research: Tacita Dean

Project 2

Research file

Artist:Tacita Dean

capturing the green ray, Tacita Dean 2001

artist infront of Tate turbine hall entitled 'Film' 

Born: 1965 UK

Lives:Berlin with husband artist  

Credentials/labels

Exhibited in Freeze show alongside contemporaries the YBA, more nostalgic

Bio

Artist biography

English draughtsman, photographer and filmmaker. Although trained as a painter, in her early work she showed a predilection for expressive formats more often found in the cinema. Her practice of drawing took on the form of storyboards, a narrative format used in the planning of movies. Her taste for storytelling triggered many of her works, often based on the possibilities raised by chance encounter. Dean gave equal weight to fictional and historical narratives, emphasising their power of evocation: notions of time, memory or nautical elements are part of her personal themes.

Dean's works play poetically on the theme of searching, as well as on the blurred identities of mysterious people or things. Dean's stories embraced the notion of struggle over elements, which explain the recurrence of the sea as a major protagonist in her work. Dean's minimal narratives are imbued with a sense of human failure and never-ending expectation resulting from actions that are curiously both heroic and modest. Some of Dean's later works are reminiscent of the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher in their focus on derelict places endowed with powerful history, as in Sound Mirrors (60 mm black-and-white film, 1999; London, Frith St. Gal.). The quaint and obsolete buildings are the remains of some prototype air-raid warning structures built in 1920; by accompanying the images with ambient sound recorded in 1999, she doubles the act of preservation of those buildings, already saved from destruction in 1988. She was shortlisted for the 1998 Turner Prize.

Themes:

Coincidence… almost a methodology of producing a work, using chance

Blink and you’ll miss it

Quotes:

Process:

“I think a lot of pre-imagined work can be quite inert.”

I proceed illogically. (laughter) But I’m very formal strangely enough. The final manifestation isn’t chaotic, although the process is, I think.

“I never know where I’m going when I cut my films”

Choice of medium:

Film is being lost because it’s about the money, it’s cynical.

Not nostalgic: as this implies things were done better back in the day, it’s not about that it’s about using a medium for it’s worth

 (1)

“Everything that excites me no longer functions in its own time.” (2)

About film analogue vs digital

"The real crux of the difference is that artists exhibit, and so care about the final presentation and presence of the artwork in the space. Other professions have their work mediated into different formats: TV, magazines, billboards, books. It remains only in galleries and museums that the physical encounter is so critical, which is why artists, in the widest sense, are the most distressed by the obsolescence of analogue mediums.”

"I GRADE MY FILMS WARM"

Others Opinions:

Of her Tate turbine hall installation:

A joyful, resplendent meditation on the mediums of film and photography—Dean’s signature theme—

The artist’s conceit is that the space in which one stands is both host and subject, and this makes for a loaded viewing experience.

The children’s joy reiterated that of the adult viewers, who were invited to remember the wonder and decisive presence of celluloid.  (3)

known for her serious-minded, beautiful, patiently paced film (5)

My thoughts:

·      Like how articulate she is: she’s not dressing up or pontificating

·      Like the idea of following an idea, coincidences and the honest narrative of her work

·      Like her defense of the importance of film vs digital-use of masking, anamorphic lenses, how she works alone

·      Meditative quality of work
·      Warm use of colour, referencing the past

Biography:

1. ACCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dOEXl_3lzI

2.Bomb Magazine: interview Jeffrey Eugnenides

http://bombmagazine.org/article/2801/tacita-dean

3.http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/tacita-dean/:

REV IEWS FEB. 16, 2012 Tacita Dean LONDON,

at Tate Modern

by Charlotte Cotton

4.http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/feb/22/tacita-dean-16mm-film

5.Adrian Searle http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/oct/10/tacita-dean-film-review
6. http://www.necsus-ejms.org/the-last-ray-of-the-dying-sun-tacita-deans-commitment-to-analogue-media-as-demonstrated-through-floh-and-film/