Tacita Dean: Schaulager, Basel.
Quandt, James
DESCENDING TO THE BASEMENT of the Schaulager--Herzog & de
Meuron's sand-encrusted bunker with its slashing gash of a
window--one was beset by a sound that seemed oddly antique, like that of
typewriter keys or rotary phone dials: the whir and clatter of a film
projector. It was apparent in that sound, now threatened with
obsolescence, that Tacita Dean's retrospective (organized by
Theodora Vischer) was called "Analogue" for both polemical and
nostalgic reasons. "Analogue, it seems, is a description," the
artist writes in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, "a
description, in fact, of all things I hold dear." Dean's
fidelity to 16-mm film and its bulky, outmoded apparatus, as digital
technology quickly renders them obsolete, defines her art and her
outlook; the materiality of the medium seems a bulwark against a
fast-advancing future where imagery is insubstantial, endlessly
transmutable, there but not there. Dean is no loon or Luddite in her
lost-cause allegiance to celluloid. As the poet of imperiled sites,
abandoned dwellings, defunct technology, and architectural relics, she
is at once an English romantic, an aesthetic descendant of Turner,
Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Michael Powell, and a recalcitrant
materialist. She adheres to the concrete and quantifiable even as her
artworks often proceed from found objects, chance events, and
coincidences, and her films rely on evanescent, unpredictable nature for
their mysterious beauty--twilight skies tinted mint, rose, peach, and
darkling purple (Boots, 2003; Fernsehturm, 2001); blackbirds gathering
to ominous mass in the dusk (Pie, 2003); a triptych of grass, trees, and
sky invaded by lowing cows (Baobab, 2002); seascapes roiling and
becalmed (Bubble House, 1999; Sound Mirrors, 1999); late afternoon light
glowing molten on glass or burnished wood (Fernsehturm; Boots; Palast,
2004).
Nowhere is Dean's adherence to analogue--a precise and
palpable "this-ness" in a world increasingly dematerializing
in a blizzard of pixels--more marked than in her latest film, Kodak,
2006, which received its premiere in the first of six islands in the
Schaulager installation. Dean seems inspired to new heights by the very
imminence of her medium's disappearance. A record of a production
cycle for soon-to-be-extinct celluloid film at Kodak Industrie in
Chalon-sur-Saone, France, Kodak is a meta-lament, its subject the end of
the material on which the film's being and beauty are dependent. By
documenting this demise with exquisite precision, Dean shows us just
what we'll be missing when celluloid has ceded to digital. (In
this, Dean echoes Godard's Eloge de l'amour [2001], the first
half of which is shot in dense, sumptuous 35 mm, the second in
juddering, swimmy DV.) More rhythmic than many of her films--it relies
less on straight cuts, more on associative editing--Kodak at times
recalls David Rimmer's classic Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper
(1970) and its transformation of industrial process into abstract,
choreographed motion. Shifting from black and white to crisp, saturated
color, populated shots to empty ones, intercutting pristine symmetries
in medium or long shot with defamiliarizing close-ups, Kodak turns the
factory's gears, shafts, and drums into Moholy-Nagy compositions of
fathomless beauty, its fixtures and white-suited employees into a
Mondrian boogie-woogie of primary colors. As the celluloid traverses six
miles of machinery, Dean's aestheticizing eye concentrates on
texture, color, found design: Flavin-like red lozenges of overhead
lighting; a cobalt drum parked next to a copper one; a strip of blue
celluloid with a beveled edge crowding three-quarters of the image, a
diagonal shaft of white light arranged behind it; a trio of symmetrical
metal tubes rolling ribbons of pinkish film; an undulating surface that
appears to be aqueous but turns out to be celluloid--accompanied by a
mechanical musique concrete of hum and whir. Dean plays with
perspective, tricks the eye with initially unintelligible details or
strange framings; one shot of a man at a desk, seemingly scrunched into
the right-hand third of the frame, suddenly reveals itself to be taken
through an oblong aperture in a door.
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Dean's elegiac intent appears in the film's finale, in
which ruination displaces celebration. Unpeopled, drained of color, shot
in steely or matte tones, Kodak's closing images focus on the
abandoned and broken--smashed spools, hanging wires, tangles of crumpled film--as if the factory, now bereft of its true function, had turned
into Tarkovsky's entropic Zone. Dean's shorthand may seem a
bit literal, but the finality of the last blackout is moving: It
represents for her not merely the end of her film, but of all film, the
end of analogue.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Museums and galleries take an increasingly cavalier attitude toward
celluloid, displaying films as digital projections for the sake of
economics and convenience. This should be a burning issue in the art
world, but isn't. A recent egregious example was the Centre
Pompidou's exhibition "Le Mouvement des images," which
smugly proclaimed that "at the beginning of the 21st century, we
are increasingly seeing the moving image abandon the cinema for the
gallery," and then exhibited most of its films in mushy digital
transfers that viewers glanced at as though at flickering wallpaper. But
Dean has never allowed her films to be displayed as digital projections,
and the Schaulager, in keeping with her wishes, presented everything in
its analogue original and mostly in spaces designed for isolated
viewing. Some films were projected in open space, such as the hypnotic
Delft Hydraulics, 1996, and Gellert, 1998, a series of fixed shots of
fleshy women, nude but for some abashed body bibs, walking, lolling,
showering, or studying one another in Budapest's sulphurous baths,
the amplitude of their bodies playing off the severe architecture of the
setting. (Counterpoint of the fixed, gridded, or linear with things
round, mercurial, or fleeting is also central to Fernsehturm; Palast;
Disappearance at Sea I, 1996; Diamond Ring, 2002; and her 2006 floor
piece Chalk Balls.) The golden, gorgeous Palast, its diminutive image of
Berlin's Palace of the Republic projected high on a wall,
didn't have to fight for attention here as it did in last
year's Venice Biennale, but nevertheless again forfeited its
important soundscape to the surrounding hubbub. Long empty and slated
for demolition, the former Communist palace of culture is an ideal Dean
edifice. Poised to disappear, the modernist schloss becomes an emblem of
historical amnesia, its precariousness given poetic expression in the
light gleaming like beaten brass off its tinted windows, the landscape
of surrounding churches, towers, and statuary melting and amorphous in
its glinting reflections.
