Time Has Told Me

How does an artist move on from one work to the next? For many of the 20th-century’s Modernist figures there was a standard model of progressive development. The artist would be involved with a never-ending struggle with their medium; each new work would temporarily answer a problem set by the previous one, and pose in turn a challenge for the next. Of course, art historians contest this schema by attending to an artist’s repressions and returns, yet the image of linear progression still basically holds good for many 20th-century artists. But how well could it account for the changing work of, say, Pierre Huyghe, or Aleksandra Mir, or Jeremy Deller? If we ask how they move from one work to the next, it is certainly not obviously a matter of formal development – more a constant set of concerns, explored in totally diverse projects.
Neither the Modernist model of linear development nor the more recent model of scattered diversity can describe the structure of Tacita Dean’s body of work. Certainly every new piece makes sense in its immediate context, but it also, more interestingly, forms links with much earlier ones, illuminating them as if from new angles and unlocking ideas or meanings for the first time. I’d like to say that Dean’s oeuvre is structured like a spider’s web, but that suggests something too orderly, too economic; it’s more like Eva Hesse’s Untitled rope piece (1970) – a web that’s a tangle.
The earliest of Dean’s works shown this autumn in London was her film Baobab, shot in Madagascar in 2002. The artist was on the island to record a solar eclipse for the film Diamond Ring (2002), her interest driven after cloudy weather partially dulled the Cornish eclipse that is the subject of her film Banewl, which she had made three years previously. Initially she had no intention of filming the baobab trees, which she simply came across by chance. As in most of Dean’s films, camera movement in Baobab is minimal; the film is a composite, as if the lens were simply collecting views, not wanting to choose between dramatic and more placid ones. At the beginning and end are distant shots showing the extraordinary shapes of the trees in the mid-ground between the sky and a plain, intermittently grazed by a herd of loud, lowing cows. The black and white tones of the film are fully exploited: the shots in the middle include viewpoints looking from the ground up – one tree shining white, the other shaded to a rich, deep grey. Sometimes the camera’s examination is so close that the surface of the tree resembles giant warts or the leathery folds of an elephant’s skin.
Mario Merz (2002) is an eight-minute portrait of the Italian artist, whom Dean happened to meet in San Gimignano while she was busy on another work (the first set of ‘Alabaster Drawings’, 2002). As the film begins, Merz declares ‘l’attore e seduto’ (‘the actor is seated’) but then quickly settles into doing nothing much. He gestures, chuckles and mumbles, his words almost drowned out by the sound of the cicadas, which create a constant, pulsing music throughout the film. His hands turn over a pine cone – an appropriate prop given the significance of the Fibonacci sequence in his work. If the traditional task of a portrait is to give a clear picture of a figure and their authority, this portrait of the artist as an old man crumbles in the making. Without the auto-adjust that renders digital cameras unflinchingly efficient in changing light, here, as the light shifts, Merz is either shaded to obscurity by the overhanging pine or, in a short yet stunning shot, back-lit so his silver hair glows like a halo. The closest and most warmly illuminated view of his face comes towards the end of the film, but it is here that the sense of disintegration is made explicit: funeral bells sound, and Merz seems distracted, picking his teeth, rubbing his brow. Of course, it’s now impossible to view this film without thinking of the artist’s recent death, but the passage is poignantly personal – the signs of anxiety his initial bravado sought to dispel are evident. There’s a final shot of the pine cone, now discarded and lying on the floor – a still life standing in place of the absent figure.
The subjects of both Baobab and Mario Merz were encountered unexpectedly and yet are unmistakably grandiose. Pie (2003) – images of magpies in a tree that Dean filmed from her Berlin window – exists on a very different register. The sky shifts without logic between an eerie blue and a hazy sunset orange. In one clip there are three silhouetted birds; in the next, a single one, recalling the children’s rhyme ‘one for sorrow’ and the numerical sequences beloved of Merz. It is futile to try and detect a structure: the film is like an everyday sketch, something made while grander projects are coming to fruition.
One such project was Boots (2003), which comprises three films. During her show at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Oporto, Dean was attracted to a dilapidated modern villa in the grounds completed in 1940 by the Marques da Silva, which had been used to house exhibitions but was now due for renovation. She decided to film the villa’s spaces, with a voice-over by her sister’s godfather, a family friend nicknamed Boots – so called because of the orthopaedic shoe he wore (the uneven thump and tap of his footsteps and walking sticks resonate around the empty rooms). Boots plays the part of a former guest of the villa returning as if after years of absence, and in each film his invented recollections are voiced in a different language – English, French or German. For reasons known only to himself Boots describes memories of the unorthodox sex his character had in the house, words we hear over a shot from which he’s absent, showing light falling across the wooden floor of an achingly empty room. The villa is by no means austere – the pink marbled bathroom has gilded scallop-shaped light fittings – but part of the fascination of Boots’ words is their unexpectedness in such a context. In Compulsive Beauty (1993) Hal Foster wrote that ‘functionalism [in architecture] is about discipline: it breaks down the domestic body into functions and assigns them to antiseptic space; the result is a house type with scant allowance for history, sexuality, and the unconscious. Surrealism is about desire: in order to allow it back into architecture it fixes on the outmoded and the ornamental, the very forms tabooed in such functionalism.’1 While Boots’ very presence saves the film from being a formal, if rather wonderful, study of the shapes and shadows of the villa, his words enact the eruption of a Surrealist sensibility within the refined space of its Modernist other.