Tacita Dean - Review

Tacita Dean

(Barcelona, Spain: MACBA, 2000)

(Barcelona, Spain: Actar, 2000)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Tacita Dean" held at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona from January 26 to March 25, 2001, this book contains the British artist's poignant reflections on the subjects, places and incidents encountered during the celluloid transfer of the filmic works that serve as scattered subject headings throughout. Written by Dean on the periphery of the moving image and with publication in mind, each text does not read like the usual collection of revised post-production notes or grand memoirs that are often piled up to replace the missing soundtrack when the screen is silent. Dean herself calls them asides: "the term that is taken from Shakespearean theatre and denotes something which an actor speaks directly to the audience, without affecting the action on the stage."

One might find that these writings perform an act of ventriloquism on her works in their semblance of a voice that was never recorded but still echoes in a directorial role. The snippets of text, like the reproduced production stills, keep their own virtue of being true attributes, reserving an equal distance to both their subjects and films, a before and after, while constantly surfacing with the artist's thoughts like a surging undercurrent. Recalling our morbid fascination with artist's writings after the "Death of the Author, Tractor Dean does perhaps serve to alleviate the bewildered chaos encountered when meaning is mute.

For these reasons, this book uncannily resonates with the fictional logbook authored by Donald Crowhurst, whose fateful voyage in the 1969 Golden Globe Race for the fist solo circumnavigation of the world ended in suicide by drowning. A major investigation in one of Dean's artistic endeavors, the imaginary diary of time and place kept by Crowhurst to deceive the world he was circling of a winning position, powerfully testifies to a human ordeal and an inner journey that was gradually engulfed by an immeasurable space between each line. Eventually lost at sea in the fiction he created and later exposed for fraudulent sportsmanship, the story of Crowhurst, like Dean's writing, invokes a desire to recognize the inevitable gaps found in sentences or between film frames and submit our narratives to a depth where buoyancy by artificial or pretentious means is less of an issue.

While most publications prepared to accompany exhibitions of film and video stumble over their oxymoronic attempts to fix the ephemeral experiences of the work onto pages, this book manages to avoid the same problem by simply overlooking it. These texts, all written in a wonderful prose, better recall the projector sound from the few interspersed stills than a full frame-count of each production. Stuck in a redemptive cycle of recovery and loss, Dean's words are thoughtfully submitted in discrete parcels like messages crammed in a bottle. Initially sealed from wind and water in a vacuum that also provides the safest harbor for model ships, the texts are set adrift through the catalog, and when encountered leave one with no choice but to smash the glass and set sail on the journey so beautifully logged.

Lourdes Portillo: The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films, edited by Rosa Linda. University of Texas Press/316 pp./price unavailable (sb).

The Map is Not the Territory, by Alan Woods. Manchester University Press/204 pp./$45.00 (hb).Minus Equals Plus, by lstvan Banyai. Harry N. Abrams/180 pp./$29.95 (sb).

Mother: Photographs by Jim Erickson, Dillon Beach Press (414 Austin St., San Francisco, CA 94109)/147 pp./$49.95 (hb).

Moving Pictures: Photography and Film in Contemporary Art, edited by Renate Wiehager. Hatje Cantz Publishers/199 pp./price unavailable (sb). Once, by Wim Wenders. D.A.P./272 pp./price unavailable (sb).

Propaganda: The art & subversion of Ron English, Soft Skull Press (www.softskull.com)/160 pp./$24.95 (sb).

COPYRIGHT 2001 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group