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The Schaulager gave the remainder of Dean's greatest hits a
little multiplex, each accorded its own viewing room, minimizing sound
bleed but doing little to hold viewers' attention. Because of their
complex structures and often extraordinary duration--it would have taken
almost ten hours to watch all twenty-nine films in the
retrospective--Dean's films, which she insists can be shown only in
installation settings and not in "real" cinemas, rarely
receive the attention they demand. (A group of local teenagers on an art
excursion popped in and out of the screening rooms, puzzling over the
identity of Mario Merz in Dean's lovely 2002 portrait of the
artist, voicing disgust at the plump, puckered bodies in Gellert,
murmuring in bewilderment at the obsessively repeated eclipse in Diamond
Ring, which turns a camera mishap into a structuralist trope.) Who but
the most patient observer with plenty of time would sit through the
glorious hour of Boots, shot in the Art Deco Casa Serralves in Porto,
Portugal? A quick glimpse, all that most viewers accorded it in Basel,
does little to reveal the film's exacting triptych structure, in
which an old, lame Brit traverses the Casa three times, speaking first
in English, then German, then French, inventing the villa's past as
he comes upon its library, its lavish bathroom, its grand stairways.
Though its Viscontian narrator, with his distorted features and
aristocratic lineage, is unusual in Dean's cinema, everything else
about Boots is echt Dean: the empty, echoing setting, an architectural
marvel that is about to be renovated (i.e., its former self will
disappear); the golden late afternoon light gathering to dusk (the
skyscapes are among the filmmaker's most delicate); the precise
sound track, which mixes birdsong and distant dog barks with the soft,
insinuating voice of the narrator and his effortful tread on two canes
and orthopedic boot; the anachronism of both locale and character; the
repetition of event, seen from different angles, various aspects; themes
of memory, nostalgia, the invention of history; and the motif of
walking, or knowledge through ambulation. A shame, then, that the film
fell victim to that eternally unsolved problem in art installation:
duration and viewer patience.
So too did the shorter but more demanding Fernsehturm, in which
Dean's static camera records the revolving of the restaurant atop
Berlin's television tower. The film fools both the eye--the
revolution of the tower often makes Dean's rigorously fixed
compositions seem like slow, lateral tracking shots--and one's
sense of temporality, imperceptibly condensing time as the day slides
into dusk, then night, over the course of forty-four minutes, the
spinning sphere suddenly blazing with light like some spaceship adrift
in the dark. (It is one of many such extraterrestrial-seeming objects
and settings in Dean's work.) The lulling sound track, a muffled clatter of cutlery and cups, muted voices, and, finally, cocktail jazz,
helps disguise the film's formalist precision, the way, for
instance, the movement of sunlight from window to window, frame to
frame, implies a metaphor for the work's own medium.
Dean's films were, of course, the focus of this survey, which
also included her drawings, photographs, and art objects, some of them
handsome and imposing, like the ghostly blackboard drawings, which
suggest an affinity with William Kentridge, some of them problematically
installed: The horizontal vitrines of Dean's cloverleaf collection
reflected banks of lighting fixtures in the Schaulager's upper
stories, like so much glowing chain mail, while the little carbon mat
strewn with chalk balls from Madagascar looked prim and overprotected
with its needless perimeter of ropes and stanchions. The triumph of the
exhibition was to reveal how Dean's body of work, despite its
multifariousness, retains a majestic coherency, each film and artwork
somehow related to everything else, either by tone (melancholy and
contemplativeness prevail), subject, or formal approach. Her new
large-format photographs of English trees recall the gnarled
monkey-bread trees in Baobab, which in turn strangely echo the hulking,
almost druidic forms of derelict military listening devices in Sound
Mirrors. Her suites of photogravures and drawings suggest the seriality
of film storyboards; her white alabaster dry points, the chalky gouache
she applies to her recent tree studies. The revolution of the tower in
Fernsehturm rhymes with that of the lighthouse beacon in Disappearance
at Sea I, both films that chart the movement of day into night. (Like
Boots, both films are also shot in the devilishly difficult format of
16-mm anamorphic scope, which gives the image wide-screen plenitude.)
The collage drawing of feet, Oedipus, Byron, Bootsy, 1991, looks forward
to the ambulatory theme and central character of Boots, while the
"windows" cut out of Nazi-era theater and opera programs in
the elegant installation Die Regimentstochter, 2005, summon up the theme
of amnesia, of the suppression or disregard of German history in both
Palast and Fernsehturm.
"I claim, for the image, the humility and the powers of a
madeleine," Chris Marker has said--a claim that Dean, her work as
immersed in the spiral of time as Marker's, might also make. Ever
the innovator, Marker has recently turned to digital filmmaking, freed,
as the Nouvelle Vague directors once were by portable cameras, by its
lightness and ease. As this splendid exhibition repeatedly affirmed,
Dean will remain faithful to analogue, happily encumbered by its
materiel and machinery, its weight in a world of flux and inconstancy.
JAMES QUANDT IS SENIOR PROGRAMMER AT CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO IN
TORONTO. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)
