 |
| Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 |
Even though Tacita Dean has retained a certain consistency
to her work over the past fifteen years, my enthusiasm for some pieces has
always been greater than it has for others. Her latest installation at Marian
Goodman in the Marais is complicated and dense, making it tempting to sit
watching the looped film of JG for
hours. For me, it’s perhaps one of the more challenging and interesting works
in her oeuvre.
 |
| Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 Film Still |
Before going downstairs to the film, in the main gallery, a
series of photographs “around” the film is exhibited. A salt encrusted book in one
photograph is both aesthetically mesmerizing, and frightening. Salt is one of
those substances that is everywhere, and it is deadly. Salt not only clogs the
arteries, but it creates thirst and negates the effects of the water it
salinates. It is like an evil disease that has entrapped the book. But salt,
for Dean, in this photograph, is also delicate, gentle, and it is all about
time. The evidence of a book that was once in the salt lakes tells of a book found
in water that has apparently dried up long ago. Salt goes nowhere in the aging
process, salt simply cakes all that falls into it. And yet, it preserves the
book, keeping it safe for generations, safe from the ruinous effects of water.
 |
| Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 Film Still |
The JG in the
installation’s title refers to J G Ballard, the science-fiction writer who
influenced Dean’s meditations on time, preservation, water, salt and sun. Dean
and Ballard shared a passion for Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, built in Utah’s Great Salt Lake in 1970. Apparently
Dean and Ballard exchanged a series of letters that discussed the resonances
and resemblances between Ballard’s The
Voices of Time and Smithson’s spiral jetty. Unlike other of Dean’s films, JG has a voiceover, Jim Broadbent
reading what I assume to be these letters.
 |
| Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 Film Still |
The press release describes Dean’s film thus: “JG is an astonishing kaleidoscopic
experimental film, which could never have been made using a digital format, its
beauty is unique to the abilities of analogue film.” And it’s not only the aesthetic,
but I was struck how all of Dean’s concerns are laced into the form and
ontology of light sensitive analogic film. The passing of time, the
preservation of memories (in saline), a spiral jetty as a way to engage with
nature and its processes all become transformed into an endless loop of film. She
says of The Spiral Jetty and
Ballard’s story that they resonate, "not just because they were made or written when spooling and reeling were the means to record and transmit images and sound, but because their spiraling is analogous to time itself." As indeed is her 35mm anamorphic film. At some point in the
film we see workers handling heavy industry, and somehow, this is appropriate
to the medium of film in a way that it is not to the digital. Work, production,
industrialization, all are the territory of a type of filmmaking unknown to the
21st century. We see the passing of time, the freezing of time, the
endless motion, the arcane and the archaic in the very images that capture it.
 |
| Tacita Dean, JG, 2013 Installation View |
In one of the most fascinating aspects of JG, Dean has developed a new technical
process that further reinforces the richness and uniqueness, as well as the
indispensability of 35mm film. Dean’s process, called aperture gate masking, is
analogous to a form of stenciling. Apparently, it “allows her to use different
shaped masks to expose and re-expose the negative within a single film frame.
This requires running the unexposed film through the camera multiple times,
giving each frame the capacity to traverse time and location in ways that
parallel the effects of Ballard’s fiction and Smithson’s earthwork and film.”
It could only be done with film.
There is something nostalgic about this reveling in
techniques and processes that are so breathtakingly gorgeous, to represent a
landscape that is likewise mesmerizing, both of which, have become obsolete.
Film and the spiral of Smithson’s artwork are gone, they have not been
preserved in sale. As Dean’s film oscillates between shots of nature, a
tripartite film strip, and the irrigation of the land, it’s as though she
captures the contradictions of these three different, extinct sites of wonder
and amazement.
All images copyright the artist and Frith Street Gallery
No comments:
Post a Comment