Tacita Dean invites us to slow down in her trio of London exhibitions
This is certainly Tacita Dean’s year. The LA and Berlin-based artist who describes herself as ‘European British’ is being given the unprecedented accolade of three simultaneous shows in three of central London’s major institutions – the National Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy - with an additional exhibition at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery in July.
Dean first came to prominence in the 1990s but her approach was always more reticent and subtly atmospheric than her throat-grabbing YBA contemporaries. She’s best known for her poetic and distinctive 16 and 35mm films and has become a passionate campaigner for the continued production and use of chemical film in the face of digitalisation.
She also works in a wide variety of other media, including large drawings on blackboard, paintings on postcards, photographs, sound works and photogravures.
Each of the London shows are loosely organised according to traditional artistic genres. In its first exhibition to be devoted to the moving image, the National Portrait Gallery is showing her filmed portraits, while at the National Gallery Dean has curated an exhibition of both historical and contemporary works, as well as showing four of her own films all themed around ideas of still life.
Next month the Royal Academy of Arts is inaugurating its new galleries in Burlington Gardens by exploring Dean’s wide use of landscape.
At the National Portrait Gallery you are greeted by a 16mm colour film of David Hockney in his studio, looking through some drawings but mainly just sitting there, smoking incessantly and at the end erupting into harsh laughter as he declares, “It’s very, very enjoyable, smoking. That’s why it won’t go away.”
Other films include Claes Oldenburg in his studio, lovingly inspecting his eclectic knick-knack collection and dusting them with a paintbrush; the poet Michael Hamburger showing the rare apples he has grown in his Suffolk orchard -including those that originated from his friend Ted Hughes; and the artist Mario Merz, who sits in a garden like an ancient deity, holding a pine cone and accompanied by the sound of chirruping cicadas.
As with all Dean’s films these are as much about time and place and the material of film itself; and particulars of circumstance, possessions and atmosphere evoke each of these subjects as much as their individual likeness.
In Gaeta, the series of 50 photographs that line the central passageway through the galleries, Cy Twombly is solely portrayed through the paraphernalia of his studio: the artist himself is absent and conjured up though arrangements of physical objects.
Upstairs in the permanent collection and flanked by cases of Elizabethan miniatures and portraits of Shakespeare and John Donne is a tiny miracle of a film, not much bigger than a smartphone. The title, His Picture in Little, is taken from Hamlet and it portrays three actors who have played the role over three different generations: Ben Whishaw, Stephen Dillane and David Warner.
They don’t do much, just sit, loll and look, but their presence is immediate and intimate – especially when you discover that, although they can appear in the same frame, they were never physically together.
Using the same masking system that she used in her giant film for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2011, Dean shot different sections of the same 35mm frame in different countries and at different times. Coexisting in the celluloid, the trio are compellingly portrayed just being – or perhaps acting – themselves.
On a very different scale, Dean’s particular kind of objective intimacy also charges the epic six-screen portrayal of Merce Cunningham which forms the exhibition’s grand finale. The great dancer and choreographer sits motionless for four minutes, 33 seconds as he performs six different versions of his life partner John Cage’s silent composition, 4’:33”.
It is profoundly moving and in fact far from silent as the outside rumble of New York pours in. The motionless Cunningham is as much a still life as a portrait, as are the of tables full of apples in the Hamburger film, while there’s a whole tradition of romantic landscape in the changing light and effects of weather in the poet’s East Anglian garden, culminating in the arc of a rainbow.
The slippage between genres continues in Still Life over at the National Gallery. Here Dean draws provocative associations between paintings selected from the National Gallery’s collections and other historical and contemporary paintings, as well as her own work.
In a wonderfully mischievous threesome, an early 16th century Italian Head of St John the Baptist on a platter hangs between Thomas Demand’s photograph of a rubber band on two stacked paper plates and an enormous late Philip Guston where a solitary hat seems to sit on a wall. If a head is severed, does it then become a still life rather than a portrait?
Cross-quotes and correspondences from across the centuries gleefully multiply in this two-room exhibition. In a playful avian fest Jacopo de’ Barbari’s 16th century portrayal of a sparrowhawk is joined by Roni Horn’s pair of stuffed owls, while high above Dean has filmed a bird singing its heart out on a telegraph wire, looking as if it could have escaped from Gwen John’s painted cage below.
Wolfgang Tillmans’ photograph of translucent plastic cartons drying on a window sill keeps very happy company with Zurbaran’s exquisite Cup of Water and A Rose, while in a new pair of films Dean dramatically scrutinises the bumps, crags and holes of flints that belonged to Henry Moore which she then pairs with his friend Paul Nash’s painting Event on the Downs.
She wanted to add the 19th century Flints in a Landscape by the Norwich school painter John Crome, but as this wasn't available she has painted her own small version, in gouache on a postcard.
At the heart of the show is the 2008 Prisoner Pair, one of Dean’s most magical films in which two pears gently ferment in separate jars of schnapps. The film moves around their mottled surfaces and the floating motes of their liquefied state of suspension – it should be inert but it is oddly full of life.
There is an additional political undertow when you discover their contested back story with one piece of fruit coming from Alsace and the other from Lorraine.
With Dean there is always a rich backstory and a sense that nothing is stable or certain. We are forced to slow down, meditate on the passing of time and to realise that even the stillest of still lives can simmer with restless potential.
Still Life is at the National Gallery until 28 May, nationalgallery.org.uk; Portrait is at the National Portrait Gallery until 28 May, npg.org.uk; Landscape will be at the Royal Academy from 19 May - 12 August, royalacademy.org.uk
