More than a decade has passed since Tacita Dean staged her immense work FILM in Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall – a work she described as an act of mourning for the demise of film and an argument for its future.
When we meet, Dean appears at least temporarily out of mourning for the medium which has earned her multiple international accolades, and seen her named by Washington Post art critic, Blake Gopnik, as one of the 10 most important artists of today.
It’s early December and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is poised to hit US$1bn in global box office earnings, making it the most successful biographical film of all time. US$17m of that was earned from just 30 70mm Imax screens around the world, while millions more watched the film in standard 70mm or 35mm.
“So many people rejected the digital version of the film and lined up to see it in [analogue] film,” says Dean, in Sydney to launch her major solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
“It means studios are now thinking there’s profit in 70mm, and if Hollywood sees profit it will keep film alive …
“I need film negative and print, and I need the film industry to continue to use it. I’m too small a unit to keep the industry going. So we’re still relying very much on the entertainment industry.”
The British Turner-shortlisted artist has long campaigned for the protection of physical film, and in 2015 she appeared with Nolan at an event in LA on the medium’s future. Kodak’s chief executive, Jeff Clarke, joined the panel, scotching rumours that the firm was poised to cease production of all film, as Fujifilm had done two years earlier.
“Film has long been – and will remain – a vital part of our culture,” Clarke said. The same year Kodak brokered a new agreement with Hollywood, with five major studios signing a commitment to buy Kodak film for the foreseeable future.
Any suggestion to convert her art to digital is anathema to Dean. “If [analogue] film is rubbed out, I can draw, I can write, I can paint. I don’t need to make that compromise.”
Dean’s name is so synonymous with film it is easy to overlook the drawing, printmaking and collage which also comprises her vast oeuvre. These mediums feature in the MCA exhibition, alongside seven installations that pay homage to photochemical film.
Dean’s films themselves can be difficult to parse; in 2001, Guardian art critic Adrian Searle described them as “an art of circumnavigations, of passes and returns”, and in the New Yorker in 2011 Emily Eakin wrote of her work’s “elegiac tone”, calling her “an anatomist of passing time”.
But recurring motifs pervade – the sea and its ability to overwhelm human life, the clouds, the human foot, the tragic Greek heroine Antigone (her sister shares the ancient name), beards (a symbol of patriarchal power), waterfalls and lighthouses.
The director of the MCA, Suzanne Cotter, has been following Dean’s career since the late 1990s, when the curator was working at London’s Serpentine Gallery and the artist was showing her early work at the Frith Street Gallery.
Cotter saw much of Dean’s earliest work at a time when she was inaccurately assigned by the art world to the group known as the YBAs – Young British Artists, or Brit Artists, the often art-in-your-face clique including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Douglas Gordon.
Cotter was there at Dean’s first survey in Basel’s Museum für Gegenwartskunst in 2000, and at another major solo show at the Guggenheim six years later. She began acquiring Dean works while she was director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, from 2013 to 2017.
“I’ve been there at every major moment of her work, so it feels like I’ve accompanied her through her career as a curator,” says Cotter. “I’ve been able to not only observe and appreciate the trajectory of her career as an artist, but also appreciate the fullness of her career and what she’s become as an artist. And I like to think that this exhibition is an expression of that breadth and depth.”
The MCA show is not a retrospective. Dean would need three museums to comprehensively survey the output of almost four decades, says Cotter – something which did actually happen in 2018, when London’s National Gallery, the Royal Academy and the National Portrait Gallery presented three Dean solo shows simultaneously.
Part of the International Art Series, which has recently brought major exhibitions of Louise Bourgeois and Wassily Kandinsky to Sydney, the MCA instead concentrates on Dean’s body of work created in the past decade, with a few dips into the early years.
It includes works created when Dean was an art student at Falmouth University and Slade School of Fine Art, some which has never been exhibited before. The artist refers to the works as “my juvenilia”.
“It’s very, very early work, but it was kind of fascinating to see how I hadn’t changed very much at all really.”
The exhibition showcases three key chapters of Dean’s life, beginning in 2014 with a collection of hand-drawn lithographs created while artist in residence at the Getty Research Institute, showing her fascination with the California sky; then her Dante Project phase in 2021, where she designed the Royal Ballet’s reimagining of The Devine Comedy in collaboration with British choreographer and director Wayne McGregor (the 35mm CinemaScope film which screens in the final act of the ballet is part of the Sydney exhibition); and finally the very recent Geography Biography, billed as Dean’s most personal work to date.
This is Geography Biography’s second public screening, after its debut in Paris’s Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection earlier this year. Dean describes it as her “accidental self-portrait”: a diptych film collage from the artist’s cutting room floor, splicing outtakes from early Super and standard 8mm footage with 16mm films, and embedded with more ephemera collected over the years.
We see Super 8 footage of a summer storm in south west France; 35mm footage of a friend’s baby’s foot; 16mm footage of her son Rufus, six months old basking in the Irish sun. These moving images are intercut with stills of 1920s sepia postcards – a frozen Niagara Falls, an Austrian edelweiss flower – and personal photographs (Dean wearing a fake beard in the early 1990s; her husband, artist Matthew Hale, celebrating his birthday.) Screened on two four-metre-high projections, these ever-changing collages offer a personal history conveyed through fleeting images, which also speaks to the transitory nature of the medium.
On a more reflective and poignant level is the photograph Small Sakura Study, capturing the fragility of a cherry blossom tree with its branches supported by crutches. Taken earlier this year, it is a portrait of the famous Jindai-Zakura tree, thought to be up to 2,000 years old, in Yamanashi, Japan.
Also part of this series are two chalk on blackboard monochromes of majestic proportions, The Wreck of Hope created in 2022, and Chalk Fall, created four years earlier.
The Wreck of Hope suggests a colossal glacier, receding in front of the viewer, a simultaneous reflection on nature’s might and fragility. Chalk Fall, created in 2019, evokes the crumbling cliffs of Dover; it is Dean’s response to Brexit, and what she sees as the geopolitical rot that now gnaws at her home country.
“It was the most stupid, terrible thing to have happen and it had a real impact on my life,” she says. Dean was living on Los Angeles with her husband and son when Britain split from Europe. The family had relocated from Berlin, where they had been based since 2000.
“We moved to California as Europeans and then halfway through our time there we lost our right to be Europeans.
“It’s like Britain shot itself in the foot,” Dean says with a hint of disgust. “And now the sepsis is setting in.”
The Tacita Dean exhibition is showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney until 3 March 2024
