Walking into the Tate Modern, the huge, open, dark, space welcomes the viewer. The little light that was eliminated allowed the audience to see the very industrial bars and beams of the gallery. A very mechanically structured building that housed modern art, symbols of contemporary ideas, styles and medium. What was once “Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s discussed power station is itself an obsolete structure that found a new lease of life as a museum, and the setting of Dean’s film therefore reflects the fate imposed upon the medium of film as it migrates from the cinema to find its last refuge within the gallery’s walls.”[1] Curator, Nicholas Cullinan draws parallel between the gallery space that now embeds Tacita Dean’s film technic, both struggling to stay relevant in this time. The medium that Dean undertakes is the essential part of her work to hold true to the qualities of the medium. It is untouched by the post-production process allowing the raw and unique texture of film that digital cannot. The beauty lies in the grainy and flicking 24 frames per second boarded by the repetitive, square-hole pattern on an actual film.
As the film flickers through, images of landscapes, window structures, and objects appear. Dean claims, “Film is a visual poem.”[2] The fluidity of the her poem rely on the material itself. She uses the “wasted” part of the film.[3] Like in a poem, it is up to the viewers to connect the dots between each line, or in this case each image. Some how they rhyme together. Then literally Dean sets one picture underlining and overlapping different images together. Certain themes and images are recalled more than once giving the same circle pattern in a poem. This one particular image of a window stricture, she displays a multiple of times and in different ways. The image is seen through different filters of colors. Other times, a whole is cut through the same frame, so the viewer can see a different image underneath the window image. Shapes and color are cut or laid on top. Brief breaks in-between shows images of landscapes of mountains, waterfalls, trees and flowers. Viewers experience her experiments in the medium where she flips and cuts.
“Film is about film… letting the material’s intrinsic magic be guide”[4] not the narrative throwing all original ways of filming and storytelling. As the viewer, the idea of having a story must be set aside freeing ourselves from the laws of a story. Like the Dada movement, Dean liberates filmmaking from any constrains of a narrative. Her focused is on the material itself and the process of making it. It is in “weeks of solitary and concentrated labor, which are at the heart of [her] creative process.”[5] It is seen through her repetitive images that come back in different color and shapes. The gallery becomes a lavatory, the testing material is the film, and the subjects are the viewer including herself. The controller is the image, and every time she changes her style, that is the experiment. How she and the viewer come to terms with the change is what she is testing.
Bibliography
Cullinan, Nicholas. The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean Film. London: Tate Modern. 2012. Admissions Brochure.
Dean, Tacita. The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean Film. London: Tate Modern. 2012. Admissions Brochure.
[1] Cullinan, Nicholas. The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean Film. London: Tate Modern, 2012.
[2] Dean, Tacita. The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean Film. London: Tate Modern, 2012.
[3] Tacita Dean. The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean Film.
[4] Tacita Dean. The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean Film.
[5] Tacita Dean. The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean Film.