Are you in the Tate Modern’s massive Turbine hall? And you
just went down the hall from the main entrance to the other extremity – a dark
space – past the flight of stairs leading to the first level, only to find a
big screen showing a mute, mostly visual film, right? Well that’s it; you have
just had your first encounter with Tacita Dean’s 2011 film.
As part of the Unilever series, Tacita Dean’s artwork is in
fact an installation; it is not solely the film but the whole setting that she
makes use of. Firstly, the darkness around simply enhances the grayscale and
colour frames of the film, hence making the whole experience visually
riveting.
The screening of the film is in the portrait format, a
vertical depiction which takes the whole of the wall, thus playing with the
viewers’ gaze: from top to bottom and from bottom to the top. This ceaseless
refocusing of our attention pulls us to review the film again and again, to try
and discern the other visual details of the different tableaus if not the very
meaning of their intended symbolism; hence Tacita Dean’s proper idea of keeping
it a continuous screening.
One poignant feature of this installation is the use of the
old. Marshall McLuhan himself said, ‘The
medium is the message’ and here Tacita Dean is paying tribute to a dying
medium. She makes use of the very basic mechanics of film-making and on the
wall found just before the installation area, we read, ‘I physically splice the
print and stick it together with tape. It these days of solitary and concentrated
labour which are at the heart of that creative process…’ The intended result of
the whole artwork is to create something which is being lost in face of
digitised technology.
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| Tacita Dean Foley Artist 1996 Installation views of Art Now Exhibition, Tate Britain © Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery. Photo: Tate |
In this light we find
another enlightening phrase from McLuhan - ‘We shape our tools and thereafter
our tools shape us’. We have become so enamoured by digital technology that
whatever preceded its invention now sparks an interest in us and thus becomes
‘art’. We find this trait in Tacita Dean’s Foley
Artist (1996), where she is honouring the skill of the foley artist which
consisted of creating the sounds of people’s footsteps, punches, kisses and
movements by using clothes, shoes, props and pits filled with varying amounts
of grit and stone. It is a skill no longer practiced in the making of cinema,
but Tacita Dean re-evoked it as an artwork. So this is what the artist conveys
to us, again, with her use of anamorphic film, large front projection,
projection booth, free standing screen, loop system and even seating
arrangement.
By the end of the 11 minutes film, one thing we are
definitely sure of: we are faced with the undeniable opposition of digital
versus analogue cellular technology. As for figuring out the content and
symbolism of the film, we’ll leave that to your own personal interpretation,
shall we?
As it is often said ‘Proof lies in the experience’.
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