Saturday, February 22, 2014

Tacita Dean, JG, @ Marian Goodman Galerie



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

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