist’s empathy for her subject.While Dean’s art is shot through with intimacy, it also has a predilection for the sublime, a concept that, since it wasfirst voiced in the 18th century, has been associated with the experience of awe when confronted with the natural world.One of her earliest pieces, “Disappearance at Sea” (1996),which was inspired by the story of the British business man Donald Crowhurst’s failed sea voyage around the world, is a14-minute film that simply captures the progression of light from dusk to nightfall as experienced by looking out on thewater from a lighthouse in the north of England. “Trying tofind the Spiral Jetty” (1997), a sound work from the sameperiod, is, ultimately, less concerned with the artist’s failedattempt at finding Robert Smithson’s elusive Land Art sculpture on the shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, than withthe sense of transcendence the journey generates.Dean shows a similar reverence for less exotic ventures.For “Majesty” (2006), she took a black-and-white photograph of one of the largest and oldest oak trees in England. She then enlarged the print and over painted the area surrounding thetrunk and branches with white gouache. Using the official name of the tree as the title of the work, “Majesty” issimultaneously a portrait, a testament to endurance, and areminder that, when it comes to artistic concerns,Contemporary artists still have much in common with their predecessors. As Bart Cornelis, a curator of Dutch andFlemish Paintings at The National Gallery, and curator of“Tacita Dean: STILL LIFE” pointed out, “Anyone who hasever walked an Old Master gallery with a Contemporary artist will notice how they are still fascinated by the very same visual problems that occupied the Old Masters.”If this fascination with old stories and anachronistic, olds chool techniques ties Dean’s work unfashionably to the past,it is less to do with a feeling of nostalgia and a desire toreturn to some idealized version of the past, than with the more Romantic connotations of “longing and pining,” Cornelissaid. Although Dean’s art has previously been characterized as nostalgic, or belonging to “Romantic Conceptualism,”Desiree de Chair, curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, isalso quick to point out that she has less of an obsession withthe past than may be surmised: “In order to be forward looking,you have to consider history.” The challenge that Dean has taken on might signal her biggest reckoning with history yet. MP
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